30,000 B.C. -- Two More Like Us?

. It is about time to update my acquaintance with paleoanthropology, the study of the origins of humans. Thus it was a happy circumstance when my son gave me The Jesuit and the Skull by Amir D. Aczel. A great plus is that the book contains much biographical detail about the life of Teilhard de Chardin (the Jesuit priest and scientist mentioned in the last posting for the worthiness of his spiritual writing for seekers of any faith). There was an especially interesting passage about evolution in general and about hominids particularly:

"Many scientists believe that it would not be unusual for several hominid species to have coexisted; the oddity is rather that we are now the only human species alive today. Coexistence of related species seems to be the rule in nature, not the exception."

. But I was not prepared for this astounding statement which immediately followed:

"And if research findings about a fossil discovery made in Java in 1996 are correct, then not two, but three different human species have inhabited our planet at the same time as late as 30,000 years ago. These were Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis, and Homo erectus -- the remnants of a hardy species of human ancestor that had wiedely inhabited our planet for well over a million yearas."

. Boy did this complicate my thinking about the relation of humans to God and spirit! This realization is not quite like hearing that life was discovered on Mars, but the feeling is very close to that, for me.
. Below is an adaptation of the human family tree provided on the Smithsonian Institution's web site. (Sorry about the reduced clarity. It looked ok on my screen but Blogspot does funny things with image resolution.) The whole point of it is to show that, based on current research by C. C. Swisher et al., the timeline for Homo erectus, also know as Java Man, might be extended enough to overlap with Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon (us).