Hobbits Walked Out of Africa

Hobbits Walked Out of Africa

www.theaustralian.news.com.au

THE identity of the tiny human-like creature discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2004 has become clearer -- and more astonishing -- thanks to a new analysis by Australian and Indonesian scientists.

According to a team led by Australian National University doctoral student Debbie Argue, not only is Homo floresiensis, nicknamed the hobbit, not a deformed modern human, as a handful of critics claim, but the small-brained, long-armed biped was the first human-like creature to walk out of Africa.

And it did so nearly two million years ago, roughly 100,000 years before a species m

(visit the link for the full news article)



Related AboveTopSecret.com Discussion Threads:
The Palau 'Hobbits' - Proof of rapid human evolution?
Real life Hobbits found
Hello, Homo floresiensis: Studies prove "hobbits a new species
Is there an ARCHAEOLOGICAL COVERUP going on in New Zealand?

[edit on 19-8-2009 by fraterormus]

Almost 2 million years ago, a separate hominin, migrated from Africa long before our ancestors ever even existed.

This new study used two distinctly different methods of identifying and dating the remains and both methods came to the same conclusion...that this is not a mutated species of early humans, but a separate species that pre-dated even Homo Erectus!

The other amazing thing is that this species of Hobbits migrated not once, but twice from Africa, showing that they were not a species small in number or an isolated incident.

(On a side-note, a friend of mine is convinced that primal memories of Homo floresiensis are the basis for the presence of the common archetype of an Ancient Civilization in humans of every culture, be it Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, etc.)

www.theaustralian.news.com.au
(visit the link for the full news article)

why havent we heard about this in the news before?
how did their race die out?
gnomes are real!
so many questions jump to mind when reading this.
more info would be great

Thank you for sharing, what interesting news!

Maybe this is where our little people myths (fairies and gnomes, elves, etc) originate from. I would have liked to seen an artist rendition of what these tiny humans looked like!

Yeah, I started to think of all the other Myths and Legends throughout History that could have been started from primal memories of an ancient diminutive Race.

Although the Celtic idea of Elves was borrowed from the Norse Sagas. Elves were not diminutive by any means, but tall and graceful and full of fury. They were basically the Norse equivalent of the Angels from Judaism. They might be divine, but you don't ever want to meet one face to face, because they only show up to kill, destroy and wreck vengeance. It wasn't until the Romantic period in the Celtic lands were Elves made cute and tiny and benevolent.

However, this does give a new twist to the origin of Gnomes. I had always thought that Gnomes were a way to poke fun of the Knights Templar who established International Banking. Although if Homo floresiensis survived beyond dying out 50,000 years ago, then maybe the Homo floresiensis are the real Illuminati and the Gnomes of Zurich!

What about Greys? Maybe little men from Outer Space are actually the ancestors of Homo floresiensis and didn't go extinct but just migrated amongst the stars. Maybe their interest in humans is anthropological.

One could go on all night drawing conclusions and rewriting a lot of the myths that we have.

However, another friend of mine who is Christian pointed out that this might explain why there are two separate Creation Myths and two separate Myths of the Creation of Man in Bereshiith/Genesis. Perhaps Christians don't have to feel threatened by Evolution anymore as a separate hominin race that existed prior to Homo Erectus actually reinforces their Scriptural belief and solves that mystery of two separate Creation Myths better than Talmudic Scholars ever have. They'll just have to admit the timeline in their Scripture is off about 1,995,500 years, but otherwise, it doesn't have to conflict with their Mythology of Creation.



[edit on 20-8-2009 by fraterormus]

reply to post by fraterormus

Nice find fraterormus this story has twists the skeleton was locked up by the Indonesian's for a time before anyone could see it again.

When the hobbit was discovered by Prof Mike Morwood in 2004 on the Indonesian island of Flores, scientists hailed it as a new species Homo floresiensis.Since then, scientists have debated whether the hobbit is indeed a new species or a modern human with a genetic disease that causes small brains called microcephaly.

Prof Mike Morwood found Fire using Hobbit's in the Kimberley region (far north coast of Australia) after finding traces and some Asian rock Art that helped make the connection,Prof Mike Morwood tracked the Hobbit's to Flores.
In Flores amongst bones of miniature Elephants they found Stone tools 700,000 yrs old that lead to the discovery,chinless skull,strange teeth ,big footed Female,brain cavity was smaller than a baby's and a chimpanzee 400 cubic cm's.

