What if European explorers encountered Homo floresiensis in the 19th century?

We have no idea how accurate it is, since we have no living hobbits in the flesh to compare it to.

I don't doubt they had dark skin, since they lived in the tropics, and possibly had curly hair, but I mostly mean other features like ears, lips, and to a less extent the nose and other soft tissues that are hardly to impossible to really reconstruct with only a skull. There have been studies trying to find where the science of it starts and where artistic licence ends.
Soft features adapted to the tropics are rather universal amongst living hominids.

Having a population have an even longer time navigating an equatorial environment and their predecessors living in a tropical environment makes me believe while there may be some benefit in curled body hair to wick perspiration in a way to facilitating greater cooling it isn't all that necessary either.

Pygmies have body hair, much more than their neighbors and they are influenced by archaic non-human Hominid ancestry. But they seem to have a very fine blonde silky body hair and then the rest is peppercorn, that coils into itself and is in tufts.

Given that it seems "silky" (1a to 3c) hair is neotenic and a later adaptation I'd think any previous Homo species but especially Hobbits would have coiled tufts like archaic influenced Baka/Aka

The Negritos are still about a foot taller than the Hobbits that's a big difference. Not to mention their body mass was much smaller too estimated to weigh only 55 lbs or so.

Physically they were closer to the proto-hominids from 3 million years ago than any pygmy.

Also I was referring to Europeans first encountering the Hobbits and that shock.
The shock would be looking at children or adolescent sized adults.

Oh, I wasn't thinking about Europeans. I was thinking first contact with humans.
 
Soft features adapted to the tropics are rather universal amongst living hominids.

Having a population have an even longer time navigating an equatorial environment and their predecessors living in a tropical environment makes me believe while there may be some benefit in curled body hair to wick perspiration in a way to facilitating greater cooling it isn't all that necessary either.

Pygmies have body hair, much more than their neighbors and they are influenced by archaic non-human Hominid ancestry. But they seem to have a very fine blonde silky body hair and then the rest is peppercorn, that coils into itself and is in tufts.

Given that it seems "silky" (1a to 3c) hair is neotenic and a later adaptation I'd think any previous Homo species but especially Hobbits would have coiled tufts like archaic influenced Baka/Aka

I don't think Pygmies are an extremely apt comparison, because they're 1) homo sapiens, and 2) have admixture from an entirely different species that wasn't floresiensis. I do think the hobbits likely had darker skin and more curled hair, but it's impossible to say for sure until we study their genome (I don't believe we have been able to yet since the tropics are bad for preserving DNA, but I could be wrong).

Beyond hair and skin color, though, features like the lips, ears, nose, etc. have nothing to do with living in an equatorial environment. We can only make close guesses at those features at best. I don't see any reason to believe they would be easily mistaken for homo sapiens. Modern humans are a small sub-set of a single sub-species with little genetic diversity, and we still have a great variety of physical features, especially in our soft tissues. It is extremely difficult to infer how those soft tissues would have looked in an entirely different species, with only bones to go off of.
 
I don't think Pygmies are an extremely apt comparison, because they're 1) homo sapiens, and 2) have admixture from an entirely different species that wasn't floresiensis. I do think the hobbits likely had darker skin and more curled hair, but it's impossible to say for sure until we study their genome (I don't believe we have been able to yet since the tropics are bad for preserving DNA, but I could be wrong).

Beyond hair and skin color, though, features like the lips, ears, nose, etc. have nothing to do with living in an equatorial environment. We can only make close guesses at those features at best. I don't see any reason to believe they would be easily mistaken for homo sapiens. Modern humans are a small sub-set of a single sub-species with little genetic diversity, and we still have a great variety of physical features, especially in our soft tissues. It is extremely difficult to infer how those soft tissues would have looked in an entirely different species, with only bones to go off of.
If there is one thing all my years of adaption has shown it's that convergent evolution is in fact not fringe.

Taking into account that

1. Climate does indeed influence nose shape

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.th...climate-shaped-the-human-nose-researchers-say

2. "Silky" hair is neotenous just as light skin as such said mutation seem to have occurred later like the latter

However, the majority of African babies are not born with springy tight curls, the African child at birth is either bald or has silky loose curls (Fig. 1) similar to the Jheri curls. The springy tight curls develop within the first year of life but a few negroid Africans retain their silky hair type for life.

