The path of human evolution is a bizarre one- far from the fish- caveman- slightly taller caveman-guy in suit depiction on grade school posters (at least when I was in grade school. Back when evolution was ok to talk about in public schools- but that is another matter. Suffice to say, if you don't believe in evolution you probably won't enjoy this site). The path of human evolution is far from a straight line: it is a jumbled, twisted tree, with stunted branches and broken twigs meandering off any which way but loose. There isn't really a pattern, and one can easily see that there isn't really a plan either.

A recent, if still controversial discovery out of Indonesia helped confirm this. A joint team of Australian and Indonesian paleontologists found were the remains of a tiny, human-like creature, no taller than a modern three-year-old child. But it wasn't a child. Examinations of the pelvic structure revealed it to be a fully-grown adult, still no more than three feet tall. This was a stunning discovery.

What they believe they discovered was a new branch of our family tree, and named it homo Floresiensis, after the Indonesian island of Flores, from whence it came. Any new addition is an awe-inspiring discovery, helping us to trace the true roots of who we are, but this one is more chilling and has deeper implications than the rest. For the bizarre Lilliputians lived as recently as 13,000 years ago, if not sooner. Previous wisdom held that the last non-modern humanoid species died out about 25,000 years ago, after which modern man was supposed to have the planet to himself.

Before we get into the spine-tingling, beautiful implications of this, a few caveats need to be addressed. The first is the most obvious one- how do they know they didn't just find the bones of a freak, a midget, and decided to base a whole new branch off a quirk? That is an important question, and one that other scholars jumped on (the world of science is open, but very competitive- and that's what makes it valuable: the bad ideas tend to get squashed, not written as Gospel). If, in some weird Planet of the Apes scenario the only bones from the 20th century found were those of Shaquille O'Neal, those super-smart apes could be fooled into thinking we were all 7'2" giants with fragile toes and weird heads. And they would be wrong (ha-ha! Jokes on you, Imaginary Ape of the Future!).

But it is not a pygmy or a midget or anything like that. I'll quote at some length an article from Scientific American, which had the story on its cover in February (well before the haughtier journal Science, which is when the story really started making headlines. Science is a more academic, peer-reviewed journal).


"...when (Australian paleontologist Peter) Brown and his colleagues considered the morphological characteristics of small-bodied modern humans- including normal ones, such as pygmies, and abnormal ones, such as pituitary dwarfs- LB1 did not seem to fit any of these descriptions. Pygmies have small bodies and large brains- the result of delayed growth during puberty, when the brain has already attained its full size. And individuals with genetic disorders that produce short stature and small brains have a range of distinctive features not seen in LB1 and rarely reach adulthood."


In addition, there are other traits that seem distinctly archaic and don't belong to modern humans, no matter their size. So this seems to take away the idea that this skeleton was just a freak, and later excavations found more and more bones that belonged to the same family.
There is still some controversy, but most of the community has accepted the finding.

An important question is: how did this happen? Floresiensis (also known as "Hobbit" but I think we'll stay away from that) is smaller than the other homo species that preceded it, and obviously far smaller than its contemporary, homo sapien (us). Smaller is generally thought to mean weaker, and we are taught that evolution doesn't design things to be less fit.

(While we're here, let's have an important side-note. When talking about evolution, one has to use phrases like "design" and "plan" and other humanistic metaphors. This is a necessity driven by the occasional poverty of language and ingrained needy superstitions. Evolution doesn't have a design, nor is it planned, nor does it "want" anything. Keep in mind these are just metaphors, lest one fall into the faux-scientific trap of "intelligent design.")

But Floresiensis came to Indonesia during the ancient waves of eastern migration, and ended up on Flores. Weird things happen on islands. Small animals tend to get bigger and big animals tend to get smaller. It is all about finding a niche. "Fittest" should never be confused with "strongest" when talking about survival. Why is this? There tend to be smaller and more confined food sources, and animals that need to eat more to survive do worse. There is evidence that the mini-humans hunted (relatively) tiny elephants, a scene that to us rings faintly comic but to them was a gripping life and death struggle in the ancient Indonesian wetlands.

The largest problem to come out of this evidence, albeit so far inconclusive, that the h. Floresiensis had relatively modern tools, despite having a tiny brain. It is troubling and fascinating in its implications: we always assumed that brain size was the most important thing. If true, this gives weight to the idea that brain size is not what counts- it is how the brain organizes itself. Needless to say, we can't make any giant leaps in our understanding of neuroscience based on a few stone tools, but this idea is gripping in the way that it could completely overturn conventional wisdom.

But there is a piece of conventional wisdom that it has already thrown on its head, and to a great good. The idea that modern man was for a long time alone cannot be valued anymore. 13,000 years ago is not such a long time. Mesopotamia was feeling the birth-pangs of its agricultural societies that led to the first great empires, and people who would become Native American were streaming across the Bering Straits. The world as we know it was beginning to form.

But there was still a glitch. In the Indonesian islands (perhaps on more than one) a distant and tiny relative remained, perhaps even thrived, possibly made tools just as advanced as "ours." Floresiensis shows just how chance-driven human evolution actually was. It was a series of quirks that made modern man what it is today, and a similar series of quirks that enabled a species to shrink itself in order to survive.

Eventually, Floresiensis disappeared. The hell of it is, though, nobody really knows when. Villagers in Flores tell tales, as the Scientific American article tells it, "of a diminutive, upright-walking creature with a lopsided gait, a voracious appetite, and soft, murmuring speech." Scientists best guess before was that they were talking about a monkey, but perhaps the answer needn't be as patronizing as all that.

Perhaps in the sweating isolation of Flores, removed from any Europeans, two species of homo co-existed until relatively recently- recently enough that it is still in oral memory- one less advanced, hiding in the jungle, but still hauntingly close enough to modern humans that they named it ebu gogo- "the grandmother who eats anything." What were these encounters like? Did they fight? Did they try to interbreed? Or did they just pass each other, a spark of dull recognition, two species closer to each other than they could imagine, and that anything science or religion has taught us since? Perhaps, and this is just pure imagination and wistful speculation, the Indonesians recognized that the world was a weird place, and they weren't as special and divinely ordained as their shamans taught them to believe. And perhaps, even more fanciful, it is a lesson we can draw as well.