We have a small update on this topic: A researcher who works at the hobbit site of Liang Bua reached out to us on social media to point out that the evidence for Homo floresiensis using fire comes from papers published before the dating of the site was revised. More recent research says that the evidence for fire in the cave comes from a time period after the hobbits were gone and suggests that modern humans were responsible. There also appears to be no evidence of burned Stegodon bones.
@@helmaschine1885 I don't completely agree because remaking videos are very expensive. However, some videos can be reupload with corrected "TEXT" flashing across the screen. Not the most professional, but I would respect this much more. Otherwise, a pinned comment is kind of okay for now, until this channel gets more funding
@@helmaschine1885 Nope. Don't take it down. Do we ban "walking with dinosaurs" because it's outdated? It is a product of its moment and the humans who made it. Science learns more and gets closer to the truth in increments over time. Science documentaries should do the same. To take down every documentary that is erroneous in any relevant detail is a form of historical erasure. Pinning a note is a great way to handle an error discovered so soon after the making of the video. If another error is revealed by research published next year, it won't even merit a note. That's how it works.
@@BradShreds in one sense yes very much indeed, but I think he was referring to Tolkien's Wargs,who some say were inspired by dire wolves....I could be completely wrong though 😂
4:04 - "It's possible that the hobbits might have been hunted by the dragons" has got to be the most Tolkien thing I've ever heard in a paleontology documentary.
Tolkien actually intended the Lord of the Rings to be a fictional history of the Earth. The idea was borne out of an initial project to make an independent "English mythology". Over time, a lot of that was lost, but a lot of presentation of the Lord of the Rings was on the idea that Samwise's family "preserved" the Red Book (which compiled The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings) and that in modern day, someone translated it
Could you imagine being a three feet tall, running in the wilderness while being hunted by a 10ft long Komodo Dragon. Good lord, how did these little guys survive at all.
They spent a lot of time in trees according to legend. They could run along the large lower branches and ambush prey by dropping down on them from above. Very fierce for their size, again, according to legend.
@@lylachristopherson865 these tiny folk are all over the Ancient map. From fairies and pixies, leprechauns and fae, seeli and unseeli, all over, and every single one. Is magically delicious 😉
Yeah the town I grew up instead in the woods that there was a town where 50 dwarfs lived in tiny houses. I thought they were kidding but I went there one day and it exists. You guys best believe I went there the next Halloween as Willow.
@@lococomrade3488 that picture bothered me so much. And then they kept showing it over and over again 🤦🏼♂️ smh It looked liked a miniature, naked version of "the weekend", not our long lost extinct ancestor.
@@Secter84 thats what they were, we didnt even evolve FROM them, they arent a extinct ancestor, just a shorter smaller cousin. They lived at the same time as Homo Sapiens, and theyre just one of the many we lived alongside (we are truly only unique today, there were at least a dozen of human-like apes throughout time that split off from us). They were just smaller as a product of their environment. The art is never supposed to be exact anyway, theyre just artist renditions to help people who have trouble visualizing things theyve never seen before in life (over 3% of people cannot physically create a mental picture in their head, and thats alot more people than it sounds like when theres nearly 8billion of us, nearly 240 million, nearly twice the entire population of mexico) The only real difference they may have had other than scale differenced is they were probably still hairier too, except thats a weird think to try and include when we cant tell anyway. Even modern humans have the same amount of hairs as a chimpanzee to this day, it just all grows to different lengths than a modern chimp. We had alot more in common with the earlier hominins than you probably think.
As a human biologist and researcher, I think it's funny to think about how very different species of the familiy Hominidae might have lived together in the past. To give an example, at roughly the same time Homo erectus dispersed in different parts of asia, the so-called Gigantopithecus existed. This extinct species of the genus ape is said to be roughly 3 m (9.8 ft) high and weighing as much as 540-600 kg (1190-1320 lb). They existed to as recently as one hundred thousand years ago and might have looked similar to gorillas or orang utans (would love to make a video about them). Just imaging walking around with your tribe, discovering a 3 m ape!
These little cousins are probably my favorite hominids. Thank you for covering them. It's been awhile since I delved into their story and it's come a long way since then.
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”~ J.R.R. Tolkien
CrashCalvin idk man, song of ice and fire is amazing. It has that nice mix of medieval fantasy, less high fantasy. Tolkien is a beautiful writer though.
@@briggasnax8575 Read the series man. It's worth it. It's what inspired modern fantasy. From D&D to Skyrim & even more unique stories like Darksouls. JRR Tolkien is a legend. My other favorite legend is HP Lovecraft
I once read a really interesting idea in an article about Homo floresiensis were the author speculated that as their brain reduced in size to adapt to their small island, they apparently also lost the ability to innovate. This because their tools which span around a hundred thousand years don't seem to have ever changed. It was almost as if they were manufacturing them mechanically from memory and failing to search for ways to improve them. The hypothesis seems a little harsh (maybe their environment was stable enough or their tools versatile enough that they could afford to forego changes in design) but the thought that human intelligence could devolve to a more primitive stage under the right environmental pressures is fascinating, even if a bit heretical.
Vladimir Lagos The island wasn't huge, and if part of it was volcanically active, that would make their accessible area even less. I don't know if the climate of the island would have varied much when they were alive. Maybe, because they were on such a condensed space that didn't change much, the need to try to innovate to adapt just wasn't there?
Maybe the innovation requires lots of exchange between different populations and the isolated Island was home to just very few individuals who didn't come across any other humans to exchange ideas. I mean, even today, the more isolated a population the more basic their tools and way of life seem to be from our point of view. What I'm trying to say is, if you have a group of 100 people who never meet anyone outside that group and stay at the same place, the potential for innovation is obviously much smaller than that of a similar group surrounded by other groups who live in different environments that require different adaptations and who meet occasionally.
