The Hobbit and the Dark Star

 

Homo Floresiensis

The World was recently let into the fantastic secret of the discovery of a new, tiny human species known to the scientific community as Homo Floresiensis.  The find was made in September 2003 in the Liang Bua limestone caves on the island of Flores, in central Indonesia.  The emerging facts have set anthropological scholars into a spin.

 

The remains are of adults who stood just 3 feet tall, bringing forth their nickname 'The Hobbits'. Their skulls imply a brain size of just 380CC, lower than the threshold previously understood to denote humanity.  Yet despite the small brains, the 'Hobbits' were capable of using tools and fire; and evidently ate their meat cooked (1). 

Homo Floresiensis shows remarkable similarities with ancient Homo Erectus, yet the remains found have been dated to between 95,000 years ago and 13,000 years ago.  This is completely unexpected for a newly discovered human species which appears to have lived up to the end of the last Ice Age, far more recent than the Neanderthals. 

This mixture of evolutionary features implies the need for a complete re-think of human evolution.

 

The timing of the presumed demise of these Hobbits is of interest to anomaly researchers.  The date 10,500BC is often banded about as a period of great catastrophe.  It is said to mark the end of a lost Golden Age of civilisation, usually associated with a trans-global super-race, or of Atlantis.  Perhaps also the destruction of the equally fabled Lost Continent of Mu, located in the Pacific Ocean and said to be a dominant world culture 25,000 years ago?  Churchward claimed that the earliest Winged Disc is that of the Naacal records, from which he presented evidence of Mu in 1868 (2).

 

The date 10,500BC may have also been associated with a return of the Dark Star Nibiru. If Nibiru was the Messianic Star with an orbit of ~3600 years then it came by around 10,800BC, which would be within 'experimental error'.   However, there is another scenario to consider.  One may have noted with interest that the bizarre orbit of the planetessimal Sedna is 10,500 years. Nibiru might eventually be found to have a resonant orbit with this body (3 Sars) making an unexpected correlation between the Messianic Era and the end of the Ancient Egyptian Zep Tepi.  This 'coincidence' is another reason to hang onto your hats regarding the incredible Sedna!

It would be premature to pounce on these projections for a link between the Hobbits and the Dark Star.  Why? Because the fact that the fossil record of Homo Floresiensis stops around 11,000BC in one cave system surely doesn't automatically mean that the whole race of these very little people can be said to have completely died off at that point in time (as is the rather rash conclusion of the entire science community...)  But who knows?  Perhaps this may provide evidence of Catastrophe; possibly of a great Flood that swept over the islands.

 

Another coincidence, on an admittedly rather smaller scale, is worth pursuing about the Indonesian island of Flores, with a link to the symbolism of the Dark Star Nibiru.

 

Nibiruan Symbolism on Flores

 

Some time ago Korbyn Ero sent me some interesting images of a headpiece that showed Nibiruan symbolism, the structure of which I have described many times in my book and on this website.  The crescent boat (below) is seen to be adorned by seven birds, either carrying it aloft of sat upon various 'masts'. 

 

The headpiece is from the island of Flores.  Because the images were obtained from literature published by a museum in Korbyn's home city of Houston, I erroneously assumed the headpiece to be an artifact of a local Indian tribe in Texas, and I planned to describe the find in an essay about North American Indian beliefs (e.g. The Thunderbird, etc).  But of course it is from Indonesia, as Korbyn kindly pointed out to me recently.  And, rather remarkably, from the same island as The Hobbits...

Raja Yoseph Djoewa Dobe Ngole (1902-1972) of Boawae, Flores

 

"According to oral tradition, this magnificent crown is 10 generations old. It was a sacred heirloom ritually used by Nage nobleman to ensure the continued prosperity of the clan and village. The crescent  shaped  section may represent a mythical ancestral ship, whereas the seven masts derive from ancient feathered headdresses" (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)

Just to emphasise how the world may have been a much smaller place even an Age ago, let us compare the headpiece from Flores with a typical example of celestial symbolism from ancient Egypt, as shown in the Louvre in Paris:

 

Here we have the red disc within the classic feathered wings, with a scarab beetle and two uraei.  Take a closer look at the celestial barge shown in the section below our Winged Disc.  The frontispiece of the barge is also a red globe, which is the focus of reverence of the Ba spirit before it (a rather small person, interestingly enough!)  To my mind this shows the Spirit's interest in the concept of Nibiru, which is symbolised by the celestial barge as a whole.

