To a palaeoanthropologist, the past is an open book, but one that fails to tell the whole story. The covers are missing. The first chapters may never be found. There are hardly any pages, and most are so smeared and crumpled, so foxed and faded, that the text could mean almost anything. The cast of characters is confusing and narrative thread anybody’s guess. Is it a detective story, a cliffhanger, or a romance? Can there be a happy ending?
Homo floresiensis was the mysterious survivor unearthed from a cave on the island of Flores in Indonesia: a pygmy descendant, perhaps, of Homo erectus, perhaps even connected to an earlier human species, but with this special feature: the bones were only 18,000 years old. So Homo sapiens, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalis and Homo floresiensis must have all shared the planet at the same time, tantalisingly recently: within the last 100,000 years perhaps. Now only Homo sapiens survives.
Stringer, 57, is head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London. One of palaeoanthropology’s big players, he has spent his career in pursuit of Homo neanderthalis and is also one of the great proselytisers of the Out-of-Africa theory, the one that says the human story begins on just one continent. Homo floresiensis, however, astonished him.
‘Nature is constantly experimenting. I think a lot of people thought that humans were somehow different; that we had this all embracing culture and this unifying adaptation, which meant that human evolution progressed in a somewhat different way, because of our technology and the way we probably vainly think we are partly controlling the world now. So people project backwards and think that humans are somehow special. The evidence shows us that our evolution was as complex and as undirected, I suppose, as that of any other species we have studied’
Modern humans probably popped up within the last 200,000 years, but the things that make modern humans so distinctive in the fossil record — symbolic art, pottery and jewellery — bloomed only about 50,000 years ago. Nobody in the world of palaeoanthropology considers modern humanity to be the flower of creation, either. A temporary bloom, maybe.
Genetic evidence suggests humans may have come close to extinction a number of times in the past. Modern humans shared the Middle East with Homo neanderthalis 120,000 years ago, and as Cro-Magnons became the sole tenants of Europe 30,000 years ago, a terrain held successfully by the Neanderthals for more than 100,000 years. Did they compete? Did they co-exist? Did they trade, or cohabit?
I still tend to the view that the primary message would have been: different. They would have had a different body language, a completely different way of communication; they would have had different behaviours.’
He and his co-author Peter Andrews — a former head of human origins at the Natural History Museum, and an expert on the early part of the human story — tried to tell the story of human evolution not just through time, but through its context, Stringer says: how you set about excavating a site, what a piece of tooth or jaw can tell you about ancient human behaviour. In that, the title of the book means what it says: complete.