Gre Gre Also, if the small isolated group was very busy just trying to survive, they wouldn’t have had the luxury of extra time to sit around the campfire pondering changes. The population might not have ever gotten big enough for that.
NGL, when he said "the last time a hominin with a brain THAT small was around", I thought he was going to finish it with "was when you were born". I hang around too many young people.
It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no telling where you might be swept off to.
"And it looks like there were changes in the island's climate and volcanic eruptions around 50,000 years ago, which might explain why this species disappeared." That's a nice way of saying "volcanoes probably killed them."
He said 50,000 years ago, not being very specific anyhow: all the region is strongly volcanic and people usually survive those catastrophes. I strongly suspect it's a wishful thinking pretext not to face the obvious: we killed them. Those dates are roughly the dates of migration to Australia (probably before 60.000 but close enough), we didn't let any other Homo species survive anywhere, sometimes we even killed our own kin, either directly or indirectly by pushing them to extreme conditions. Even the brainy and strong Neanderthals could not resist us in the long run...
I was so glad when this hobbit was found. It meant all the stories from my grandmother about menehune or “Hawaiian hobbits” were in fact real. I felt that way again when researchers were able to prove that the giant moai 🗿 on Rapanui walked in place. My grandmother always said they walked there baby.
@@lilmama6689 Hawaiian ancestors the Austronesians actually came from Southeast Asia. So maybe that's where the oral story came from, and the story were brought to Hawaii by their descendants. About the Hobbit like creatures.
This is very interesting. In Solomon Islands, the people from one of the provinces have legends passed down from generations that when they first came to the islands where they currently live, there was a group of small hairy people who already lived there. The stories say that they fought and eventually overcame these people. In another province located far away, they also have stories of small hairy people that exist in their islands and possibly still do. They're known as Kakamora and they were featured in Disney's Moana.
I was just about to mention this! That perhaps this race was not only endemic to Flores Island. In Kiribati where I'm from there are stories of the first people to arrive in the islands and they met a people who were "dark skinned, short, hairy and with large floppy ears" for which they clashed and intermingled at various times until they became a uniform population. Samoan, Tongan and Hawaiian mythology have stories of them too, they called them the Menehune/Meneuli who lived in caves.
@@TM686K woah, that's fascinating. I thought they were only in our legends in the Solomons. Perhaps they're not just legends, but actual events in history passed down through generations
@@aniisnotok5099 Very much possible. It cannot be coincidental. In most Polynesian and as a whole Pacific Island mythology, there is usually a similar structure of epochs in time: The Age of Spirits The Age of Half Spirits Half Humans The Age of Humans My theory (and I do stress my theory) is that this could be a metaphorical interpretation of the Human Taiwanese/Melanesian Migration when they first came into contact with Autochthonous races in the Pacific (other hominids like hobbits and possibly giants) who they met with, eventually interbred with them until they lastly became extinct with modern day Pacific Islanders carrying remnants of them in their DNA.
Much love from Indonesia. I saw the discovery of the bones as well as the early debate about it from the news. This video summarizes many studies about "The Hobbit" and makes it easier for the people in this archipelago to understand the story before our ancestors came to the place we call home. Thanks a million.
8:28 Homo luzonensis was found not "on a remote island in Southeast Asia" but, in fact, on the main island of the Philippines: Luzon, the planet's 15th largest island. The dig site, however, is located in a rural area in the northeast section of the island.
The point was that describing Luzon as a ". . .REMOTE island in Southeast Asia" is simply wrong on many levels. For one thing, how can Luzon be described as "remote" when in the year Homo luzonensis was announced the island of Luzon already had about 50 million Facebook and internet users?
@@VidAudioJojo Luzon is remote from a hominid's perspective: you can't get there without a boat or a ship, that may mean that hominids were seafaring way before we thought they could.
Can you please make a episode on the evolution of the Brain? From how clumps of specialized cells in prehistoric fish evolve to become our complex brain in the modern time.
Actually I saw a few documentaries some years back about a small group of hikers who were, supposedly, attacked by some small humanoid primates whilst hiking thru the jungle of an Indonesian island (can't remember the name); when the 1 survivor managed to return to civilization he was charged with murder because no one believed his story and he'd been trying to prove it ever since. I found it, hmm, interesting, that no reference to this story was made particularly since tales of these creatures are common in local native lore and THEY certainly believe those creatures are out there. I'm not saying I believe it, don't really care either way, but it is interesting in the light of THIS finding I think
Thank you guys from PBS EONS for bringing all these amazing discoveries to us. I'm currently working on a project (a novel) in which sapiens, floresiensis, neanderthals and denisovans live together...in present times... let's see how it goes.
There was a smaller species found this year in the Philippines which has been named Homo Luzonensis. The sapien “evolutionary bush” is fascinating Edit: Just saw that part of the video. This channel is amazing and covers many points of Human Evolution that others miss. Great Work guys!
🙄 . *WHAT ARE THE CHANCES* that someone's put a mixture of little human skulls and chimp bones together in a cave and is watching this video having a laugh? 🤔💭->😅🙈👨⚖
A new Eons video! Thank you for always making such interesting and thought-provoking videos :) Do you think you will ever do a video on the lions of Europe (ex. cave lions)?