Hobbit-Like Human Ancestor Found in Asia
The original skeleton, a female, stood at just 1 meter (3.3 feet) tall, weighed about 25 kilograms (55 pounds), and was around 30 years old at the time of her death 18,000 years ago. The skeleton was found in the same sediment deposits on Flores that have also been found to contain stone tools and the bones of dwarf elephants, giant rodents, and Komodo dragons, lizards that can grow to 10 feet (3 meters) and that still live today.

Source:
The "unique wrist anatomy" was that the Hobbit has a bone shaped differently in its Wrist,
Wrist Bone Points to Flores "Hobbit" as a Unique Human Species unlike Humans but the same as a Gorilla.(if I remember right)

The findings, recently reported in the Journal of Human Evolution, back a similar argument made in the journal Science in 2007 that the hobbit's unique wrist anatomy suggested the 1m-tall creature came from a lineage that lived long before the common ancestor of people and Neanderthals.

What's the link here there's two miniature's here,the Hobbit and Elephants.

Zelong.

Originally posted by Zelong
What's the link here there's two miniature's here,the Hobbit and Elephants.

Hmmm, short Hominin with small brains + miniature elephants = George W. Bush?

I jest, I jest!

I read about the presence of elephant bones but somehow I completely missed that they were miniature elephant bones. Honey, Someone Shrunk the Pre-Paleolithic Kids! Or maybe they shrunk from the Deluge lasting too long.

All humor aside, that is pretty curious. Thanks for pointing that out.

[edit on 20-8-2009 by fraterormus]

Wait i'm confused
the article says the hobbits came from homo erectus but then shrunk because they were isolated on an island?????

what?

Firstly this means that hobbits are indeep our ancestors and therefore not gnomes, fine.

But how can one shrink because they are stuck on an island?

what's the logic here?

reply to post by fraterormus


I already knew this. Primates have been walking out of Africa for millions of years.

None of you knew this?

Well, oh well. FYI, homo erectus walked out of Africa before modern humans, becoming Neanderthals in Europe, and another species I can't remember in Asia.

There have been some half-dozen human species in the past few million years. All of which our species exterminated upon contact. Makes you feel great, eh?


reply to post by ModernAcademia


Creatures in isolated environments have a tendency to shrink. It's not clear why. The same is true for sheep in Ireland or somewhere.

Also, no, we are not related. Human evolution is not linear. As I said above, there have been half a dozen or so unrelated human species that all were killed off, mostly by us.

[edit on 20-8-2009 by Gorman91]

At least 2 species here are known to have been exterminated by modern humans. Of this list I suspect more were killed off.

But as you can see, human evolution is not linear. We have had countless unrelated cousins. Species like us but who have no direct ancestry to us. I don't know how old this photo is, but I think I know more species exists. None the less, a good number of the left side were killed off by us.

[edit on 20-8-2009 by Gorman91]

So dwarves and hobbits were 'real' more or less... perhaps greys ancestors...

And elves maybe represent the reports of a 'nordic' race? fair and perfect... genetically perfect and superior - capable of 'angellic' phenomenon, or magic

Remember, J.R.R. Tolkien was no idiot.

reply to post by Gorman91


How come this presents itself as new when it's from 2004 on Wired?

anyhow

Because the island is so isolated, creatures morphed into either dwarf or giant forms, including a little elephant called a pygmy Stegodon, and Komodo dragons, giant lizards and turtles that were almost as large as the elephants. But this is the first such incident noted in a human species, showing that humans are subject to the same evolutionary processes as all other mammals.

"On small islands it is common for animals larger than a rabbit to shrink, while very small mammals get bigger," Brown said.

The amount of food available and the absence of predators causes these odd size changes, the advantage being that you need less food to survive when you're small. For example, the elephants likely became very small because they had limited food, but no animals threatening to eat them.
www.wired.com...

Well.. this makes very little sense to me
It suggests that height is an adaptive trait responding to a threatening environment.

I guess it's a form of inbreeding, like deers
Like if you take a snowshoe rabbit from here and bring it to Ireland it'll change in the winter


[edit on 20-8-2009 by ModernAcademia]

reply to post by ModernAcademia


I don't know dude. Sometimes when nothing is new to report, they take something old and make it new.

