There'll Be Hell To Pay Now

We killed Bilbo Baggins. Let me be the first to say, "I blame Bush!" They hope to extract DNA to prove whether or not they were a different species.

MODERN humans wiped out the hobbit-sized people who lived on the Indonesian island of Flores, research suggests.

Remains of at least 13 members of the little species, Homo floresiensis, who were about a metre tall, were unearthed in Liang Bua between 2001 and 2004. The hobbits lived there from 95,000 to 12,000 years ago when a layer of volcanic ash filled the cave.

It had been thought the eruption devastated life on Flores and led to the demise of the little people, as well as the pygmy elephants they feasted on.

Studies of the volcanic ash by two team members, Chris Turney and Douglas Hobbs, however, showed it was from an eruption about 600 kilometres to the west, near Bali, and so was unlikely to have resulted in island-wide extinctions.

Mike Morwood, co-leader of the Australian and Indonesian discovery team, said he now believed modern humans, who arrived on the "lost world" of Flores soon afterwards, hunted the stegadon to extinction and were responsible for the disappearance of the hobbits.

Homo floresiensis … eruption wipeout theory disputed.
Photo: Robert Pearce

Comments

[Artie]

These hobbits are evil-doers. They hate our freedom. They should be liberated immediately.

[John Costello]

There are few fields of science more given to ludicrious self-promotion than human paleontology. I do blame Louis Leakey for it, with his constant creation of a new species with every fossil. Well, he did need the money for the research and had to get backers.

The people on Flores were no more hobbits than the Mbuti pygmies were (before the Huto refugees in the darkeset Congo ate them all -- we can thank the French for that!) Dwarf populations of animals such as humans and mammonths come into existence when isolated populations have reduced food supplies and territory and need to increase their numbers to maintain genetic variability. The people of North Korea seem to be going this way now, mainly from lack of good.

[John H. Costello]

In the above:

For 'Huto' read 'Hutu'
For 'good.' read 'food.'

[Phoenix]

John,

I'd chance to say the 'career' of celebrity politics is the 'science' most ludicrously exploited. Leakey did some shameless promotion twenty years ago, but he needed the money, and his team has since been exonerated by their continuous finds and their relentless work in the field.

I read about these little people in National Geographic. It will be interesting to see what the findings are as they were unique to that island.

[Ugg]

What problem? They not even that great for eating. Couple of tacos and a fur hat, tops.

[Cindi]

Being a little person, I have no objection to anyone eating me.

[Phoenix]

Hey, Cindi. I'm with you. I'm real little and I have no objection to being chow.