Great Episode! Now some suggestions for future episodes -Titanoboa -Australian Megafauna -Diprotodon -marsupial Lion -Giant Kangaroos -Megalania *tbh I feel each of these could and deserve to get their own separate episodes -Domestication of Dogs? (“How Dogs became mans best friend”)
Yes! Thank you for uploading this video! I can't believe the hobbits were covered on this channel! I'm not much of an archaeologist but i do find research on h. floresensis and h. neaderthalis to be fascinating! The mere thought that other species of "humans" were once walking the planet is crazy to me. Great video! Now if a video on the scimitar cats (genus homotherium) could get uploaded, my wishlist for this channel would be complete. The scimitar cats are so under-appreciated.
An island near the Equator, "the Middle of the Earth" with Hobbits and Dragons (Komodo Dragons). I'm just saying where are the elves and dwarves? Keep up the good work PBS Eons!!!😁
I think the race of Elves and Dwarves failed. The Elves went to the Havens to the Undying Lands and the Dwarves mined very deep and kept to themselves. oof?
@@samsunguser3148 The elven race isnt made to be a middle Earth dweler. They stayed for so long because they were the noblest of the races there. But! in the next realm they were the lowest of Peoples. Like the middle men in ME.
2:16 One of the authors of that paper, M. J. Morwood, was in my class at high school, Mount Albert Grammar, Auckland NZ, and I'm very proud of him. I have been following the debate since the discovery was announced. The Hominin tree is getting bushier and bushier.
Thank you so much! Real scientific approach becomes rarer in social media. I appreciate your presentation very much, including your giving an update! ❤
Guys...I love your videos so much that I've clocked through all of them in the past week. You guys kick ass. While I'm not an expert in the field and while I know that there are limitations on how much info you can access or provide, I was wondering if you guys could enlighten us all as to why pandas are such terrible parents and how they have managed to survive this long?
Dangit! I JUST bought some Raycon earbuds, and NOW there's a link to support one of my favorite channels! Oh well. At least I can vouch for their quality. Me likey.
"When hobbits were real, and lived alongside dragons in the shadows of Mount Doom". Also, I think, if the idea of a hominin different from erectus left Africa first holds out, that a habilis line hominin spread throughout Southern and maybe Eastern Asia, but where outcompeted by invading erectus line hominins except on a few remote islands, giving us the hobbits and their mixed bag of features.
Brilliant video. Clearly we have a lot left to discover,, which makes the "old guard anthropologists" defending there existing hypothesis to the bitter end a bit sad.
Fossilization is a rare process, especially in tropical jungles. We are fortunate to know as much of our ancestry already as it is. Who knows what kind of animals and plants have lived on this earth that we will never find fossils of.
this is my new favorite channel. everything is so interesting and educational. i'm by no means a science-oriented person (my things is history and english) but this is so cool!!!
It blows my mind that so many different kinds of hominids used to exist but have now gone extinct. It would be so cool to have other species more like us around.
There will probably be some kind of next level racism. Regular racism among homo sapiens and next level racism between homo sapiens and other human species lmao
There would be some type of conflict to establish superiority. If there's racism within our own species, I could only imagine what tensions would be like if a different species of humans walked the earth. Genocide, most likely.
0:41 was during the Corona Era when a specie called Homosapien thought to buy all the toilet paper in existence would prevent them from being infected.
If we knew every mystery of human history (all of it) I have a lurking feeling that we would be completely blown away and have our entire perceptions on reality irreversibly altered.
Makes me think of the "menehune", little mountain people in Hawaiian folklore. They were said to be skilled crafters and engineers of sorts building fish ponds (stone enclosures to place caught fish along the banks of rivers), as well as ditches and dams. Folklore states you pay them with one freshwater shrimp (opae) each menehune. Is it folklore, or is it a seafaring hobbit of Flores...?
Polynesians originally migrated from Southeast Asia about 4500 years ago. In the video, it was saying there was possible evidence from as recently as 15,000 years ago. Perhaps a few survived another 10,000 years and those ancient ancestral Polynesians had some run ins with these little Flores peoples in the deep woods of island Southeast Asia. Then, a few thousand years later, when those ancient Polynesian’s descendants finally made it to Hawaii, they brought the stories of their ancestors with them: of little people in the hills and the woods; of Menehune.
A couple of years ago I found a work of fiction, titled The Prophet (I forget the author's name) that provided my first exposure to homo Florensis. I read it 3 times back to back, and have read it at least twice since then. Fascinating science, and a well written book. I'm glad to have a bit more background info now!
Great video, it's nice to get an overview of the latest research on Southeast Asian hominins. But it looks like we are only somewhere in the middle of a wave of discovery, so please provide an update video as more results come out, including ideas about how H. luzonensis might fit in with a braided stream view of species development. I'd also love to see a video about current thinking on the origins of language in this braided stream, such as the significance of genetic research by Carina Schlebusch and others on the genetic ancestry of extant hunter-gatherer and herder populations from southern Africa, from before the Bantu expansion. Surely there is a prima facie case that full human language dates back to the most recent common ancestor of extant humans, and that the clade that gave rise to the pre-mixing population of anatomically-modern humans in southern Africa already had the capacity and practice of full language. When was that? 300-400 thousand years ago? A long time before Chomsky's proposal of a single mutation some 70,000 years ago as part of a "behavioral modernity" package. And if full language was around back then, there may be a case (and evidence I don't know about) for Neanderthals and Denisovans having at least some elements of human language. Models of what cognitive and communicative capacities and practices they had may eventually be falsifiable as new data from genes, bones and stones is discovered. So what were the cognition and (proto-)language capacities of H. floresiensis and H. luzonensis? Inquiring minds want to know.
