H. sapiens (average Australian Aboriginal) 1,287
Figure 2.5. Peter Brown photographing hobbit skull. Courtesy of Peter Brown.
Flores natives have not forgotten their own Ebu Gogo, true wild men or cryptids, covered with body hair and only four and a half feet tall, who “ate anything” (Ebu Gogo roughly translates into “grandmother who eats anything”), raided their crops, and may also have made off with their children. This is not Flores mythology (as a Google search will tell you). It is Flores history: In the eighteenth century, the Nage villagers of Flores disposed of the devious little Ebu Gogo by tricking them into a cave and firing at them. The same tactic, as we will see, was used in Sri Lanka to exterminate the equally wild Nittevos.
Long armed and pot bellied, Ebu Gogo were probably the last of the hobbits’ mixed descendants, carrying the genes not only of Homo floresiensis, but also those of the ancestors of the light-skinned, very short, Rampasas folk, still living on Flores. Some researchers noted that Flo had the same rotated teeth and receding chin as the Rampasas pygmies living there today, quite near the LB cave.
HOMO SAPIENS PYGMAEUS
Yes, quite a bit of H. erectus blood flowed in the veins of our hobbits, even though they lived as recently as 12,000 years ago. Flo’s race is said to date back 95,000 years (others say only 38 kyr) and to have survived up to 12,000 years ago. But these dates can be problematic: Even H. erectus’s successor, Neanderthal man, was supposed to be gone from Earth by 28,000 BP. It seems, though, that both H. erectus and Neanderthal garnered a bit of immortality by planting their genes with more advanced humans who “succeeded” them.
Ah, but until scientists twig to the persistent crossbreeding among all these ancient stocks (not different species, just stocks), they will keep discovering “previously unknown species” like Flo, and keep asking misfired questions like: How did hobbit get so small? The favorite (and flawed) answer is that they are a scaled-down version of H. erectus, according to the principle of island dwarfing; or they got small due to “global warming caused by massive volcanic activity . . . [which] led to dwarfing.” Or Flo is a “stunning” example of isolation at work “miniaturizing” a sequestered race.11
Their littleness is not an anomaly at all and does not need to be explained away, though every analysis I have come across has the little people shrinking to their current size, acquiring reduced stature. Unbiased research points to an original gene pool for littleness, belonging to the race of Homo sapiens pygmaeus, which began with the Ihins, the first AMHs whom we will come to see as a people of learning and peaceful ways, and who, though now extinct, once dominated the world population. “Now, for the most part, all the people had become Ihins.”12 (at around 45 kya).
The shrinkage theory completely ignores the primeval existence of Homo sapiens pygmaeus (the name coined by zoologist Ivan T. Sanderson), the original little people. Instead, the experts account for the short stature of these living and extinct races as downsizing or simply an irrelevant oddity that needs to be explained away as:
anomalous mummies, or perhaps the skeleton of a small bear
hoax specimens, or simply those of children
tendency toward pedomorphism (retention of juvenile traits in adults)
congenital abnormality, growth deficiency
an adaptation to jungle life: easier to move around dense forest, climb trees for fruit, etc.
squatting in canoes
inbreeding (due to isolation)
lack of sunlight (in forest)
crowding (on islands)
shifting the reproductive age forward: having babies younger, hence stunting growth, under “evolutionary pressure” to reach adulthood faster
island-dwarfing due to limited food supply; nutritional stress leads to smaller bodies
The stature of early man is often near the upper limits of pygmy stature.
HARRY SHAPIRO, PICK FROM THE PAST
No, the little people were not “derived” or shrunken from anything; they were always around, even before H. erectus, even before Au. This is why Earnest Hooton proposed “evolution of the Negro from the pygmy,”13 rather than the other way around (which posits pygmies as “shrunken Negroes”). We perceive Ihin genes in Africa’s Negrillos (pygmies) in their browridges—smoother than the forest Negroes. The pygmies are racially different from the Bantu and Sudanic people. Colin Turnbull, in his charming ethnography, The Forest People, lists a good number of pygmy traits “uncharacteristic of the Negro tribes.” Most notably, the pygmies are more brachycephalic (round headed) than the dolichocephalic (long headed) Africans, and they are lighter skinned, not so woolly haired, straighter nosed, and not prognathous.*23 As Roland Dixon put it, “the admixture of this element [brachycephaly], which throughout the centre of the continent seems to be derived from the Pigmy peoples, leads to a diminution in stature.”14 The combination of very short stature and brachycephaly is again seen in New Guinea’s little people as well as other Negrito groups. The Ihins were short, brachycephalic, gracile, and big brained.