Nibiru is the name of the missing planet in our solar system, but its symbolism is complicated by the fact that it has 7 moons, making it an 8 body system in entirety. 

Its appearance is therefore rather complex, and the contents of the barge in this diagram accurately reflects that.  The celestial barge's overall identity is denoted by the red globe at its helm, indicating Nibiru. The figure within the central Kartouche on the barge is the Celestial Lord of the Nibiru system, taking the physical form of the Dark Star, a multiple-Jupiter mass planet.  This identity is made clearer still by the red cross, or ankh-like emblem above the figure.  The other seven figures are equivalent to the accompanying 7 'stars', or attendant moons, some of which are complete with further hieroglyphics, perhaps indicating their primacy within Nibiru's own planetary system.  The 'barge' bringing the components together into a whole system moving through the heavens as one.

The overall symbolism is also firmly twinned with the Winged Disc on the Egyptian artifact, which is in keeping with Zecharia Sitchin's original thesis.

Other planets in out solar system could be similarly described; a barge containing two figures might stand for the Earth and Moon; a barge containing a dominant Lordly figure (in a Kartouche) with four other figures might denote Jupiter and its four Galilean moons. And so on.  This kind of analysis is subject to the scientific understanding of the solar system from the point of view of the ancient Egyptians.  Perhaps is may even be extended to other star systems, e.g. Sirius?

So, is the Flores headpiece yet another example of the Winged Disc, this time in South East Asia?  If so, its origins may be ancient indeed; perhaps associated with a completely different species of Human...
 

The discovery of homo floresiensis continues to create controversy.  The relics discovered in the Liang Bua limestone caves on the island of Flores are currently under lock and key, preventing further scientific analysis of this tumultuous find.  The remains of the 'hobbit' were handed over to an Indonesian academic, Professor Teuku Jacob of Gadjah Mada University in Jakarta, by an Indonesian member of the original project team.  Professor Jacob, who has a reputation for closely-guarded curatorship. has caused embarrassment by refusing to give the remains back.  Furthermore, he maintains that homo floresiensis  is not a new human species in its own right, but a pygmy form of human suffering with microcephaly (3).  Attempts to persuade him to hand over the scientific find have so far failed, amid concerns that a strong-arm approach might scupper chances of further excavations in the caves.  Professor Jacob is said to have signed an agreement to return the relics by 1st January 2005.

 

Another cave on Flores is generating controversy, this time for what might be found there still alive.  Locals have many stories to tell about the little folk who once lived in caves on the 2100-metre-high Ebulobo volcano, and, incredibly, the elderly chief of the villager of Boawae on Flores claims that a metre-high woman was recently encountered in the area.  The scientists involved in the excavation of homo floresiensis appear to be keeping a guardedly open mind about a connection between the palaeontological find and the long-standing folklore of the area:

"A Dutch palaeontologist, Dr Gert van den Bergh, a member of the team, was first shown the cave at a distance more than a decade ago, after hearing folk tales of the Ebu Gogo, which means 'grandmother who eats everything'.

"People living around the volcano told him a consistent story of the hairy creatures that devoured whatever they could grasp in their long fingers. The villagers tolerated the stealing of food until the Ebu Gogo began to snatch babies and eat them too. They then set upon the little people, forcing them out of the cave with bales of burning grass. Van den Bergh dismissed the tales as akin to those of leprechauns and elves, until the hobbit bones were found." (4)

Perhaps this whirlwind of controversy explains the erratic behaviour of certain Indonesian academics.  Like the controversial Starchild Skull, the only way to establish the truth is to do the scientific tests, particularly on the DNA.  There is some irony here.  The Starchild Skull is readily available for such testing, but lacks funding, whereas homo floresiensis has the world's palaeontologists clamouring to examine the find, but may end up being shut away from the world...

 

A Case of Microcephaly?

 

The BBC's flagship science programme, Horizon, recently looked at the discovery of the 'Hobbit', and the controversy it has created in the world of academic palaeontology(5).  Horizon has a tendency to side with the more conservative wing of science, effectively debunking theories that venture beyond the mainstream. But on this occasion, the team who had discovered homo floresiensis, and championed the find as an entirely new species of human, seemed to come out on top.

Various academics, clearly uncomfortable with the ramifications of the discovery, had looked into other possibilities to explain it away.  Professor Jacob, in Indonesia, had sought out examples of pygmy humans among the communities in the immediate locality of the Liang Bua caves.  Finding some relatively short folk, he declared the matter settled: the indigenous peoples of the area were naturally fairly little, and it only took a single case of microcephaly in a pygmy human to provide us with the homo floresiensis specimen of 18,000 years ago.

