Fossils

[dolly]

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=198867&page=1
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041027/ap_on_sc/dwarf_cavewoman_2

What do you all think?

 

[Runt]

Well, it doesn't seem unreasonable that there would be fossils of "hobbit sized people" ... I mean, we have midgets today, so why not long ago as well?

 

[painted wolf]

I cant wait to see the paper on this in the journal "Nature". I have to agree with Runt, if you look at the wide variety of human sizes nowadays its not hard to picture 'dwarfed' hominids. Some populations of people today don't often go much above 5 ft.
I find is kind of sad that the best way the media chose to explain the size was "hobbit sized".
While accurate in a vague sort of way it is also a bit misleading in that it creates the association with the fictional critters.

wa:do

 

[kbc_1963]

I would assume that they could be the same as our modern day midgets or dwarfs, but they could be an extinct species of man. many of the fossils of what science classifies as our ancestral line could very well in fact just be extinct races of man, just as we have so many diverse races today there could have been many races that went extinct rather than being our predecessors. We have the aboriginies today that are quite small compared to the other races of man and who knows maybe the 2 are related in some way, scientist tell us that there are thousands of ape species that have become extinct that were contemporaries with each other but rarely do they say the same about fossils of man.
I say there were more races of man in our past but they were contemporary with man as we are today and not an ancestral link as scientist have classified them, and just as we have small humans now so have we always had as long as man has existed.

 

[painted wolf]

if there were more similarities with humans than I would think this a sub-group of man but just using the brain size I would have to say it is not.
I cant give any more evidence till I read the paper on this.

wa:do