SCIENTISTS DISCOVERY CHANGES HUMAN PRE-HISTORY AGAIN

Wow, here's a weird story--18,000 years ago a race of 3 foot-tall humanoid creatures existed on an island not far from Java. Of course, the press is jumping all over the story and calling these people "hobbits". However, if you'll have a gander of the artist rendition of what these blokes look like, you can clearly see they were not natives of Hobbiton. Sheesh, doesn't anyone read books anymore? Hell--these guys don't even look like the movie characters!

Still, this is an incredible find and this story is an example of what I'd be writing about here at ThePete.Com if only the world wasn't so incredibly screwed up these days. But I digress. Here's a clip from a Reuters article over at Yahoo News:

The partial skeleton of Homo floresiensis, found in a cave on the island of Flores, is of an adult female that was a meter (3 feet) tall, had a chimpanzee-sized brain and was substantially different from modern humans.

It shared the isolated island to the east of Java with miniature elephants and Komodo dragons. The creature walked upright, probably evolved into its dwarf size because of environmental conditions and coexisted with modern humans in the region for thousands of years.

"It is an extraordinarily important find," Professor Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum in London, told a news conference on Wednesday. "It challenges the whole idea of what it is that makes us human."

Peter Brown of the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, and his colleagues made the discovery of the skull and other bones, and miniature tools in September 2003 while looking for records of modern human migration to Asia. They reported the finding in the science journal Nature.

"Finding these hominins on an isolated island in Asia, and with elements of modern human behavior in tool making and hunting, is truly remarkable and could not have been predicted by previous discoveries," Brown said in a statement.

I just love it when science is proven wrong. It reminds us of the fact that there is never an absolute 100% truth. We always need to keep that in mind when dealing with so-called "historical facts." So much is open to interpretation and everything you believed can change on a dime when something like this happens.

This is why it pays to keep an open mind.

That is, unless you like looking like an overzealous moron...