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16 ★ FTWeekend 27 July/28 July 2019
Homo sapiens
T
oday humans are the domi- humans moved in about 45,000 years news of the discovery of a diminutive syndrome or congenital iodine defi-
Masters of Science nant species on our planet ago. skeleton in Liang Bua, a cave on the ciency?
— so much so that some sci- Only Homo sapiens, with the use of Indonesian island of Flores. Particularly challenging was the
Welcome to the third series of FT entists talk of a new geologi- ocean-going vessels, was able to spread It had primitive features such as a apparently associated evidence of stone
Weekend’s Masters of Science. The cal era, the Anthropocene, further eastwards across the island brain cavity the size of an ape’s and a tools, hunting behaviour and fire-mak-
experiment we began in 2017 has defined by the traces left by human chains leading towards Australia, which strong and chinless lower jaw, and ing, and the possibility that Homo
developed into an annual showcase activity. Yet, for most of its history, we reached at about the same time as seemed to retain traits from tree-dwell- floresiensis had reached Flores by boat (a
for scientists who can communicate Homo sapiens left only the faintest of Liang Bua, a Indonesia. ing ancestors, even though it was ini- technology supposedly only within the
complex research with enthusiasm footprints. cave on the No researcher now could subscribe to tially dated to only about 17,000 years capacity of Homo sapiens) — all unlikely
and clarity to lay readers. Researchers such as myself, who try Indonesian this straightforward narrative. A tor- ago. So peculiar was it that its finders accomplishments for a creature with a
Chris Stringer of London’s to answer the question of how our seem- island of Flores, rent of fossil finds and technological assigned it to a new human species, brain the size of a chimp’s.
Natural History Museum (pictured ingly all-conquering species evolved, where a breakthroughs has swept away many of Homo floresiensis. Since then, further excavations in
below) kicks off the series with the have to make relatively little evidence diminutive these ideas. Arguments soon raged about whether Liang Bua have uncovered other dwarf
remarkable change over the past 15 do a lot of work. That means new discov- skeleton was It’s a flood that shows no sign of letting this find — which quickly acquired the human remains in deeper levels, and
years in palaeontologists’ views of eries can make a big difference — and in discovered in up: this month brought news that analy- nickname of “hobbit” — could have have shown that the original skeleton
human evolution. the past decade and a half there have 2004 and sis of a fossil found in Greece had pushed descended from Homo erectus, shrunk in was actually at least 60,000 years old.
Over the coming weeks, we will been a lot of them. assigned to a back the arrival of Homo sapiens in size by “island dwarfing”, an evolution- Meanwhile similar, more fragmentary
feature six Masters covering some At the turn of the century, we thought new human Europe by at least 150,000 years. ary process known in other mammals. remains have been found at another site
of the most exciting fields, we had a clear picture of the past species, Homo The first major challenge to the con- Or was it actually an abnormal modern on Flores — Mata Menge — dating from
including creating a “synthetic 500,000 years of human evolution. floresiensis — Getty ventional wisdom came in 2004 with human with a condition such as Down’s about 700,000 years ago, suggesting
intelligence” with nanotechnology; In essence, it was a simple family saga
the quest for new plastics; growing
mini-brains in a lab dish; regrowing
with a clear arc and only a few players. It
began with Homo heidelbergensis
In 2010, analysis of a
failed organs in the human body, (named from a jawbone found in Ger- finger-bone fragment
and exobiology, the search for life
elsewhere in the universe.
many in 1907), a widespread ancestral
species with heavy brows and a very
from a cave in Siberia
muscular body, known from Africa and revealed an entirely new
western Eurasia between about
600,000 and 400,000 years ago.
kind of human, neither
Heidelbergensis gradually evolved into Homo sapiens nor Homo
two descendants: the Neanderthals
(Homo neanderthalensis), thick-set and
neanderthalensis
big-nosed, in western Eurasia, and
Homo sapiens — us, with our globular that the “hobbit’s” lineage ran deep on
braincases and small brows — in Africa. the island. Earlier this year, comparably
Genetic data from living people sug- diminutive and distinctive human fos-
gested that our species subsequently sils were excavated from Callao Cave on
dispersed from Africa about 60,000 the island of Luzon in the Philippines,
years ago and, by 30,000 years ago, had dating from about 70,000 years ago and
completely replaced the inferior Nean- given the name Homo luzonensis.
derthals across Eurasia, with little or no Did this species also reach the Philip-
interbreeding. pines by boat, or could the ancestors of
Other Homo species, with earlier ori- both Homo floresiensis and Homo luzon-
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gins, overlapped with these. One was ensis have been swept by tsunamis to
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skull found in Dali, Shaanxi Province, in tation? Pending new fossil evidence,
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1978; another lived in Indonesia, where such questions will remain unanswered.
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fossils suggested that Homo erectus, an Compared with fossil sites in Africa and
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27 July/28 July 2019 ★ FTWeekend 17
Spectrum
Trump, Johnson and performance”. The same applies
I
magine that you are an average advert can make you crave something
US Republican in early 2015. You you’d never considered before. Trump to Trump. Their vocation is as
always vote Republican, and the communicates so powerfully that he entertainers.
and politics’ new rest of the time you just get on with
life. In 2016, you vote Republican.
has even created an enemy tribe too:
he has done a better job of mobilising
Both men could have turned their
tribes into big-tent movements that
Republican tribe — more than 90 per In other words, a leader with O’Toole has remarked on Johnson’s Simon will be speaking at the FT Weekend
Opening shot cent of whom voted for him — into a
Trump tribe. It’s true that he is doing
exceptional communication skills can campness, his “comic persona that
alter his followers’ minds, just as a good evades the distinction between reality
Festival on September 7, Kenwood House,
London — see ftweekendfestival.com
as the last Neanderthals were disap- puerca hills of northern Spain yielded once seemed straightforward, have
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pearing across Europe. DNA that shed new light on Neander- become hotly disputed. For scientists
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Some Neanderthal DNA was not ben- thal evolution. studying our evolutionary history, these
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eficial to the modern humans who Some 430,000 years old, these are exciting times.
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inherited it and was rapidly selected remains had already been tentatively
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away (a process attested to by the large characterised as primitive Neander- Chris Stringer is a research leader at the
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“deserts” in today’s human genomes, thals from their teeth and skulls; in
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