Some references: CM Schlebusch#, H Malmström#, T Günther, P Sjödin, A Coutinho, H Edlund, A Munters, M Vicente, M Steyn, H Soodyall, M Lombard, M Jakobsson (2017) Southern African ancient genomes estimate modern human divergence to 350,000 to 260,000 years ago. Science, 358:652-655 Mário Vicente, Mattias Jakobsson, Peter Ebbesen, Carina M Schlebusch. Genetic Affinities among Southern Africa Hunter-Gatherers and the Impact of Admixing Farmer and Herder Populations Molecular Biology and Evolution, Volume 36, Issue 9, September 2019, Pages 1849-1861, doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msz089
We have a small update on this topic: A researcher who works at the hobbit site of Liang Bua reached out to us on social media to point out that the evidence for Homo floresiensis using fire comes from papers published before the dating of the site was revised. More recent research says that the evidence for fire in the cave comes from a time period after the hobbits were gone and suggests that modern humans were responsible. There also appears to be no evidence of burned Stegodon bones.
@@MrTotosaurus yeah, at this point the video is spreading misinformation and should be taken down and revised.
Although I agree with the both of you, the videos are overall interesting
Imagin cloneing a human species but then someone has to voluntarily be a surget for such humans...
@@helmaschine1885 I don't completely agree because remaking videos are very expensive. However, some videos can be reupload with corrected "TEXT" flashing across the screen. Not the most professional, but I would respect this much more. Otherwise, a pinned comment is kind of okay for now, until this channel gets more funding
@@helmaschine1885 Nope. Don't take it down. Do we ban "walking with dinosaurs" because it's outdated? It is a product of its moment and the humans who made it. Science learns more and gets closer to the truth in increments over time. Science documentaries should do the same. To take down every documentary that is erroneous in any relevant detail is a form of historical erasure. Pinning a note is a great way to handle an error discovered so soon after the making of the video. If another error is revealed by research published next year, it won't even merit a note. That's how it works.
The "Missing Link": Fake
Hobbits and Direwolves: Real
You guys have taught me so much.
You mean wargs*
Ceratosaurus Studios isn’t the warg the person who can connect and “slip into the skin” of the animal?
@@BradShreds I think you are referring to wargs from a song of ice and fire, he is referring to wargs from the lord of the rings
PJ yeah, and I don’t think they have a video on that... maybe Monstrum will?
@@BradShreds in one sense yes very much indeed, but I think he was referring to Tolkien's Wargs,who some say were inspired by dire wolves....I could be completely wrong though 😂
Bruh imagine being a hobbit that live on an island where you eat tiny elephants and get hunted by dragons
Fun Fact: did you know on the island of Komodo there is no such thing as human rights there is only "animal rights"
@@dfk2199 TF you're talking about
I am stoned.
Lmao
That's what Bilbo Baggins hates!
“Dragons??? Nonsense! There hasn’t been dragons in these parts for a thousand years!” 🐉
Brian Messemer - if you become smaller, big animals might indeed start to look like dragons...
So... Lizards look like dragons to roaches and ants?
@@transnewt Komo dragons look gargantuan to ants.
Dinorex 109 yes,
And how any animals have went missing for thousands or years in the folasle record then just showed up to say hi were still alive latter (many)
4:04 - "It's possible that the hobbits might have been hunted by the dragons" has got to be the most Tolkien thing I've ever heard in a paleontology documentary.
"When hobbits were real"
Me looking at my 4"11 friend:" they still are..."
Holy crap you freaking killed them dude
These were like 3 feet
That's not that short
@@joedartonthefenderbass thats pretty short to human standards
@@granttube6881 short but not hobbit short
So there were hobbits, dragons, giant birds, and volcanoes? Makes Lord of the Rings look like a documentary!
Tolkien actually intended the Lord of the Rings to be a fictional history of the Earth. The idea was borne out of an initial project to make an independent "English mythology". Over time, a lot of that was lost, but a lot of presentation of the Lord of the Rings was on the idea that Samwise's family "preserved" the Red Book (which compiled The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings) and that in modern day, someone translated it
And it was not that long ago
This is why I feel like our imaginations aren't far from reality
@Håkan Bråkan Kråkan thats why the lord of the rings was filmed in new zealand... haha
What do u mean like? You mean "is".
Could you imagine being a three feet tall, running in the wilderness while being hunted by a 10ft long Komodo Dragon. Good lord, how did these little guys survive at all.
They must have been expert runners
Not for long!
They spent a lot of time in trees according to legend. They could run along the large lower branches and ambush prey by dropping down on them from above. Very fierce for their size, again, according to legend.
That's the thing, they didn't 💀😅
“Fool of a Took.” 🧙♂️
“Throw your self in next time and rid us of your stupidity “
A fool, but an honest fool he remains
"Little people of the forrest" in most histories and myths.
You mean as an hallucination due to chemical abuse, right?? LOL. Leprechauns!!!
And catchy tunes that stick in your head for over 20 years
@@lylachristopherson865 these tiny folk are all over the Ancient map. From fairies and pixies, leprechauns and fae, seeli and unseeli, all over, and every single one. Is magically delicious 😉
@@yourstruly4817🎵 Frosted Leprechauns are magically delicious🎵🤗
Yeah the town I grew up instead in the woods that there was a town where 50 dwarfs lived in tiny houses. I thought they were kidding but I went there one day and it exists.
You guys best believe I went there the next Halloween as Willow.
I love how we draw extinct animals all majestic and pretty, and then we just draw other humans like old drawings of gnomes.
Why our lil hobbit friend so close to that epic battle between two dragons and a bird-demon?
Whats wrong with that
@@lococomrade3488 that picture bothered me so much.
And then they kept showing it over and over again 🤦🏼♂️ smh
It looked liked a miniature, naked version of "the weekend", not our long lost extinct ancestor.
