Human

by Hayley Camille

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I’m sorry but I don’t know her. So, no can do. Check up the hall for another researcher to pass on the message.”

  “Jayne – she’s your superviser!”

  Jayne's smile faltered at her name. She stood up, moving around the desk to meet him.

  “Sorry, have we met?”

  “Have we- of course we’ve bloody well met! I’m Orrin, remember? Ivy introduced us.”

  “Ivy?” Jayne shook her head. “Ivy who?”

  “Ivy Carter!”

  Jayne looked genuinely confused. “I don’t think so; I don’t know anyone by that name. I haven’t been here long though, maybe you think I’m someone else-”

  “Ivy Carter,” he repeated, slower this time. Jayne’s face remained blank. “She's your supervisor, Jayne. Here in the residue lab. I saw you talking with her the other day in the courtyard. You're working on the Flores tools together.” Orrin’s patience began to wane.

  “Look … um, Orrin? I really can't help you. I don't know an Ivy Carter.” Jayne frowned. “Professor Ellery is my supervisor and I'm working on these Flores tools alone. He organised it all for me.” She gestured to the scattering of sample bags on the desk in front of her.

  “But Ivy's been waiting months for these tools,” Orrin said. “She told me all about it.”

  “Months? She can't have.” Her blue eyes registered Orrin’s annoyance and grew wide. “These artefacts were airmailed with a week's notice. No one else wanted them. They were pulled from a salvage dig before the mining began.”

  Salvage dig? Mining? Orrin dismissed their obvious miscommunication. It was Ivy he wanted. Needed. “Are you serious? I saw you in the courtyard a week ago, Jayne. You were with Ivy - she had the chimp up a tree - I mean bonobo or whatever - right in the courtyard. You waved at me! I saw you again that afternoon– and a few days after that as well!”

  “A chimp?” Jayne repeated. She looked embarrassed for him and took a step back.

  “Yeah - Kyah. Black hair, up a tree…”

  “Wow,” said Jayne. “Okay, I really think you've got the wrong person, I haven't been in all week, I’ve had the flu. Honestly, I can't help you.” She glanced surreptitiously to the security phone on the far wall.

  Orrin's breathing came faster. She thinks I’m nuts. This is mental. This woman had spoken to him. Numerous times. She knew Ivy. Ivy knew her. Would Ivy have asked Jayne to pretend she wasn't here? Was she avoiding me altogether? He didn't see how that would work when they were both on the same campus. Did I honestly upset her that much by scaring Kyah? Orrin shook his head and rubbed his eye sockets with his thumbs. No, Ivy doesn’t seem like the type to lie. At a loss, he took one last stab.

  “Look Jayne, if Ivy turns up here later, can you just tell her I'm sorry? I didn't mean to let the chimp get hurt, or upset. I should have realised - can you ask her to call me at least? Or leave a message at my lab?” He took a step closer to the bench and then scribbled his contact details on a coffee receipt from his pocket.

  He held it out to Jayne but she had withdrawn further and made no move to reconcile the space between them.

  “Look Orrin, I'm telling you the truth,” Jayne said. “I really don't know this Ivy woman and I haven't met you or any chimp. Just take the number to the admin ladies upstairs or to someone else. Please.”

  “I've tried upstairs and they said she doesn't bloody exist!” Orrin shouted.

  He leaned forward, both hands on the counter. This was either a desperate ploy to get out of a date, or he was going insane. Orrin’s eyes burned. Caught under his finger was one of the small plastic sample bags. He stared at it, his eyes toying with the black stone artefact inside as he tried to calm himself. A stone tool, he supposed. It looked oddly familiar but nothing that stirred his memory so he directed his attention back to Jayne. She had backed up a few steps more and was looking at him with accusing and panicked eyes.

  Orrin lowered his voice and raised his hands in surrender. “Look, I apologise Jayne; there's obviously been some sort of mistake here.” I'm losing it. He took a deep breath. “Here's my number anyway… just in case.” Orrin slid the scrap of paper across the bench and let himself out of the room.

  He heard the lock click behind him as he strode away.

  An insistent telephone ring greeted him as he hit home that evening, tired and angry.

  “Orrin here.”

  “Big brother, I was beginning to think you'd disappeared,” a woman’s voice replied.

