Did Hobbits exist?
February 23, 2005 at 4:03 am
This article of National Geographic brings up that particular question.
Scientists made one of the most spectacular discoveries in paleoanthropology in half a century: The skeleton of a 18.000 year old 1-meter tall adult. They determined that this human species is completely new to science.
However they also found pieces of dwarf elephants and lizards, so the species was probabaly a hunter just as our ancestors were at that time. And although the adults body was the size of a 3 year old modern human child, its brain was only one third of the size of such a child.
So the romantic view that hobbits did really exist gets hammered down in the same article, but scientists find it spectacular none the less. But it would still be a nice and beautiful image that the Lord of the Rings is indeed a historic journal, just like J.R.R. Tolkien described it.
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