@@Secter84 thats what they were, we didnt even evolve FROM them, they arent a extinct ancestor, just a shorter smaller cousin. They lived at the same time as Homo Sapiens, and theyre just one of the many we lived alongside (we are truly only unique today, there were at least a dozen of human-like apes throughout time that split off from us). They were just smaller as a product of their environment. The art is never supposed to be exact anyway, theyre just artist renditions to help people who have trouble visualizing things theyve never seen before in life (over 3% of people cannot physically create a mental picture in their head, and thats alot more people than it sounds like when theres nearly 8billion of us, nearly 240 million, nearly twice the entire population of mexico) The only real difference they may have had other than scale differenced is they were probably still hairier too, except thats a weird think to try and include when we cant tell anyway. Even modern humans have the same amount of hairs as a chimpanzee to this day, it just all grows to different lengths than a modern chimp. We had alot more in common with the earlier hominins than you probably think.
@@Secter84LMAOOO the weekend 😂😂😂😂😂😂
"Experts can't figure out if it was a pathological case or a new species "
All right then keep your secrets...
lol
As a human biologist and researcher, I think it's funny to think about how very different species of the familiy Hominidae might have lived together in the past. To give an example, at roughly the same time Homo erectus dispersed in different parts of asia, the so-called Gigantopithecus existed. This extinct species of the genus ape is said to be roughly 3 m (9.8 ft) high and weighing as much as 540-600 kg (1190-1320 lb). They existed to as recently as one hundred thousand years ago and might have looked similar to gorillas or orang utans (would love to make a video about them). Just imaging walking around with your tribe, discovering a 3 m ape!
They did a video on Gigantopithecus
ruclips.net/video/1qW256pUdYg/видео.html
KING KONG
These little cousins are probably my favorite hominids. Thank you for covering them. It's been awhile since I delved into their story and it's come a long way since then.
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”~ J.R.R. Tolkien
God I've never heard or read such an excellent and quotable opening to a book ever.
Was gonna comment that XD. Nice
Am I wrong in saying its the greatest fantasy epic of all time?
CrashCalvin idk man, song of ice and fire is amazing. It has that nice mix of medieval fantasy, less high fantasy. Tolkien is a beautiful writer though.
@@briggasnax8575 Read the series man. It's worth it.
It's what inspired modern fantasy. From D&D to Skyrim & even more unique stories like Darksouls.
JRR Tolkien is a legend.
My other favorite legend is HP Lovecraft
The giant Komodo dragons should be called “Smaugs”
"I am king under the mountain!"
"No, *I* am!"
Probably what they were arguing about in the artist's rendering...
Smaug had wings though; Glaurung the Golden was wingless.
@@slappy8941 lazy too
Looked more like a Brohug to me.
And neanderthals should called dwarfs
I once read a really interesting idea in an article about Homo floresiensis were the author speculated that as their brain reduced in size to adapt to their small island, they apparently also lost the ability to innovate. This because their tools which span around a hundred thousand years don't seem to have ever changed. It was almost as if they were manufacturing them mechanically from memory and failing to search for ways to improve them. The hypothesis seems a little harsh (maybe their environment was stable enough or their tools versatile enough that they could afford to forego changes in design) but the thought that human intelligence could devolve to a more primitive stage under the right environmental pressures is fascinating, even if a bit heretical.
Vladimir Lagos The island wasn't huge, and if part of it was volcanically active, that would make their accessible area even less. I don't know if the climate of the island would have varied much when they were alive. Maybe, because they were on such a condensed space that didn't change much, the need to try to innovate to adapt just wasn't there?
Maybe the innovation requires lots of exchange between different populations and the isolated Island was home to just very few individuals who didn't come across any other humans to exchange ideas.
I mean, even today, the more isolated a population the more basic their tools and way of life seem to be from our point of view.
What I'm trying to say is, if you have a group of 100 people who never meet anyone outside that group and stay at the same place, the potential for innovation is obviously much smaller than that of a similar group surrounded by other groups who live in different environments that require different adaptations and who meet occasionally.
Gre Gre Also, if the small isolated group was very busy just trying to survive, they wouldn’t have had the luxury of extra time to sit around the campfire pondering changes. The population might not have ever gotten big enough for that.
Like how ants and termites instinctively build nests. Neat.
And tasmanians lost the use of bows, so?
Very small populations+harsh conditions often means technological stagnation.
As a short person, I think I've found my ancestors...
even more so if you're from south-east asia
@@HN-kr1nf I am. Lol
@@gigibritannia 😂
Indo short gang rise up😔
5'5" boys put your hands up
NGL, when he said "the last time a hominin with a brain THAT small was around", I thought he was going to finish it with "was when you were born".
I hang around too many young people.
There are several of those running for president right now.
@@mellane4608 and the orange man baby himself :)
It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no telling where you might be swept off to.
My favorite line from that book!
You might end up on an island in Southeast Asia.
Can you guys discuss the evolution of mollusks in general? It would be quite interesting. Like why clams became sessile
You made me google a word, and I learned something. Thanks!
Momon no problem!
I for one am very interested in the ancestor of mollusks.
I’ve been wanting a molluscs vid too
"And it looks like there were changes in the island's climate and volcanic eruptions around 50,000 years ago, which might explain why this species disappeared."
That's a nice way of saying "volcanoes probably killed them."
John Lisowski after Frodo tossed the one ring in, the volcano erupted and killed them all. No eagles saved them.
He said 50,000 years ago, not being very specific anyhow: all the region is strongly volcanic and people usually survive those catastrophes. I strongly suspect it's a wishful thinking pretext not to face the obvious: we killed them. Those dates are roughly the dates of migration to Australia (probably before 60.000 but close enough), we didn't let any other Homo species survive anywhere, sometimes we even killed our own kin, either directly or indirectly by pushing them to extreme conditions. Even the brainy and strong Neanderthals could not resist us in the long run...