Though the genes of H. sapiens pygmaeus are represented everywhere in the record, they remain unrecognized by the bone people. Only their gracile (delicate) build is worth a mention; but gracility did not develop from some previous condition, as evolutionists suppose. It was not some random gene change “selected” (by the environment). Gracility was part of the H. sapiens pygmaeus package from the start, and H. sapiens pygmaeus was on the scene from the beginning. And this is the reason why little fossil men (like Au) are older than their robust counterparts. In South Africa, for example, “the smaller form [Au. africanus] seemed to be from deposits that are earlier [e.a.] than those containing the larger form,”15 (the smaller ones from Taung, Sterkfontein, and Makapansgat, and the larger robust ones from Kromdraai and Swartkrans). Au. africanus also had better shaped frontal and temporal lobes than Au. robustus.
The brain of East Africa’s Skull 1470 was, surprisingly, much bigger than H. habilis’s, even though 1470 was quite a bit older. It was another out-of-sequence disjunction, whereby Richard Leakey had to conclude “that there were several different kinds of early man, some of whom developed larger brains earlier than had been supposed.”16 But both Hooton and Weidenreich wisely understood gracility and advanced brain as part of the same original package. No “development” here: the little people, H. sapiens pygmaeus, were anatomically modern in every respect from the start, save height.
Kenya’s (Lake Rudolf) enigmatically modern 1470 man (H. rudolfensis) then is a disturbing case of AMHs older than they should be (Ihin older than the upgraded Asu who received their genes). Richard Leakey announced his 1470 find as a “surprisingly advanced” specimen, springing up 2.9 mya among ultraprimitive hominids.17 Opponents howled that 1470 was actually younger; the volcanic tuff in the region, retested, made him more recent, 1.9 mya, therefore a H. habilis type, thus avoiding an embarrassing reversal to the scheme of ever-improving evolution. Paleoanthropologist Ronald J. Clarke, for example, matched one Olduvai H. habilis palate (OH 64) to the jaw of 1470 and voilá, “Homo rudolfensis [conveniently] disappears.”18
But 1470 had good chopping tools, which no other contemporary creature had. The expected heavy bones or visor brow (of the primitive type) just were not there; 1470’s skull was also too modern for H. erectus (let alone H. habilis), and his cranial capacity was well beyond H. habilis’s. How could his moderate brow and flat face be ancestral to H. erectus, with his massive barlike browridge and prognathous face? Not terribly likely that 1470 evolved into a more archaic form! Reversal? Devolution?
Compared to H. erectus or H. ergaster’s (3733) heavy visor, “it is a very strained theory that posits that we moved from 1470 to 3733 and then back again to lighter brows, fuller foreheads, higher domes.”19 Broca’s area, a region of the brain linked to speech found in modern humans, was also present in 1470. Its leg bones, moreover, were almost indistinguishable from H. sapiens. Yet this man was a contemporary of Au; he lived before H. habilis, H. erectus, Nea
nderthal, and Cro-Magnon. But he was too large to be a H. habilis and had a bigger brain.*24 The features of 1470 were, in short, a remarkable mixture of both primitive and advanced. The solution to the problem (if there is a problem) is extremely simple: crossbreeding. Only mixing gets us past this tangled web (see chapter 5, where we again see Ihin retrobred with Au, producing such types as 1470). Richard Leakey himself declared: “Either we toss out this skull [1470] or we toss out our theories of early man. . . . [for] it leaves in ruins the notion that all early fossils can be arranged in an orderly sequence of evolutionary change.”
Figure 2.6. The devolution of evolution. Cartoon by Marvin E. Herring.
The stirring question of lost races and lost civilizations has engendered a new breed of researchers: protohistorians, most of whom are considered fringe voices. In this area of knowledge, the flow of information has been embargoed, blocked, ridiculed, and dismissed with contempt, largely because it is a threat to the ruling paradigm of onward-and-upward evolution. H. sapiens pygmaeus are the bodies buried in the foundation of the house of evolution. Only indirectly have we been able to find these ancestral little people. The problem took me on a book-length search (The Lost History of the Little People). They were, as this winding journey revealed, the first truly upright even civilized race of man, the first honest-to-goodness humans. They did not evolve. (Chapter 7 goes into their remarkable genesis.)
