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.

Two steps back

It has been a wild few weeks for supporters of the Bush plan to spread democracy in the Middle East. Developments in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt have been well-documented, sometimes to exhausting length; sometimes with dizzying rhetoric. There are a lot of questions and hesitations that should trample Republican/liberal hawk gloating, but overall one has to say that even these tentative, fragile steps would have been impossible without regime change in Iraq and the heroic election that followed (an election, it is important to note, that the Admin didn't want to happen, which should be enough to shut up messianic preening).

However, just when you think things are going well, the Administration shoots itself in the foot with two high-ranking appointments to international bodies. Last week, it was announced that John Bolton would become the Ambassador to the United Nations, a body he detests. We'll talk about Bolton a little more later, as he is not very well-known. The well-known appointee is to the Presidency of the World Bank; the nominee is the globally despised Paul Wolfowitz.

Start with Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz is one of the leading proponents of regime change in Iraq, and one of the most forceful voices that convinced President Bush to go to war. He is the most well-known "neo-con," gaining fame over even Richard Perle. Throughout the world, his name is met with fear and disdain.

Not here, though, and by here I mean on this site. I like Wolfowitz. I think sometimes he is irritating, and even offensive (pretending not to know how many troops had been killed in Iraq when testifying before Congress was one of the most repugnant displays of truth-hiding during the course of this war- a callous display driven by arrogant ideology). But I think Wolfowitz is the most consistently interesting man in the Admin.

A Washington Times article from a few years ago (I can't find a link to it anymore; I apologize) detailed a complex, fascinating man. The reporter clearly went into the story expecting to find a drooling monster and came out of it deeply impressed. Wolfowitz is a man driven by a hatred of tyranny and oppression. His family escaped Eastern Europe before WWII, but his extended family was wiped out by the Holocaust, and he was forged in this weird prism of fear and relief, and a deep love for the freedom America provides.

Once, at a pro-Israeli rally, Wolfowitz, through an expected chorus of boos, talked about the suffering of the Palestinians, and how it was important to remember their needs. Wolfowitz is usually described as a staunch supporter of Israel, and he is, but recognizes the humiliating brutality of the Occupation and the rights of the Palestinians, and does not slavishly approve of everything done by Sharon. He is not a Likudnik.

His rationale for the war in Iraq followed a similar logic. Yes, a stable and democratic Middle East is good for both America and Israel, but Wolfowitz recognizes that these things are a great good outside of their strategic needs. He loathed Saddam and what he did to the Iraqis trapped under his cruel thumb. He hates the oppressive and autocratic regimes all throughout the Muslim world (and outside of it as well). Though his zeal may at times be frightening and one fears he thinks military action in Iran would be a good thing (it wouldn't), his heart is in the right place.

John Bolton, on the other hand, is an explosion-obsessed nutcase, a far-right chicken hawk who, were he not so smart, would be driving around with a car full of yellowed, crazily underlined newspaper clippings and a bumper sticker reading "US out of UN/UN out of US." He is a hawk for the sole reason that he thinks the US has to use all of its power in a dangerous world, and despises multilateralism. He hates the United Nations- it is the same vein as appointing Spencer Abrams as Secretary of Energy, a cabinet pose that as Senator he tried to abolish- only here, it is writ large on the international level.

The implication is obvious- the Bush Administration feels that their tactics are a universal, unquestionable success, with no caveats or missteps, and certainly giving no sway to the notion that they may have stumbled backwards into achieving their goal. Appointing Bolton is a slap in the face to multilateralism; it is a way to say to the UN that they will be doing things our way, or else. This is a dangerous and arrogant move at time when Poland, Ukraine and Italy are all discussing withdrawing their troops. Even if it doesn't make too big of a tactical difference (though we will miss the Poles), it will make a giant difference in perception.

And the perception is the important thing here. It sounds weird for me to bury Wolfowitz' nomination than praise him in the next breath. But we are in many ways fighting a war of perception. That is as important in this death-struggle against radical Islam as is fighting and killing the bad guys. Wolfowitz is hated in the Middle East, where people know little about him other than the Zionist conspiracy gibberish.

What is this gibberish? It is the notion that a cabal of Israel-fellating Likudnik American Jews are driving US policy in a direction that only serves the greater good of the Jewish state. Wolfowitz, with his clearly Jewish name, is an easy target for this vile caricature. Yes, there are people in the US who are just as concerned with Israel as America, but to assume that A) it is just because they are Jewish and B) all Jews feel this way is a horrid notion. The claim of anti-Semitism may in fact be leveled too often, but that doesn't mean it isn't even more often appropriate.

And it is growing in places, especially Europe, where it has been adopted, albeit with more gentle rhetoric, by the left- allowing them to make an obscene dovetail with the traditional hard-right. This is a terrible development, and one we'll look at more closely tomorrow.
So what am I saying: that appointments need to be decided by global consensus? Of course not- it is the right of any nation to determine who will represent them. The World Bank is slightly different, as Wolfowitz is not there only to further American interests, but tradition dictates the US appoints the post. It is the prerogative of the President to make these appointments.

However, there need to be other concerns addressed. Wolfowitz is an easy target, and unless Bolton reins himself in he will turn off even those countries who support the US. This is dangerous. The war we are in can only be won when Muslim countries come to the consensus that jihad is ruinous and those who have hijacked Islam provide a bad alternative. But for that to happen America has to show a good alternative- the power and freedom of a secular, democratic society.

The election in Iraq helped this, as does the Cedar Revolution and Egypt's slow steps. But the President is threatening to erase these steps by appointing two loathed men. It is hard to say which is worse- I think it is Bolton, because he is a dangerous nutcase. But the Wolfowitz one is very bad, even though I think in the long run his humanist side will allow him to do an excellent job in the fight against poverty (which is a big part in the war against terror).

But the World Bank is already seen by many as an arm of bullying American policy. And Wolfowitz is (wrongly) perceived as one of the chief proponents of a testosterone-driven Islam-hating US war machine. The confluence of the two will help to convince even moderates that the US only has bad intentions. There are surely others who can do a good job. I know Bush wants to reward Wolfowitz, but the price of his loyalty will be paid by the rest of us.