@@LuisAldamiz We haven't exactly stopped killing our own kin.
@@LuisAldamiz Thank you. I'll correct it now. And yeah, homo sapiens do seem to be the cause of most of our relatives dying off.
Luis Aldamiz well we actually mated with Neanderthals which is why everyone outside of Africa shares DNA with them that Africans do not
I was so glad when this hobbit was found. It meant all the stories from my grandmother about menehune or “Hawaiian hobbits” were in fact real. I felt that way again when researchers were able to prove that the giant moai 🗿 on Rapanui walked in place. My grandmother always said they walked there baby.
Nice!
As a Moluccan from the nearby island of AMBON I feel like a partial descendent of Homo Floriensis aka Mehehune.
@@gpl992 Wow. I’m on the shorter side and have always wondered about the possibility of intermingling between the two.
🥰
@@lilmama6689 Hawaiian ancestors the Austronesians actually came from Southeast Asia. So maybe that's where the oral story came from, and the story were brought to Hawaii by their descendants. About the Hobbit like creatures.
This is very interesting. In Solomon Islands, the people from one of the provinces have legends passed down from generations that when they first came to the islands where they currently live, there was a group of small hairy people who already lived there. The stories say that they fought and eventually overcame these people.
In another province located far away, they also have stories of small hairy people that exist in their islands and possibly still do. They're known as Kakamora and they were featured in Disney's Moana.
I was just about to mention this! That perhaps this race was not only endemic to Flores Island. In Kiribati where I'm from there are stories of the first people to arrive in the islands and they met a people who were "dark skinned, short, hairy and with large floppy ears" for which they clashed and intermingled at various times until they became a uniform population. Samoan, Tongan and Hawaiian mythology have stories of them too, they called them the Menehune/Meneuli who lived in caves.
@@TM686K woah, that's fascinating. I thought they were only in our legends in the Solomons. Perhaps they're not just legends, but actual events in history passed down through generations
@@aniisnotok5099 Very much possible. It cannot be coincidental. In most Polynesian and as a whole Pacific Island mythology, there is usually a similar structure of epochs in time:
The Age of Spirits
The Age of Half Spirits Half Humans
The Age of Humans
My theory (and I do stress my theory) is that this could be a metaphorical interpretation of the Human Taiwanese/Melanesian Migration when they first came into contact with Autochthonous races in the Pacific (other hominids like hobbits and possibly giants) who they met with, eventually interbred with them until they lastly became extinct with modern day Pacific Islanders carrying remnants of them in their DNA.
Much love from Indonesia. I saw the discovery of the bones as well as the early debate about it from the news. This video summarizes many studies about "The Hobbit" and makes it easier for the people in this archipelago to understand the story before our ancestors came to the place we call home.
Thanks a million.
Imagine one of these small people drifting or sailing into Australia by accident, and running into megalania!
That's like meeting Glaurung.
That would be a cool movie!
8:28 Homo luzonensis was found not "on a remote island in Southeast Asia" but, in fact, on the main island of the Philippines: Luzon, the planet's 15th largest island. The dig site, however, is located in a rural area in the northeast section of the island.
The name is literally there, "Luzon"ensis
The point was that describing Luzon as a ". . .REMOTE island in Southeast Asia" is simply wrong on many levels. For one thing, how can Luzon be described as "remote" when in the year Homo luzonensis was announced the island of Luzon already had about 50 million Facebook and internet users?
@@VidAudioJojo Luzon is remote from a hominid's perspective: you can't get there without a boat or a ship, that may mean that hominids were seafaring way before we thought they could.
Can you please make a episode on the evolution of the Brain? From how clumps of specialized cells in prehistoric fish evolve to become our complex brain in the modern time.
I'm obsessed with any episode in PBS Eons about human evolutionary progress. Thank you so much for this episode :D
This episode could easily be a couple hours longer! Completely fascinating!
1:53 I love that they use the squid as a transition complete with dramatic whoosh
We KNEW it! The Precious told us Hobbitses are still around ...SNEAKING!
Actually I saw a few documentaries some years back about a small group of hikers who were, supposedly, attacked by some small humanoid primates whilst hiking thru the jungle of an Indonesian island (can't remember the name); when the 1 survivor managed to return to civilization he was charged with murder because no one believed his story and he'd been trying to prove it ever since.
I found it, hmm, interesting, that no reference to this story was made particularly since tales of these creatures are common in local native lore and THEY certainly believe those creatures are out there.
I'm not saying I believe it, don't really care either way, but it is interesting in the light of THIS finding I think
@@susie9893 stop snorting glue
@@kentgil2526 be nicer
Every time he says "LB-1" I hear "Obi Wan."
H E L L O T H E R E
General Kenobi!
"that's no elephant....it's a stegadon"
@@zddxddyddw You are a bold one!
So uncivilized.
A name I've not heard in a long time. A long time.
Thank you guys from PBS EONS for bringing all these amazing discoveries to us. I'm currently working on a project (a novel) in which sapiens, floresiensis, neanderthals and denisovans live together...in present times... let's see how it goes.
cool idea
@@jtktomb8598 thx!
The Sapiens probably enslaved the other hominins.
There was a smaller species found this year in the Philippines which has been named Homo Luzonensis. The sapien “evolutionary bush” is fascinating
Edit: Just saw that part of the video. This channel is amazing and covers many points of Human Evolution that others miss. Great Work guys!
In my opinion among the best content on RUclips. Fascinating. Keep up the great work!
I always knew lord of the rings was a scientific documentary
And who was the actual eye of Sauron?
