Forensic expert reconstructs hobbit's face

Adam Khor · 10-12-2012 08:33PM #1

As in Homo floresiensis, and it doesn´t look like Bilbo.

But it does look much less "primitive" than expected.

http://www.zmescience.com/science/anthropology/real-life-hobbit-face-reconstructed-43243/

steddyeddy · 11-12-2012 12:12AM

Adam Khor wrote: »

As in Homo floresiensis, and it doesn´t look like Elijah Wood.

But it does look much less "primitive" than expected.

http://www.zmescience.com/science/anthropology/real-life-hobbit-face-reconstructed-43243/

To be honest I'm always extremely skeptical of these reconstructions. Archaic species always look far too human in my opinion.

Wibbs · 11-12-2012 10:02AM

I'd tend to agree with SE alright. The fashion seems to wax and wane between more apelike and more human. I suppose the only thing that may settle it is if we ever find a pickled or frozen archaic. Hope springs

The hobbits are a real odd one. Tiny brain, but with remarkably modern toolkit. At first it was assumed they were a homo erectus dwarfed by island living. Well judging by other stone tools found erectus had been on Flores for near a million years. Then it got weirder. They looked at the bones and it was an odd mix of traits. The feet in particular were more archaic than erectus as was the wrist. The wrist was more like the one found on Lucy's species the australopithecines rather than the more modern erectus. It's beginnng to look like they may be an earlier hominid. So erectus may not have been the first to leave Africa. Instead Habilis or the like was. Maybe they left around the same time? If there was more than one hominid in Africa at the time(and there seems to have been) and conditions were ripe for one to go walkabout, it shouldn't surprise us to posit that another wouldn't follow.

If they are pre erectus humans and have a toolkit like this and show sea faring abilities and care of sick/unfit individuals* that changes soooo much about what the kind of questions we start to ask of archaics and how they might have interacted.

*one of the hobbits found was very old for one. Close to 40 by some accounts. He hadn't a tooth in his head and his jaws had healed over the tooth sockets and retreated so he'd been like that for many a year. Yet he survived for many a year so the group or someone in the group had helped him process food. Another shock for such an archaic hominid. We know we do stuff like that and evidence is very strong for Neandertals doing the same. Even Erectus examples have been found of similar, but an hominid that archaic?

Adam Khor · 12-12-2012 04:25AM

Wibbs wrote: »

*one of the hobbits found was very old for one. Close to 40 by some accounts. He hadn't a tooth in his head and his jaws had healed over the tooth sockets and retreated so he'd been like that for many a year. Yet he survived for many a year so the group or someone in the group had helped him process food.

Either that or he had the One Ring

magicherbs · 13-12-2012 04:34PM

These fossil reconstructions are purely for popular media and have zero scientific credence, usefulness or application. Have you ever seen the methods use to reconstruct and reimagine dinosaur/other extinct species from fossils applied to extant skeletons? They never look like the animal actually existed.

Wibbs · 13-12-2012 08:08PM

Well to be fair compared to dinos we do have living examples of humans, so we can give a good oul guess as to how other versions of us may have looked. That said even with modern humans skin depth varies across different populations. Nose shape is very hard to guess at as is the size of the lips and the ears. Hairiness or not another guess as is hair texture. With humans for which we don't have living examples these guesses could make a big diff to the final picture. Imagine in the future an alien found a lad from Lagos' skull. If he gave him long straight blonde hair, white skin and a button nose he'd look nada like he should look.

Rubecula · 13-12-2012 11:25PM

I can't remember when it was on but there was a TV show called something like Hobbits, Monsters and Myths a few years ago and there was tribe found that they called Hobbits. The men are all tiny (women are normal sized) Somewhere in the far east I think. Not sure now.

steddyeddy · 13-12-2012 11:51PM

Rubecula wrote: »

I can't remember when it was on but there was a TV show called something like Hobbits, Monsters and Myths a few years ago and there was tribe found that they called Hobbits. The men are all tiny (women are normal sized) Somewhere in the far east I think. Not sure now.

I think I saw the same programme. The zoologist guy who presented it was wearing an eye patch I think. The hobbits he found were regular pygmys in indonesia.

The flores man which existed on the island of Flores is remmebered in the oral traditions of the islanders as the "ebo gogo". Below is a report from the daily telegraph detailing the villagers tales of the ebo gogo.

