Flores 'Hobbit' Walked More Like A Clown Than Frodo

New Scientist ^ | 4-16-2008 | Ewen Callaway

[blam]

Flores 'hobbit' walked more like a clown than Frodo

12:30 16 April 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Ewen Callaway

Henry McHenry, University of California, Davis American Association of Physical Anthropologists Tolkien's hobbits walked an awful long way, but the real "hobbit", Homo floresiensis, would not have got far.

Its flat, clown-like feet probably limited its speed to what we would consider a stroll, and kept its travels short, says Bill Jungers, an anthropologist at the State University of New York in Stony Brook.

"It's never going to win the 100-yard dash, and it's never going to win the marathon," he says.

He presented his conclusion at last week's meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Columbus, Ohio.

By analysing the nearly complete left foot of an 18,000-year-old hobbit skeleton dubbed LB1, found on the Indonesian island of Flores , Jungers' team estimated the length of the hobbit's feet, which were unusually large for its metre-high frame. "Sort of like a young girl wearing her mum's shoes," Junger says.

Funny walks And because of their long feet, H. floresiensis probably had to bend its knee further back than modern humans do, resulting in a sort of high-stepped gait. "You would watch these hobbits walk and say they're walking a little funny," Jungers says.

The foot had other peculiar features as well. For one, its big toe was quite short compared with the others, similar to earlier hominids such as Australopithecus. However, the shape of the toes, even the short big toe, is like modern human ones, Jungers says. "It has a human morphology and an ape-like proportion," he says.

Jungers and other researchers who claim the hobbit was a distinct species from Homo sapiens point to the foot as further evidence supporting their theory.

[blam]

GGG Ping.

Frodo Baggins

[MS.BEHAVIN]

PING!

[Old Sarge]

Bizarre... utterly bizarre...

[SunkenCiv]

· join list or digest · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post a topic ·
	Gods Graves Glyphs	Note: this topic is from April 2008. Blast from the Past. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother, and Ernest_at_the_Beach
·Dogpile · Archaeologica · ArchaeoBlog · Archaeology · Biblical Archaeology Society · · Discover · Nat Geographic · Texas AM Anthro News · Yahoo Anthro & Archaeo · Google · · The Archaeology Channel · Excerpt, or Link only? · cgk's list of ping lists ·