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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis claims that the most recent fossils are about 50,000 years old.

by btilly 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis claims that the most recent fossils are about 50,000 years old. Without more recent bones, we have no reason to believe that they still exist. That said, myths about both small human-like animals and large ones are practically universal. We have another universal myth that was fairly recently dated to be much older than you'd expect. https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronomers-say-global-myths-about-seven-sisters-stars-may-reach-back-100-000-years-151568 https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronom... shows that the myth about the Pleiades, aka "seven sisters", likely date back 100,000 years. Given that, would it be surprising that myths like the Sasquatch date back to folk memories of Neandertals? Who our ancestors knew much more recently than that?

KarlKemp 5y ago
Growing up 250m from where the Neandertals were found, I got to watch in real time as the common (or communicated) thinking on it evolved, from the image of the primitive brute to the model that, wearing a suit, wouldn't seem out of place sitting across the table from you at Starbucks. Assuming the later view to be closer to the truth, and also including the genetic evidence that quite a bit of mating happened between these branches, I believe the relationship would have been more familiar than the rare sightings of physically intimidating strangers that seem to form the core of the Sasquatch myth.
- btilly 5y ago
  Given the evidence that Neandertals were not able to master things like sewing, and also lived an extremely active lifestyle (they were bigger, stronger, and had lots of broken bones that healed), the Sasquatch doesn't seem like that bad a fit. As for quite a bit of mating, current estimates say a maximum of dozens of times over a period of 12,000 years. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC532398/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC532398/ for verification. This is, "once every few hundred years someone got pregnant." This fits with rare enough encounters that interspecies sex only happened once every few generations.
  - galangalalgol 5y ago
    It seems interesting that even that much of their (our?) DNA has been conserved. Do they have a guess at how much of it has been lost due to lack of benefit?
    - gscott 5y ago
      It seems ancient unused dna just sticks around https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mutant-chicken-grows-alli/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mutant-chicken-gr...
  - ASalazarMX 5y ago
    > Given the evidence that Neandertals were not able to master things like sewing Don't read too much into that. Native Americans (homo sapiens from the whole American continent) didn't master wheels for transport. Aztecs did have toys that used wheels, the concept wasn't foreign, but somehow they didn't see the need to upscale it for transport. Yes, we can argue that they didn't have draught animals, but there are plenty of human powered uses for wheels, and some regions did have horses, llamas or buffaloes. Maybe Neanderthals just weren't interested.
    - progre 5y ago
      Horses and humans i the Americas at the same time is a post-Columbus thing. Buffaloes can't be domesticated. Llamas are mountain animals and wheeled wagons in mountains are extra hard to do well. Even in the old world, wheels where primarily a steppe thing. Edit: I was wrong about the horses, there is a overlap.
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        No. Before 12800 years ago, North America was home to both horses and camels, along with ~30 other now extinct genera including mammoths, mastodons, cheetahs, dire wolves, giant sloths, and a bear much larger than the grizzly. All of those were obliterated at that geological instant, along with the Clovis culture, apparently by a meteorite or comet strike. It also melted many cubic miles of glacial ice in an instant, scouring out the Scablands of eastern Washington state in a flood hundreds of feet deep, carving out the whole Columbia Gorge in only days. It ignited continent-spanning fires that destroyed everything anyone might have built. Nothing would have prevented the people who lived before then from domesticating horses and using them to pull wagons. None has been found, but remarkable little remains of the people who were in North America for at least 10 millennia before then.
- duxup 5y ago
  > from the image of the primitive brute I kinda prefer the short stint in the 60s and 70s where they were imagined / portrayed to be a sort of nature oriented flower children. Fun how culture influences things.
