Really? Truly? Hobbits?
I guess a whole lot of people are going to be disappointed. Now that we know some researchers jumped to conclusions. Guess they were raised on a diet of Middle Earth possibilities. And thought they discovered the link between imaginative fiction and historical reality.A few months back there was an article in the newspapers about the discovery of human skeletal remains of great antiquity, found in Indonesia. In fact the story itself originated a few years back, but I distinctly recall that popular reports in the news media were only months earlier than what I read in my newspaper yesterday.
And what that report told me was that the anomally of an extraordinarily small human head with concomittantly-small brain was not that of a smaller-than-pygmy humanoid, but, alas, a pygmy born with microcephaly. Microcephaly is a somewhat rare, but disastrous human condition from birth, where a baby is born with an unnaturally small head, small brain, leading most often to mental retardation.
Robert Eckhardt, a professior of developmental genetics and evolutionary morphology at Penn State University was quoted as saying that the skeletal remains of Homo floresiensis, more commonly labelled LB1 indicated upon further study that the tiny being most likely suffered from physical and mental disabilities.
So while two years earlier the scientific community was fairly well committed to the idea that LB1 was a newly-discovered remnant of a plucky, diminutive race of people who grew to the full height of a three-year-old child, with brains smaller than that of a chimpanzee, who survived by hunting with sharp stone blades, the fanciful has given way to the reality of misidentification.
It is not science that is so fallible, it is scientists who interpret the results of their experiments or findings who are humanly prone to jumping to happy conclusions. You want Hobbits? I'll give you Hobbits!
LB1, it now transpires, was actually just over four feet tall, while others of his society who were normal, were in all likelihood a little taller, much like pygmies who still live on the island of Flores. And now LB1 appears to be identified as a man and not a woman as formerly believed, and lived to be 25 to 40 years of age.
Ah, but here, to me, is the most interesting, the most notable, the most impressive, the most heart-warming part of this little historical nugget. As an early human suffering from microcephaly in a hunting society where survival was most certainly tenuous at best, this being who suffered from mental and physical incapacity, lived from between 25 to 40 years.
That would certainly not have been possible if he were to have been responsible for his own well-being. Nor would it have been possible if other members of his immediate society had expectations that he would be capable of aiding and assisting his community in their ongoing struggle to survive. Instead, his community realized his dire shortcomings, accepted them, and obviously resolved to do their utmost to ensure that as they survived, so would he.
Here's the last quote from Mr. Eckhardt: "The local group must have been doing some caregiving."
Were sweeter words ever said?
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, August 24, 2006
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