  Orrin’s shoulders slouched. For a split second, he'd hoped.

  “Sorry Bernie, work’s been brutal this month.”

  “Nothing too bad I hope,” his sister said.

  “Nothing I can't handle.”

  “Mmm. That sounds ominous. Listen, I just wanted to check you were still coming next Saturday, the kids are dying to see you.”

  Damn. Jess’s birthday party, entirely forgotten. “Sure, I wouldn't miss it.”

  “You'd better not. Hey… you can bring someone if you want,” she ventured.

  I'd have to find her first. “Thanks, but at this stage I’m on my own.”

  “Okay sure, well in any case, I've invited Renee from work, with the short red hair remember? She's great, and she's really looking forward to meeting you.”

  Red hair. “Bernie, any more set ups and I will disown you.”

  “Ha ha, you wish it was that easy. Okay O, but seriously less work, more craic, hey. Hang on, Jess wants to say hi.”

  “Uncle Orrin?”

  “Hey Jess, how's my favourite niece?” he said, tiredly.

  “I'm your only niece Uncle O!

  “No you aren't! What about Chrissy?”

  “That's silly; she's a guinea-pig!”

  Orrin chuckled. Jessica had an endless supply of coddled pets, and insisted he hold them all at least once during each visit.

  “Guess what, today at school we went to the zoo!”

  “Zoo, hey? Bet that was fun, dote.”

  “Yeah, and guess what! We saw koalas and monkeys and kangaroos, and Leah and I got to touch a snake! And we saw the cougars and the elephants and the hobbits and the …”

  “The what?”

  “The hobbits. They were in a pretend cave and they had a babby and everything. The zoo lady fed them for us!”

  “Is that right?” Must be some new cute and cuddly for kids to fixate on. He chuckled. Payback to Bernie for setting me up again. Orrin was used to humouring Jess, spoilt as she was, the first and only girl in his extended family. The handful of little boys occupied each other while eight-year-old Jess clucked over them and her animal 'babbies'.

  “Yeah, the lady gave them apples and roast chicken. But I didn't like them. They looked scary. I guess the babby one was cute though. It talked to me and I patted it and Mum said if I’m good I might get one for my birthday!”

  Talked… “What do you mean? Animals don’t-”

  “Ma says I have to go, Bye Uncle O!” Click.

  Ivy gave up carrying Kyah after the first half hour. She was surprised to find the hunters paid the bonobo little attention. The part of her mind that ached to analyse and categorise and understand the minutiae of life forced itself above her fear. As Ivy walked, she studied the hunters. Homo floresiensis. The very sight of them thrilled her, despite the fact they could be the last things she ever saw.

  One female trailed her side, closer than the others. Ivy chanced a look down at the woman’s face. Her eyes were filled with curiosity, not aggression, although a spear was still tight in her hand. Ivy swallowed nervously. The womans wide cheekbones were shadowed by pronounced eyebrows, each side defined and arched separately like Ivy's own. Her face was far from the mono-browed brute she'd so often seen depicted in pop culture.

  The woman’s strong but petite jaw line shaped a relatively flat face with wide, thin lips and markedly human teeth. She looked enticingly familiar but for the distinct lack of a chin beneath.

  Iv
y couldn’t help but recall the debate sparked in her tutorial the week prior. She’d been dragging her students through the complexities of migration routes and trying to stifle a yawn and her own rumbling stomach simultaneously.

  “Let’s get an early mark, guys,” she’d said. “And this time please catch up on your readings to avoid that arse-kicking….”

  Ivy had begun to pack up, considering her caffeine options.

  “Actually, I have a question…” Claire called over the shuffling and sudden scraping of chairs.

  “Sure.” Ivy had pointedly ignored the muttered expletives and groans around the room as the others were denied an early escape.

  “Well, I've been reading about this Homo flor-es-i-en-sis?” Claire stumbled over the name as the others took their seats again, interest vaguely sparked. “The hobbit? Well, if you're saying modern humans got to Indonesia around fifty-five thousand years ago, and they’re saying these tiny ape-men were still there until up to at least fifty thousand years ago… then, how does that work? They lived on the same island?” Claire looked doubtful. “How could it get across that big tidal rift you were talking about if modern humans didn’t do it until so much later? I mean there must be a mistake in the dating - this little thing was like a chimp, it had a tiny brain…so, not that smart, right?”

