Well, this was an exciting bit of news I heard on the radio on my way home today. You can get the whole, ungarbled story from National Geographic here but the upshot of the whole thing is that bones have been discovered which show that there was a 3ft tall member of the human family running around at the same time our modern human ancestors were running around in Asia. These two different types of humans must have met each other, and modern humans living today in the area say their ancestors told them stories about small people living in caves. Must be very gratifying to those people to have their "legends" taken so seriously!

Of course, they say they're gone now, and amazingly, we didn't kill them off. Volcanic eruption did them in, poor things.

But, oh, don't you hope they find them?! Don't you hope, like me, that on some island, in some jungle, on some remote mountain top we make contact again with our "cousins" who may have become the fairies, leprechauns, dwarves, or bogarts of our stories? Doesn't it just fire your imagination? What could they have been like? They made tools, they hunted - okay, everybody's gotta eat. But what about their social life? Did they have language? They must have been able to communicate and cooperate: they hunted what was for them large game. I bet that if they held an election they could have come up with better candidates than this one - even given that their brains were 1/3 the size of ours.

The question is were they USING all of the brain they had? Because if they were, they might have been just as smart as us, even smarter.

The t.v. station has a point: There's no Thrill like Discovery!