 

This idea was also favoured by several Western academics.  Between them they set out to show that a precedent existed among the historical human population for a 3 foot high person with a minute brain capacity.  Again, such a person would have had an extreme microcephalic pathology. 

Surprisingly, perhaps, they managed to show that microcephalic human brains did not show the kinds of distorted forms normally associated with advanced pathology.  This then implied that the seemingly normal shape of the homo floresiensis brain (recreated by modelling the inside skull case) could not actually rule out microcephalic pathology in that specimen.

These arguments seemed to cast a dark shadow over the exuberant claims of the field team.  The sceptics claimed that 'critical faculties had been suspended' during the media furore over the discovery.  This find was, they argued, nothing more than a microcephalic pygmy human, and the discovering team had made a terrible, and professionally embarrassing, mistake. 

The field team were in trouble, particularly after the rather ignoble argument with Professor Jacob over possession of the remains of homo floresiensis.  They needed to find a second specimen to disprove the sceptics.  And, it turned out, they had just a specimen in the form of a second lower mandible.  This relic had the same abnormal structure as the first, indicating that homo floresiensis was not an isolated case.  The microcephalic pygmy argument could not hold water in the face of two such specimens found in such close proximity.  The odds of such an event occurring would be astronomical.

 

Homo floresiensis clearly does not fit into the evolutionary structure established by palaeontology.  If this new species evolved from groups of homo erectus isolated in Indonesia, then they must have worked out ways of travelling between islands (principally from Java to Flores).  The technological skills exhibited by their stone tools alone are also not in keeping with their brain sizes, at least according to anthropological theory.  But such is life!  Science has always had to adapt to new evidence, and bizarre facts which challenge pre-existing assumptions held dear by academics. 

 

My gut feeling is that this discovery will pass into the history books of science as another remarkable landmark which was initially challenged tooth and nail by the establishment. This opinion has been bolstered by an interview on Radio 4's 'Today' programme with Professor Mike Morwood, one of the leading members of the team of anthropologists in Flores (7).  (This picture of Mike Morwood shows him with a (presumably) aboriginal picture which strangely seems to show two suns over a mountain... Just like the Mesopotamian Niram-Sin Stele (below)).

 

Interviewed by James Naughtie (allegedly pronounced 'Nocherty'), Professor Morwood cited the discovery of more jawbones of Homo Floresiensis as evidence that this is a new species of human (8).  The various remains of Homo Floresiensis display "an array of distinctive characteristics" which set the species apart from Homo Sapiens Sapiens.  He suggested that this remarkable new species of dwarf humans evolved and adapted in isolation on the island of Flores over the course of a million years.  The archeological evidence indicates that the entire species became extinct following a massive volcanic eruption some 12,000 years ago which also wiped out the island's population of dwarf elephants. 

The  team, keen to discover more specimens of this new human species, have travelled back to the island of Flores to plan more digs.  However, they are not allowed back into the Liang Bua limestone caves which are now closed to further investigation.  This means that their work starts from scratch at a new site, and may take a decade to yield new results.  It seems as though controversy and science are not happy bedfellows. 

 

Modern-day Humans Found Walking on all Fours

 

Scientists have revealed information about a family of five siblings living in Turkey who walk on all fours.  The Kurdish family suffer with some sort of rare genetic disorder and/or neurological condition that prevent them from carrying out sustained bipedal mobility.  Some researchers have speculated that the genetic mutation involved is akin to 'reverse evolution', but this claim is disputed by others in the field (10).  Nevertheless, the case has generated much professional debate.

Of interest to our discussion here is the fact that this kind of condition has been associated with microcephaly:

"Based on brain scans, the scientists ascribed the condition to a type of disorder called an ataxia, tied to underdevelopment of the cerebellum, a brain structure. Yet this can’t be the whole explanation, they added; it could be “a combination of unusual factors—genetic, physiological, psychological and social.” The German team noted that affected people also have abnormally small heads, a condition called microcephaly, which Charles Darwin cited as a possible evolutionary “regression” in his On the Origin of Species." (10)

People affected by ataxia are generally still bi-pedal, but wobbly in their gait and balance.  The family in Turkey have a good sense of balance developed, however, but have retained this sense of balance by walking well on all fours.  The pathological condition called "Disequilibrium Syndrome' appears to be a major contributing factor in this case, but what has stunned researchers is the exact way the siblings walk.  Instead of using their knuckles, as the quadrupedal great apes do, they have their hands palm-down, distributing their forward weight through their wrists (11).  This is very unusual, even for normal human infants developing their mobility.  Even when children do go through a phase of 'bear crawling', they normally make the transition to bipedal walking within months. 