I think it's important to look at the covergently adapted people and not fear the obvious phenotypical traits that come from people that may indeed come from non-human Hominid ancestry. The selective pressures to maintain them have likely influenced those traits continuation to this day.

But we're going off topic probs.
 

This doesn't seem to be such a settled argument, from your own link:

“Although nasal width may be subject to natural selection, it is not clear that this is being driven by climate,” she says pointing out that the study’s link between climate and nose shape disappears when northern Europeans are removed from the analysis.

What’s more, says Von Cramon-Taubadel, the study focuses only on the external features of the nose even though its internal structure is also important when it comes to air-conditioning. “So while this study sheds light on the evolution of external nose shape, it does not necessarily address the aspects of nasal anatomy that are most important for understanding climatic adaptation,” she said.


2. "Silky" hair is neotenous just as light skin as such said mutation seem to have occurred later like the latter

While again I agree that they likely had curly hair to some extent, we can't compare them to homo sapiens and mutations found in sapiens. For example, neanderthals likely had lighter skin, which was a completely different mutation that happened much earlier than the similar mutations that occurred in sapiens. Hobbits would be a species even more distantly related, I believe they're supposed to have been descended from homo erectus, and there's no reason to believe they wouldn't have independently accumulated many different mutations distinct from our own.
 
This doesn't seem to be such a settled argument, from your own link:






While again I agree that they likely had curly hair to some extent, we can't compare them to homo sapiens and mutations found in sapiens. For example, neanderthals likely had lighter skin, which was a completely different mutation that happened much earlier than the similar mutations that occurred in sapiens. Hobbits would be a species even more distantly related, I believe they're supposed to have been descended from homo erectus, and there's no reason to believe they wouldn't have independently accumulated many different mutations distinct from our own.

She herself was not in the study + it only shows that the variance found in Europe is higher through longer periods of time to adapt to said climate. Looking at the growing body of human migration history of Asia it went from South/near equatorial to North showing less adaptation.


Secondly, the trajectory of Neanderthals involves an evolutionary process adapted to the higher latitudinal North that produced similar phenotypical/color variations as later modern humans only proving my point further.
 
Humidity is also a major factor influencing nose evolution.

Consider that great apes and Equatorial humans tend to have short wide noses because they live in humid environments, hence do not need to adjust air humidity before it enters their lungs.
Meanwhile, Ethiopians, Somalis and Arabs tend towards long noses because they live in dry climates and need to moisturize inhaled air before it enters their lungs.
 
"The rare 'Flores Man', part ape, part man--indeed a transition between animal and human being. Even the inferior races of mankind are superior to this ape-man in all aspects, but this ape-man is still superior in intelligence--although certainly not in stature--to the other apes."

This would also, IMO, be really good for racism (so really bad for everyone outside Europe). Europeans now have the homo florisiensis for them to conclude that some of the oppressed 'inferior' races aren't human. Probably end up in a horrifically worse situation than OTL (if that's possible).
 
This would also, IMO, be really good for racism (so really bad for everyone outside Europe). Europeans now have the homo florisiensis for them to conclude that some of the oppressed 'inferior' races aren't human. Probably end up in a horrifically worse situation than OTL (if that's possible).

How so? It seems obvious that Homo floresensis is on an entirely different level than anything considered human. Although ethnic groups in the area, like the darker-skinned Indonesians, the Negrito peoples, Melanesians, and Australian Aboriginals might have it even worse because of the theories of admixture from this literally subhuman race.
 
How so? It seems obvious that Homo floresensis is on an entirely different level than anything considered human. Although ethnic groups in the area, like the darker-skinned Indonesians, the Negrito peoples, Melanesians, and Australian Aboriginals might have it even worse because of the theories of admixture from this literally subhuman race.

They'd be seen that way but they are as much a sub-group under the Homo genus as Homo Sapiens are.

People used to think of Neaderthals as literal sub-humans as well.
 
How so? It seems obvious that Homo floresensis is on an entirely different level than anything considered human. Although ethnic groups in the area, like the darker-skinned Indonesians, the Negrito peoples, Melanesians, and Australian Aboriginals might have it even worse because of the theories of admixture from this literally subhuman race.

Well, I was thinking it'd give Europeans a clearer excuse for their argument that there's a path from human to animal, so they could put themselves at the top, all the other races in a staircase, and then homo florisensis next to apes. It gives them one moremos link in an evolutionary hierarchy to put themselves at the top of.
 
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