Man came on earth fully and perfectly developed . . . [He] was a special creation and not of nature’s making . . . but required education and mental development.
JAMES CHURCHWARD, THE LOST CONTINENT OF MU
We find the little people in folklore, we find them in language, we find them in scripture, we find them in elfology, and we find them in the fossil record. A tiny yet well-shaped (not dwarfish) and genteel people, the Ihins were civilized almost from the start. Darwin’s sometime friend the Duke of Argyll, along with Archbishop Whately, thought “man came into the world as a civilized being.” A similar belief was later held by Arthur Keith and his famous student Louis Leakey, both of whom believed (despite the Darwinian paradigm) that AMHs (anatomically modern humans) somehow appeared very early in the record. Steinheim Man (Germany), discovered in 1933, seemed to corroborate this idea, as well as Galley Hill Man (United Kingdom), Olmo Man (Italy), Atapuerca Man (Spain), and other AMHish specimens earlier than Neanderthal. Yet another example of an early AMH is Hungary’s Vertesszollos Man, dated by some as old as 700 kya, though possessing a very large brain (1,500 cc) and rounded occiput (like H. sapiens). He lived at the same time as H. erectus. The claim was that he was H. erectus, even though his skull was entirely out of H. erectus range.
Also consider this: With the appearance of AMHs, many scholars thought physical evolution may be considered as finished. Therefore, since AMH is so very early in the record, how can evolution be seriously applied to man at all?
When the Ihins first appeared, the only other creatures on Earth were Asuans (Ardi). Au (australopith) was not yet on the scene. The Ihins came into being as sapient men; they were the first on Earth to know religion and consciousness, the first to speak words and to congregate in cities, and the first to wear clothes and to labor, practicing the arts of agriculture long before the Neolithic Revolution. They were AMH from the start, with upright posture, opposable thumbs, large brains, and small teeth; they never did swing from trees.
But they are a lost and forgotten race and their great antiquity has been trifled with. Today, when AMHs are discovered in unexpectedly early strata, the verdict is likely to be “intrusive” burial: meaning, we must take them as much more recent, accidentally reburied in older deposits. This is a misstep, which was exposed in the 1980s when it became clear that some Homo finds “indeed predate many australopithecine fossils.” One example comes from Ethiopia, paradoxically revealing that “afarensis [Au] becomes more modern the older it gets.”20 Here, the 3.6-myr fossil (KSD-VP-1.1), although 400 kyr older than tiny Lucy, is more Homo-like, especially in humerus, ulna, and scapula. All the same, they lumped it together with Lucy’s bunch.
Earlier, then, does not necessarily mean more primitive at all. A great array of fossil men who are AMH in some respects, but considered too remote in time to be so advanced, have been pushed back into the shadows—saving Darwinism from the wrecking ball.
Close to a century ago, Prof. Dixon made it plain that “as far back of the Neanderthaloids as these are back of us, there existed men . . . comparable in most respects to the peoples of European type today.”21 For a hundred years that fact has been swept under the rug. We keep finding a more advanced type (AMH) on the lower branches of the family tree. Why? Because, back in the beginning, the little Ihins, our ancestors, were fully human. Indeed, another question lurks: Why do the first AMH specimens resemble the European type?22 Because the little people were Caucasian in their features.
The AMH remains of little people, H. sapiens pygmaeus, have been recovered all around the world: in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, New Mexico, and Vancouver, British Columbia, as well as in Germany (Bonn), France (Montespan), Scotland (Hebrides), Switzerland (Dachsenbiel), Belgium (Spy), Egypt (Baderian), Africa, the Philippines, Japan, and Sundaland. All and any AMH traits recovered from “surprisingly” archaic horizons can be traced to Ihin genes, which are equally the source of all the gracile (and large-brained) types from Au on forward.
The little people were finely made and shapely of limb, their signature being distinctively dainty hands and feet, which show up in many parts of the world (see table 2.2).
