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Troll evolution; If trolls were real creatures, how would it have evolved
Topic Started: May 20 2010, 03:44 AM (1,487 Views)
Cephylus
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Torando of Terror
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I've read the artimes fowl novel, and book 1and 4 features trolls, A shaggy, tusked and gigantic predator descibed as a kind of ape. i'm wondering what would be the troll like and its evolutionary past if it is a real predator? would it be an ape? or a carnivourous boar? or something else?
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Ddraig Goch
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Ar hyd y nos

In a lot of cases, trolls seem to simply be offshoots from the human branch of evolution. Stories of them probably came from sitings of giant apes such as Gigantopithecus, or more likely simply old wifes' tales to keep children from misbehaving.

Given that the majority of troll stories come from Europe, either human ancestory, or another Eupropean species, seems most likely.
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Pando
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Trolls came from human-like rocks, neanderthals made ogres.
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Holben
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Rumbo a la Victoria

TBF, there are different types of troll with different characteristics.
Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea.

"It is the old wound my king. It has never healed."
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sam999
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Pew. When I clicked on this topic I thought you ment the evolution of....
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irbaboon
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Troll is such a variable category. It can mean something like this
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or like this
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or like this
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Toad of Spades
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Clorothod
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The Lord of the Rings troll looks like it has features for a semi-aquatic lifestyle, but the features don't match its lifestyle. Maybe Orcs could have captured them from swamps, lakes, and ponds, then trained them and forced them to work. It also looks like it could be some kind of giant amphibious ape or hominid.
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irbaboon
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Any thoughts on the other types I posted?
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Ook
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not a Transhuman
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that trolls from lord of the rings movie isnt look as it was described at Lord of the rings
Edited by Ook, May 22 2010, 02:48 PM.
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Holben
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Rumbo a la Victoria

No, it was animated to look good though.
Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea.

"It is the old wound my king. It has never healed."
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Ook
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not a Transhuman
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tolkien describe it less different
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colddigger
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I want to read this whole neanderthal ogre thing...
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MitchBeard
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What about an extant species of paranthropus? They only went extinct a million years ago, it wouldn't be hard to imagine an alternate reality where they survived to the present.
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SIngemeister
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Probably better than my giant gorilla-lizards.
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Zoroaster
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The Flores Hobbit only died out about 12,000 years ago... that's possibly long enough for a folk memory of different species of human... they shared Flores with Komodo dragons and even bigger varanids...

And then there's the "hobbits" of Palau, who were a dwarf race of homo sapiens, who shrunk and lost brain mass to cope with living with limited resources - and perished as recently as 3000 years ago...
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