Flores man

"If the weather is not conducive, they should not give permission to sail," says Ms. Jemana.

Her organization has been looking at other tourist attractions to promote, such as sites linked to Portuguese traders and missionaries who settled in the island in the sixteenth century, and the discovery there around twenty years ago of remains of Homo floresiensis, the extinct Hobbit man that is a relative of modern humans.

Flores has other national parks and active volcanoes, but at the end of the day, the tourists wanna see the dragons.

Unfortunately, many of them don't know how to behave once there.

And there's a serious version of this idea from a different island.

On Flores in Indonesia, home of the tiny extinct species Homo floresiensis, the local Leo people have long told stories about small, hairy human-like creatures.

An anthropologist named Gregory Fourth spent decades studying those stories and wrote a whole book arguing they might preserve a memory of a real hominin.

Most of his colleagues aren't convinced, but he's a legitimate scholar asking a real question.

This is ritual behavior from a small brained human that might have lived as recently as two hundred and fifty thousand years ago.

Homo floresiensis, the so-called Hobbit, discovered in Indonesia in two thousand and three.

Adults stood about three and a half feet tall with brains the size of grapefruits.

They evolved their small size through island dwarfism, a process where large animals evolve smaller body sizes when trapped on islands with limited resources.

The Neanderthals went extinct.

The Denisovans vanished.

Homo floresiensis disappeared from their island refuges.

Homo naledi, if they'd survived that long, were gone.

... pronunciation on that-

Island of Flores Man.

Yeah.

The, the Hobbit people.

There were, however, obviously many species of humans who did not go on, who for whatever reason could not adapt to their environments well enough to carry on their DNA.

Examples include Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, and Homo floresiensis.

Peter Watts, in his novel Blindsight, merely adds an additional species to that list.

They evolved in a different way.

Species like Neanderthals and, of course, homo sapiens were a lot more human-looking.

But then again, there was another hominid species, Homo floresiensis, the Hobbit man, three guesses as to why it's called that, which lived at around the same time as us and Neanderthals and had morphological features more similar to apes and more basal hominids.

Its shoulder joints were similar to Homo erectus.

It had longer toes like apes, wrist bones similar to australopithecines.