A commentary
SYDNEY — The announcement of a new species of ancient human (more correctly hominin) from the Philippines, reported today in Nature, will cause a lot of head-shaking among anthropologists and archaeologists.
Some will greet the publication with wild enthusiasm, believing it confirms their own views about our evolutionary past. Others will howl angrily, believing the declaration goes way too far with too little evidence.
Me, I sit somewhere in the middle of this spectrum of opinions. I’ve long promoted a pluralist view of human evolution and do see the hominin fossil record as strongly suggesting high species diversity.
There is no reason to expect human evolution to have been any different to the evolution of other animals where, for example, among our close primate relatives, diversity was and often continues to be the rule.
At the same time, each and every new discovery has to stack up and must be judged on its merits, on the basis of the evidence presented. We can’t just accept the interpretation of a new discovery because it suits our strongly held views.
But we need also to keep a cool head, because the naming of any new species is still a scientific hypothesis, ripe for testing and far from set in stone, even if published in the esteemed pages of a journal like Nature.
The Philippine find
So, just what have they found? It’s dubbed Homo luzonensis, after the Philippines’ main island of Luzon, where it was recovered during excavations of Callao Cave in 2007, 2011 and 2015.
This new hominin is represented by a handful of heavily worn adult teeth from one or two individuals, one foot and two toe bones, two finger bones, and the fragment of the shaft of a juvenile thigh bone
Its anatomy is argued to be a peculiar mix of features normally found in living humans, Homo erectus, the Hobbit (Homo floresiensis) and Australopithecus.
The similarities to Australopithecus are especially intriguing when one ponders for a moment on just who the australopiths actually were. A famous example is “Lucy” who belonged to Australopithecus afarensis living in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa. Another is Australopithecus sediba, from a cave in South Africa and found just a decade ago.