🙄 . *WHAT ARE THE CHANCES* that someone's put a mixture of little human skulls and chimp bones together in a cave and is watching this video having a laugh? 🤔💭->😅🙈👨⚖
Stories, myths and random things Smr amen to that
I really like the image used of the "hobbit" running away from the scary bird. His expression is so sassy!
A new Eons video! Thank you for always making such interesting and thought-provoking videos :)
Do you think you will ever do a video on the lions of Europe (ex. cave lions)?
Great Episode! Now some suggestions for future episodes
-Titanoboa
-Australian Megafauna
-Diprotodon
-marsupial Lion
-Giant Kangaroos
-Megalania
*tbh I feel each of these could and deserve to get their own separate episodes
-Domestication of Dogs? (“How Dogs became mans best friend”)
Yes! Thank you for uploading this video! I can't believe the hobbits were covered on this channel! I'm not much of an archaeologist but i do find research on h. floresensis and h. neaderthalis to be fascinating! The mere thought that other species of "humans" were once walking the planet is crazy to me. Great video! Now if a video on the scimitar cats (genus homotherium) could get uploaded, my wishlist for this channel would be complete. The scimitar cats are so under-appreciated.
I saw a new vid from pbs eons, I like first before I watch because I'm sure I'm going to like it and replay it many times.
An island near the Equator, "the Middle of the Earth" with Hobbits and Dragons (Komodo Dragons). I'm just saying where are the elves and dwarves? Keep up the good work PBS Eons!!!😁
There are mountains inside the Amazon and ruins too... Im not saing It is mirkwood, but It is mirkwood
I think the race of Elves and Dwarves failed. The Elves went to the Havens to the Undying Lands and the Dwarves mined very deep and kept to themselves. oof?
@@samsunguser3148 The elven race isnt made to be a middle Earth dweler. They stayed for so long because they were the noblest of the races there. But! in the next realm they were the lowest of Peoples. Like the middle men in ME.
@@miguelmontenegro3520 ye
Homo erectus: tall, graceful, firstborn of the truly human
Homo neanderthalensis: short, stocky, underground dwelling craftsmen
Found em!
2:16 One of the authors of that paper, M. J. Morwood, was in my class at high school, Mount Albert Grammar, Auckland NZ, and I'm very proud of him. I have been following the debate since the discovery was announced. The Hominin tree is getting bushier and bushier.
I just realized when this guy finishes talking I have to catch my breath.
Anyway, LOVE this channel, fun, instructive and AMAZING: Keep this way.
Thank you so much! Real scientific approach becomes rarer in social media. I appreciate your presentation very much, including your giving an update! ❤
so glad you finally covered this.
So much info crammed in such a short graffic video. Wonderful job PBS team
3:36 OK that dude doesn't look nearly scared enough considering what's chasing him.
Because he knows what's waiting for the bird when he gets to safety. He's the bait.
I think I'd just be praying the dragons didn't notice me an kept fighting each other instead tbh...
FINALLY! I watched a documentary about them ages ago and never forgot. Was waiting for this video.
YES finally ! we got a hobbit episode!
When Hobbits were real.
Or- Concerning Hobbits.
Well even this video is not saying hobbits where ever real.
they missed the chance
@@iqbalarsyah215 maybe they didn't have enough time?
He called them "creatures" - If they were still around Vice would be going crazy about this.
*Vsauce music starts playing*
1:41
Yep. That's me. You may be wondering how I got into this situation.
hahahahaaaaa hunting after shiny gligars? lol
Good stuff ! JRR Tolkien was on to something. Love this channel. Take care.
Guys...I love your videos so much that I've clocked through all of them in the past week. You guys kick ass.
While I'm not an expert in the field and while I know that there are limitations on how much info you can access or provide, I was wondering if you guys could enlighten us all as to why pandas are such terrible parents and how they have managed to survive this long?
Fav narrator on pbs eons
Dangit! I JUST bought some Raycon earbuds, and NOW there's a link to support one of my favorite channels!
Oh well. At least I can vouch for their quality. Me likey.
Love the picture of the hobbit peacing out from the massive bird.
Being killed by a stork would be a very embarassing death. 😂
The very thing that brought you into this world can take you out of it as well.
@@mynamehasspacesinit8687 hahahaha, same thing crossed my mind. My mom always told me, she brought me into the world and she can take me out.
Babies are actually kidnapped hobbits 🤯
My sister was killed by a sugar glider.
@@BaronSaturday66 are you serious?
Fascinating, and great presentation!
"When hobbits were real, and lived alongside dragons in the shadows of Mount Doom".
Also, I think, if the idea of a hominin different from erectus left Africa first holds out, that a habilis line hominin spread throughout Southern and maybe Eastern Asia, but where outcompeted by invading erectus line hominins except on a few remote islands, giving us the hobbits and their mixed bag of features.
Thanks for this playlist
I love your videos!!! Thanks from iceland😁
This was in my recommended. I've been on a news binge lately... Thanks, YT algorithm.... You knew my psyche needed a break 👍🏼
Makes me wonder a bit about the reports of the "Orang Pendek" on the nearby island of Sumatra.
I absolutely love your jokes! "The Shire" cracked me up!
1:42
_record scratch_
_freeze_
*Yup, that's me. You're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation.*
did click, wasn't deceived. *You deserve GOLD*
Brilliant video. Clearly we have a lot left to discover,, which makes the "old guard anthropologists" defending there existing hypothesis to the bitter end a bit sad.
Just like the tower guards guarding the white tree of Gondor...😔🎖
After that i will eat my second breakfast.
Mingo Dupal hmm don’t forget elevenses
knock knock*
"Dwalin, at you service."
