Thursday, October 28, 2004

Prehistoric hobbits

So Tolkien was right! It's all over the newspapers about this race of tiny people whose skeletal remains have just been unearthed in caves on an Indonesian island. They're a different species, but co-existed with homo sapiens, and villagers put out food for them, like Europeans did for the fairies. The average height was only a metre, smaller than pygmies. They've been nicknamed hobbits. They were a lot brighter than their small brains would suggest, and I like to think they might have been refugees from the Shire.

It's great every now and then when you get some news that tells you it's okay to dream.

I wonder what it was like, being such a small human in a huge world, confronting huge humans, giant rats - but oddly, dwarf elephants.

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