another svt draft/wippost

title: ouroboros
rship: soonyoung/minghao
summary: There's a silver ring in Han River.
general tags: modern setting, psychometry, jewelers, strangers 2 lovers, past relationships, mild sexual content

Minghao laughs. “Why was your ring in the river?”
Soonyoung opens his mouth, then closes it. “Because I threw it.”

title: passenger planes
rship: soonyoung/joshua
summary: There's 5,953 miles between Los Angeles and Seoul, a distance that's already huge, even without the 65 English phones that don't exist in Korean. Joshua closes the first gap, then tries bridging the second.
general tags: university au, exchange programs, pseudo mentorship, temporary relationships, language difficulties

     For the last paper Joshua turned in before the semester hit for his exchange program, he wrote a mindblowingly long essay about the induction of a new suffix into the English language: -ception. It started off as a joke after Inception swept the box office, disregarding the original meaning of the word, and took up the new definition of recursive layering, concentric circles, matryoshka dolling any object, any concept. Hyper-specific. Useless in everyday life. Still, it exists, operates, functions. 
     He thinks the suffix gives everything its added to a dream-like, surreal quality; cities folding over, hallways spinning below him. 
     Joshua touches the back of Soonyoung's neck, deep in sleep beside him, and tucks the tag on his shirt back beneath the collar. There is a love inside this love inside this love, and somewhere out there, he's awake, driving off a bridge in slow motion.

h. floresiensis: the lost manlets of genus homo

homo floresiensis is one of the strangest and also most recent additions to the genus homo, discovered and announced in 2004. their place in the human evolutionary tree is still up for debate. the estimated age of the h. floresiensis fossils differ wildly, ranging from 100,000 years ago to merely 17,000, the more recent end of the estimates placing h. floresiensis' time on earth well within the range to have co-existed with modern humans of the old and new world. the ancestor that is thought to have bridged the gap between australopithecines and hominids lived 335,00 - 236,000 years ago, for perspective.

h. floresiensis is named for the island the fossils were found on, flores, indonesia, a place located in what is sometimes referred to as 'wallacea' or just past the wallace line, which separates the ecozones of asia and australia. it should be noted that very few, if any, large terrestrial animals ever migrated into this area. the majority of the fossils were discovered in liang bua cave with simple tools later classified as oldowan tools, meaning they were extremely simple and in the style of the oldest stone tools ever known.

 

liang bua cave babey!
 

the reason h. floresiensis has an unclear place on the evolutionary tree is largely in part due to the size of the fossils. the first skeleton discovered (also the only one with a nearly complete skull) stands at roughly 3 foot 6 inches tall. the specimen was thought to have been a child until four other skeletons were discovered with similar statures, and study showed evidence of adulthood. floresiensis had large feet, large teeth, rolled shoulders, no chin, receding foreheads, and a brain size small enough for it to be interesting that they used tools (400ccs compared to the modern human average brain size of 1500ccs). the consistency of the small size proved that this was a population of small bodied individuals and that the first specimen was not an anomaly. the ancestral and derived traits of floresiensis paint a confusing picture in terms of ancestry; their skulls resemble those of the genus homo like the recently (in terms of anthro) extinct erectus and habilus, and a skeleton that retains the more primitive traits of 3 million year old australopiths, all in a population living (possibly) only 17,000 years ago.

there are a couple theories relevant to the existance of h. floresiensis:

• homo erectus managed the crossing of waters to reach flores, and over time shrunk in size, in line with the well documented concept of island dwarfing for large-bodied mammals, i.e.: weird shit always happens on islands. elephants shrink to the size of dogs, insects grow to the size of bowling balls, the founders effect in tandem with isolation can make biological mutations the norm etc. this theory is up for debate due to floresiensis' brain size. floresiensis' brain size is 1/3rd the size of their proposed ancestor homo erectus, which is unusual considering brain size typically decreases far less in island dwarfing than the rest of the body, though it is not completely unheard of.

queen LB-1 aka the first specimen, a 30 yr old lady who was only 3 and a half feet tall

• it is difficult to place h. floresiensis as descendents of any earlier species than erectus on the genus homo or australopiths due to the absence of any fossils on the island or nearby in south east asia.
• floresiensis remains are modern humans suffering from pathological conditions, like microcephaly, which causes the neurocranium to be significantly smaller than that of a healthy human, myxoedematous endemic hyperthyroidism, which causes neurological defects and small stature due to delayed skeletal maturity, or laron syndrome, which causes the body to be insensitive to growth hormones and the skull to exhibit bizarre bone structure. each proposal comes with significant setback. microcephaly does not explain the primitive traits of the skeleton, endemic hyperthyroidism usually causes brachycephalic and unfused skulls and occasionally an enlarge pituitary fossa, none of which can be attributed to any of the specimen. skull structure patterns associated with laron syndrome are the functional opposite of what can be found on floresiensis. 

left: modern human w/ enedmic hyperthyroidism
center: first specimen of homo floresiensis
right: modern human w/ microcephaly
obviously none of these conditions explain the skulls and the pathological theories are kind of shit

 

anyway. the jury is still out and probably will be for a while because it takes a billion years for anthropologists to agree on shit considering nobody has 100% agreed on why modern humans even learned to WALK yet, but the most popular and (imo) plausible theory is that floresiensis descended from homo erectus. those adventurous, horny bastards. thank you.