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    Maybe Homo Floresiensis devolved from Homo Sapiens the same way the Sleestak devolved from the Altrusians. https://landofthelost.fandom.com/wiki/Sleestak https://landofthelost.fandom.com/wiki/Sleestak >At one time, in the distant past, the Sleestak were known as Altrusians. They were a very peaceful and intelligent race and eventually grew into an advanced civilization, mastering many (if not all) of the secrets of the Land of the Lost, creating cities and temples among other landmarks. Unfortunately, the Altrusians lost control over their emotions and destroyed their civilization becoming known as the Sleestak. >In their decline, the Sleestak became are a degenerate warring race that lost much of their knowledge and culture. Now based on a distrust of strangers and struggle for survival, they have come out of the Era of Intelligence and into the Era of Solitude. The Era of Intelligence was the period in time when the Sleestak first arrived at The Land of the Lost. They built several temples now called Pylons which serve to regulate the life conditions, seasons and meteorological traits of the area. There was a period when there was only darkness before the Sleestak built the Time Pylon, which controls the light and dark cycles of The Land of The Lost. >As the Sleestak moved into The Lost City they entered a more barbarian state as they reverted back to their more primeval conditions. They eventually became ruled by a Sleestak called Sol, who reorganized the Sleestak and taught them how to hunt and kill.
- rishav_sharan 5y ago
  Would the African bush pygmy people be considered as a separate human branch? What makes the Hobbit people different from the current pygmy people? I think my question boils down to - if these separate branches of humans existed today, wouldn't we just consider them as Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
  - jandrewrogers 5y ago
    Pygmy populations are ordinary humans with conserved genetic mutations, due to inbreeding, that limit the expression of things like growth hormones. They are anatomically modern humans, just much smaller. The ease with which these mutations can occur is evidenced by the existence of unrelated Pygmy populations in different parts of the world. There is no evidence of speciation or material genetic divergence in these cases. While we can't say anything for sure, the genetic divergence between modern humans and these other hominid species is significantly larger.
    - oh_sigh 5y ago
      I agree with 100% of what you said, but if we didn't have access to the genes and were merely going by fragments of a few fossils - what then? Can one quantify the magnitude of difference between H. nalendi and H. erectus fossils, and compare it to the magnitude of difference between hypothetical Polynesian and Pygmy fossils?
      - bayesian_horse 5y ago
        You'd still notice a difference between two lineages diverging for a few hundreds or thousands of years and a two lineages diverging for hundreds of thousands of years or more. It's not just size or deformity, but other features that will diverge.
    - epivosism 5y ago
      I think the sense of the question was that as the most distant modern human branch, they're useful to compare relatively to potential new discoveries.
- beowulfey 5y ago
  If you read a lot of ancient mythologies there is a pattern that the "gods" are regularly mentioned and read as a separate species or society that interacted with us. Personally, I have a guess that it was interactions between Neandertals and early Sapiens that led to these myths. Two separate societies, viewed as independent. I won't make any guesses as to which is which, but I think the possibility makes sense.
- DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
  they ate ordinary amounts of meat, some sources say >70% of their diet was carnivore. Also they were sprinters rather than marathon runners and could outrun us and also had much more muscular build. Some theories suggest that they likely also consumed rotten meat if they had no choice. There carnivorous lifestyle would mean different gut biome to us allowing their bodies to get away with eating rotten meat more often.
duxup 5y ago
> Neandertals I wonder if they told stories about those weird humans…
- krrrh 5y ago
  I kind of like the theory that Neanderthals were basically orcs. https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/when-orcs-were-real?s=r https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/when-orcs-were-real?s=r Europeans maintained stories of ogres 10s of thousands of years after the last Neanderthal walked the earth, it’s plausible that the Lio in the article maintained myths about small humanlike creatures that fuelled the imaginations of the people who claim to have seen them in the same way.
  - kurupt213 5y ago
    I’ve assumed that homo erectus are the elves
tsimionescu 5y ago
> https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronomers-say-global-myths-about-seven-sisters-stars-may-reach-back-100-000-years-151568 https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronom... shows that the myth about the Pleiades, aka "seven sisters", likely date back 100,000 years. This is definitely a fringe theory, based on a very literal interpretation of a myth, and ignoring the importance of numbers like 7 in the human mind. Edit: fixed link
- throwaway777012 5y ago
  While the cited link is broken, the dating of celestial folk tales to remote antiquity is far from a fringe theory. The fact is that some of the earliest recorded information is related to celestial motions (whether for farming or rituals, who knows). Stonehenge is a gigantic calendar, along with MOST other megalithic constructions across ALL cultures. The history book keeps getting pushed further back, sites like Gobekli Tepe depict megalithic construction from around 11000BC (before agriculture) with hieroglyphs and depictions of celestial constellations. The cave paintings of Lescaux depict constellations and religious/magical divination acts. It would be more appropriate to refer to the fields of comparative mythology, theology, and art history as fringe fields :)
