*Okay, this turns out to have been a hoax on a satirical website. I swallowed the bait, hook, line, and sinker. Mea Culpa.
Many of you may have already seen reports on this, but a team of archaeologists affiliated with the University College Dublin have discovered a trio of skeletons from a previously unknown humanoid species of extremely small size in a wooded area of Eastern Ireland.
OMG the squee!!!
The new species has been named Homo minusculus (tiny man) and it looks as though they were ‘people’ as humans are today. They may have only had stone age technology for their grave goods – including an axe, two knives, a spear point and two miniature sewing needles – but you need to be human kind of smart to craft these kinds of tools. That means there were people, real honest to goodness people, who were living in Ireland who could aptly be described as The Wee Folk:
“The bones and artifacts have shown that they dated from somewhere between 1145 and 1230 AD, which means that the species would have coexisted with modern humans for more than 45000 years. This amazing discovery suggests than many tales and stories from the Middle Ages which were considered as fantastic by historians, could indeed be based on real facts. Homo minusculus could have inspired stories of leprechauns, elves and brownies that are common in European folklore.”
Ladies and gentlemen, they have found elves in the archeological record and I am beside myself with Celtic Joy.
Elf-lore of continental Europe describes the Elves as tall and fair, but the Wee Folk in Ireland (the Sidhe) are usually just that – WEE. The Germanic legends of beautiful Elves has a home in Ireland too, but the native Irish myths focus on fairies of all types. Fairies are typically human-looking minikins of very teeny stature who can be either helpful or harmful depending on how you treat them. Folklorists have long speculated that the ‘good people’ were a race indigenous to Ireland that was conquered and driven into hiding by invading Celts, and they eventually attained mythic status in the retelling. Never in the wildest dreams of academia did we ever think someone would discover that indigenous race of humans would literally be the Wee Folk!
Please Lord, let them do facial reconstruction so I can actually see a fairy!!!
*Seriously, I feel like an idiot. My only comfort is that Asperger’s are more easily fooled because we don’t understand how lies work.*