[SIZE=-1]

[/SIZE]Villagers speak of the small, hairy Ebu Gogo

Richard Roberts, discoverer of the Hobbit, says local tales suggest the species could still exist When I was back in Flores earlier this month we heard the most amazing tales of little, hairy people, whom they called Ebu Gogo - Ebu meaning grandmother and Gogo meaning 'he who eats anything'. The tales contained the most fabulous details - so detailed that you'd imagine there had to be a grain of truth in them. One of the village elders told us that the Ebu Gogo ate everything raw, including vegetables, fruits, meat and, if they got the chance, even human meat.
When food was served to them they also ate the plates, made of pumpkin - the original guests from hell (or heaven, if you don't like washing up and don't mind replacing your dinner set every week).
The villagers say that the Ebu Gogo raided their crops, which they tolerated, but decided to chase them away when the Ebu Gogo stole - and ate - one of their babies.
They ran away with the baby to their cave which was at the foot of the local volcano, some tens of metres up a cliff face. The villagers offered them bales of dry grass as fodder, which they gratefully accepted.
A few days later, the villagers went back with a burning bale of grass which they tossed into the cave. Out ran the Ebu Gogo, singed but not fried, and were last seen heading west, in the direction of Liang Bua, where we found the Hobbit, as it happens.
When my colleague Gert van den Bergh first heard these stories a decade ago, which several of the villages around the volcano recount with only very minor changes in detail, he thought them no better than leprechaun tales until we unearthed the Hobbit. (I much prefer Ebu as the name of our find but my colleague Mike Morwood was insistent on Hobbit.)
The anatomical details in the legends are equally fascinating. They are described as about a metre tall, with long hair, pot bellies, ears that slightly stick out, a slightly awkward gait, and longish arms and fingers - both confirmed by our further finds this year.
They [the Ebu Gogo] murmured at each other and could repeat words [spoken by villagers] verbatim. For example, to 'here's some food', they would reply 'here's some food'. They could climb slender-girthed trees but, here's the rub, were never seen holding stone tools or anything similar, whereas we have lots of sophisticated artefacts in the H. floresiensis levels at Liang Bua. That's the only inconsistency with the Liang Bua evidence.
The women Ebu Gogo had extremely pendulous breasts, so long that they would throw them over their shoulders, which must have been quite a sight in full flight.
We did ask the villagers if they ever interbred with the Ebu Gogo. They vigorously denied this, but said that the women of Labuan Baju (a village at the far western end of Flores, better known as LBJ) had rather long breasts, so they must have done.
Poor LBJ must be the butt of jokes in Flores, rather like the Irish and Tasmanians.
A local eruption at Liang Bua (in western Flores) may have wiped out local hobbits around 12,000 years ago, but they could well have persisted much later in other parts of the island. The villagers said that the last hobbit was seen just before the village moved location, farther from the volcano, not long before the Dutch colonists settled in that part of central Flores, in the 19th century.
Do the Ebu Gogo still exist? It would be a hoot to search the last pockets of rainforest on the island. Not many such pockets exist, but who knows. At the very least, searching again for that lava cave, or others like it, should be done, because remains of hair only a few hundred years old, would surely survive, snagged on the cave walls or incorporated in deposits, and would be ideal for ancient DNA analyses.
Interestingly, we did find lumps of dirt with black hair in them this year in the Hobbit levels, but don't know yet if they're human or something else. We're getting DNA testing done, which we hope will be instructive.
Richard "Bert" Roberts is a University of Wollongong professor and one of the team investigating the Hobbits.

Interesting tales of small hair covered men are found all over asia and asia minor.

Adam Khor · 14-12-2012 02:07AM

steddyeddy wrote: »

Interesting tales of small hair covered men are found all over asia and asia minor.

Also in Africa and South America, really...

About the forensic reconstructions looking nothing like the real thing, I've always found them very interesting, if only because of the artistic side of it.
This may not be what an Australopithecus afarensis looked like in real life, yet the model does look like a creature that could exist and is an artistic masterpiece IMHO:

And I suspect these are much closer to reality than our current reconstructions of dinosaurs.

On the other hand, some of the digital reconstructions shown by Discovery Channel of ancient Egyptians look like badly rendered videogame characters or grotesque caricatures... I would really like to see a reconstruction with a quality like the Australopithecus above applied to say, Ramses II or Tutmosis III...

Rubecula · 14-12-2012 10:19AM

steddyeddy wrote: »

Interesting tales of small hair covered men are found all over asia and asia minor.

And even in Sherlock Holmes (The Sign of Four).

(By the way my grandad was only 5'2" Does that count?

