You sure? Maybe the old European legends about trolls, ogres, etc., are really about Neanderthals. Some writers have exploited that idea. Michael Crichton’s novel Eaters of the Dead (film-adapted as The Thirteenth Warrior) plays with the idea that the monsters of Beowulf were Neanderthals, and in Mary Renault’s The Bull From the Sea, the Kentaurs are obviously Neanderthals.
Who cares? The important question is, what’s the market like for hobbit porn? 
I read in the paper today that they are not sure this can be really classified as a Homo species, due to some interesting and puzzling differences in skull shape and so on (to be truthful, the description of the different characteristics reminded me a bit of Piltdown Man!). Anyone have information on that?
Religious person, no problem with evolution, no faith-shaking going on. Neat, though.
What if we found a community of hobbits in the middle of the Indonesian forest and gradually made friends with them like we did with the gorillas. Then, after a couple of decades research, we found that they could be taught language (English).
After a while, the hobbit population would grow exponentially because they would be so well protected. There would soon be millions of them. Pretty soon we’ll start to get rich hobbits. Before long some woman, somewhere in the world (I dunno why but I picture some dumb blonde from LA) will want to marry a hobbit. She will proclaim that her love for the hobbit is as genuine as any other kind of love and she’ll demand a legal marriage.
It won’t be a gay marriage because the hobbit will be male so we can forget the whole gay marriage issue. Should she be allowed to marry the hobbit?
(For the purposes of the argument, imagine it was a good looking hobbit with a distinctly non-hobbit sized wazunga)
Probably pretty high. Search the board for the phrase “pervy hobbit fancier” and follow links in said threads!
Most, but not all!
Adding another one: Dance of the Tiger, a novel by the paleoanthropolgist Björn Kurtén, about interactions between Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals in interstadial paleolithic Scandinavia. Kurtén has his Cro-Magnons referring to the Neanderthals as “Trolls.” He implies that this is how Scandinavian legends of trolls began.
Please don’t believe it. Look upon it as a highly successful and accurate theoretical framework with both superb descriptive and predictive power. Question it. Probe it. Try to experience and observe some of the evidence, if you can. Then, I hope, you will come to be confident that it is a good theory.
Pope John XXIII officially dropped “Let us pray for the perfidious hobbits” from the Mass.
yeah, yeah, yeah… 
Others have pointed out potential Neanderthal myths, so I’ll just point out that all of those myths are just that-- myths. No one knows if **any **of them are from a period when either species co-existed with us. Those “corroborating stories” are nothing of the sort. Every culture has myths about “wildmen” and there is no one of knowing if any of them, including these, has any basis in fact.
Please tell me that you’re kidding—that there’s no such thing.
Speaking as one in the same catagory as Padeye, “Christian confident that evolution is a highly successful and accurate theoretical framework with both superb descriptive and predictive power” just doesn’t work as a conversational shortcut.
And if I may attempt to answer Jojo’s questions: absent a live hobbit, questioning hobbit faith is about as meaningless as questioning Neanderthal faith, or Yeti faith, or big-headed space alien faith. We’ve had other archaic, presumably extinct hominid species to speculate about, so adding one more to the mix changes nothing on a spiritual level. If a human and a hobbit successfully mated, I just hope to God that they are a human woman and a hobbit man–for the sake of the mother.
The most complete remains, those of the 30-year-old woman, are 18,000 years old, but all seven specimins found date to a range of ages: 95,000 to 13,000.
John Mace, the orang pendak was the first thing I thought about when I read the first news story!
You’re suggesting the Ainulindalé is written in symbolic language, and is not the truth? :eek:
Out, heretic!!!
Me, too. I thought readers of this thread would be interested in that crypto-beast, as I don’t think it’s very well known. It needs a better press agent, like Bigfoot or Yeti.
Not to my knowledge (with the obvious exception of Polycarp, of course, whose devotion to Eru has never been questioned ), but that just means that you can be the first one on your block. Put on that elven cloak and head down to your local church, synagogue or college campus to preach the truth of the Valar to the unbelievers! Be sure to hand out plenty of literature with titles like Darwin’s Gold Ring and Evolution? The Fossils Say, “Wicked! Tricksy! False!”. Before you know it, there’ll be a copy of the Silmarillion in every motel room.
If only we were in the Pit so I could say what I really think of you Bilbo-thumpers…