Lilliputs Were Our Ancestors!

Are we hoodwinked to believe that a new tiny Homo species roam the earth at the same time as that of our ancestors? With giant Dragons and pigmy elephants? Whatever more will be revealed in future about the “Little Lady of Flores” depends on future research and discovery. But now it is sure that we cannot throw away the kind of stories telling the mysterious existence of ‘Yeti’ or other human like species. The ‘Lady of Flores’ is the best example which proves such an Indonesian legend about Ebu Gogo, a three feet tall human like creature. Even in the 16th century, when the island of Flores was colonized by the Dutch, they repeatedly heard stories of ‘Little People’ having been seen in the jungle from the local tribes, but none of these rumors appear to have been proven.But now it is proved with the discovery of a new and unexpected species of human who lived in this planet 18000 years ago, which is regarded a very little time when we study human evolution. They were little more than 3 feet high, used fire, and hunted down fierce dragons, pigmy elephants and giant rats. Reads like a fairy tale! But the researchers of human evolution are now busy with these fairy tale elements after Dr Mike Morood and his colleagues has unearthed, in September 2004, the evidence of a distant and previously unknown relatives of ours. The story leads us to a remote island of Indonesia- Flores which lies towards the eastern end of the chain of islands that make up Indonesia. Some Australian and Indonesian researchers led by Dr Mike Morood discovered the bones of some miniature human in the cave of ‘Liang Bua’, situated in the heart of western end of the island. This new species is named Homo Floresiensis, after the island on which it was found. It is also dubbed by dig workers as ‘hobbit’, after the tiny creatures from the ‘Lord of the Rings’. The most remarkable among them is the near complete skull of a woman with her incomplete skeleton- the ‘Little Lady of Flores’ [also called LB1, named after the cave where it was found]. It is just 1meter [3.3feet] tall, weighed about 25 kilograms, and was of an adult aged around 30 at the time of her death. She had a grapefruit sized skull that is one third of a modern man. Found with her in the cave were bones of at least seven hobbit sized individuals and also faunal remains including fish, frog, snake, tortoise, birds and bats, giant rats, a giant carnivorous lizard, similar to but larger than Komodo dragons, and 17 tiny elephants called Stegodons that disappeared almost 40,000 years ago. What is interesting with this ‘Little Lady of Flores’ is the fact that she not only proves the existence of a new kind of human species totally unknown to us but also rewrites the history of human evolution indicating that these Homo Floresiensis lived in this planet with modern Homo sapiens just 18000 years ago, and that they are younger than the Homo neanderthalensis who disappeared 30000 years ago. Currently it is widely accepted that only two ‘hominin genuses’, Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis, co-existed before the later one vanished. But the carbon dating method and other dating methods like TL and ISRL reveal that the bones found in the cave of Liang Bua are only 18000 years old and thus prove that Homo sapiens shared the planet with other humans much more recently than previously believed. There are some other things that set anthropologists atwitter; when did these tiny people come to the remote island? Dr.Morood has failed to find any evidence that can prove that the Homo sapiens existed in the island before 11,000 years. But he has found some 80000 years old artifacts in Liang Bua that are very similar to those of Javanese Homo erectus. So it may be possible that the first hominid immigrants to Flores were about 80,000 years ago, and they came as Homo erectus, not as Homo Floresiensis. But that over the millennia, isolated on the island, their size decreased as a response to limited food supply or otherenvironmental causes.Thus we can find a cause behind the small size of the Homo Floresiensis. But problem arises when we look at their small brain of 380 cm³ which is very small compared to that of Homo sapiens (1000-1700 cm³), Homo neanderthalensis (1100-1140 cm³) and Homo erectus (750-1250 cm³).Those people with a body of a three year old modern child must be intelligent enough to hunt down giant dragons and pigmy elephants that weighed at least 1,000 kilograms. Even more surprising, these critters used fire. The blades, perforators, points and other cutting and chopping utensils, and the faunal remains of Komodo dragons and pigmy elephants found in Liang Bua prove both of the facts. How so much of intelligence is possible with such a small brain? The answer may lie in the fact that these Flores man carried a small brain that once used to be a big brain. A modern man who has suffered massive brain damage or undergone serious brain surgery often manages a normal life with only two thirds of the brain tissue working; then why not these Flores men?