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Hobbits? Only in your mind, scientist says: He didn?t like the nickname(Times-News (Burlington, NC) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Feb. 21--ELON -- For the record, Australian anthropologist Peter Brown did not like the decision his team made about a nickname for the small human beings they discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores. The creatures have been nicknamed "Hobbits," after the mythical beings created by British writer J.R.R. Tolkien. Brown doesn't think that was apt. "They were small and they lived in caves," Brown said of homo floresiensis, the small creatures whose remains he and his team found in a cave on the island in 2003. "But that's the only similarity." In the first place, he said, Hobbits are imaginary, and homo floresiensis was very real, if a puzzling participant in the evolution of mankind. "The discovery was certainly unexpected," Brown said dur ing a visit to Elon University, where he was to deliver a Voices of Discovery lecture Monday night in McCrary Theatre on campus. "Things with their body size and brain size were supposed to have been extinct three mil lion years ago," he said in an interview Monday afternoon. But homo floresiensis goes back far less than that, an esti mated 18,000 to 38,000 years. The creatures were about a meter tall, but much more heavily muscled than modern human beings, Brown said. They used stone tools and hunted pygmy elephants, or stegodons. But where they were came from, and how they came to be, is one big puzzle. Saying he was surprised at the discovery is "an under statement," he said. "I knew it wasn't a modern human being," he said of the first skeleton. "But it should have been much, much older." Brown will close a three week lecture tour later this week in Michigan, and after that it's back home to Australia. He isn't sure when he or his team members will head back to Indonesia, though he's anxious to go. He said in the interview that he's been besieged with ques tions in America about what light, if any, his small people will shed on the evolution vs. creation debate. But he said he thinks about that little, if at all. THE DEBATE MAY BE a big thing in the United States, he said, but that's not the case overseas. He quoted figures that while 60 percent of Americans may believe in the biblical account of creation, only five to 10 percent of Europeans or Australians do. "Darwin's always been a hard sell in America," he said, but that's not so other places. "If you talked about intelligent design in Africa, with all its problems, you'd get laughed out of town," he said. Brown doesn't discount the publicity the name Hobbits produced for his discovery. But it was an accident, he said. The idea of a nickname was forced on them by the British science magazine Nature, which first published the find ings of Brown and his col leagues. If they didn't come up with a nickname, British news papers would, Nature told the researchers. |