Fossilization is a rare process, especially in tropical jungles. We are fortunate to know as much of our ancestry already as it is. Who knows what kind of animals and plants have lived on this earth that we will never find fossils of.
God I love pbs eons.
Honestly was shocked when you said real hobbits have big feet too. Thanks for the shoutout! all the love
1:54 "an unexpected discovery" I see what you did there
Another brilliant episode. Many thanks.
I love how you said that the Hobbit was from The Shire!! LOL. Love The LOTR comment too.
This was a really good video. Particularly comprehensive.
love learning more about hominins
this is my new favorite channel. everything is so interesting and educational. i'm by no means a science-oriented person (my things is history and english) but this is so cool!!!
As a LOTR fan, I did read loads of Tolkien books, and I somehow remember him talking about extinct hobbits hahaha.
Another great video 👍 keep the anthropology videos coming!
It blows my mind that so many different kinds of hominids used to exist but have now gone extinct. It would be so cool to have other species more like us around.
There will probably be some kind of next level racism. Regular racism among homo sapiens and next level racism between homo sapiens and other human species lmao
There would be some type of conflict to establish superiority. If there's racism within our own species, I could only imagine what tensions would be like if a different species of humans walked the earth. Genocide, most likely.
About the best I've watched or read on this topic. TY.
0:41 was during the Corona Era when a specie called Homosapien thought to buy all the toilet paper in existence would prevent them from being infected.
They are so cute!!!! Great video as always.
Local lore holds them to be fierce and cunning (kidnap and eat children etc)
8:00 looks ready to say floresiensis with a hard r
i love this channel so much
If we knew every mystery of human history (all of it) I have a lurking feeling that we would be completely blown away and have our entire perceptions on reality irreversibly altered.
I know right it's like everything they tell us that's folklore and fantasy is actually real and exist.
Just on a higher frequency and vibration.
Amazing as always. Keep it up!
Makes me think of the "menehune", little mountain people in Hawaiian folklore. They were said to be skilled crafters and engineers of sorts building fish ponds (stone enclosures to place caught fish along the banks of rivers), as well as ditches and dams. Folklore states you pay them with one freshwater shrimp (opae) each menehune. Is it folklore, or is it a seafaring hobbit of Flores...?
Polynesians originally migrated from Southeast Asia about 4500 years ago. In the video, it was saying there was possible evidence from as recently as 15,000 years ago. Perhaps a few survived another 10,000 years and those ancient ancestral Polynesians had some run ins with these little Flores peoples in the deep woods of island Southeast Asia. Then, a few thousand years later, when those ancient Polynesian’s descendants finally made it to Hawaii, they brought the stories of their ancestors with them: of little people in the hills and the woods; of Menehune.
Cool video :)
Pls make one about ancient australian megafauna
Imagine being on the planet at a time when multiple species of pre-human existed.
7:13 That's the best part. Content for days
They moved to the Undying lands with Frodo and Bilbo.
Mortals do not have that kind of gift. Only the one knows
A couple of years ago I found a work of fiction, titled The Prophet (I forget the author's name) that provided my first exposure to homo Florensis. I read it 3 times back to back, and have read it at least twice since then. Fascinating science, and a well written book. I'm glad to have a bit more background info now!
The Hobbit couldn't take down a full grown elephant but didn't they do that in Rohan?
And it was an Oliphant on top of that
Nope, Legolas did. haha
@@janiwirman But it still only counts as one
@@ricois3 Which is roughly 10 times the size of an actual elephant.
Or maybe 20 times the size of a pygmy elephant
I can't believe I live in a world that PBS is thanking Ray Jay for sponsoring this video. wow
Snoop Dogg, whatever
Miley Cirus, Whatever
EONS, awe shoot, gotta try these raycons
So much to learn! Thank you for this amazing channel.
"Alright, then. Keep your secrets."
guilmon182 I didn’t want to know your secrets anyways so whatever
Great video, it's nice to get an overview of the latest research on Southeast Asian hominins. But it looks like we are only somewhere in the middle of a wave of discovery, so please provide an update video as more results come out, including ideas about how H. luzonensis might fit in with a braided stream view of species development. I'd also love to see a video about current thinking on the origins of language in this braided stream, such as the significance of genetic research by Carina Schlebusch and others on the genetic ancestry of extant hunter-gatherer and herder populations from southern Africa, from before the Bantu expansion. Surely there is a prima facie case that full human language dates back to the most recent common ancestor of extant humans, and that the clade that gave rise to the pre-mixing population of anatomically-modern humans in southern Africa already had the capacity and practice of full language. When was that? 300-400 thousand years ago? A long time before Chomsky's proposal of a single mutation some 70,000 years ago as part of a "behavioral modernity" package. And if full language was around back then, there may be a case (and evidence I don't know about) for Neanderthals and Denisovans having at least some elements of human language. Models of what cognitive and communicative capacities and practices they had may eventually be falsifiable as new data from genes, bones and stones is discovered. So what were the cognition and (proto-)language capacities of H. floresiensis and H. luzonensis? Inquiring minds want to know.
Some references:
CM Schlebusch#, H Malmström#, T Günther, P Sjödin, A Coutinho, H Edlund, A Munters, M Vicente, M Steyn, H Soodyall, M Lombard, M Jakobsson (2017) Southern African ancient genomes estimate modern human divergence to 350,000 to 260,000 years ago. Science, 358:652-655
Mário Vicente, Mattias Jakobsson, Peter Ebbesen, Carina M Schlebusch.
Genetic Affinities among Southern Africa Hunter-Gatherers and the Impact of Admixing Farmer and Herder Populations
Molecular Biology and Evolution, Volume 36, Issue 9, September 2019, Pages 1849-1861, doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msz089