When another kind of human shared the Earth

Twelve thousand years ago, just prior to the time when people in the middle east were about to settle down in towns and start the march towards civilization, men and women of a very different kind from us eked out a living on the island of Flores. The more advanced Neanderthals, with brains as large as ours, had already been extinct for seventeen thousand years.

These people made tools, started fires, and cooked food on those fires. They cooperated in activities such as hunting. Some anthropologists are wondering whether these people should be considered a member of the Homo family tree. Well, of course they should. Aside from their advanced hominid morphology (yes, along with a handful of apelike traits), they engaged in behaviours we associate only with branches of the Homo family tree - fire and cooperative hunting do not date back to the Australopithecines.

What makes me really wonder at the possibilities is that a volcano wiped out their population. Just think - if that volcano had not erupted, we Homo Sapiens would not be the only kinds of hominids alive today. What would it be like to see these relatives of ours? Would we consider them like us, or would we put them in a zoo?

I think one thing it does do is beg the question, "What is it to be human?"

We know we're unique. But I think we are often quite ignorant about why. Yes, we are intelligent, but so are many animals. Chimpanzees can solve the same kinds of shape puzzles that are used in human intelligence tests, with comparable skill. We make tools, but so do certain kinds of crows. We speak with an advanced grammatical language, but even this is a question of degree and not kind - apes can be taught to use sign language, and many other animals have highly advanced forms of communication, using vocalizations, body language, and scents.

So what makes us different? Are we just better at some small tasks? Nothing more than animals with a couple of strong aptitudes?

No. There is a difference. We quest - we strive to know. Some other curious animals may want to learn as much about their environment as they can. But only we seek to understand what creation itself is. Only we seek to understand what place we have in it, and if we have a place in it at all. Only we peer to its edges with radio telescopes, as if we could spy the one who made this creation if we look hard enough.

If there is a seat to the human soul, the image of God we believe ourselves to be created in, it is this. What are the possibilities? What heights are we capable of reaching? What is our destiny? The paintings on the cave walls of France show that, some forty thousand years ago, human beings became the first Earthly creatures to start to ask such questions. It is the dignity that first called us to find out who we really are.