Archaeologists discovered what is believed to be a new species of man . An upright ground dweller who coexisted with modern man, perhaps for as long as 40,000 years and may have emigrated out of Africa to the islands of Indonesia. (By what means remains speculative).
In 2003, in a very hobbit like cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, archaeologist happened upon a species of man who stood only a meter high. Homo floresiensis, often referred to as a micro-pygmy, even had large feet like a hobbit. A hunter gatherer living off of giant rodents like the capybara the hobbit even fashioned sophisticated stone tools and coexisted with the the stegadont a pygmy elephant.
The hobbit thrived on Flores for almost 100,000 years until about 12,000 years ago when all of a sudden it vanished.
Ten active volcanoes populate the eastern sections of Flores. The Liang Bua Cave, where the first hobbit was discovered, has volcanic ash deposits dated at 12,000 years ago supporting some theories that an eruption may have caused the demise of the hobbit. Others suspect a more sinister and no less likely cause. Jared Diamond speaking with Nova says the arrival of man would have done them in in short order.
Alright. So you’re thinking here real speciation. If there were an attempt to inseminate one to the other, what would be the issue, if they were truly a different species?
The likelihood of a viable hybrid, given the extreme differences, would be rather slight. There are the size differences. One would expect there to be developmental differences, maybe a different duration of pregnancy. I would expect them to be too different. But on top of that, people talk about possible coexistence between the micropygmies and modern sapiens for 40,000 years. I don’t believe it. My guess is that within 100 years of modern sapiens arriving on the island, the dwarves would have been exterminated.
By the humans?By the humans. We know that modern humans, given the opportunity, exterminate other modern humans. I cannot believe that they would have failed to exterminate these dwarves in a very short time.
I would give them 100 years. Maybe even just 10 years from the time that full-sized sapiens arrived before they were exterminated.
That seems to be your prejudice. I mean, you said the dumbest thing that ever happened was Carl Sagan sending off the message to outer space saying “Here we are, the lovely people on Earth.” In your mind, that was called “Come and get me.”That’s right. I’ve worked in New Guinea for the last 41 years, and I know what happens in New Guinea. And we have evidence about what happens in traditional human societies, namely, there are uneasy relationships at the boundaries. You certainly don’t tolerate strangers, because it’s dangerous to tolerate strangers. You try to kill them. When a human population colonizes an area with another human population, there is a touchy negotiation in which either one group exterminates the other or they decide that they can’t exterminate the other, so they see if there is some mode of coexistence based on different economics.
For example, coexistence between Pygmies and farmers in the Congo basin. Pygmies and farmers don’t kill each other. They have different economies, which match. The Pygmies are hunter-gatherers; they gather honey, they hunt animals in the jungle. And the farmers grow crops. So the Pygmies and the farmers trade back and forth. They have different economies. It works. In the case, then, of the micropygmies and Homo sapiens [on Flores], both of them would have been hunter-gatherers. They would have been competing directly. There would have been no basis for trade, because there wouldn’t have been a difference that would have allowed profitable trade.
This seems very plausible when you consider Columbus was able to decimate the peaceful and friendly Arawaks of the Bahama Islands in less than 150 years. A People’s History of the United States (P.S.)
tells us the Spaniards, “In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead”.
So inhumane was the treatment by Columbus and his crew that, unable to resist the superior weaponry, Arawaks committed mass suicide using cassava poison, even killing their infants to spare them.
The hobbit may not have stood much of a chance against a species like homo sapiens
