The answer to the question, “Are we alone?” will be answered some time off in the distant future. But we already have an answer to, “Have we always been alone?” We haven’t. Cousins of man have shared the globe with us, Homo erectus and Homo neaderthalis.
An expedition, led by Peter Brown and Michael Moorwood of University of New England, Australia found a new answer to this question in an unlikely place, Liang Bua, which means "cool cave" in the local Manggarai language of Flores Island, Indonesia, in September 2003. We’ve had company more recently than we knew.
The evidence was the skeleton of a distant ancestor from a mere 18,000 years ago. She is called LB1. Her kind, now called Homo Floresiensis (also called Flores Man) seems to have lasted until just before our recorded history, dying out a mere 13,000 years ago. We may even have met on some unheralded day on the shores of Flores. If so no record remains save perhaps in the oral traditions of the Homo sapiens natives of Flores with their tales of a little people, the Ebu Gogo.
It is a new distinction for the island of Flores, its only prior claim to fame being that it was the furthest place from the island of Krakatoa, from which the dreadful volcanic explosion of 1883 could be heard.
The story of the discovery of this new branch of humanity led me to wonder what would have happened if we had found a small tribe of Homo floreseinsis alive on that island instead. What would it have meant to the world?
Consider some of the issues that this would raise. Imagine yourself as the leader of a National Geographic expedition that unexpectedly comes across a tribe of people in the jungle. Or are they people? They are about three feet tall, hairy and apish. Yet in the eyes that stare in wonderment across the clearing, you detect a spark of the divine. The being staring up at you is a toolmaker, not just a user like a chimpanzee. He’s armed with a smaller version of the same stone ax that Homo erectus carried during his 1.6 million-year run. He also carries a spear and there is fire in the rude campsite that you have stumbled into. You don’t know if he buries his dead, or uses abstract art to represent the universe, but you do know he has rudimentary language.
You know something else. You have rocked his universe. He was the biggest man of his tribe and you stand almost twice his height and three times his mass. He recognizes your machete as a tool between his ax and his spear, and boy would he like one. You are beginning to fear that he sees you as a god with a small g. Then you wonder if he already had gods with small g’s. Monotheism is surely beyond his small brain?
Maybe if you knew he and his small tribe were there, you’d have come up with some “Prime Directive” and prevented contact with Homo floresiensis to avoid contaminating his culture, too late now.
But would it have been any easier if we saw them and they did not see us? We would know that they were there, eking out a slim and perilous existence. Homo floresiensis is a hunter, but so are the Komodo dragons of their island and some of them die from predation. Others die from disease and malnutrition. Should we leave them to die, shredded by tooth and claw, or savaged by germs when we could save them? What if a typhoon or tsunami was heading for their island? Should we warn them, if we could even figure out how?
Imagine that the threat is even more directly our fault. Suppose their island was to be submerged due to global warming raising the sea level? Do we owe them relocation? Where and in whose custody?
What if their island lay between Indian and Indonesian territorial waters and one nation wanted to put a base there. Shouldn’t they be safe from our wars? Imagine if one side bribed Homo floreseinsis to serve as scouts and guards or even short order cooks?
If you decide that we do owe them something, medicine or food, you know that there will be opposing voices. That opposition will take many forms. Purists, who believe the Flores mans must remain untainted will denounce any aid as culturally insensitive. As they sit in their air-conditioned houses, watching the Discovery Channel, they demand you cease interfering in the natural order. They won’t face a Komodo dragon five times their size with a fire-hardened spear, but they want to watch someone else do so.
Others will ask from what source you derive the right to make any decision regarding Flores man? After all they are Indonesian citizens. Or, are they? Don’t you have to me a human before you can be a citizen? Homo floresiensis isn’t human. He doesn’t have the same chromosome or DNA as Homo sapiens and we can’t interbreed, that makes him another species.
If they are citizens, who claims them and their island? Do they have the right to self-government? We have not done so well with the primitives of our own species. Who will speak for these distant ancestors?