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    Fixed the link now to point to same link as GP. There is a huge difference between linking direct observations of the stars to things like Stonehenge, and looking at stories that are thousands of years old, and linking them to a single detail of an oral history that would have to be 100,000 years old to make any sense. Gobekli Tepe is actually a good example: even though it's a mere 11-13k years old (Wikipedia says 9000BC,not 11000BC, but that's anyway irrelevant), and even though it was still being used maybe 8k years ago, we have no oral histories about it, and no other memories of it, except perhaps a vague idea that the hill it was on was sacred. We also know that human cultures find certain numbers as especially meaningful - 1,2,3,7 are all numbers that hold special meanings in mythology all around the world. It seems way more plausible then to interpret a myth about six stars expressed as 7-1 as being a way to fit a 7 in the story. Edit: note that in good viewing conditions, there are about 11 stars in the Pleiades clusters visible to the naked eye, though 6 of them are significantly brighter: https://www.naic.edu/~gibson/pleiades/pleiades_see.html https://www.naic.edu/~gibson/pleiades/pleiades_see.html
yesenadam 5y ago
> https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronom https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronom... shows that the myth about the Pleiades, aka "seven sisters", likely date back 100,000 years. I think it's very, very far from showing that.
Steko 5y ago
> Without more recent bones, we have no reason to believe that they still exist. Eyewitness accounts aren’t bones but they are still evidence.
xbmcuser 5y ago
I have always wondered with how prevalent dragons are in human myths did some kind of dinosaurs survived long enough for homo to have interacted with them.
- yesenadam 5y ago
  "The earliest stories (among Westerners) of a dragon-like animal existing in the region circulated widely and attracted considerable attention. But no Westerner visited the island to check the story until official interest was sparked in the early 1910s by stories from Dutch sailors based in Flores in East Nusa Tenggara about a mysterious creature. The creature was allegedly a dragon which inhabited a small island in the Lesser Sunda Islands (the main island of which is Flores). ... The Dutch sailors reported that the creature measured up to seven metres (twenty-three feet) in length with a large body and mouth which constantly breathed fire. It burnt them and so they could not continue the investigation. It was believed then that the odd creature could fly." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_(island) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_(island) "The Komodo dragon was the driving factor for an expedition to Komodo Island by W. Douglas Burden in 1926. After returning with 12 preserved specimens and two live ones, this expedition provided the inspiration for the 1933 movie King Kong. It was also Burden who coined the common name "Komodo dragon."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_dragon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_dragon Your mention of dragons made me think of the Komodo dragon. I only noticed after pasting the first quote the strange coincidence that it mentions Flores! I thought it interesting that the very real Komodo dragon, 10 ft long with dragony teeth and nasty bite, produced traditional-dragon-like legends even into the 20th C.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  There's a very interesting (but somewhat contrived) anthropological hypothesis that dragons are composites of various predator creatures that were a danger to our ancestors- birds of prey, great cats, and pythons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Instinct_for_Dragons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Instinct_for_Dragons
  - kuhewa 5y ago
    The archetypal origin seems parsimonious to me. Consider that people that would never have interacted with large lizards still had dragony myths, see the mo'o among ancient Hawaiians.
kristopolous 5y ago
I remember reading somewhere about some explorer in like the 1600s or so describing a similar creature on I believe it was Flores. But I can't find the reference now. It also mentioned some other accounts from around the same time that they were an unruly nuisance that couldn't be domesticated and would steal grain, pets and livestock so the locals killed them off. I believe the ambiguity is whether the bones found on Flores are related to these stories (assuming they are accurate) or if they are describing say some irritating primate (the classic monkey causes very similar headaches for farmers, such as opening gates and letting an an entire herd of sheep wander on to a highway. In many places you can simply shoot troublesome monkeys without consequence) People didn't really have vast zoological knowledge in the 17th century so it could have just been a fairly common regional creature that somehow made it to the island from a trading ship and was causing issues. Of course more than the written word should be available as evidence here regardless of the integrity or intention of the source. Also as an exercise, pretend some group of hominids were alive somewhere; wouldn't we expect them to come around and steal things? If you don't conceive of private property, a grove of evenly spaced easy to access fruit trees would look like an amazing find. I'd sure be excited to stumble across that. I'd expect a farmer to shoot one of these creatures and a body to come up, right? I wish I could find it. Google is being useless as usual
