Do little people go to heaven?

When they showed on television the cave on the island of Flores where the remains of little people had been found, I felt, I admit, a Yeatsian frisson that the world of politics cannot give. It was not delight at a new branch on the hat-stand of anthropoid evolution, but the thought that in the thick Indonesian rainforest there were (or had been, perhaps as recently as the time when dodos lived) creatures with whom we could converse, but which were not men.

The appetite for talking to other creatures is amply exemplified by our often exasperated one-sided conversations: ‘Get off the bloody table, Tigger, there’s a good cat.’ The very existence of pets as a sort of imaginary friend shows how reluctant humans are to be alone among the frightening emptinesses of Paschalian space. The exciting news was that the folk tales of green men, little people, wood-dwellers, might be based on fact.