Hominid News

I don't often link to random news stories, but this rings too many of my bells for me to pass it up (so thanks to Colin for bringing it to my attention). It's a recently-discovered species of human, apparently extant as recently as 12,000 years ago -- well after the last known Neanderthal remains in Europe, and way way after all other (proto)human species were thought to have been extinct.

It was a dwarf species located on the Indonesian island of Flores, which it shared with pigmy elephants and komodo dragons. (Predictably and tackily, the hominids, who may have been partially arboreal to avoid the dragons, have already been nicknamed "hobbits".) The species is thought to be descended from Homo erectus -- which in itself suggests that erectus were brighter than anyone thinks, as they must presumably have reached Flores using some form of boat.

Excitingly, it's plausible at least that this species may have coexisted with modern humanity. Like most communities everywhere, the Floresians have folklore concerning hidden "little people" who were seen at various points by their ancestors -- the difference being that, in the case of Flores's "Ebu Gogo", it now seems very plausible that there was an actual anthropological basis for the stories. While one example obviously doesn't make a generalisation, this does means that global legends of yeti, faeries, elves and orang-pendek have acquired overnight a slightly stronger, and mildly disturbing, call on our respect.

From the point of view of an S.F. author, the really intriguing factor is what has always intrigued me about the other human species (and which I wrote a certain amount about in Of the City of the Saved...). If Homo sapiens and Homo floresiensis did meet, what would we have to say to each other? Would our respective ethics, culture, art, craft, religion and ritual show us both how much we had in common, or would they be mutually alien and incomprehensible? How did a floresiensis human think, reason and imagine? What was, or would have been, their understanding of their distant cousins? Could they be integrated into sapiens society, or we into theirs?

It's the ultimate unanswerable question in S.F. -- the subjectivity of an alien. Since floresiensis is clearly extinct now (unless we're very lucky), this question won't get answered any less speculatively, even by scientists, than the equivalent questions relating to Neanderthals. But even so, such a (very nearly) concrete example of interaction, at such a recent point in history, between two such distinct sentient species, can't help but get my imagination running ahead of reality.