Sterkfontein fossil feet in South Africa, like today’s Bushmen’s, proved to be quite tiny (under four inches long); the anklebone of these specimens (named Little Foot) was “extremely humanlike,” even though they are the earliest known hominid in South Africa: Little Foot was 1 myr older than most of the other Sterkfontein Au (Au. africanus).23 The anachronistic difficulty of this specimen’s too-early modernity goes away if we allow it to represent one of the earliest Ihin mixes with Au.
Figure 2.7. Laurence van der Post with the Bushmen.
Donald Johanson wondered how his famous Lucy (Au. afarensis) got such modern feet. In some H. habilis, too, as well as in the acclaimed 3.7-myr Laetoli Au footprints of Tanzania, a small and “improved” foot is seen on these little people (only four feet seven inches), featuring a rounded heel, uplifted arch, and forward-pointing big toe, all typical of the perfectly modern foot. All it takes are a few of the right H. sapiens pygmaeus genes!
TABLE 2.2. WORLDWIDE INSTANCES OF SMALL HANDS AND FEET
Where Who Description
Brazil Tapuyas Delicate, small hands and feet
Chile Yaghans Tiny hands and feet
Far East Mongolians Small hands and feet
Italy, Switzerland, UK Neolithic skeletons Remarkably small feet
Kalahari Desert, southern Africa Bushmen Tiny hands and feet
Mexico Maya Small hands and feet
New Guinea Pygmies Small, dainty, graceful feet
United States, Arizona Hopi women Exquisitely molded little feet
Worldwide Protopygmies Small feet, barely five inches long*25
Yemen Zeranik people Small hands and feet
In America, when the Ongwee hybrids appeared, possessing 50 percent Ihin blood, they too inherited the modern foot: “His instep is high; he can spring like a deer. . . . He flees to the plain and the forest on his swift feet.”24 Even primitive Dmanisi Man (whom we will take a better look at in chapter 11) is a real mongrel, blending Au, H. habilis, H. erectus, and Ihin traits, the latter including modern feet—in contrast to the typically large and clumsy feet of H. erectus. Resulting from gene mixing among the races, possessors of a primitive foot may evince little people genes in their short stature, but also may retain H. erectus genes for large feet. These include:
Most Au: flat arch
Flores hobbit: large, flat feet
Andamanese, Andaman Island: very large feet on very shortpeople
Bogenahs, Panama: pint-size folk with large feet
Veddas, Sri Lanka: unusually flat feet
The Veddas of Sri Lanka show a baseline of Caucasian blood (Ihin genes), and so they are classed. Prof. Coon identified a major substratum in Southeast Asia and Sundaland as “Veddoid,” representing an ancient mixture of Caucasoid and Australoid people. Very short and pale, the Veddas are handsome and well built, their hair wavy to straight; some of the men sport elaborate beards. Who, then, were their Caucasoid ancestors?
Moslems throughout the world regard Sri Lanka as the Garden of Eden, the birthplace of human civilization. Ancient works on the teardrop island may be a clue to the Vedda’s civilized forebears: the water tanks in Sri Lanka are of great antiquity, a vast well-made system for irrigation. “The race which constructed these tanks has passed away, and the country where . . . there once existed a highly civilized and skillful engineering people, is now the abode of wild Veddahs.”25
Today, DNA analysts would have us believe that the origin of the Caucasians is recent, dated after the demise of the Neanderthals (a subject I return to in chapters 10 and 11). But Marcellin Boule, Arthur Keith, Henri Vallois, and other leading European paleontologists of the previous century recognized a Caucasian antiquity much deeper than Neanderthal. More recent scholars, though, think they have overturned these venerable theorists, some of whom believed in the primacy of AMH—which today’s experts smugly call “a moribund approach to human ancestry.”26
Figure 2.8. The Veddas are a striking mix of racial traits.
Nevertheless, the well-sculpted, gracile form of the original (nowextinct) little people offers confirmation to every paleoanthropologist who has ever thought that somehow, despite the evolutionary paradigm, earliest man was of the oxymoronically “modern” type (AMH). And he was. After all, the earliest fossil skulls of Au were gracile. And with AMHs standing at the earliest point in human history, the need for evolution simply evaporates, not only because a modern form in fact predates so many primitive ones, but also because evolution is thought to stop happening once man has culture to ensure his survival (we’ll return to this idea that physical evolution is over). And the Ihins had culture.
Mysterious Origins of Hybrid Man Page 8