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In Lord Of The Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, we are given a look at the Shire - home to those quirky little people known and loved as "Hobbits." But were these creatures something J.R.R. Tolkien made up - or did people like hobbits really exist?
Two years ago, the discovery of a miniature human skeleton on a remote island in Indonesia suggested that hobbits may have been more than a figment of Tolkien's imagination. The complete female skeleton, along with fragments of six other individuals, were those of hominids standing about 3 feet tall (1 meter), leading scientists to believe they were a new species, which they dubbed "hobbits."
Today in New Scientist however, Australian anthropologists published some findings to indicate that they perhaps weren't a new species after all.
  Peter Brown and Mike Morwood from the Australian University of New England concluded that the skeleton and fragments actually represented an isolated population of Homo Erectus (a predecessor of the Neanderthal). Their small stature, they believe, was an adaptation to the restricted diet available on the island.
On the other hand, Ann MacLarnon from Roehampton University, UK disagrees on the basis of the skeleton's reduced brain capacity - roughly the size of a grapefruit. “As they dwarf, species’ brain sizes decline far more slowly than body size,” she says. “Brain size is key to a mammal species’ identity." As an example, she points out that there is no difference in size between the smallest modern humans, the 1.4-meter (3-1/2 ft) Bambuti people of the Congo, and the tallest, the 2-meter (six ft) Masai of east Africa. The presence of sophisticated stone tools, and the fact that all heretofore evidence has been gleaned from a single specimen leads MacLarnon to conclude that the woman suffered from a pathological condition known as microcephaly.
Morwood argues, “The other bones we found show that LB1 was a normal member of an endemically dwarfed hominid population,” calling the microcephalic explanation "bizarre."
The controversy rages on... but at least we'll be able to inhabit the lives of the stout, furry-footed creatures when LOTRO hits shelves - or maybe you'll be one of the lucky ones chosen for the beta testing!
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