HOBBITS AND LICE:
In late 2004 the media was all agog with the small hominids
found on Flores Island where I had written about artifacts
showing sea travel technology must have existed. I had argued
with many people about the issue and their argument had some
merit in that we had no proof of a connection to humans or the
nearby Mungo Man. However, once we found these creatures which
some researchers even think could be part chimpanzee the issue
became clearly in my favor. I think the divergence of human lice
proven through DNA technology going back 1.18 to 1.8 million
years ago is even more telling and I look forward to the further
research on pubic lice that might prove hominids cross-breeding.
Here is one source for further review.
?It was astonishing and exciting enough to have discovered a
new - and wholly unexpected - hominid species last week. The
discovery of the partial skeletons of three-foot tall "hobbits"
on the Indonesian island of Flores would have been front page
news however old they were. But what made them really
extraordinary was their age. They weren't fossils. These were
bones rotted to the consistency of blotting paper, less than
18,000 years old; and there are grounds for hoping that the
creatures lived on into historical times. Some might even be
alive in sufficiently remote island jungles today. The native
legends about "Ebu Gogo" suggest that contact between Homo
sapiens and Homo floresiensis took place within the last century
on Flores.
The idea that our ancestors had contact with other human
species is a profound and disturbing one. The whole term "human
species" begs the question. If they are other species, can they
really be what we mean by "human"? Human is a moral category as
much as a biological one. That's why it is such a useful weapon
word in the debates about abortion. To call someone or something
human is generally meant as praise, and implies that they should
be treated as we treat ourselves.
This interpretation of "humanity" is not, of course, a
necessarily human trait. It's certainly not encoded in our
genes. Most cultures, in most of history, have had no trouble in
treating other human beings as domesticated animals or very much
worse. But we, who speak English, call this process
"dehumanisation".
The skeletal fragments, and the legends from local people, make
this story far more vivid than the other evidence for human
encounters with other humanoid species. That shouldn't obscure
the fact that this is the second such story this autumn, and the
first one is far more chilling.
The evidence there came from lice. As the parents of almost any
school age girl will know, human lice are extraordinarily
tenacious and well adapted to life on our scalps. They don't
survive for more than a few hours away from human flesh.
The war between lice and their hosts has continued for billions
of years - there are species of louse adapted to almost every
sort of primate and many species of birds. In humans, they
infest our head, our clothes, and our bodily hair. Curiously,
the body lice are the same species as head lice - although they
behave quite differently, living in clothes, and coming in to
feed on skin once or twice a day. Head lice live in hair and
feed more often.
But it turns out that DNA analysis shows there are two distinct
sub-species of head lice in humans. All over the world, except
in western North America, they are the same. But there is a
population of lice along the Pacific coast of North America
which have been evolving separately from the rest of the world
for about 1.8m years. The only way to make sense of this is to
assume that their separate development took place on Homo
erectus, who also split off from our hominid ancestors about
that time ago.
So how could these lice have reached their present, wholly
human hosts? It seems to me that this could only have happened
through some act of primal genocide when Homo erectus met Homo
sapiens somewhere in eastern Siberia. Lice can only travel
between living bodies, or very freshly dead ones. If the
transmission had been from living bodies, we would expect the
same pattern in bodily lice. It isn't there. Nor is there any
trace of Homo erectus in our DNA. So the lice must have come
from very fresh corpses and it is hard to suppose that they had
died peacefully just before the intruders turned up.
The story of "Ebu Gogo" sounds more improving. According to
local villagers, these creatures were around until about a
century ago: three feet tall, hairy, and speechless, though they
could imitate human speech, like parrots. The villagers
tolerated them and even fed them, though they would only eat raw
food, until they stole and ate a baby. They drove them from
their cave with blazing bales of grass. Shortly thereafter, the
villagers themselves moved off and western settlers arrived. The
cave where the Ebu Gogo lived has not been found. But if it is -
and scientists are looking - it might yield some extraordinary
remains.
These wouldn't be technological. Perhaps the saddest aspect of
the whole story is the slow loss of technology it implies. Ebu
Gogo seems to have been a descendent of Homo erectus, also known
as Java man, who reached the island about 840,000 years ago.
This was almost certainly something that required boats, which
seem a pretty human-level technology.? (1)
About the author:
Author of Diverse Druids Columnist for The ES Press Magazine
Guest 'expert' at World-Mysteries.com
|