Oh maybe not, unless Dublin was in the far east back then

Adam Khor · 14-12-2012 11:31PM

Rubecula wrote: »

And even in Sherlock Holmes (The Sign of Four).

Really? I'm pretty sure I read The Sign of the Four but I don´t remember any small hairy men...

I do remember that Sherlock for one second mistakes a baboon for a small, hairy, deformed child, but I think that was in The Adventure of the Speckled Band which was one of my faves :pac:

Rubecula · 15-12-2012 11:39AM

OK it is straying off topic a bit, but I do know a bit about Sherlock. In the sign of Four the mysterious assistant, who when the footprint in the attic is shown to Watson, thinks it is the footprint of a child (Holmes knows better) Anyway I am rambling now, it was an Andaman islander. and he had poisonous darts and a blowpipe.

Adam Khor · 15-12-2012 11:35PM

Rubecula wrote: »

OK it is straying off topic a bit, but I do know a bit about Sherlock. In the sign of Four the mysterious assistant, who when the footprint in the attic is shown to Watson, thinks it is the footprint of a child (Holmes knows better) Anyway I am rambling now, it was an Andaman islander. and he had poisonous darts and a blowpipe.

Ooooh I remember now :>

I had to google "Andaman islander" tho to see what they actually look like. I think plenty of Europeans would like to be that hairless, actually XD

Squeaky the Squirrel · 25-01-2013 11:36PM

Faces of Our Ancestors

Adam Khor · 25-01-2013 11:41PM

Squeaky the Squirrel wrote: »

Faces of Our Ancestors

Very cool :>

Squeaky the Squirrel · 26-01-2013 07:46PM

Face of the 26,000-year-old woman

Carved from a woolly mammoth tusk 26,000 years ago, the earliest portrait of a woman ever created is set to go on display at the British Museum.

The astonishing piece of art, smaller than a thumb at just 4.8cm high, was created in the middle of the last Ice Age, in a valley in what is now Moravia in the Czech Republic, using stone tools.

Experts believe it to be the earliest ever portrait of a woman and, among with a range of other ancient works of art, it is set to go on display at a groundbreaking new exhibition at the British Museum.

Rubecula · 26-01-2013 08:39PM

If it is genuinely that old it is incredible, and the fact it has survived even more so.

Adam Khor · 27-01-2013 12:11AM

That is incredible :O

Reminds me of early Greek or Mesopotamian art :eek:

Rubecula · 29-01-2013 02:45PM

Yes Adam it does look a lot like that. Certainly something from a more advanced culture. Which is why I said "If it is genuine" It may possibly have been made later on an old bit of ivory??? I would have said it looks sort of Norse in actual fact.

Maybe it is a precursor to Norse culture?

I am actually a little excited by this, has it been posted in the Archeology forum do you know? I am sure they would love it in there.

Adam Khor · 30-01-2013 01:26AM

There's an Archaeology forum? :pac:

Adam Khor · 17-02-2013 09:43PM

Here's an article regarding the Ice Age portrait posted by Squeaky. Maybe I'm not thinking clearly- I didn´t sleep well- but it seems like a lot of nonsense to me. Are they really trying to find the "secret" to the Mona Lisa's smile by looking at a skull? Please...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/9869920/Happy-families-Mona-Lisa-and-her-prehistoric-ancestor.html

dodderangler · 18-02-2013 02:58AM

Adam Khor wrote: »

As in Homo floresiensis, and it doesn´t look like Elijah Wood.

But it does look much less "primitive" than expected.

http://www.zmescience.com/science/anthropology/real-life-hobbit-face-reconstructed-43243/

Looks like he was a model for shock waves in hobbit times

Wibbs · 18-02-2013 09:41AM

Adam Khor wrote: »

Maybe I'm not thinking clearly- I didn´t sleep well- but it seems like a lot of nonsense to me. Are they really trying to find the "secret" to the Mona Lisa's smile by looking at a skull? Please...

Nonsense is being kind AK. I'd call it utterly daft ballsology of the first order. "Oh look her left eye is bigger this means...." that the artist wasn't that good? Or cultural need for realism was low?* Or that flint tools are a pain in the arse for small detail?

*Look at early Irish "celtic" illuminations and their representations of people. They weren't too pushed with going for the romanesque reality vibe. Doesn't make them bad artists

Adam Khor · 18-02-2013 08:05PM

Wibbs wrote: »

*Look at early Irish "celtic" illuminations and their representations of people. They weren't too pushed with going for the romanesque reality vibe. Doesn't make them bad artists

Yeah... but as sort of an artist myself I can tell you people these days is very cynical when it comes to judging art- artistic license or anything that deviates from reality is seemingly a sin these days...

