To a palaeoanthropologist, the past is an open book, but one that fails to tell the whole story. The covers are missing. The first chapters may never be found. There are hardly any pages, and most are so smeared and crumpled, so foxed and faded, that the text could mean almost anything. The cast of characters is confusing and narrative thread anybody's guess. Its authorship is the subject of political debate in the US, the beginning is the stuff of fantasies, and even the latest chapters are entirely provisional. Is it a detective story, a cliffhanger, or a romance? Can there be a happy ending?
There is a story-so-far, but that potted version of events is forever being revised, and nobody knows that better than Chris Stringer, one of the authors of a book published last week called The Complete World of Human Evolution.
Complete? Stringer spent eight years on the text. In the course of it, he had to contemplate plot lines that incorporate unexpected characters, teasing bits of evidence and relics of ambiguous adventures from the sere soils of Africa and the limestone caves of Europe. Then, late last year, he had to sit down in one night and compose an entirely new chapter to incorporate the discovery of Homo floresiensis, also known as the Hobbit.
Homo floresiensis was the mysterious survivor unearthed from a cave on the island of Flores in Indonesia. It was a pygmy descendant, perhaps of Homo erectus, perhaps even connected to an earlier human species, but with this special feature: The bones were only 18,000 years old. So Homo sapiens, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalis and Homo floresiensis must have all shared the planet at the same time, tantalizingly recently, within the last 100,000 years perhaps. Now only Homo sapiens survives.
What stories could those bones tell? And who could have dreamed, before their discovery, that some tree-climbing, pygmy-elephant-hunting human candidate could have survived on a tropical island while Homo sapiens moved into the Fertile Crescent, preparing to invent agriculture, civilization and global
terrorism?
Stringer, 57, is head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London. One of palaeoanthropology's big players, he has spent his career in pursuit of Homo neanderthalis and is also one of the great proselytisers of the "out-of-Africa theory," the one that says the human story begins on just one continent. Homo floresiensis, however, astonished him.
"Until that turned up, we had no idea that ancient humans had ever reached as far as Flores. We certainly had no idea that there was a completely new kind of human -- or is it even human? That is still being argued about -- living there, and the fact that it was still around there when modern people passed through the region. Each of those is astonishing and that shows how little we knew about human evolution in that part of the world. We are building up pieces of a huge, complex jigsaw, and we still have a lot of spaces to fill in," he said.
"Nature is constantly experimenting. I think a lot of people thought that humans were somehow different, that we had this all embracing culture and this unifying adaptation, that meant that human evolution progressed in a somewhat different way, because of our technology and the way we probably vainly think we are partly controlling the world now. So people project backwards and think humans are somehow special. The evidence shows us that our evolution was as complex and as undirected, I suppose, as that of any other species we have studied."
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