The United Nations steps in so we can begin the long argument about what is and is not a human. Time goes by and scientists observe Homo floreseinsis. He’s not doing well. The outside world is there and he knows it, but can neither understand nor cope with it.
Something happens that you have dreaded. A Homo floresiensis is killed. You want the killer arrested for murder.
“Murdering what?” the authorities ask. They are till scratching their heads about whom has jurisdiction over crimes on the island. Now you want to charge a drunken fisherman with murder? The fisherman says one of the Flores men tried to bite him, so he shot it thinking it was merely a rabid animal.
Then the fisherman adds another twist. He’s known about Homo floresiensis for the last twenty years. He thinks they make fine pets. They do great work in his garden. Oh yes, he owns a few, took them from the island decades ago. They can be trained quite well, he says, and are more useful then a dog. Incidentally they taste like chicken. His brother in law ate one once.
Cannibal, murderer, slaver, you demand justice be done.
But will it? Homo floresiensis can’t go to court. Neither can your German Shepherd, despite PETA's best efforts. The judge won’t recognize the Homo floresiensis sitting on the floor, shaking and defecating in terror and incomprehension, as a plaintiff. Homo floreseinsis can’t hire a lawyer, they don’t have money (an absolute necessity for any dealings with a lawyer) and they can’t sign pleadings. They are incompetent. A court would have to appoint guardians for them, but which court? Would they fall under the jurisdiction of the world court or the Indonesian ones?
Reporters want to interview a Homo floresiensis. Ecologists want to preserve them as they are. Mormons are vying with Jesuits and mullahs to save their souls. Do-gooders want to give them food, medicine and a vote in the UN.
As the expert on and discoverer of Homo floresiensis, you put the question to the assembled nations and the Security Counsel of the UN, “They are people and we must protect them.”
“From what?” you are asked.
“From being eaten, hunted, enslaved or infected,” you reply
“To what purpose?”
“What do you mean?” you ask.
“Protect them from contact with us and our culture and what will happen to them?”
Ah, there’s the rub. Nothing stops. You are on your way up or on your way down. Without your help and active protection, what is Homo floresiensis’ eventual fate? Death, of course. It’s amazing his small, inbred population has survived to this point. Some natural factor will destroy him. Storms, volcanoes, tsunamis or perhaps some germ will jump from birds to Homo floresiensis, as AIDS jumped from monkey to man. Finis.
Even if Homo floresiensis isn’t actively destroyed, what becomes of him? Here you come up against the single hardest cruelest fact. You like Flores man. He’s three feet tall with big eyes. He could put Elijah Woods out of the hobbit business. Despite his limitations, Flores man has lasted practically forever in the face of horrendous odds. But he has no potential. Behold Homo erectus, for over a million years, he was the apex of evolution on our planet and in large part so what? It was a million-year cycle. He began with a stone ax and grunts and ended with a stone ax and grunts. If the unexamined life isn’t worth living, how about a million years of unexamined lives?
Homo floresiensis, his diminutive offshoot, doesn’t have it in him either. Flores man will never speak to you. He doesn’t have the brain and he doesn’t have the voicebox for it. If the world were to last forever, he will never amount to more than he is now. No spaceshuttle, no probes to other worlds, no printing press and no computers, he’s at the end of the trail and that's ok with him because he lives there. We don’t. We are heading out into the universe and now we are saddled with a simpleminded cousin.
Do we create themeparks for him to live in? We’ll take out the dragons of course. We may have to put something in Homo floresiensis food to keep him from overbreeding. There’s also sterilization and abortion as options, of course.
By this point the UN has literally degenerated into a fistfight. Israel denounces involuntary human sterilization; they’ve been down that road before. The US feels conflicted about abortion. Conservative Muslim states denounce birth control and imperialism of the Flores man. They feel Homo floresiensis deserve to know Allah. The delegate from the Vatican wants to know if the Flores man is closer to the Garden of Eden then we are. Advocates for the retarded say that status as a human being cannot be made dependent on intelligence.
Screams and shouts and what do we do with Flores Man?
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