I don't know anything about "Piltdown Man." I'm sure there are tons of things that have been claimed to be discovered by various flakes through the ages that were actually plants and forgeries. magazines like the national enquirer were at one time very well respected printings where you could read about controversial but true stories. now its nothing but a gag mag. i think the last cover story i saw on it was 500 lb model gives birth to 40 lb baby. i remember one where they claimed to have brought abe lincoln back to life for 90 seconds or some crap like that. the sad thing is that there are people out there who read those magazines and actually believe it. not that some of the stories aren't amusing, anyone who really believes it, really needs help. i dont argue the point that when something new is presented it should be thoroughly investigated before drawing any conclusions or rewriting any text books. but at the same time there have been several cases in the not too distant past where archaelogists have prestented hard evidence that clearly defied the current belief system of "how things are and what happened when" and those are the ones who get shot down and their fundings cut off because they dare prove otherwise. Not always, i know, but it does happen. I wish i had a clear cut example to give you right now but i'd have to take some time to look up some of those that i've read about and watched documentaries on in the past. it does bring to mind though, a story that i was discussing with someone not too long ago (within the last year or so) about a woman who discovered a specific type of plant or herb in egypt that dated back thousands of years. but at the time that this substance was being used in egypt, it didn't grow there naturally. the only other place in the world that it did grow was south america, which in her findings (more than just this plant) she proved that there was trade going on between the two, yet everybody else swears they didn't have trade (maybe now trade between the two is accepted, i'm not sure, but at the time this happened it was not believed to have ever happened). So because this woman faught for what she'd found, she was chalked up to being a fraud. There's more to the story than what i can currently remember, but that is what it all boiled down to. I wish i had more details about the case to give you but i don't at the moment. its just an example of the point i brought up in my previous post. Not to mention all the other unexplainable instances around the world. the pyramids for example. "Experts" claim they're only something like 4,000 years old and were built by the egyptians who lived there at the time. right... built by a group of people who were barely more than cavemen (no offense), so precisely that even with today's technology and machinery no one can replicate any of the 3 great pyramids. not to mention their astrological alignment, which they don't line up with anymore, but they DID, 10 to 12,000 years ago. but wait, that can't be because the people they think built them 4,000 years ago weren't capable, or didn't exist, 10 to 12,000 years ago. then there's the water erosion on the pyramids and the sphinx that took thousands of years to happen, but wait. its not water erosion, those nearly perfect horizontal erosion and water marks that a body of water would leave after several thousands of years of the water levels slowly falling are actually wind and sand erosion, with some water mixed in, from all the times that the nile overflowed (even though it didn't overflow far enough to reach the pyramids very often, or stayed there very long, but we'll just ignore that minor detail because 4,000 years is more comforting and fits better with our current narrow-minded theory of what happened and when).

there's always going to be a skeptic in every group. it just irks me when there's so many other logical paths that something could take but no one wants to pay attention to them because it doesn't fit in with the rest of the picture the way they want the picture to be. so they waste their time trying to paint it the way they believe it should be instead of the way it really is, or could possibly be.

E.D. P.S: And I know this has gotten WAY off base of poser, or daz creating hobbit-type figures. Sorry. Having always been fascinated by egypt and the rest of the ancient world, far more so than i am fascinated with the present world, i'll say that it'd be nice to see some of our fellow poser artists create more egyptian, greek and other acient era art. i think the daz studio has some packs available for this. I will look into it.

Message edited on: 10/29/2004 03:52