cience Matters by David Suzuki
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Mini-hominids rock the scientific community
November 05, 2004
For this column, I was going to write about the U.S. missile defense system, but something far too fascinating came along and I just could not pass it up.
Recently, scientists discovered a new human-like species that lived at the same time as modern Homo sapiens and died out less than 18,000 years ago. The discovery was made in a remote area of the island of Flores in Indonesia and was revealed in a recent edition of the journal Nature. It has scientists stunned.
The new species, Homo floresiensis, came out of the blue. Few expected to find another human contemporary - certainly not in this area. The ancestors to Homo sapiens, Homo erectus, are thought to have migrated out of Africa about two million years ago, but it was thought unlikely that they could have made it to remote Indonesian islands because to do so would have required advanced skills to cross large bodies of water - skills believed to be unique to H. sapiens.
But several years ago, 800,000-year-old stone tools were discovered on Flores, suggesting that our less-developed relatives had indeed successfully accomplished ocean travel. The new findings of H. Floresiensis, not only supports this theory, but suggest that an entirely new species evolved on the island from those early ocean-going H. erectus.
Flores man, or in this specific case, a woman, was about 30-years-old, stood only one-metre (three feet) tall, yet walked upright and on two legs as we do. She had a prominent brow ridge and no chin, like more primitive hominids, but she also had a small, delicate face and modern teeth. Her brain was about one-third the size of ours, but she appears to have used advanced tools. In fact she may have hunted and dined on pygmy elephants - another creature that, due to its genetic isolation and limited natural resources, had also shrunk to dwarf size.
Astoundingly, she may have carried out her daily activities long after modern humans had migrated into the region, even after our ancestors had begun settling into villages, growing crops and making pottery. How long her descendents may have existed on the island is unknown, as is their fate, but her discovery raises new questions about the evolution of human beings.
Not long ago, it was believed that human evolution proceeded inexorably along in a linear fashion. The recent findings of the Flores people again show that this is simply not the case. In fact, it seems that for the majority of humanity's 160,000-year history, we shared the earth with other intelligent, bipedal beings. A very short time ago - less than 30,000 years - modern humans actually shared this planet with at least two other cultural contemporaries, Neanderthals and H. Floresiensis. Both of these species appear to have made relatively advanced tools and may have even had unique cultures that involved behaviours such as burial rites.
Both species also died out, possibly after coming into conflict with modern humans, or possibly due to a changing climate or other problems to which they were unable to adapt. But the findings beg the question - how many other hominid species did modern humans share the planet with at the same time? What happened to them? And is there any chance of small groups of hominids still eking out an existence in some remote region of the globe? Suddenly, the search for mythical creatures such as Sumatra's orang pendek, also known as the "jungle yeti," may not be so absurd after all.
H. Floresiensis has raised all these questions and more about the history of hominids and humans on the planet. More important, it raises the question of what it really means to be human.