i was going to mention something about giants, but didn't feel like it at the time. hobbit might occur here and there prior to tolken but i bet you if somebody came along trying to pass off their dwarfish character as a hobbit whoever owns the rights to the tolken gig would have something to say about it. they might not win, but there'd definately be some feathers flying somewhere. on a more scientific approach, i think finding things like that skeleton in indonesia is great. i love when something new about our past is discovered that changes what we think is fact. i've never believed that all the answers to where humans came from are burried in africa. for some reason that's just where somebody decided that's where we're gonna look for them. i'm actually kind of surprised that they let the news out so quickly. in a lot of cases in the past, when something has been discovered that goes against what all the "experts" say, it gets shot down and shut up and whoever found it gets threatened with having their funding taken away. maybe now that sort of thing isn't happening as often as it use to. if the right people started looking in other places for pieces to our past we'd probably find all kinds of new stuff that would completely overturn the way we currently think. like, right here in the u.s. for example. there's truth burried beneath most any myths and legends. i think there's a ton of beings and creatures from the fantasy realm that went from existence into legend. mermaids, dragons, giants, vampires, demons, etc. there's too many accounts of the same kind of creatures existing all over the world in the legends of cultures that were too far removed from one another to simply be sharing the same stories. and, way back when, people were too busy trying to survive to really have time to sit around and think up these fanciful creatures just because they had active imaginations. E.D.