None the less, now you know. Humanity is hardly the only intelligent primate.

Out of all our brethren, the only thing that makes us really unique is imagination and creativity. We can imagine something that doesn't exist. We can innovate something and then innovate the innovations. We can develop and express ourselves creatively. And what does this? Roughly a brain only a couple percents bigger then the other ones.

Our species isn't that special. A crow with some time to develop would be able to do the same.

None the less, we're here, we're homo, get used to it.


This is related to something I'm going to investigate on something about greys. so stay tuned!

[edit on 20-8-2009 by Gorman91]

reply to post by Gorman91


are you familiar with atavism?
It's a highly interesting topic to say the least!

Originally posted by fraterormus

Originally posted by Zelong
What's the link here there's two miniature's here,the Hobbit and Elephants.

All humor aside, that is pretty curious. Thanks for pointing that out.

[edit on 20-8-2009 by fraterormus]

It's something that always stands out Two anomaly's so possibly more to be found.
I'm a little more curious about the Hobbit's because these folk traveled on sea from Flores too Australia and back regularly by the look of it.
Three foot sea men 18,000 years ago,I believe it, they had to do something to get away for a while A?

I've always liked this Hobbit,I must catch back up......... and I am now,a lot more data on it.
Did the Flores Hobbit Have a Root Canal? Dental work claim challenges antiquity of hobbit skeleton the picture on that link states.

"DENTAL WORK?: The lower left first molar of the hobbit is claimed to have a filling--an observation that other hobbit researchers say is refuted by this photograph."

Now it's statements like this that make you wonder.
The Hobbits were few they seem to be too few to of survived the extent they did or maybe a race not of earth,

Source:
– suggest that Homo floresiensis diverged from the Homo sapiens evolutionary line in the Early Pleistocene, or even the Pliocene, nearly 2 million years ago, meaning that Homo floresiensis did not share an immediate ancestor with modern humans.

It's all in the wrist on this one and I haven't found the source on that yet,it's good.

Homo floresiensis

Zelong.

Originally posted by ModernAcademia
Wait i'm confused
the article says the hobbits came from homo erectus but then shrunk because they were isolated on an island?????

what?

No, the Article is pointing out that this has been proven incorrect. The article is pointing out a study, using two distinct methods, proved definitively that they did not come from Homo Erectus. They predated Homo Erectus by at least 100,000 - 200,000 years. They are a separate species and were not mutated or shrunken humans or proto-humans.

Originally posted by ModernAcademia
How come this presents itself as new when it's from 2004 on Wired?

The initial discovery was from several years ago. The results of the two new studies were just released yesterday and is new.

The studies have scientifically disproved the human mutation, shrunken by island isolation pygmism that had previously been considered by some. The results of this study that are new is that this is a distinct race and much older than previously thought.

Not only did they exist 100,000-200,000 before Homo Erectus, but they migrated out of Africa not once, but twice! Even more startling is that these two migrations occurred 300,000 years apart which means this wasn't an isolated species or a fluke of nature, but a very populous and perhaps civilized species to have survived for so long and had the resources to migrate twice after such a long time span apart.

The other thing that is newsworthy is that they survived up till 13,000 years ago. That means not only did their species survive and remain basically the same for almost 2 million years (whereas our species went through several evolutionary steps during that time frame before becoming "modern" man), but that puts their survival up to the time of Paleolithic Man and the first City of Catal Hyauk.

The implications of that are profound...even if we have jested about it in this thread.

The possibility that they domesticated Elephants as well, from the post Zelong added to this thread, explains quite a bit as well. Not only that, Animal Husbandry puts them at the Paleolithic level in terms of advancement...hundreds of thousands of years before we started domesticating animals.

[edit on 20-8-2009 by fraterormus]

Originally posted by ModernAcademia
But how can one shrink because they are stuck on an island?

what's the logic here?

Logic?

I'd say some geneticists have their work cut out for them. I think there is either a genetic connection to the modern Pygmies or a environmental one that has not been found yet. Either way the pygmies are a hell of a lot closer to them than the average westerner. They are found all the way from Africa to Australia. If the Hobbit came first then it was followed by a very similar group of people who are very much closer to them in height.

They came from Africa?
Not surprising IMO.