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  Irritating primates: in the town of Simla, in northern India, there are many monkeys - there's a monkey temple at the top of the hill, and monkeys are "revered". Revered or not, though, the locals throw stones at them to make them get out of the path. I stayed there in a hotel. During the night, there were scratching noises - I assumed it was mice. It turned out to be a big alpha male, and he'd stolen all our chapatis and fruit from under the bed. He was very aggressive - he wouldn't back off when I confronted him, he really seemed to be up for a fight. I certainly wasn't - monkeys in that region carry rabies.
andrelaszlo 5y ago
In my part of Sweden, young women used to be alone with the cattle in the forest all summer (http://www.hhogman.se/summer-pasture.htm http://www.hhogman.se/summer-pasture.htm) An ancestor of mine, something like a great-great grandmother, woke up to see a family of very small, about knee-high, people driving their flock of very small cattle. This wasn't very unusual. Everyone knew about småfolk (little people) and they were usually described in similar ways. On Sundays they could be seen on the forest pathways leading to church, wearing traditional Sunday clothes. This fascinates me. Of course I don't think there's a parallel society of tiny humans living in the Swedish forests but I don't think that most people were lying either. I wonder what makes you experience something like that.
- mcv 5y ago
  Sometimes, when my mind is tired, it switches to a state where it interprets things that are large and far away as being small and nearby. I wonder if that phenomenon could explain why so many people see little people doing the same things regular people do.
  - neuronic 5y ago
    I have a similar effect with Cannabis. I can see things and recognize their distance but my mind distorts it and says "Hey, wait a second, these 10cm might also be 10m, you never know!" All while I can clearly see it not being 10m. I know it's 10cm but my mind doesn't "accept" it. I wonder if the drug triggers pathways that might be triggered in 'natural' situations as well, such as fatigue.
- b112 5y ago
  Could just be midgets (I hope that term is not mysteriously offensive, if so, sorry), but who felt shunned, intermarried, thus strengthening the genes. Look at how big, and how small dogs can be. Why not humans, too?
  - gpt5 5y ago
    > Look at how big, and how small dogs can be. Why not humans, too? Search for photos of the shortest humans, they are proportionally as small as small vs big dogs.
DrBazza 5y ago
> Without more recent bones, we have no reason to believe that they still exist. But you can say that about many mammals that are close to extinction now, we rarely find their bones, and if we do it's because we know about them and their habitat. We know nothing about hf. other than through the accidental discovery of their bones. If they're like us, a marginally intelligent tool using ape, and still exist, it's entirely possibly that they bury their dead, and we'll never find bones.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  >We know nothing about hf. other than through the accidental discovery of their bones. >it's entirely possibly that they bury their dead, and we'll never find bones. Ok but most of that accidental discovery of bones is accidental discovery of bones that were buried.
  - bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
    What if their death ritual is fire related?
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      I'm pretty sure that burnt remains have been found also, but I was just responding to the idea that we weren't finding any evidence of their existence because they buried their dead.
dmurray 5y ago
Right. "local culture has myth around mysterious secretive humanoid creatures" really shouldn't alter our priors at all. If this investigation is justified, it's because of the fossil record. The folk story makes a cute human interest angle, and if the researchers do find anything, it will make a fantastic stick to beat them with: "the Lio people have known about this ape species for hundreds of years, why didn't anyone just ask them?"
lkrubner 5y ago
"we have no reason to believe that they still exist" In the article, he's asking why we give so much importance to the bones. If we have 40 eyewitnesses, that would be enough to win in any court. An eyewitness account is evidence, just like a bone is evidence. His essay raises the question, why don't we put more weight on the eyewitness accounts?
- ZanyProgrammer 5y ago
  Because eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable? There’s not a shred of physical evidence?
  - krageon 5y ago
    Their point is people get convicted on "not a shred of physical evidence", but plenty of eyewitnesses. Why are the rules for punishing someone so much more lax than the rules for whether or not something can exist?
  - lkrubner 5y ago
    This researcher is claiming 30 eyewitnesses: "These include reports of sightings by more than 30 eyewitnesses, all of whom I spoke with directly." That's a lot of people. This not comparable to the 90 year old granny who squints and says "Yes, officer, that's the man, I'm sure that is him." About this: "There’s not a shred of physical evidence?" Why does there need to be physical evidence? As he asks in the article, why aren't the observations recorded enough?
    - nescioquid 5y ago
      Could it not be that these people (like others elsewhere) have a folk tradition about "little people"? Could the tradition have its roots in a prior encounter with fossils of this hominid? Hardly enough to surpass reasonable doubt, I think.

