Chinese What-Is-It

There is a May 30, 2006, news item that is one of those tidbits that have you scratching your head. It is running in the China Daily under the headline "Bizarre Creature Puzzles Thousands." The entire article (note: it sometimes becomes a deadlink, having mysteriously vanished 12 hours after it was first published) reads: Thousands of residents of Tianmen, Hubei Province, have flocked to see a rare turtle-like creature caught by an elderly man in a nearby reservoir. Some think that the animal, weighing in at 8.3 kilograms, looks like an alligator. It has three rows of horns on its [...]

More Hobbits

Peter Brown (above with the LB1 skull) passes along word that another Homo floresiensis volume is due out soon. The book is Little People And A Lost World: An Anthropological Mystery (ISBN: 0822559838) by Linda Goldenberg Atkinson. It targets the juvenile readership, at 112 pages, from the Lerner Publishing Group in their Twenty-First Century Books Series. Set to be published in September 2006, it will have a library binding. More information on Mike Morwood’s and Penny van Oosterzee’s new book, entitled The Hobbit’s Tale: Discovery, Significance and History of a New Human Species on the Island of Flores, Indonesia can [...]

Return of Abominable Snowmen

Sometimes it causes me a little tribulation to announce the reprint of a new book, and this is one of those times. Not because of the contents of the book, not because of the original author, and not even because of the price. No, sometimes, I have feelings about seeing good books republished too quickly as paperbacks, by publishers sometimes known for their loose editing and less than classic packaging. Hopefully, I will be mistaken about this one, but I won’t know until I see a copy to find out. Any day now, Adventures Unlimited Press (AUP) is set to [...]

Hobbits Book Announced

Exclusive Be prepared for some books on Homo floresiensis. I just received the direct news from Mike Morwood (below), Professor of Archaeology, University of New England, Australia, the leader of the Flores on-site Homo floresiensis discovery team, that his book is on its way. He wrote saying he has completed a book with Penny van Oosterzee entitled The Hobbit’s Tale: Discovery, Significance and History of a New Human Species on the Island of Flores, Indonesia. Penny van Oosterzee is one of Australia’s best science writers, and is the recipient of the 1997 Eureka Science Book Prize for her book Where [...]

Homo floresiensis Supporter’s Challenge

One of the arguments from the Homo floresiensis debunkers (such as from Dr. Jacob pictured here) has been that the little-people are merely representatives of the local people and/or microcephalics in the local population. Here’s a new challenge from Peter Brown, shown photographing Homo floresiensis (LB1) below, who speaks directly to these critics, via Cryptomundo: "For those wanting to know more about modern people on Flores, Teku Jacob has a number of mesolithic skeletons from Liang Bua (excavated more than 20 years ago) in his laboratory. You would think that if modern humans on Flores had the same features as [...]