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Post by youcantry on May 6, 2008 1:49:16 GMT 10
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Post by Ravi on May 8, 2008 23:48:33 GMT 10
Well, YCT - even if no one else did I found this amazing!
Ravi
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Post by youcantry on May 9, 2008 0:00:49 GMT 10
Ditto. I went back and read the whole thing.
Tonight I saw Mike Morwood present at Sydney Uni on Homo floresiensis and I had the opportunity to speak with him. He is of the opinion that there still are small Aboriginal people in northern Queensland. The article I linked above gave the impression that they had been bred out since the 1960s through being relocated to various locations.
However, when I recently was told a story about "hobbits" in far north Queensland, it seems almost certain this was a mistaken identity with Australia's Aboriginal negritos in the 1940s.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on May 9, 2008 9:29:24 GMT 10
Fascinating all right but the whole subject is politically fraught. Why would these people have been expunged from popular memory? How did the Australian pygmies become extinct within the public consciousness?
There have been two main reasons. We explain them in detail below but, briefly, they were: first, a vitriolic debate within the academic discipline of anthropology in which the view prevailed that there was nothing remarkable about these people; second, the emergence in the 1960s of the radical Aboriginal political movement, which found the existence of a pygmy people an inconvenient counter-example to one of its central doctrines.To wit: that the present day aboriginal inhabitants of Australia were the first and are direct descendants of the people from 50,000 ya. They weren't and they're not. Science has this nasty habit of biting the hands that feed it.  |
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