The San and the Hobbits - The Darwinian Tourist - page 317

would have left that continent 2 million years ago, and walked half a world
away.
The more likely possibility is that the H. erectus that left Africa were a
more diverse collection of hominans than we have supposed. They may have
harbored so much genetic variation that it was not dii cult for natural selec-
tion to produce tiny Hobbits from a mix of H. erectus types, once they had
reached Flores. There is some evidence for this hypothesis. Finds of H. erectus
in Georgia in western Asia from 1.8 million years ago have puzzled anthro-
pologists, because it is clear that even though all the skeletons belong to a
single group of people, they nonetheless range widely in size . 14 And some of
the diverse skulls from Georgia also show characteristics that resemble those
of the Australopithecines.
We will not be able to distinguish among these possibilities until we
learn something about the genetic history of the Hobbits on Flores and on
other islands of the Sunda chain. We also need to fi nd more complete sets of
tools and artifacts in the little-explored caves and rock strata of these islands.
And there is always the exciting possibility that Hobbits lived in other parts
of Southeast Asia, and left additional traces deep beneath the fl oors of the
numerous limestone caves that honeycomb the region.
We know distressingly little about the Neanderthals of Europe and west-
ern Asia, despite more than a century and a half of searching and study. If we
are lucky, our knowledge of the Hobbits will advance more swiftly. And I can
confi dently predict that the new discoveries will reinforce Darwin's conclu-
sion that there is nothing unique about human evolution. If modern humans
had never appeared, there is no reason to suppose that there could not even-
tually have been thriving civilizations of Neanderthals or Hobbits.
We will never fi nd out, because these close relatives of ours are gone for-
ever. Sadly, they may have been the last victims of the interspecies warfare
that accompanied the spread of modern humans. And yet, the discovery that
Neanderthals intermixed with modern humans a hundred thousand years
ago (Green et al. Science 328:710, 2010), and that some of their genes have
lasted down to the present time, holds out the possibility that H. erectus and
the Hobbits might have bequeathed some of their genes to us as well.