  Ivy inwardly groaned and took a deep breath. Like a perfectly targeted missile, Claire had managed to denigrate Ivy's two favourite subjects in a single sentence.

  “Okay well,” Ivy said, “firstly I have it on very good authority that chimpanzees are actually very intelligent, more so than quite a few humans I know,” laughs peppered the room, “and secondly, from what we’re discovering now, yes, it seems this new species of hominid, Homo floresiensis or ‘the hobbit’ as it’s affectionately being called by the media, must have co-existed with modern humans on the island of Flores for thousands of years.” Ivy jumped up. “Okay, who’s familiar with the Flores case? Anyone?”

  A scattering of hands waved half-heartedly.

  “Come on guys, this one is actually really exciting!” Ivy’s eyes sparkled with passion. “Smouldering volcanos, an exotic rainforest island, carnivorous dragons, tiny warrior tribes…this is real archaeology! Eat-your-heart-out Indiana Jones!” Ivy's enthusiasm washed over the group like a wave, dragging them back to her. “Okay, picture this. Six hundred kilometres east of Java on a remote jungle island - a place only accessible by water - a skeleton is found in a cave. She's only one metre tall. No chin, tiny brain case, narrow V-shaped jaws with paired roots on her pre-molars - all these features are prehistoric, reminiscent of our erectus and australopithecine ancestors. Ancestors who died out at least two hundred thousand years ago, some of them, two million years ago!”

  Ivy was almost lost in her own imagination as she painted the scene, pacing up and down.

  “But…we have new, modern features thrown in too. Evidence for group hunting of stegodon, an extinct dwarfed elephant - still much bigger than these tiny hominids - requiring communication and strategy and planning. We've also got fire use, impressive stone tools and the ability to get enough people across the ocean to make the founding population genetically viable.”

  “This is a total contradiction of old versus new in a single population. What we need is a date; some way to place this new species, if that's what it is, into our family tree. So we test.” She paused for effect, scanning faces. “And we get totally floored. Radiocarbon, thermoluminescence - all bringing in dates of only fifty thousand years, maybe younger. Recent time, sapien time.”

  “And what do we have?” Ivy looked around the class and was met by confused faces, all struggling to make sense of the onslaught of contradictory information.

  “We have a spectacular, brilliant mess in our hands, that's what!” she exclaimed, landing back onto the desk at the front. “Now seriously, just imagine the massive environmental changes up to the last ice age. They fought for survival and they won for a really, really long time. This is a very tough little bunch of cookies!” A few of the students looked impressed. “So Claire is right to ask - where do they fit in? What are they?”

  Ivy paused to look around the room. Nobody showed any sign of wanting to escape the adventure she offered now.

  “Maybe it was a kid?” offered Claire. “A child's bones left in the cave by modern humans? That's why it's so small?”

  “It was small, about the size of a three-year-old human,” Ivy agreed. “But the cranial sutures are closed and its wisdom teeth are erupted and already worn down. So we are definitely looking at an adult. Anyone else?”

  “I thought someone said these hobbits were dwarfed modern humans?” called Ryan from the back row. “That the bones were pathologically diseased? Micro - whatever?”

  Ivy clasped her hands, grinning. Excellent, a devil’s advocate.

  “Microcephaly? Maybe. But we aren't just talking about one person here. So far there are up to twelve individuals represented from a single cave. That's twelve diseased people from a single population. Although, to be fair, we only have one complete skull so far.”

  “What’s microcephaly?” asked Travis.

  Oliver, the anatomy major, answered him. “It’s a pathology where the brain case is a lot smaller than normal. It’s extremely rare though. Usually the life span, intellectual ability, speech and motor function are pretty low in microcephalics due to abnormal growth of the brain. Even if these were microcephalic modern humans, I doubt they'd survive to adulthood, not in such a primitive environment.”

  “Yet,” interrupted Ivy, “the archaeological evidence suggests these hunters required strategy and communication - pretty sophisticated brain functioning. Which is exactly what endocast studies are showing up now; the structure of their brains are beautifully formed with no sign of microcephaly. Just tiny.”

