WERE OUR DISTANT COUSINS THE BAGGINSES OF FLORES?

Date: Saturday, June 25, 2005

Hobbits and monkeys and bats, oh my!

"Hobbit," with a nod to J.R.R. Tolkien, who invented the term for a not-quite-human species inhabiting Middle-earth, is the affectionate nickname bestowed on a not-quite- human species whose bones were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores. When researchers announced the discovery in October 2004, they chose for this creature the scientific name Homo floresiensis -- that is, another species of the same genus as Homo sapiens.

There are no other extant species in our genus, although I understand there's a small amount of taxonomic dispute about chimpanzees and bonobos (genus Pan). But there are a number of ancient species, now extinct; what makes the hobbits so fascinating is that they're recent.

The skeletons found on Flores date from 13,000 to 18,000 years ago, and given that nobody's dug up the whole island, they might have survived much longer, well into the range of historical memory.

Do you wonder, as I do, how unimaginably different human history would have been if we'd shared it with another species, recognizably more like people than any other creature we knew of, and yet clearly different?

The hobbits were a bit more than 3 feet tall, and their brains were correspondingly smaller, about the size of a chimpanzee's, but that doesn't tell us much about their mental capacities.

In a post on the Web log Language log (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language log/archives/001984.html), linguist John McWhorter proposes what he calls a "nervy guess."

Last year, he learned about a couple of very odd languages that have no affixes at all -- "no WALK-ED, no FRIEND-SHIP, no RE-SEND" -- only separate words that carry out the grammatical functions that affixes do in nearly all human languages. That's not unknown, but it's very rare and -- you can guess where I'm going with this -- these are languages spoken on Flores.

"These days," McWhorter writes, "I am thinking that this, of all things, may be evidence of an interspecies encounter between two different species of HOMO."

Some of the people of Flores, he says, have legends about "little people" who lived among them as late as the 1500s. They could speak among themselves, but learning H. sapiens' language as adults, they learned it imperfectly (as tends to happen to members of our species as well) and streamlined it by stripping out the fiddly bits. Something very like that happened to English after its encounter with Norman French, and it's known in many other historical cases as well.

If hobbits were part of human society, it could be that "their non-native rendition of the newcomers' language gradually became the model that all children learned," McWhorter says.

The hobbits were small, but that fits with a common observation that island species often are; if there's no advantage to being big, like outrunning or outfighting whatever's chasing you, the advantage of being small, so you don't have to find as much food, will favor smaller size. (That's microevolution, for those readers who don't believe in any other kind.)

But along the way, their brains got smaller too. Doesn't that contradict the view that evolution was purpose-driven to produce big-brained us? No. There aren't enough Homo species around to test theories on, but there are plenty of bats. Carl Zimmer, writing on corante.com (http://www.corante.com/loom/archives/200 5/06/16/look_up_in_ the_sky_flying_hobbits.php) notes that brains are metabolically costly, and reports on research that bat species tend to have brains that are big enough for them to succeed in the ecological niches they inhabit, but not bigger.

When the bats begin to fly where he lives in Connecticut, Zimmer says, "I'll think of them as flying hobbits."

Could the hobbits have invented the tools they used with their chimpanzee-sized brains? Maybe not, but they could certainly have retained the ability to use tools. Another post on Language Log (see URL above, with archive post number 002243) quotes from a New York Times article on monkey economics by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt. Researchers at Yale trained capuchin monkeys to use coinlike tokens for money. One of the researchers, the authors say, "saw something out of the corner of his eye that he would later try to play down but in his heart of hearts he knew to be true. What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: The monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.)"

Mark Liberman, who wrote the Language Log post, says that the main point of these experiments "is to show that capuchins can learn to engage in a wider variety of behaviors that look like human economic transactions. In my view, this is yet another interesting demonstration that nonhuman mammals have more of the basic abilities required for speech and language than one might have thought."

And all the more so for not-quite-humans like the hobbits.