Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The argument continues nonetheless. Personally I fi nd it dii cult to
imagine that a race of pathologically deformed modern humans survived
in a state of nature on Flores for 90,000 years. Not only did they survive,
but there is also strong circumstantial evidence that they were able to kill
elephants and Komodo dragons and dine extravagantly on them.
The clincher that would decide this argument, of course, would be the
deciphering of even a small stretch of Hobbit DNA. The clear genetic dif er-
ence between modern humans and Neanderthals was fi rst demonstrated on
the basis of a bit of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA only about 300 bases
long. If Hobbit DNA sequences should also turn out to be substantially dif-
ferent from those of modern humans, then their origin on another branch of
the hominan family tree would be proved. Alternatively, if the sequences were
the same as those of modern humans, then the Hobbits would be demoted to
mere morphological variants of our own species, like the African pygmies
and other small-statured groups of people such as the San.
All attempts at isolating DNA from Hobbit bones have so far failed.
Unfortunately, the bones in Liang Bua cave have been so wet for so long that
bacterial activity has almost certainly destroyed most traces of their own-
ers' DNA. But new technologies that can sequence single molecules of badly
fragmented DNA are now available, and they may yield positive results. And
there may be Hobbit bones in other, drier caves, more favorable for DNA
preservation, that lie in wait for the paintbrushes and tweezers of the arche-
ologists and the remarkable technologies of the molecular biologists.
Like the pre-Neanderthal hominans that were the fi rst colonists of Europe
on the other side of the world, the Hobbits and their ancestors seem to have
evolved in isolation for at least a million years. Did they acquire new cultural
capabilities during this long period of isolation, despite the fact that there
were so few of them? Could they have done so even in the face of calorie limi-
tations that selected them for smaller and smaller bodies and brains?
And could it be that the Hobbits were always small? Were they descen-
dants of the tiny African Australopithecines rather than the much larger
H. erectus
? This might mean that groups of Australopithecines managed to
accompany
H. erectus
all the way from Africa. These small-brained hominans
