Word: rampasasa
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...inhabitants of Rampasasa insist their claimed genealogy is no tall tale. Indeed, among the rattan-and-thatch shacks of what otherwise seems an ordinary if very poor Flores village, it's hard not to notice the large number of very short people, particularly among the older folk, some of whom are the same height as a typical 10-year-old. Some six generations of intermarriage with outsiders, says Rampasasa's headman Alfredus Ontas, have left few truly tiny individuals. But to prove their antecedents, he and other locals eagerly display photos of recently deceased relatives whom they say were...
...Today, it's the villagers of Rampasasa who are causing others to be, if not embarrassed, then at least flustered. Liang Bua is where a team of Australian and Indonesian scientists reported in Nature magazine last October that they had discovered the bones of seven individuals ranging in age from 13,000 to 95,000 years old. (Another set was found later.) Among the findings: a nearly intact skeleton that the anthropologists said belonged to an adult female who lived as recently as 18,000 years ago yet was only the size of a modern-day 6-year-old. Because...
...however, the presence of small people living within strolling distance of Liang Bua has cast doubt over the separate-species theory, and sparked a bitter split in scientific circles over its validity. Battle lines have been drawn, with each side vigorously trying to discredit the other. Rampasasa "makes the short-stature argument completely irrelevant," says skeptic Alan Thorne, an anthropologist at the Australian National University. "There are plenty of Pygmies in that area. In the case of these bones, it was probably a diseased Pygmy." Counters Peter Brown, the University of New England paleoanthropologist who co-wrote the Nature report...
...paper flatly rejecting the idea that a new species had been discovered. Jacob, who is among the fiercest critics of the H. floresiensis theory and has been accused by Brown of damaging the bones while they were in his possession (a charge he denies), led an expedition to Rampasasa in April to determine if its residents could indeed be classified as Pygmies (the height threshold is 150 cm or shorter). Jacob measured more than 70 villagers and says 80% of them qualified. The theory that Thorne, Jacob and other like-minded anthropologists are propagating is that the Liang Bua female...
...village of Rampasasa, Viktor Jurubu harbors no such doubts. He has the floor again and is recounting the story of how Paju, a famous warrior, ran into one of the "normal" people in the woods one day while out hunting. "This beautiful lady lit a fire and cooked the wild boar Paju had killed," Jurubu says. "She wanted to marry him and knew she could tempt him with the taste of cooked meat. He did like the taste, so he agreed to marry her and come out of Liang Bua with the rest of the tribe, founding a new village...