by btilly 5y ago

KarlKemp 5y ago

Growing up 250m from where the Neandertals were found, I got to watch in real time as the common (or communicated) thinking on it evolved, from the image of the primitive brute to the model that, wearing a suit, wouldn't seem out of place sitting across the table from you at Starbucks. Assuming the later view to be closer to the truth, and also including the genetic evidence that quite a bit of mating happened between these branches, I believe the relationship would have been more familiar than the rare sightings of physically intimidating strangers that seem to form the core of the Sasquatch myth.

btilly 5y ago
Given the evidence that Neandertals were not able to master things like sewing, and also lived an extremely active lifestyle (they were bigger, stronger, and had lots of broken bones that healed), the Sasquatch doesn't seem like that bad a fit. As for quite a bit of mating, current estimates say a maximum of dozens of times over a period of 12,000 years. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC532398/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC532398/ for verification. This is, "once every few hundred years someone got pregnant." This fits with rare enough encounters that interspecies sex only happened once every few generations.
- galangalalgol 5y ago
  It seems interesting that even that much of their (our?) DNA has been conserved. Do they have a guess at how much of it has been lost due to lack of benefit?
  - gscott 5y ago
    It seems ancient unused dna just sticks around https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mutant-chicken-grows-alli/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mutant-chicken-gr...
- ASalazarMX 5y ago
  > Given the evidence that Neandertals were not able to master things like sewing Don't read too much into that. Native Americans (homo sapiens from the whole American continent) didn't master wheels for transport. Aztecs did have toys that used wheels, the concept wasn't foreign, but somehow they didn't see the need to upscale it for transport. Yes, we can argue that they didn't have draught animals, but there are plenty of human powered uses for wheels, and some regions did have horses, llamas or buffaloes. Maybe Neanderthals just weren't interested.
  - progre 5y ago
    Horses and humans i the Americas at the same time is a post-Columbus thing. Buffaloes can't be domesticated. Llamas are mountain animals and wheeled wagons in mountains are extra hard to do well. Even in the old world, wheels where primarily a steppe thing. Edit: I was wrong about the horses, there is a overlap.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      No. Before 12800 years ago, North America was home to both horses and camels, along with ~30 other now extinct genera including mammoths, mastodons, cheetahs, dire wolves, giant sloths, and a bear much larger than the grizzly. All of those were obliterated at that geological instant, along with the Clovis culture, apparently by a meteorite or comet strike. It also melted many cubic miles of glacial ice in an instant, scouring out the Scablands of eastern Washington state in a flood hundreds of feet deep, carving out the whole Columbia Gorge in only days. It ignited continent-spanning fires that destroyed everything anyone might have built. Nothing would have prevented the people who lived before then from domesticating horses and using them to pull wagons. None has been found, but remarkable little remains of the people who were in North America for at least 10 millennia before then.
duxup 5y ago
> from the image of the primitive brute I kinda prefer the short stint in the 60s and 70s where they were imagined / portrayed to be a sort of nature oriented flower children. Fun how culture influences things.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  Maybe Homo Floresiensis devolved from Homo Sapiens the same way the Sleestak devolved from the Altrusians. https://landofthelost.fandom.com/wiki/Sleestak https://landofthelost.fandom.com/wiki/Sleestak >At one time, in the distant past, the Sleestak were known as Altrusians. They were a very peaceful and intelligent race and eventually grew into an advanced civilization, mastering many (if not all) of the secrets of the Land of the Lost, creating cities and temples among other landmarks. Unfortunately, the Altrusians lost control over their emotions and destroyed their civilization becoming known as the Sleestak. >In their decline, the Sleestak became are a degenerate warring race that lost much of their knowledge and culture. Now based on a distrust of strangers and struggle for survival, they have come out of the Era of Intelligence and into the Era of Solitude. The Era of Intelligence was the period in time when the Sleestak first arrived at The Land of the Lost. They built several temples now called Pylons which serve to regulate the life conditions, seasons and meteorological traits of the area. There was a period when there was only darkness before the Sleestak built the Time Pylon, which controls the light and dark cycles of The Land of The Lost. >As the Sleestak moved into The Lost City they entered a more barbarian state as they reverted back to their more primeval conditions. They eventually became ruled by a Sleestak called Sol, who reorganized the Sleestak and taught them how to hunt and kill.
rishav_sharan 5y ago
Would the African bush pygmy people be considered as a separate human branch? What makes the Hobbit people different from the current pygmy people? I think my question boils down to - if these separate branches of humans existed today, wouldn't we just consider them as Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
- jandrewrogers 5y ago
  Pygmy populations are ordinary humans with conserved genetic mutations, due to inbreeding, that limit the expression of things like growth hormones. They are anatomically modern humans, just much smaller. The ease with which these mutations can occur is evidenced by the existence of unrelated Pygmy populations in different parts of the world. There is no evidence of speciation or material genetic divergence in these cases. While we can't say anything for sure, the genetic divergence between modern humans and these other hominid species is significantly larger.
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    I agree with 100% of what you said, but if we didn't have access to the genes and were merely going by fragments of a few fossils - what then? Can one quantify the magnitude of difference between H. nalendi and H. erectus fossils, and compare it to the magnitude of difference between hypothetical Polynesian and Pygmy fossils?
    - bayesian_horse 5y ago
      You'd still notice a difference between two lineages diverging for a few hundreds or thousands of years and a two lineages diverging for hundreds of thousands of years or more. It's not just size or deformity, but other features that will diverge.
  - epivosism 5y ago
    I think the sense of the question was that as the most distant modern human branch, they're useful to compare relatively to potential new discoveries.
beowulfey 5y ago
If you read a lot of ancient mythologies there is a pattern that the "gods" are regularly mentioned and read as a separate species or society that interacted with us. Personally, I have a guess that it was interactions between Neandertals and early Sapiens that led to these myths. Two separate societies, viewed as independent. I won't make any guesses as to which is which, but I think the possibility makes sense.
DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
they ate ordinary amounts of meat, some sources say >70% of their diet was carnivore. Also they were sprinters rather than marathon runners and could outrun us and also had much more muscular build. Some theories suggest that they likely also consumed rotten meat if they had no choice. There carnivorous lifestyle would mean different gut biome to us allowing their bodies to get away with eating rotten meat more often.

