Natural Born Killers?

Riffing off the recent spate of publications regarding the dig of Homo floresiensis. The existence of an alternative hominid, or perhaps I should say another alternative hominid, in the path of sapient manifest destiny weighs heavily on our species own judgments of self.

We ought to consider the implications that the conquest of our ecological niche, at the expense of alternative homonid existence, has on our affection for foreign species, primate or otherwise. It is by now almost certain that Homo sapiens and neanderthalensis were contiguous in time and place over most of Europe extending to the Caucasus. It is now, to me, not unlikely that a similar interaction took place in Indonesia with our now deceased, diminutive friends. As research in this field of study progresses it will become ever more clear that neanderthalensis and floresiensis were sentient by any definition of the word and human by many definitions of the word. Art was in the domain of the Neaderthal, tools in the arsenal of the Floresian. Yet, historical reconstruction neglected, the interactions of modern sapiens with semi-intelligent or intelligent non-sapiens primates did not result in the preservation of those other species. Was there cultural transmission? Was there despair at the extinction of those other hominids? Was it a willed extinction? None of these questions can be answered, but we must face the reality that we prevailed, and are prevailing, in the niche that primates occupy on this earth.

But what to make of this? I will refrain from here waxing (wrong)philosophical about the necessity of a genetic ‘mean streak’, an evolutionary obliviousness. But there are a lot of people immune from reason, and maybe we have to conclude that maybe that’s what got us here in the first place.