Potentially, this was how our ancestors mobilised.  The British researchers wonder whether anthropologists have been right to model the gait of our austalopithicine ancestors on that of the chimpanzee, when an alternative is now available for study in our own midst. The idea that we went through a stage of 'wrist-walking' during our evolution is not entirely new, having been proposed by Russel Tuttle (12). Perhaps there is some merit in the case, bringing about another re-think regarding established views about the course of human evolution.

A wonderful documentary about this anthropological case has been shown publicly, highlighting both the complex human and cultural issues faced by the family as well as the serious questions confronted by the scientific community (13).  

There seem to be a number of factors contributing to the quadrupedal gait of the 5 affected members of the Kurdish Turkish family.  There is an underlying brain-damage, relate to a genetic defect.  The cerebellum, the part of the brain controlling balance, is damaged.  This, on its own, does not mean that a person is unable to walk, but it would certainly affect their balance and gait.  Another structural aspect of the affected children's biology is their bone structure, which is certainly strange, and interested the palaeontologists interviewed on the programme.  The German team analysing DNA samples from the family have found a mutation in a patch of DNA which may indicate a genetic problem.  Finally, the austerity and cultural isolation faced by the family over several decades has undoubtedly contributed.  The children didn't get the support they needed to develop and overcome these disabilities.

The question of DNA mutation is important to those following arguments proposed by Zecharia Sitchin, which is the main thrust of this website. If the problem is genetic in character, then the implication is that a single patch of genes altered relatively suddenly during the course of human evolution.  The shift from quadrupedal mobility to bipedal walking implied by such a find would have to have been very rapid during the evolutionary development of humans.  This would be a fascinating discovery, and would be supportive of Sitchin's claims that the predecessors of humans were altered genetically, culminating in a new species which emerged relatively quickly on Earth; our ancestors.  Hopefully the German team in Berlin working on this case will have definitive results to share with the world in the near future.

That thought aside, what was wonderful to see was how the family responded to support and physiotherapy input.  The children made great strides, literally!  Within months they were able to use parallel bars and even take some normal steps.  This is the best possible outcome, because their status as outcasts within their remote Kurdish community would change for the better, just as the controversy of their remarkable and bizarre ambulation becomes a world-wide talking point.

 

The Hobbit in Myth

 

The debate about whether Homo Floresiensis is a new human species, rather than a group of microcephalic humans, appears to be drawing to a close: the ancient 'hobbits' from the Indonesian island Flores are indeed part of a new species of human. 

""We have answered the people who contend that the 'Hobbit' is a microcephalic," said world-renowned palaeoneurologist Dean Falk, who is also chairwoman of FSU's anthropology department.  Her team's study of the skull, which included modelling both normal and microcephalic human brains, was published in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

"The computer model reproduced the surface of the brain, including its shape, grooves and vessels, revealing what Falk described as a "highly evolved brain".  Archaeologists had found sophisticated tools and evidence of a fire near the remains of the metre-tall adult female, who had a brain roughly one-third the size of a human from the same period. "People refused to believe that someone with that small a brain could make the tools. How could it be a sophisticated new species?" Falk said." (14)

So now that's settled, we can look at the repercussions of this amazing discovery.  The location of the discovery is remote, and the tiny Hobbits of Flores were wiped out many thousands of years ago.  However, there is no escaping the fact that these 'little people' really did exist.  Which is interesting from the point of view of myth.  There are a great many accounts of 'little people' appearing all around the world.  Sometimes called fairies, or the Gentry, or the Sith, a whole folk mythology is built up around the supposed existence of a different species of intelligent beings co-habiting our world.

The renowned Ufologist Jacques Vallee has drawn our attention to the common ground shared by the fairy myths and more modern-day accounts of UFOs and alien abductions (15).  He highlights ancient accounts of warrior pygmies, who were skilful archers, and asks this question:

"Were there or were there not races of dwarfs living among the West and Middle Europeans of antiquity? Were the legends about the fairies and the elves based on the fact that the ancient inhabitants of the northern parts of the British Isles were such a race?" (15)

Questions like this suddenly take on greater poignancy in the light of the discovery of Homo Floresiensis.  After all, folk memories of human beings go back far further in time than our written records.  In the same way that one might well argue that our global Flood mythologies have some basis in truth in a post-thaw period after the last Ice Age, then so too might the very real existence of the Hobbits from Indonesia have a connection with fairy mythology. 