Wibbs · 18-02-2013 11:09PM

Adam Khor wrote: »

Yeah... but as sort of an artist myself I can tell you people these days is very cynical when it comes to judging art- artistic license or anything that deviates from reality is seemingly a sin these days...

QFT

dodderangler · 18-02-2013 11:54PM

Actually really interesting about how the humans and Neanderthals at some point lived at same time and basically humans wiped them out by overpopulating and Neanderthals may have preyed upon humans being stronger and faster than humans but humans being smarter and built for long distance may have outran them and many survived
Still in process of reading it have it saved on iPad so il read the rest later

Adam Khor · 19-02-2013 07:00PM

dodderangler wrote: »

Actually really interesting about how the humans and Neanderthals at some point lived at same time and basically humans wiped them out by overpopulating and Neanderthals may have preyed upon humans being stronger and faster than humans but humans being smarter and built for long distance may have outran them and many survived
Still in process of reading it have it saved on iPad so il read the rest later

I would recommend reading the Neanderthal related threads in this forum; I've learned more about them from our very own Wibbs than I have from any book on the subject :>

Wibbs · 19-02-2013 08:22PM

On that score, here's a possible Neandertal fashioned "face" from even further back;

Found in a cave entrance in France and dated at 35,000 years old maybe more. Whoever made it seemed to have had a definite plan in mind. Interestingly for me it used bone and the use of bone among them seems to be rare. Recent discoveries in Spain of sophisticated wooden utensils miraculously preserved under rare conditions might mean we may find even more Neandertal "art". They collected pigments that's for sure and applied some pigments to seashells. They also selected for and collected particular coloured bird feathers for some purpose or other, maybe personal adornment? The pigments may have been used in a similar way.

The other question I'd raise is what is art, a sense of the aesthetic and where do you find it? We're used to art that is external, public. A thing, on a plinth or a wall, separate to us, something to be viewed. Maybe external public art was our invention? Maybe they didn't think like this. They were the canvas, rather than something external and abstracted from the body*?

Consider modern human types of "internal/private" art, tattoos. Otzi the iceman has tattoos on his body, the oldest known and a walk down any street today will find tattoos much in evidence. If we never found Otzi we'd never know Neolithic man had them. The most wonderfully covered modern tattooed person would be lost after death unless they were flash frozen.

Maybe just maybe if you went back in a Tardis you'd see very colourful Neandertals, painted in all the colours they could find in an area, with feathers and pendants. Actually on that score, that above "face" from France? I'd be sticking that into an electron microscope to see if any minute traces of pigment remain(if they haven't already washed it

)). Most ancient cultures painted human representations. An ancient Greek would be puzzled walking around a museum to see all the Greek statues in plain white marble.

*with the possible exception of finely made handaxes/bifaces. They appear to be a very strong cultural meme for nigh on a million years. The Neandertals were the last to make them, we didn't AFAIR? The finely made ones usually show no edgewear so weren't used as tools. Some are too massive to be useful and some are effin spectacular examples of symmetry, which took huge skill and planning.

Adam Khor · 20-02-2013 07:24AM

Wibbs wrote: »

On that score, here's a possible Neandertal fashioned "face" from even further back;

I can´t help but to imagine the Neanderthal making this simple face thing and then laughing his arse off, like a child laughing at a funny cartoon he just drew.
Seeing as our fellow great apes laugh and seem to have a sense of humor, I guess Neanderthals did too :pac:

Squeaky the Squirrel · 05-03-2013 10:17PM

dodderangler wrote: »

Actually really interesting about how the humans and Neanderthals at some point lived at same time and basically humans wiped them out by overpopulating and Neanderthals may have preyed upon humans being stronger and faster than humans but humans being smarter and built for long distance may have outran them and many survived
Still in process of reading it have it saved on iPad so il read the rest later

The Neanderthals May Have Died Out Because of ... Bunnies?

Wibbs · 05-03-2013 11:19PM

Interesting StS. Maybe. Though the fact they selectively hunted birds for what appears to be their feathers and birds are a lot harder to catch than rabbits and the like, I'm not so sure. Their calorie needs, being higher than our own may plug into the bunny theory more, rather than an inability to catch such prey. You'd need an awful lot of rabbits to equate to the calorie result of say a buffalo.

Forensic expert reconstructs hobbit's face

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