Our Lady of Flores

18000 years ago isn't that much on an evolutionary scale. The climate has changed, many species have disappeared, but none have really evolved. The last contender to the status of Human, the Neanderthal, was by -18000 long gone and forgotten. And so, not content to consider great apes as our relatives, we were left alone at the onset of history. Or... were we really alone?

I recently stumbled on a set of articles on Nature that left me flabbergasted. Up until 18000 years ago, there used to be a species of dwarf hominids to which an advanced level of tool-making was attributed and who may very likely have had a language of their own. This discovery was made in the southern Malay Archipelago, on the island of Flores. These little men and women of the jungle fed on dwarf elephants and giant rats. They had no chin and unusually long arms. The Indonesian folktale of the Ebu Gogo, a legendary hobbit-like peoples with hairy chests and a mumbling speech, may be the folk memory of Homo Floresiensis from a time of cohabitation between the two species of humans.

Did they too disappear at the hands of Homo Sapiens? In what way would we perceive our navels had the Lady of Flores survived to this day? The implication would have been profound since there would then be two species of humans capable of speech.