The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution Read Online Free Page B

primitive hominin than
Homo erectus
, perhaps a creature so primitive that it would not be grouped within the genus
Homo
. This had indeed been an option favored by the original discovery team, but they had to some extent been dissuaded by the panel of experts I’d assembled to assess the original report, who had looked at the skull of LB-1 and said that despite its size it fit better within
Homo
rather than outside it.
    After all, what choice was there? It seemed far simpler to admit a new member to our own select genus, no matter how weird the entrant,than to defy everything we thought we knew we knew about the human story: to open the floodgates of the unknown unknown.
    Conventional wisdom suggests that the entire tale of human evolution had taken place exclusively in Africa until around 1.8 million years ago, when
Homo erectus
became the first hominin to leave that continent and colonize much of the rest of the Old World. The fossils from Georgia might have represented this wave of emigration. There is no compelling evidence that earlier hominins, such as
Australopithecus
or the earliest members of our own genus such as
Homo habilis
(somewhat more like
Australopithecus
than
Homo erectus
in many ways) had ever left Africa. 23
Homo floresiensis
just might be that first piece of evidence.
    Perhaps some hominin left Africa long before
Homo erectus
had evolved, migrating across the Old World, evolving into all sorts of diverse and unimagined forms, the only trace of such an adventure being a single, late-surviving relic marooned on remote and distant Flores.
    When the researchers unearthed
Homo floresiensis
from its long home, they opened the door to things we not only didn’t know, but didn’t even suspect, so wedded were we to the canonical out-of-Africa picture: not just to a remarkable, almost unbelievable testament to the power of evolution to shape living matter into unexpected shapes; but to a hitherto unknown and unsuspected chapter in human evolution, a vista far greater and more varied than anyone had dreamed possible.
    I have chosen to highlight the case of
Homo floresiensis
as it’s the best example I can think of, from my own experience, of a new discovery that challenges our expectations, our restricted notions of evolution based on human exceptionalism, and with it an idea of progressive improvement.
    The tale of the Hobbit is the book in microcosm. It shows that new discoveries often challenge deeply held notions of how we think evolution really ought to have happened, such that we humans are the culmination of some cosmic striving for order and perfection. It also shows us that stories we tell based on fossils are often easily bruised by the sheer scale of our ignorance. Fossilization is rare—so rare that there could well have been an entire episode of human evolution, a pre-
Homo
exodus from Africa, that has left no trace in the geological record other than the Hobbit.
    If there is one lesson that science holds for us, it is this—that our special estate, based either on a progressive scheme of evolution leading to its inevitable human culmination, or on a narrative reading ofprehistory, is never justified. It was Charles Darwin himself who put it best. Right at the end of
The Origin of Species
, he presented the idea of the “tangled bank,” his vision of evolution in action: “It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.” From this, it’s evident that Darwin saw evolution not as progressive or improving, but as an activity that happens in the continuous present, as creatures interact with one another, moment by moment. From this it is clear that