The Tiny People of Flores
Very recently a race of tiny people lived on a tiny island
with tiny elephants and gigantic rats. Even if it sounds like a query
letter for a bad fantasy novel, it’s true and I am intoxicated with
their story. You must understand that I love bad fantasy. It is not because
of shame, maturity, or fear of declining social status that I currently
do not indulge as often as I once did, it is simply that I don’t
have much time anymore to spend with anything that is not real or vital.
So when this real-life fantasy novel started playing itself out in scientific
journals, Newspapers, and on the cover of National Geographic, I forgot
about school, love, fun, and work. Instead, I spent days reading every
story I could find on the tiny people of Flores. They lived on the Earth
at the same time as Homo sapiens. They were three foot tall, fifty pound
hunters who made meals of rats that came up to their shins and elephants
that, though dwarfs themselves, outweighed the Flores folk by 15 times.
The archaeologists who found the first skeleton named it Hobbit. This
was exactly the sort of non-fiction fantasy I’d been looking for.
Flores was, and still is, is a small island in Indonesia that has never
been connected to the main Asian land mass. Before the discovery of Hobbit
the only animals discovered on Flores had either managed to float or swim
the distance. Archaeologists previously thought that no proto-human species
could have the brain-power to cross the miles of ocean between Java and
the chain that Flores belongs to. But the ancestors of these tiny people
had the brains. They made it across.
When Hobbit died, her bones laid undisturbed for18,000 years. And then,
a few months ago, delighted and long laboring archaeologists found her
beneath dozens of feet of dust and dirt. 18,000 years ago, in Hobbit’s
time, modern man had already inhabited the earth for at least 150,000
years. Homo sapiens thus, may have met these people as they expanded across
Earth. With these facts in hand, I could not help but compose short fantasy
tales in my mind:
Not long after Hobbit died, the island which had been her home broke
open. The ground shook, caves collapsed, liquid rock shot from the earth,
and dust blotted out the sun and stained its light blood red. For months
the dust permeated their lives: in their eyes, in their water, in their
food, and in their lungs. It killed their infants. The tiny people of
Flores took solace on the eastern edge, far from the site of the eruption.
They cried and bonded and fought over the few tools they had managed to
bring with them They hunted animals that had fled from the volcano, and
they were hunted by giant water monitor lizards who were five times large
than the people. But they survived.
Before the eruption had become only myth in their children’s ears,
another force, even more powerful, flowed into their world. Not hot and
liquid fire from the Earth, but huge men of strength and grandeur from
the sea.
These were our people, the ancestors of the current residents of Flores.
This new place was habited, not by people, but by aliens, a small, fast,
intelligent, and strong willed species. To me, it reads like a Star Trek
script.
We don’t know very much for sure. There is no direct evidence that
modern man ever met the tiny people, but something, whether volcanic eruption,
resource depletion, or conflicts with modern man, seems to have resulted
in the extinction of these fascinating people. But we do know that the
natives of Flores have tales of hairy, half-sized people with flat foreheads.
These stories, the fantasy novels they told their children but never wrote
down, tell tales of Hobbits just like ours do. Only their stories, it
turns out, are true.
For a full year I wrote a weekly column for a daily paper in Boulder CO. I wrote about being young, poor and green, and the column was widely loved throughout the city. It remains one of the most rewarding things I've ever done.
If you've got some time on your hands...check 'em out.
Colder than the Hinges of Hell
Four More Ounces of Responsibility