The Age Of Man

 

It's commonly accepted that modern man, Homo Sapiens, evolved in Africa in a Kenyan garden of Eden around 350,000 BC (Pleistocene) and spread out from there, eventually reaching Europe around 40,000 BC, and the America's some 30,000 years later across the Bering Strait land bridge.

Typical

All well and good, and the schema runs something like this: Ancient apes evolve into smarter apes, who evolve into still smarter apes, until over millions of years you get apelike semi-humans, hominins. Then, at last, in the middle Pleistocene, Homo Sapiens arrives, following on from Homo Erectus. The latter being the "missing link" between us and the ape people of prehistory.

Eoliths, which you can see are clearly not shaped in any way at all

It sounds good, but what if stone tools were found dating to a far earlier period in the earth's history, say the Miocene (23-5 million years BC), in the earth's Tertiary? What's more, tools which were indistinguishable from their counterparts in East Africa (Olduvai) in the Pleistocene some million years later. Or, for that matter, from stone tools made by modern humans, in Africa and elsewhere.

Yet More Ancient Stone

Without getting down in the weeds in an admittedly complex and fractious subject, what if Homo Sapiens is far older than currently thought, and existed with hominins for many hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps interbreeding, as we apparently did with Neanderthals? What then.

Out of Africa?

All the history books would have to be rewritten, for a start, and dates pushed back much further. More seriously, the process and theory of evolution itself would come under question. As opposed to something gradual, taking place in tiny increments over thousands of years, we'd be faced by the sudden emergence of rational man at a very early date. 

Ahem

Gradualism to catastrophism? Perhaps. Maybe the same impetus that drove the explosion of megafauna after the cataclysmic demise of the dinosaurs drove the remarkable rise of our early human cousins and humanity itself. Then again, can intelligence evolve into reason? C.S. Lewis, famously, says no, the two are qualitatively different.

Hmmmmm

In the meanwhile, here at the Compound, sweet and sour pork's on the menu.

Bifacial Chipped Flint Forever,

LSP

Are Flores Hobbits Ebu Gogo?

In 2003, stunned archeologists discovered tiny humanlike skeletons in a cave on the island of Flores, Indonesia. Could these dwarf relatives of modern humans be the ancestors of the island's mysterious race of jungle dwelling pygmies, the Ebu Gogo?

Named Homo Floresiensis or "Hobbits," the Flores skeletons reveal a small race of hominin that stood around 3 feet tall and had a brain the size of a grapefruit. Initially dated between 100,000-12,000 years ago, paleoarcheologists speculated that the pint sized creatures may have interacted with Homo Sapiens and could even exist today.

Rumors of a pygmy race of living in the impenetrable jungles of Flores have persisted for centuries. Called Ebu Gogo, whose name means "grandmother who eats everything," these strange creatures are reported to steal food, kidnap children and even mimic human speech. At 60" tall, they're also good candidates to be the Hobbits' descendants.

However, new dating suggests the Hobbits left their cave far earlier than previously thought, 50,000 years ago. This, say experts, makes it unlikely for the height-challenged beings to exist today.

"Sorry, cryptozoologists -- 'Little Foot' and 'Hobbits' are very unlikely to have persisted from 50,000 years ago to today," says science communicator Kristina Killgrove.

Have the little people we know as Hobbits died out or do some still live among us today? You, the reader, be the judge.

Hail to the Chief,

LSP