Friday, December 17, 2004

Of Homo Leprechaunus

I find the search for the Big Bang and the search for the Missing Link to be two of the most ironically worthwhile pursuits of modern science. The search for the Big Bang has given us the two Hubble Deep Field photographs, along with their precocious younger sibling, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which together present the most brainspattering, shotgun-blast-to-the-face witness to the majesty of the Creator I have seen. The search for the Missing Link, on the other hand, is far more interesting for its dead ends. And I am not speaking of the much-hyped hoaxes and cavemen constructed from bone chips, but rather of the very real scientific discoveries and their implications for people such as myself who have stubbornly refused to stop believing in fairytales.

Picture if you will a tropical island populated by tiny little people who hunt dragons, giant rats the size of golden retrievers, and miniature elephants. While this seems like the setting for a bad fantasy novel, it actually comes from the pages of a scientific peer-review journal, and is intended as quite serious natural history. The remains of a race of three-foot-tall hominids (read, 'wee folk') have recently been discovered in Indonesia, and the discovery has created quite a stir in the scientific world. Most especially, this is because they are apparently (even from an evolutionary standpoint) neighbors of Homo sapiens and not his ancestors. As such, Homo floresiensis stands as one of the few known semihuman creatures that may very well have interacted with humankind; another is Homo neandertalensis. This past summer, while rereading Lewis' The Discarded Image, I became convinced that the neandertal and the elves or high faeries of European folklore were one and the same. (The modern paleoanthropologist's conception of the neandertal is very little like the sloping caveman of the popular imagination. Neandertal was apparently not only stronger and hardier, but also more intelligent than modern man. Oh, and his slightly shorter stature fits in well with this theory also.) Now the appearance of the diminutive Homo floresiensis lends credibility to the existence of such fairytale staples as leprechauns, gnomes, and the like. Even the scientists have admitted as much, especially since the tiny people recently discovered in Flores (affectionately dubbed 'hobbits' by their discoverers) have always featured in the folklore of that island in much the same way that leprechauns do in the folklore of the Irish or pucks and Robin Goodfellows in that of the wider British Isles.

Science rules.

posted by Jeremy at 6:47 PM

3 Marginalia:

Christians waste a lot of breath teaching evolution sarcastically. The best thing about evolution is how ridiculous it is. It's the most imaginative of the sciences. Without it we wouldn't have the X-men or the Lottery, and those things are fun.

Good stuff here, Tank.

Remy

By  Anonymous, at 3:37 PM  

Tank, Stevenson told me to check out your blog as well as Gibbs. Sweet stuff going on here, mad props. I heard about the Hobbits in the news recently, but not the neanderthals being smart. Scientists remind me of a group of grade school students getting worked up. "Dude it would be like totally sweet if we came from monkeys, no wait from lizzards, or bugs! yeah, out of some gross slime! yeah! sweet."
-Sackattack

By  Anonymous, at 3:54 PM  

Dude,
Where you all up at? I daily vainly check this site, nuturing nascent hopes you happily abort.

Josh

By  Josh, at 3:39 PM  

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