I love paleoanthropology.  I don't know why; maybe it goes back to some early watching of 2001: A Space Odyssey or something.  But the idea that we have ancestors who were very different from us, millions of years ago.

In an earlier post from last July, I mentioned an archaeological dig of about 3000 years ago.  Today there's one that's a lot older than that: somewhere between 108-117,000 years ago.  That's the time point after which archaeologists have so far found no evidence of communities of Homo Erectus anywhere in the world. It's the site called Ngandong, on the island of Java, in today's nation of Indonesia.  Because they had already died out elsewhere hundreds of thousands of years earlier, it stands to reason that the last point at which they are recorded at Ngandong is the last point at which they are recorded on the earth.  At that point modern Homo Sapiens had been flourishing, maybe for a hundred thousand years, maybe more, in Africa.  It might have even expanded beyond Africa, though those migrations seem to have died out (at least as far as we know).

Probably no Homo Sapiens ever saw Homo Erectus; by the time the two species were genetically crisply distinguishable, Homo Erectus had died out where Homo Sapiens thrived.  But we know that Homo Sapiens did encounter Neanderthals.  Maybe other species too.  This is unusual for us, because we do not have now any close genetic relations.  Well, I suppose we do, if you count Chimpanzees.  But the truth is, at one point we had sibling species with whom we could inter-breed.  I wonder what it was like for us to encounter other, recognizably different creatures, yet to whom we were in some sense related?  

What is the species-feeling of humanity like?  I don't know that we know, because we've probably never felt it, esp in terms of the narcissism of minor differences.   Will we in the future?  Is it like racist self-identification?  Is it different?  Has the memory of these rival forms of human creatures implanted itself in our deep memory, as giants, trolls, gnomes, monsters?  So many things to wonder about.  How does our deep history inform our understanding of who we are today?