duxup 5y ago

> Neandertals I wonder if they told stories about those weird humans…

krrrh 5y ago
I kind of like the theory that Neanderthals were basically orcs. https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/when-orcs-were-real?s=r https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/when-orcs-were-real?s=r Europeans maintained stories of ogres 10s of thousands of years after the last Neanderthal walked the earth, it’s plausible that the Lio in the article maintained myths about small humanlike creatures that fuelled the imaginations of the people who claim to have seen them in the same way.
- kurupt213 5y ago
  I’ve assumed that homo erectus are the elves

tsimionescu 5y ago

> https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronomers-say-global-myths-about-seven-sisters-stars-may-reach-back-100-000-years-151568 https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronom... shows that the myth about the Pleiades, aka "seven sisters", likely date back 100,000 years. This is definitely a fringe theory, based on a very literal interpretation of a myth, and ignoring the importance of numbers like 7 in the human mind. Edit: fixed link

throwaway777012 5y ago
While the cited link is broken, the dating of celestial folk tales to remote antiquity is far from a fringe theory. The fact is that some of the earliest recorded information is related to celestial motions (whether for farming or rituals, who knows). Stonehenge is a gigantic calendar, along with MOST other megalithic constructions across ALL cultures. The history book keeps getting pushed further back, sites like Gobekli Tepe depict megalithic construction from around 11000BC (before agriculture) with hieroglyphs and depictions of celestial constellations. The cave paintings of Lescaux depict constellations and religious/magical divination acts. It would be more appropriate to refer to the fields of comparative mythology, theology, and art history as fringe fields :)
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Fixed the link now to point to same link as GP. There is a huge difference between linking direct observations of the stars to things like Stonehenge, and looking at stories that are thousands of years old, and linking them to a single detail of an oral history that would have to be 100,000 years old to make any sense. Gobekli Tepe is actually a good example: even though it's a mere 11-13k years old (Wikipedia says 9000BC,not 11000BC, but that's anyway irrelevant), and even though it was still being used maybe 8k years ago, we have no oral histories about it, and no other memories of it, except perhaps a vague idea that the hill it was on was sacred. We also know that human cultures find certain numbers as especially meaningful - 1,2,3,7 are all numbers that hold special meanings in mythology all around the world. It seems way more plausible then to interpret a myth about six stars expressed as 7-1 as being a way to fit a 7 in the story. Edit: note that in good viewing conditions, there are about 11 stars in the Pleiades clusters visible to the naked eye, though 6 of them are significantly brighter: https://www.naic.edu/~gibson/pleiades/pleiades_see.html https://www.naic.edu/~gibson/pleiades/pleiades_see.html

