The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution Read Free

the team of editors who have the immense privilege of selecting which research papers from the stream of submissions will be published in the journal. One of the pleasures of the job is receiving the first news of important, potentially world-changing discoveries.
    An account of perhaps the single most remarkable discovery I’veseen in my career as an editor was submitted to
Nature
on 3 March 2004. The discovery was of something quite unexpected, opening up unsuspected vistas on things we didn’t know we didn’t know, and challenging conventional assumptions about the inevitable ascent of humankind to a preordained state as the apotheosis and zenith of all creation. After several revisions, and much discussion among my colleagues and the panel of scientists we’d assembled to advise us on the report of the discovery, the news was published in
Nature
on 28 October 2004. 4
    This communiqué from beyond the realms of the known came from an international team of archaeologists working in a cave called Liang Bua, on the remote island of Flores, in Indonesia. If you want to find Flores on a map, look up the island of Java, and work your way eastward, past Bali and Lombok, and there it is. Flores is part of a long chain of islands that ends up at the island of Timor, well on the way to Australia, New Guinea, and the Pacific Ocean.
    One of the more intriguing questions in archaeology is when Australia was first settled by modern humans, the ancestors of today’s aboriginal peoples. There is much debate about this issue. Clearly, one way of illuminating the problem is to search for early modern humans living in what is now Indonesia, which can be thought of as a series of stepping-stones between mainland Asia and Australia. 5 That’s where Flores comes in. Archaeologists are interested in the caves of Flores and other islands such as Timor because of their potential to yield remains of
Homo sapiens
, modern people caught in the act of heading toward that distant island continent later associated with cold lager, “Waltzing Matilda,” and
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
. This is what drew an international team of archaeologists to Flores, and in particular to Liang Bua, known as an archaeological site for decades.
    Flores, though, is an island of mysteries—for it has been inhabited for at least a million years, 6 and not by
Homo sapiens
. Stone tools have been discovered in several places on the island, and their makers are usually thought to have been
Homo erectus
, an earlier hominin, 7 whose remains are well known from Java, China, and other parts of the world. The bones of these early inhabitants of Flores have not been found, their presence betrayed only by the distinctive stone tools they left behind.
    But whoever these early inhabitants were, their very presence is a problem. In the depths of the ice ages, when much of the earth’s water was locked up in ice caps and glaciers, the sea receded so far that manyof the islands of Indonesia were connected by land bridges—they could be colonized by anything able to walk there. Not so Flores: this remained separate, cut off from mainland Asia by a deep channel.
Homo erectus
—if that’s who it was—must have made the crossing from the nearest island by boat or raft, or, like other animals, washed up there by accident. Once they made landfall on Flores, there they stayed—cut off from the rest of the world for a very long time.
    Isolation on islands does strange things to castaways, making them look very different from their cousins on the mainland. So it was with Flores, home to a species of elephant shrunken to the size of a pony, rats grown to the size of terriers, and gigantic monitor lizards that made modern Komodo dragons look kittenish by comparison. 8
    Such peculiar faunas are typical of islands cut off from the mainland where, for reasons still unclear, small animals evolve to become larger, and large animals evolve to become smaller. Miniature