It's funny to think about evolution, isn't it? I mean I guess I always sorta had it in my head that we were the end result of evolution, not just a point on a never ending chain. And to think about all the iterations of life on this planet... why would we think that humans are the pinnacle? I think Stephen Hawkings recently publicly voiced that we really should be looking for ways to protect ourselves from another meteor crash a la Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck's silly movie whose name I can't think of at the moment. I found reference to Hawkings' pronouncement here, though I have no idea about the credibility of the website.
I guess this theory also supports the additonal data that humans have been wiping out species left and right for millions of years. Too bad our detectives are finding the clues to the crimes; we can't get away with it forever.
Evolutionary researchers are fascinated by Homo floresiensis, a mysterious species of 3-foot-tall human ancestors unearthed a dozen years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores. At first, fossil remains seemed to suggest these creatures—nicknamed hobbits, after the diminutive characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels—lived as recently as 18,000 years ago. But new excavations indicate they roamed the island much earlier than previously thought—perhaps between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago. The discovery contradicts the prevailing theory that hobbits outlived Neanderthals, which became extinct at least 28,000 years ago, and that they co-existed with Homo sapiens for tens of thousands of years. In fact, Homo floresiensis did not survive long once modern humans arrived in the region, suggesting that they may have been driven to extinction. “We were likely the decisive factor in their demise,” researcher Bert Roberts of Australia’s University of Wollongong tells Reuters.com. “But we still need to find hard evidence to back up this hunch.”
Taken from the April 22 edition of the Week Magazine.
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