yesenadam 5y ago

> https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronom https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronom... shows that the myth about the Pleiades, aka "seven sisters", likely date back 100,000 years. I think it's very, very far from showing that.

Steko 5y ago

> Without more recent bones, we have no reason to believe that they still exist. Eyewitness accounts aren’t bones but they are still evidence.

xbmcuser 5y ago

I have always wondered with how prevalent dragons are in human myths did some kind of dinosaurs survived long enough for homo to have interacted with them.

yesenadam 5y ago
"The earliest stories (among Westerners) of a dragon-like animal existing in the region circulated widely and attracted considerable attention. But no Westerner visited the island to check the story until official interest was sparked in the early 1910s by stories from Dutch sailors based in Flores in East Nusa Tenggara about a mysterious creature. The creature was allegedly a dragon which inhabited a small island in the Lesser Sunda Islands (the main island of which is Flores). ... The Dutch sailors reported that the creature measured up to seven metres (twenty-three feet) in length with a large body and mouth which constantly breathed fire. It burnt them and so they could not continue the investigation. It was believed then that the odd creature could fly." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_(island) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_(island) "The Komodo dragon was the driving factor for an expedition to Komodo Island by W. Douglas Burden in 1926. After returning with 12 preserved specimens and two live ones, this expedition provided the inspiration for the 1933 movie King Kong. It was also Burden who coined the common name "Komodo dragon."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_dragon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_dragon Your mention of dragons made me think of the Komodo dragon. I only noticed after pasting the first quote the strange coincidence that it mentions Flores! I thought it interesting that the very real Komodo dragon, 10 ft long with dragony teeth and nasty bite, produced traditional-dragon-like legends even into the 20th C.
Apocryphon 5y ago
There's a very interesting (but somewhat contrived) anthropological hypothesis that dragons are composites of various predator creatures that were a danger to our ancestors- birds of prey, great cats, and pythons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Instinct_for_Dragons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Instinct_for_Dragons
- kuhewa 5y ago
  The archetypal origin seems parsimonious to me. Consider that people that would never have interacted with large lizards still had dragony myths, see the mo'o among ancient Hawaiians.

kristopolous 5y ago

I remember reading somewhere about some explorer in like the 1600s or so describing a similar creature on I believe it was Flores. But I can't find the reference now. It also mentioned some other accounts from around the same time that they were an unruly nuisance that couldn't be domesticated and would steal grain, pets and livestock so the locals killed them off. I believe the ambiguity is whether the bones found on Flores are related to these stories (assuming they are accurate) or if they are describing say some irritating primate (the classic monkey causes very similar headaches for farmers, such as opening gates and letting an an entire herd of sheep wander on to a highway. In many places you can simply shoot troublesome monkeys without consequence) People didn't really have vast zoological knowledge in the 17th century so it could have just been a fairly common regional creature that somehow made it to the island from a trading ship and was causing issues. Of course more than the written word should be available as evidence here regardless of the integrity or intention of the source. Also as an exercise, pretend some group of hominids were alive somewhere; wouldn't we expect them to come around and steal things? If you don't conceive of private property, a grove of evenly spaced easy to access fruit trees would look like an amazing find. I'd sure be excited to stumble across that. I'd expect a farmer to shoot one of these creatures and a body to come up, right? I wish I could find it. Google is being useless as usual

denton-scratch 5y ago
Irritating primates: in the town of Simla, in northern India, there are many monkeys - there's a monkey temple at the top of the hill, and monkeys are "revered". Revered or not, though, the locals throw stones at them to make them get out of the path. I stayed there in a hotel. During the night, there were scratching noises - I assumed it was mice. It turned out to be a big alpha male, and he'd stolen all our chapatis and fruit from under the bed. He was very aggressive - he wouldn't back off when I confronted him, he really seemed to be up for a fight. I certainly wasn't - monkeys in that region carry rabies.