 

Microcephaly Refuted

Further scientific work carried out on the Homo floresiensis skulls and other skeletal remains have provided more evidence that the hobbit is not human. Instead, the hobbit descended from one of the archaic Homo ancestors along a different evolutionary line to ourselves.

 

"The results of the analysis of the asymmetry of the skulls, which refers to differences between the right and left sides of the skull, refutes the suggestion that the LB1 skull was that of a modern human with a diagnosis of microcephaly. In modern humans, a high degree of asymmetry may indicate that the individual was diseased. At least one scientific study on the asymmetry of LB1 supported the argument that this individual had microcephaly. Conversely, Dr. Baab and colleagues found the degree of asymmetry of the LB1 skull was not unexpectedly high and therefore not supportive of the diagnosis of microcephaly.


 


"Dr. Baab recognizes that the controversy as to the evolutionary origins of Homo floresiensis will continue, perhaps without an answer. However, all the evidence that she and colleagues illustrate in their article “Size, shape, and asymmetry in fossil hominins: The status of the LB1cranium based on 3D morphometric analyses,” suggest that Homo floresiensis was most likely the diminutive descendant of a species of archaic Homo.  The results of this study are also in line with what other researchers in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University have found regarding the rest of the hobbit skeleton. Drs. William Jungers and Susan Larson have documented a range of primitive features in both the upper and lower limbs of Homo floresiensis, highlighting the many ways that these hominins were unlike modern humans."
(16)
 

If one accepts the alternative view of humanity's emergence through some kind of external genetic meddling by visitors to our world, it might be interesting to speculate whether Homo floresiensis is how we would have turned out if evolution had been left to its own devices. 

In other words, the hobbit is the organic descendent of the Homo line, and we are the genetically modified version.

 

Written by Andy Lloyd, 2004-2009

author of 'The Dark Star' (2005),  'Ezekiel One' (2009),  'The Followers of Horus' (2010),  'Darker Stars' (2019)

Published by Timeless Voyager Press

 

    Darker Stars

 

References

1) W. Knight & R. Nowak "Meet our new human relatives" New Scientist  pp8-10, 30 October 2004

2) James Churchward "The Lost Continent of Mu" Futura

3) Stephen Cauchi "Hobbits locked away as scientists argue" 26 November 2004

theage.com.au article

4) Deborah Smith "Hobbits? We've got a cave full" 6 December 2004

smh.com.au article

5) 'Horizon'  BBC, broadcast 22nd September 2005

6) H. Mayell "Hobbit-Like Human Ancestor Found in Asia" National Geographic News, 27 October 2004

nationalgeographic.com article

7) 'Today', BBC Radio 4, 12th October 2005

8) Associated Press "More Bones of Hobbit-like humans discovered"  11 October 2005, thanks to Robert Avery

nbcnews.com article

9) Photos of the Flores headpiece are from the Visitors Guide of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 

10) World Science "Claim of reversed human evolution provokes scepticism, interest" 27 Feb 2006 (article no longer available online)

11) Nicholas Humphrey, John R. Skoyles & Roger Keynes "Human Hand-Walkers: Five Siblings Who Never Stood Up" 3 October 2005

citeseerx.ist.psu.edu article

12) Russell Tuttle "Quantitative and functional studies on the hands of the Anthropoidea. I. The Hominoidea", Journal of Morphology, 128: 309-63, July 1969

onlinelibrary.wiley.com abstract

13)  BBC TV/Passionate Productions "The Family that walks on All Fours" 17 March 2006, BBC2

14)  Cosmos Magazine "Ancient 'Hobbit' not a malformed human" 30 Jan 2007, with thanks to David Pearson (article no longer available online) but see:

Will Dunham "Hobbit is new species, brain study shows" 30 Jan 2007

abc.net.au article

15) Jacques Vallee "Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers" p72 1970 (Tandem 1975)

16) Stony Brook University Medical Center "'Hobbit' Skull Study Finds Hobbit Is Not Human", ScienceDaily, 21 January 2009, with thanks to David

sciencedaily.com article

 

El Hobbit y la Estrella Oscura

 

Scientific Index