The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution Read Free Page A

elephants, in particular, were rather common in the ice ages. Practically every isolated island had its own species. 9 The one on Malta lived eye-to-eye with a gigantic species of swan called
Cygnus falconeri
, with a wingspan of around three meters. 10 Micromammoths evolved on Wrangel Island in the Russian Arctic, where they outlived their larger mainland cousins by thousands of years. 11
    The fate of island faunas was an important consideration for Charles Darwin, who marveled at the creatures of the Galápagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean, when HMS
Beagle
visited in 1835. Darwin noted that each island had its own species of giant tortoise, as well as its own finches—different from one another yet plainly similar to finches from the mainland of South America. Had some stray finches, once marooned on the Galápagos, evolved in their own way?
    The scene is set, then, for Flores, where, at Liang Bua, archaeologists surrounded by the bizarre sought for something so seemingly prosaic as signs of modern humans.
    What they found instead was a skeleton, not of a modern human or anything like one, but a hominin shrunken to no more than a meter in height, with a tiny skull that would have contained a brain no larger than that of a chimpanzee.
    In some ways the skull looked disarmingly humanlike. It was round and smooth, just like a human skull, and with no sign of an apelike snout. In other ways it was a throwback. The jaw had no chin—thepresence of a chin is a hallmark of modern humans,
Homo sapiens
. The arms, legs, and feet of the creature were most odd, looking less like those of modern humans than those of “Lucy” (
Australopithecus afarensis
), a hominin that lived in Africa more than 3 million years ago. The big surprise, though, was its geological age. Despite its very ancient-looking appearance, the skeleton was dated to around 18,000 years ago. In terms of human evolution, this is an eyeblink, hardly rating as the day before yesterday. By that time, fully modern humans, having evolved in Africa almost 200,000 years ago, had spread throughout much of the Old World. They had long been resident in Indonesia, and indeed, Australia.
    So what was this peculiar imp of a creature doing on Flores, seemingly so out of tune with its times?
    Despite the tiny brain, the creature seemed to have made tools. Pinning tools on a toolmaker is very hard (we weren’t there to see them do it), but these tools looked very like those known to have been made on Flores hundreds of thousands of years earlier, presumably by
Homo erectus
. The only difference was that they were smaller, as if fitted to tiny hands. Had the archaeologists discovered a hitherto unknown species of hominin, dwarfed by long isolation alongside the miniature elephants?
    Further work at Liang Bua showed that the first skull and skeleton were no flukes. The skeleton was soon joined by a collection of more fragmentary remains, though no more skulls. 12 All the remains could be attributed to the same species of tiny hominin, and showed its presence at Liang Bua, off and on, from as long ago as 95,000 years ago (well before
Homo sapiens
arrived in the area, as far as we know) to as recently as 12,000 years ago.
    After that—catastrophe. A layer of ash found in the upper sediments at Liang Bua indicate that many of the inhabitants of Flores were destroyed in a volcanic eruption around 12,000 years ago. The calamity swept away the fairy-tale fauna of giant lizards, tiny elephants, and tiny people (though the giant rats are still there, to this day). More recent sediments, laid down after the eruption, betray the presence of modern humans, their tools, and their domestic animals.
    The account that reached my desk at
Nature
made it plain that the discoverers were as honestly puzzled by their discovery as anyone else would have been, in this coal-face confrontation with the absolutelyunknown and unexpected—a new species of hominin that lived until almost historical times, but