EXTINCT? Episode 2: Orang-Pendek vs. the Hobbit

Still frame from Extinct? Episode 2 - Indonesia

"...eyewitnesses have again described the Orang-Pendak as being completely covered in hair, with extensive musculature developments. Homo Floresiensis in comparison, is much weaker." -- Adam Davies

Those guys at TheBigfootReport.com have done it again. As you recall we announced the first episode of "Extinct?" back in late Feb, they have produced another video with the same charm and clear narrative as the first. (See New Independent Yeti Documentary Shows Promise )

Read an excerpt from the Video below:

EXTINCT? - Episode 2 - INDONESIA - The Search For Little Foot (2012)

Special thanks to Adam Davies
Written, directed, narrated by Ro Sahebi

In the jungles of Indonesia, discoveries are being made. Could this be the missing link we've been looking for? Homo Floresiensis and Orang-Pendek are all the rage in primatology and anthropology. We get a little help in the episode from the Orang-Pendek goto guy, Adam Davies (MonsterQuest, Is it Real?). 

The Bigfoot Report

Hobbit Still Stirring Things Up

Homo-floresiensis A.K.A. the Hobbit will be starring in its very own special issue of The Journal of Human Evolution

Some of the biggest findings are evidence of close ties to Australopithecus, A famous speculative Bigfoot ancestor.

Combined with other anatomical evidence, the results ruled out Asian Homo erectus as the progenitor. Both jawbones shared characteristics with Australopithecus and early Homo, and were closer to them than the Dmanisi skeletons were. The ancestral hobbits must have left Africa before the hominins who reached Dmanisi, Brown and Maeda reasoned.

Another big one would be the redefinition of the genus Homo.

“What will come from this is either the redefining of the genus Homo or the argument that this species has so many unique characteristics and so many features shared with australopithecines that it probably belongs in its own genus,” Brown tells HES.

Discovery Magazine has a great blog dedicated to the Hobbit here.

Hobbit Wars

Here at the Big Foot Lunch Club we have a high interest in Homo floresiensis. Homo floresiensis ("Flores Man"; nicknamed Hobbit) is a possible species in the genus Homo, remarkable for its small body and brain and for its survival until relatively recent times. It was named after the Indonesian island of Flores on which the remains were found.

This small bipedal hominid lived among us over 1 million years ago. More significant, as we declared in an earlier post, it is an entirely different species than us, Homo sapiens.

As Bigfoot enthusiast we like the idea of other bipedal hominids living among us. In another post we also suggested Hobbit’s feet were more structurally similar to Bigfoot’s than humans.

A new Time Magazine article declares there is opposition to the different species theory below is an excerpt from the article. To read the whole thing click here.

Inhabitants of the Indonesian island of Flores used to tell stories of a separate race of little people called the ebu gogo, 3-ft.-tall, hairy human-like creatures that hid in the island's many limestone caves.
That changed in a paper published in the current issue of the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The PNAS team closely examined the one almost complete skull unearthed at Flores and say they found no evidence that it was belonged to anyone but a modern human.
The original authors of the Nature paper — Peter Brown and Michael Morwood, both of the University of New England in Australia — aren't about to surrender their belief in a new species. In an email, Brown says that the PNAS paper "provides absolutely no evidence that the unique combination of features found in Homo floresiensis are found in any modern human."
Colin Groves, an Australian biological anthropologist who is an author on an upcoming paper in the Journal of Human Evolution that discounts the microcephaly hypothesis, says the PNAS team subtly shaped the evidence to fit their conclusion: that the hobbit was just a developmentally stunted human. Henry Gee, a senior editor at Nature who was responsible for overseeing the publication of the original Flores paper, concedes that the PNAS paper is "very interesting" but says the authors "cherry-pick the evidence [they] like."

The two sides quickly descend from debating the finer points of human fossils to slagging off on each other's ethics. If only the Flores debate could be so clearly decided. What's certain is that the scientific stakes are extremely high: if the Flores find is really a separate species, then the history of human evolution will have to be rewritten.

Hobbits have feet like Bigfoot

Bizarre foot
"My problem with that is that it doesn't speak to the rest of the skeleton," says Jungers, who also presented his analysis of the hobbit's bizarre foot at an anthropology conference last year.

For starters, the feet of H. floresiensis are far longer than would be expected of 1-metre tall H. erectus or H. sapiens. The resulting need to drag its feet back high with each step to avoid kicking the ground would have limited its ability to move swiftly. It also has unarched feet. "It's never going to win the 100-yard dash, and it's never going to win the marathon," Jungers says.

Both features also point to an ancestor that predates fleet-footed H. erectus, Jungers says. "If in fact human evolution redesigned the bipedal foot in some way, these guys missed the train."

A closer inspection of the bones in the hobbit's nearly complete left foot reveal both modern and archaic characteristics. Its short big toe resembles that of an australopithecine like Lucy, while the shapes of the toe bones appear human. "It's definitely a head-scratcher," Jungers says.

He speculates that the hobbit's closest relative is a species of human more ancient than H. erectus, with a smaller brain – perhaps H. habilis.

Hobbits 'are a separate species'

It has been accepted by two separate studies that Homo floresiensis is indeed a separate species!

This is delightful news. Although it does not necessarily prove Bigfoot is possible, it definitely supports that Bigfoot is possible.

One of the primary theories of bigfoot is the species may have a common ancestor with a modern day primate. This is exactly the case with Homo floresiensis approx 1 million years ago. The theory is not completely fleshed out, but the common ancestor may have been Homo erectus .

reported by the BBC is the following...

Hobbits 'are a separate species'

The Hobbit's foot is in many ways quite primitive
Scientists have found more evidence that the Indonesian "Hobbit" skeletons belong to a new species of human - and not modern pygmies.

The one metre (3ft) tall, 30kg (65lbs) humans roamed the Indonesian island of Flores, perhaps up to 8,000 years ago.

Since the discovery, researchers have argued vehemently as to the identity of these diminutive people.

Two papers in the journal Nature now support the idea they were an entirely new species of human.

The team, which discovered the tiny remains in Liang Bua cave on Flores, contends that the population belongs to the species Homo floresiensis - separate from our own grouping Homo sapiens .

They argue that the "Hobbits" are descended from a prehistoric species of human - perhaps Homo erectus - which reached island South-East Asia more than a million years ago.


Over many years, their bodies most likely evolved to be smaller in size, through a natural selection process called island dwarfing, claim the discoverers, and many other scientists.

However, some researchers argued that this could not account for the Hobbit's chimp-sized brain of almost 400 cubic cm - a third the size of the modern human brain.

Original article at BBC News Worls America