  “Pygmies?” suggested Travis.

  “Well, there are some native Indonesian populations that have a small body size, even in line with pygmies, but their brain size is proportionately normal. Our Flores friends have brains significantly smaller in relation to their body size. Perhaps the microcephalic offspring of a pygmy… but twelve?”

  “Some of their skeletal morphology takes us all the way back two to four million years to the Australopithecines like Lucy,” Ivy continued. “Fully adducted big toes tell us they walked upright, but their feet are way too long for a modern human and totally flat-footed, believe me, you wouldn’t want to go shoe shopping for these guys.

  “Here's a thought for you all,” Ivy offered. “New finds in Ethiopia are actually suggesting tool use might go as far back as 3.4 million years. The foundations for technology were already there, so maybe these ‘hobbits’ are an entirely new branch of humanity derived from Australopithecines that made their own way to Indonesia a million years ago? Two million years ago? Even before Homo erectus did?”

  “Why not an offshoot of Homo erectus though?” asked Oliver.

  “Could be,” said Ivy. “They do have similar cranial characteristics to Homo erectus, and we know our erectus poster boys were nearby in Java.”

  “But erectus were twice their size,” Kathryn interjected, “and had a bigger brain capacity. So they would have had to shrink - devolve.”

  “That’s true. But even if they were decendants of an Australopithecine or smaller Dmanisi hominid, they must have still evolved into a separate species on Flores sometime after they arrived. Homo erectus arrived there by boat 800,000 years ago,” Ivy said. “But in a limited gene pool like this, you could see massive changes in body and brain size over a relatively rapid period of time. In 800,000 years of isolation, it’s possible.”

  “But why so small?” asked Claire.

  “Aha!” Ivy clapped her hands, bouncing on the balls of her feet. “Because these islands are famous for their bizarre effect on evolution! We've already got massive komodo dragons, giant carnivorous birds and rats as big as a cat. On the other end of the scale are dwarfed stegodon and tiny humans. I
n isolated populations like these islands, cut off from outside breeding, mutations emerge and flourish. Dwarfism is a common occurrence. Who knows why?”

  “A larger body is an expensive resource,” said Oliver. “A large brain, especially so. It’s just natural selection. A smaller body size is more efficient if you have limited food available - you don't require as much energy to survive. If there aren't any predators, there’s less selective pressure to be bigger and stronger to compete.”

  “Correct. Who’s heard of the experiments of the biologist Safi?” asked Ivy. As expected only Oliver raised his hand. “Okay well, Safi studied brain evolution in bats - he determined that brain size in bats grew bigger or smaller through evolutionary time, based entirely on the ecological niche the bats kept.” Ivy drew some quick sketches on the whiteboard to illustrate her point.

  “Bats hunting in heavily forested areas needed bigger wings for manoeuvrability and had therefore evolved a bigger brain to control their wings. But for bats especially adapted to eating fruit and flowers in more open spaces, well, flying was a simpler affair. They needed less energy to control their smaller wings, and therefore developed smaller brains to manipulate them. So,” Ivy turned back to the group, “were the smaller bats stupid?”

  Travis grinned. “Were they from Gotham City?” he said. Claire kicked his chair.

  “Maybe,” Ivy laughed. “But they weren’t stupid. They lived, flew and fed just as effectively as any others. They simply adapted to their natural surroundings, in this case, by shrinking - brain and all.

  “But isn’t mankind smart because we have a big brain?” asked Travis, looking confused.

  “We’re smart, yes,” Ivy said. “But surely you all know the saying; it’s not how big it is that matters, it’s what you do with it.” Ivy blushed at her own joke. “Mankind seems to have a disturbing obsession with size.” The girls laughed and Ivy high-fived Kathryn. “Humankind did become smarter, unquestionably. But it’s the ratio of brain to body size that’s more important, and how you’re wired. Our brains became more complex over time, not just bigger. The number of neurons increased dramatically. The parts that help us learn, adapt, communicate, strategize and think creatively grew more connections as we faced more challenging environments and bigger social groups. It’s these nerves - the number of them, and how intricately they’re connected to one another that really influence our intelligence.” Ivy was vaguely aware of muted shuffling and chatting in the halls as classes ended.