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

with a weird, antique anatomy and a very, very small brain indeed.
    To emphasize the strangeness of the creature, the discoverers gave it a scientific name that was noncommittal, yet set it apart from anything discovered hitherto. They called it
Sundanthropus florianus
—the Man from Flores, in the Sunda Islands. However, the panel of experts I called on to comment on the draft paper, and to make suggestions for its improvement, pointed out how relatively modern the skull looked—how much it looked like our own genus,
Homo
. One commentator also noted that “florianus” didn’t actually mean “from Flores” so much as “flowery anus.” Clearly, some revision was required.
    When the revised paper was published in October, the creature had become
Homo floresiensis
—Flores Man. The skeleton with its skull was catalogued as LB-1, but the media were quick to catch on to a suggestion of one of the discoverers that it should be known as the “Hobbit,” after the diminutive hole-dwellers of J. R. R. Tolkien’s fiction—though we in the
Nature
office sometimes referred to her as “Flo” (the skeleton having been described as that of a female).
    The paper—and the several commentaries that appeared in its wake—saw the Hobbit as a member of a race of humanlike creatures that had evolved in isolation, on Flores itself or nearby, perhaps descendants of the full-sized toolmakers known to have been on Flores for as long as a million years. If isolation on islands could do strange things to creatures as varied as birds and elephants, lizards and tortoises, there seemed no reason in principle why hominins should be exempt. The Hobbit could easily be seen as a relative of
Homo erectus
, known from remains on mainland Asia to be almost as tall as a modern human—but dwarfed as a result of isolation, alongside the elephants whose island it shared.
    And then the fun started.
    Hardly had the ink dried on the first account of the Hobbit when the backlash began. 13 Critics were exercised by two particular aspects of the discovery.
    First, that such an archaic-looking creature had existed so recently, in a region already long inhabited by modern humans.
    Second, that a creature with such an incredibly tiny brain could have made tools. The brain was so tiny, even in proportion to the tiny body,that the Hobbit must—the critics reasoned—have been suffering from a physical or genetic abnormality.
    Although criticism of the find came in various shades, critics were united, more or less, in proposing an alternative scenario for the existence of the Hobbit. Rather than it being a distinct species, a relic of an older world preserved out of time, it was a form of modern human suffering from microcephaly, a congenital disorder that produces midgets with abnormally small heads. 14
    The first objection can be seen as a symptom of human exceptionalism, the erroneous yet deeply ingrained tendency that I seek to explode in this book. That is, the tendency to see ourselves as the inevitable culmination of a progressive trend of advancement in evolution. The discovery of such a primitive-looking creature living on the same planet at the same time as
Homo sapiens
challenges that view. It is a perhaps unfortunate fact that the only hominin that still exists on Earth is our own. This fact rather reinforces the idea that various species of hominin—the “missing links”—each more humanlike than the one before, succeeded one another with the planned inevitability of runners in a relay race, and that it is not somehow possible for several species of hominin to coexist on the same planet.
    It was not always so. As recently as 50,000 years ago, there were at least four different kinds of hominin on Earth—
Homo sapiens
in Africa, Neanderthals (
Homo neanderthalensis
) in Europe and western Asia, and
Homo erectus
in southeastern Asia, to which must now be added the obscure “Denisovans” from eastern Asia. 15 The addition of a fifth—
Homo