andrelaszlo 5y ago

In my part of Sweden, young women used to be alone with the cattle in the forest all summer (http://www.hhogman.se/summer-pasture.htm http://www.hhogman.se/summer-pasture.htm) An ancestor of mine, something like a great-great grandmother, woke up to see a family of very small, about knee-high, people driving their flock of very small cattle. This wasn't very unusual. Everyone knew about småfolk (little people) and they were usually described in similar ways. On Sundays they could be seen on the forest pathways leading to church, wearing traditional Sunday clothes. This fascinates me. Of course I don't think there's a parallel society of tiny humans living in the Swedish forests but I don't think that most people were lying either. I wonder what makes you experience something like that.

mcv 5y ago
Sometimes, when my mind is tired, it switches to a state where it interprets things that are large and far away as being small and nearby. I wonder if that phenomenon could explain why so many people see little people doing the same things regular people do.
- neuronic 5y ago
  I have a similar effect with Cannabis. I can see things and recognize their distance but my mind distorts it and says "Hey, wait a second, these 10cm might also be 10m, you never know!" All while I can clearly see it not being 10m. I know it's 10cm but my mind doesn't "accept" it. I wonder if the drug triggers pathways that might be triggered in 'natural' situations as well, such as fatigue.
b112 5y ago
Could just be midgets (I hope that term is not mysteriously offensive, if so, sorry), but who felt shunned, intermarried, thus strengthening the genes. Look at how big, and how small dogs can be. Why not humans, too?
- gpt5 5y ago
  > Look at how big, and how small dogs can be. Why not humans, too? Search for photos of the shortest humans, they are proportionally as small as small vs big dogs.

DrBazza 5y ago

> Without more recent bones, we have no reason to believe that they still exist. But you can say that about many mammals that are close to extinction now, we rarely find their bones, and if we do it's because we know about them and their habitat. We know nothing about hf. other than through the accidental discovery of their bones. If they're like us, a marginally intelligent tool using ape, and still exist, it's entirely possibly that they bury their dead, and we'll never find bones.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>We know nothing about hf. other than through the accidental discovery of their bones. >it's entirely possibly that they bury their dead, and we'll never find bones. Ok but most of that accidental discovery of bones is accidental discovery of bones that were buried.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
  What if their death ritual is fire related?
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure that burnt remains have been found also, but I was just responding to the idea that we weren't finding any evidence of their existence because they buried their dead.

dmurray 5y ago

Right. "local culture has myth around mysterious secretive humanoid creatures" really shouldn't alter our priors at all. If this investigation is justified, it's because of the fossil record. The folk story makes a cute human interest angle, and if the researchers do find anything, it will make a fantastic stick to beat them with: "the Lio people have known about this ape species for hundreds of years, why didn't anyone just ask them?"

lkrubner 5y ago

"we have no reason to believe that they still exist" In the article, he's asking why we give so much importance to the bones. If we have 40 eyewitnesses, that would be enough to win in any court. An eyewitness account is evidence, just like a bone is evidence. His essay raises the question, why don't we put more weight on the eyewitness accounts?

ZanyProgrammer 5y ago
Because eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable? There’s not a shred of physical evidence?
- krageon 5y ago
  Their point is people get convicted on "not a shred of physical evidence", but plenty of eyewitnesses. Why are the rules for punishing someone so much more lax than the rules for whether or not something can exist?
- lkrubner 5y ago
  This researcher is claiming 30 eyewitnesses: "These include reports of sightings by more than 30 eyewitnesses, all of whom I spoke with directly." That's a lot of people. This not comparable to the 90 year old granny who squints and says "Yes, officer, that's the man, I'm sure that is him." About this: "There’s not a shred of physical evidence?" Why does there need to be physical evidence? As he asks in the article, why aren't the observations recorded enough?
  - nescioquid 5y ago
    Could it not be that these people (like others elsewhere) have a folk tradition about "little people"? Could the tradition have its roots in a prior encounter with fossils of this hominid? Hardly enough to surpass reasonable doubt, I think.