Africa

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/7cf12926b978.jpg[/atsimg]

Borneo

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/c0ae2cc1740c.jpg[/atsimg] [atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/6ce491c1614c.jpg[/atsimg]

Australia

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/b04780879656.jpg[/atsimg]


Pygmies

Asian pygmies

Negritos
Main article: Negrito

Negritos in Southeast Asia (including the Batak and Aeta of the Philippines, the Andamanese of the Andaman Islands, and the Semang of the Malay Peninsula), and occasionally Papuans and Melanesians in adjacent Oceania, are sometimes called pygmies (especially in older literature).[citation needed]

Negritos share some common physical features with African pygmy populations, including short stature and dark skin. The name "Negrito", from the Spanish adjective meaning "small and black", was given by early explorers.

The explorers who named the Negritos assumed the Andamanese they encountered were from Africa. This belief was, however, discarded by anthropologists who noted that apart from dark skin and curly hair, the Andamanese had little in common with any African population, including the African pygmies.[23] Their resemblance to some Africans, it is generally believed, is due to adaptation to a similar environment, rather than shared origins.[24]

Their origin and the route of their migration to Asia is still a matter of great speculation. They are genetically distant from Africans,[24] and have been shown to have separated early from Asians, suggesting that they are either surviving descendants of settlers from an early out-of-Africa migration, or that they are descendants of one of the founder populations of modern humans.[25]

T'rung

Frank Kingdon-Ward in the early 20th century, Alan Rabinowitz in the 1990s, P. Christiaan Klieger in 2003, and others have reported a tribe of pygmy Tibeto-Burman speakers known as the T'rung inhabiting the remote region of Mt. Hkakabo Razi in Southeast Asia on the border of China (Yunnan and Tibet), Burma, and India. A Burmese survey done in the 1960s reported a mean height of an adult male T'rung at 1.43 m (4'6") and that of females at 1.40 m (4'5"). These are the only "pygmies" noted of clearly East Asian origin. The cause of their diminutive size is unknown, but diet and endogamous marriage practices have been cited. The population of T'rung pygmies has been steadily shrinking, and is now down to only a few individuals.[26][27]

Australia Barrineans
Short statured aboriginal tribes inhabited the rainforests of North Queensland, Australia, of which the best known group is probably the Tjapukai of the Cairns area.[28] These rainforest people, collectively referred to as Barrineans, were once considered to be a relict of the earliest wave of migration to the Australian continent, but this theory no longer finds much favour.[29] The Rainforest People tended to live in the first variety of Jykabita, a wood and mud structure renowned for incubation of plants.[30]

The extinction of the Australian pygmies

From the 1940s until the 1960s, it was fairly widely known there were pygmies in Australia. They lived in North Queensland and had come in from the wild of the tropical rainforests to live on missions in the region. This was a fact recorded at the time not only in anthropological textbooks and articles but also in popular books about the Australian Aborigines. There was even an award-winning children's book tracing their origins. The more famous photographs of the Australian pygmies were reproduced in both the academic and the popular literature.

At the time, there was controversy about their origins but not over the fact of their existence. In 1962, the first volume of Manning Clark's History of Australia recorded their presence on its first two pages and repeated the then influential anthropological theory about their origins and their place in the waves of migration of hunter-gatherer peoples from Asia who populated the Australian continent in the millennia before the British arrived in 1788. [1]

[edit on 20-8-2009 by SLAYER69]

Actually we have forgotten how tall the average Westerner has grown from our ancestors.

I remember taking my daughter to an Egyptian Museum when she was really young. She kept asking me why all the Mummies were of children. I scratched my head as to why she thought that, being that they were all adult Mummies of Nomarchs. It then dawned on me, even if you take dessication into account, 5 feet was indeed unusually tall by Ancient Egyptian standards.

6-7 foot tall humans would have been considered Giants by Ancient Egyptian standards.

Most of the Semitic civilizations were similarly short.

A plentiful diet, medicine, and other conveniences have not only extended our lives but caused humans to evolve much taller than we had been previously. It wasn't that long ago (3500 years +) that our most Advanced Civilizations were no taller than Pygmies.

reply to post by fraterormus


Normally I would agree but we also have some of the tallest people in the world in Africa. Google both the Masai and the Mandinka (aka Mandingos) are known for being tall, with the women being over 6 feet and the men close to 7. There may be other tribes as well.