All,
Find below a copy of what I just received from Iain Davidson. I suspect that the whole piece has a bit of a tongue-in-cheek flavour which, I might add, is a welcome change to the recent speculations and discussions regarding Professor Jacob’s antics.
Jacques Cinq-Mars
Out of ancient disasters, forebears may have colonised new lands
Smh.com.au -- January 14, 2005
Tsunami survival tales hint how our ancestors crossed the sea, write Mike Morwood and Iain Davidson.
Who would have thought there would be a link between two of the top news stories of 2004: the discovery by an Australian/Indonesian team of the hobbit of Flores and the dreadful devastation of the Asian tsunami? An Indonesian woman, Melawati, was rescued after drifting for five days after being washed away by the tsunami, and an Indonesian man, Rizal Shahputra, was rescued after eight days. Does their survival solve one of the puzzles about how the ancestors of the hobbits got across the sea barriers from Bali to Lombok and then from Sumbawa to Flores?
The ancestors of the hobbits first left signs of their presence in Flores about 840,000 years ago. These creatures' stone tools have been found by Dutch, Indonesian and Australian researchers with remains of primitive elephants and komodo dragons. An Australian/Indonesian team first obtained absolute dates for the appearance of these tools.
The elephants, it is thought, probably swam across the sea barriers. But the other distinctive mammals of Asia, such as tigers, orang-utans, monkeys, rhinoceroses, pigs and deer, never reached Flores. In the 1850s, Alfred Wallace reported this huge difference between the animals of mainland Asia and those of the islands that had never been joined. Thinking about these differences famously prompted him to anticipate Darwin's theory of evolution.
The first skeletal remains from Flores, reported last year, were those of a completely new species of the human family, Homo floresiensis, like a dwarfed version of one of the human ancestors, Homo erectus, and with a brain smaller than that of modern chimpanzees. It seems most likely that the process of dwarfing had occurred because of the isolation of ancestors on Flores, just as the elephants became dwarfed there and on other islands such as Malta and the channel islands of California.
But if the hobbits had been isolated for so long, how had their ancestors crossed to the island in the first place?
More than 10 years ago, it was established that the watercraft that first brought people to Australia showed those people probably used language. We argued that language was needed to get the idea of bringing together the different materials to make a raft, and to work out that this was a good way of going fishing. None of the ancestors of humans before this had made anything as complicated as a raft for a purpose so out of sight as deep-sea fishing.
But the finds of stone tools in Flores presented a problem for this argument, because nothing about the archaeology of 840,000 years ago suggested that human ancestors of that time had such complex behaviour. In the Mediterranean region, for example, one view is that there were no crossings to the islands until about 13,000 years ago. What is the difference between the Mediterranean and the Indonesian islands?
It was suggested in 1999 that one difference might be that in South-East Asia, but not in the Mediterranean, animals could cling to natural rafts of vegetation - but not many people believed it. This has also been suggested as one of the ways monkeys got from Africa to South America more than 25 million years ago.
Now, with the ordeal and survival of Melawati and Shahputra, we see that the mechanism exists. What is more, we know that Melawati survived by eating the fruit and bark of the sago tree she clung to, and Shahputra ate coconuts (though presumably the first human ancestors to get to Flores did not have the advantage of a metal door latch to open the coconut). What is more, Shahputra was accompanied for several days by family members, so for a shorter crossing, perhaps a founder population would have been possible.
It looks as though here we have a mechanism that could have brought the ancestors of Homo floresiensis to Flores, and which would explain the isolation that led to the dwarfing. Now all we need is to find signs of a tsunami before 840,000 years ago.
Many years ago, the zoologist John Calaby joked that all that was needed to colonise Australia was a pregnant woman on a log. The latest news is that Melawati is three months pregnant, and the baby survived the ordeal.
Iain Davidson holds a personal chair in archaeology and palaeoanthropology at the University of New England, Armidale. Mike Morwood is an archaeologist with the University of New England who led the Australian arm of the team that discovered the hobbit of Flores.
