From New Scientist: Whether they are robust brutes or tiny midgets, it appears humans just can’t stop getting it on with each other and now apparently with other human species.
Our first bizarre tale of cross species dating comes from Svante Pääbo’s team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. It appears that the genome of humans today is roughly 1 to 4 per cent Neanderthal (Science, vol 328, p 710). This disturbing fact is true for all non-Africans with the implication that H. sapiens and Neanderthals interbred sometime between 100,000 and 45,000 years ago. That means after the first humans left Africa but before they split into regional populations that inhabited Europe and Asia.
Jeffrey Long at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque presented results from nearly 100 modern human populations at a meeting of the American Association for Physical Anthropologists confirming this find. His work provided evidence that Eurasians obtained some of their genetic diversity from breeding with other Homo species (Neanderthals-Homo neanderthalensis?) after they left Africa. Interestingly, other genome work indicates that Neanderthals had some genes for red hair. I’m not sure where this is going but I will leave it to the reader to fill in the blanks depending on their affinity for red hair.
Similarly, scientists also noticed an increase in genetic diversity among Indo-Pacific peoples, dating to around 40,000 years ago. The timing of this genetic diversity makes it highly unlikely that it came from sexual romps of humans with Neanderthals simply because those northern brutes were not into warm weather, unless there was a prehistoric spring break that has yet to be discovered. That leaves several likely suspects, including Homo erectus and perhaps the diminutive Homo floresiensis, the dwarf hobbits of Flores Island legends that were kicking around 18,000 years ago. The dwarf hobbits were three feet tall, had pot bellies, sloping foreheads and big feet. Oh well, as they say, at closing time all of the girls start to look like models.
Now the hobbits, or the Ebu Gogo as they are called by the natives on Flores Island, are always a bit more problematic, just as they are in my novel Flores Girl: The Children God Forgot. There are some real issues to be addressed particularly as to how the much larger humans got it on with the three foot tall hobbits or why the hobbits would even let the such giants near them. However, keep in mind that ancient Asian humans were much smaller than they are today and it was probably common for them to be less than five feet tall forty thousand years ago. That’s less of incongruous disconnect in size than imagining today’s six foot tall human specimens dating these three foot midgets.
Now if you are a creationists it’s all good, because according to the Young Earthers, the world is only six thousand years and all of these different species -Neanderthals, Homo erectus and homo floresiensis- are actually just individual variations on the same human species. Whether they be big-footed midgets like Homo floresiensis or robust chinless Neanderthals that were built like Arnold Swarchenegger to the creationists they are all Homo sapiens.
However, if you are a rational person believing in evolution and an earth a little older than six thousand years, this bizarre dating scenario does stretch the imagination. Really, how do those first dates go? However, it does address the vexing question as to how Homo floresiensis or the Ebu Gogo got to Flores Island in the first place. After all, there was no land bridge for them to trudge across in Indonesia. Perhaps they were ritualistic sex toys for an early human priesthood that insisted on ferrying the hobbits from island to island on early boats, sort of a prehistoric religious singles cruise. Sounds weird and bizarre, but hey they were human right and sometimes we do some kinky stuff. Apparently let’s get it on was a common refrain tens of thousands of years ago but on second thought I don’t think I could ever get that drunk.
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