Hobbit Forming

The pilfered picture above shows the attempt at recreation of the features of a Hobbit from the isle of Flores. One look and anyone can tell it's not real. That doesn't look anything like Bilbo Baggins.

Red Deer Cave People

Photo: BBC, Darth Vader Revealed

From The BBC reporting on a release from PLoS One journal:

“The remains of what may be a previously unknown human species have been identified in southern China.

“The bones, which represent at least five individuals, have been dated to between 11,500 and 14,500 years ago.

“But scientists are calling them simply the Red Deer Cave people, after one of the sites where they were unearthed.”

Take note of those dates. That’s just prior to the beginning of farming, and there’s nothing saying where in the lifespan of this species these remains are from. It could have survived for thousands of years after these individuals and have been around for tens or hundreds of thousands years prior.

A quick count gives us: us, the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, the Hobbits, and now the Red Deer folk roaming around together. My original prediction was for between sixteen and twenty humanoids walking around at the same time. We’ll probably never find them all, but we’re a quarter of the way to twenty with no reason to suspect we’re at the end of the trail yet.

It’s time to revisit cultural memory. Not the conscious cultural memory of history books and monuments and museums but the hidden memory of culture shared through vehicles such as language, folk traditions, myths, and religion; especially the tales of other peoples in the woods, other creatures like, but not like, us. To be sure, we’ve always had tales of bad or dangerous or merely different people, as well, but stories about others not quite human have persisted worldwide since forever. How big were those Hobbits? How tough were those Neanderthals? Think any of them could have lived under the bridge and eaten Billy Goat Gruff?

Copernicus Redux

Copernicus, we remember, got in trouble for suggesting that Earth might not be the center of the Universe. We snicker now at such provincialisms. Yet at the same time we warn against anthropomorphism, the trait of looking at anything through human eyes. We are continually reminded that other animals don’t act like us, although most often the reminder comes without the qualification “other”; usually it’s just “animals don’t act like us,” as if we were somehow separate and distinct from the rest of the kingdom.

A defining difference between us and “the animals,” has traditionally been tool use. Only people use tools. That has been a given. Ergo, if one finds evidence of ancient tool use, one has found evidence of early humans. Look at the archaeology of Britain, for example. They’re forever talking about early people in Britain up to 500,000 years ago on the strength of finding stone tools. If A, then B. If all stone tools are made by people, then, if one finds stone tools, one has found evidence of people. Can’t be any other way.

Unless, of course, the premise is wrong; and the more we look around, the more it’s becoming evident that tool use is an upper-primate—call us apes if you will—characteristic, not simply a human one.

It’s also axiomatic that, if two tool-using primates are found to coexist, there’s no guarantee that one of them developed out of the other one; they could have, and probably did, come from a common ancestor further back. The Neanderthals were bad enough, but now we have the Flores Hobbits . The Australians are reporting that, not only was the Hobbit not a human, but that it predated (at least on Flores), the traditional pre-human primate that everyone likes to claim as an early human: homo ergaster (et al). He’s the same guy as Peking Man and the folks leaving those early tools in Britain, if I have it right, who both the Chinese and the English claim as early humans. The Neanderthals we could handle so long as H. ergaster was predecessor to them both; i.e. one tool using species giving rise to two branches: the Neanderthals and us.

But those pesky Hobbits throw a bone into the machinery. If they were not an evolution of h. ergaster, from whom did they evolve? And if they didn’t evolve from h. ergaster, who’s to say we did? Or the Neanderthals?

But isn’t it interesting that all three species, us, ergaster, and florensis, all managed to cross the forty or fifty miles of ocean necessary to reach Flores? Did two species arrive there by accident, with only us getting there on purpose because we knew how to navigate? Or did all three species have more in common than fire and tool use? What would it mean that at least three species of greater apes have learned how to sail? Or paddle?

Isn’t it a tad presumptuous to call all tool users “human”? And isn’t equally presumptuous to think that any characteristic we think of as human is our prerogative exclusively? I’m not saying that the human family isn’t big enough to hold some pretty weird characters, but I don’t necessarily think that any chip off the old stone is a person. Just because we now know chimps use tools, doesn’t make them any cuter to me. I’m still not ready to let them into the family. If they can figure out how to be butlers, fine, they can have a job; but don’t expect me to let them date my daughter.

Back to the drawing boards, folks. We’ve got some rethinking to do.

But chimps are not merely highly challenged people.