Curious

Someone I don’t know has read boht this and my other ‘blog. I don’t know what to think. My first reaction is wonder; how these people come across me? I know I’m listed, but there’s zillions of things on the Web, and most are more interesting than me.

Then I get curious about my newfound audience. What can I say, I’m human; it’s my nature.

Speaking of Hominids, National Geographic, as usual, has a great spread on another discovery of some earlier hominids in the April issue (here). I always like seeing that. The reconstruction is always so fascinating; it shows not only what they find, but also the unconscious assumptions we make about such unanswerables like skin color and hair pattern. We can always guess, but it will always be a guess.

Useless fact: Chimps also can have male pattern baldness. Don’t ask me how I know that, but it’s true.

The dig of the Homo Erectus group in Tblisi, Georgia (here) shows several skulls, one is missing teeth. The real remarkable thing is, there is bone growth over the sockets where the the teeth were, indicating he lived quite awhile after losing his teeth.

From the article:

Not only are there no teeth, but nearly all the sockets are smooth, filled in by bone that grew over the spaces. The jaws look like two crescent moons. Although it's hard to be sure of his age, "it looks like he was maybe about 40, and the bone regrowth shows he lived for a couple of years after his teeth fell out," says the anthropologist. "This is really incredible." How did the toothless old man survive, unable to chew his food? Maybe his companions helped him, says (David) Lordkipanidze. If so, those toothless jaws might testify to something like compassion, stunningly early in human evolution. You have to flash forward more than one and a half million years, to the Neanderthals of Ice Age Europe, to see anything comparable.

The other article (here) is about a group of small, approximately a meter tall, human-like skeletons. They estimate the age to approximately 18,000 years old, well within the time our ancestors were wandering around the globe. They nicknamed the skeleton ‘hobbit’, because of his diminutive size. To me they don’t look like Hobbits.


They look more like Brownies, or Pixies.


In Europe, there are several myths of small human like characters. Maybe the only traces left by those were in the stories we’ve re-told?