By Dr. Robert Thorson

Though I hope to forget the divisive political campaign as soon as possible, I do want to keep those baseball embers glowing. Hence, I offer the following story about a Little League team that stayed on top for 840,000 years. Dubbed “hobbits” by the scientists who discovered them, this extinct group of little people highlights the fact that every human alive today is on the same major league team called the Homo sapiens.

The extinct Little League team I’m referring to wasn’t composed of children. Instead it’s composed of fossilized skulls of a separate human species that lived on the remote island of Flores in the Indonesian archipelago between Java and East Timor. As reported in the most recent issue of Nature, this new species, Homo floresiensis, descended from Homo erectus, an archaic group that left Africa for other parts of the world about 1.5 million years ago. Homo erectus later evolved into at least three separate species: modern humans, Neanderthals and the Little Leaguers, who might have survived on Flores until the arrival of Dutch traders in the 16th century.

The true-to-life hobbits downsized because they were geographically isolated on an island, with no opportunity to mingle – – and therefore mate — with other human groups. They also lived in caves, which are usually cramped quarters. Under these circumstances, natural selection seems to have favored adults who reached sexual maturity at a smaller size, though not necessarily at a younger age. When fully grown, the average adult on Flores would have stood just over 3 feet tall, roughly between the midriff and the sternum of a modern human adult. This is about the same size as the boys and girls on a co-ed Little League team.

Humans weren’t the only creatures to get small on this island. Elephants got smaller too, diminishing to the size of a Holstein dairy cow. Lizards, however, took the opposite path. They evolved into what are known today as Komodo dragons — alligator-size, forest-dwelling, dry-land lizards powerful enough to take down big game, especially deer. These dragons probably ate a few of the little guys, though I suspect it was usually the other way around. Dragon bones — along with those of pygmy elephants, birds and fish – – are found in the caves where the Little Leaguers lived.

Like other creatures, humans have a tendency to affiliate with those who are like themselves in some respects. Especially during the mating game, we often seek those with similar outlooks, goals, family history, habits and experience. Skin color, race, ethnicity and religion may play an important role. Humans also have a tendency to exaggerate their differences, whether this is explicitly stated or not. Quite often, the civility of a society and the equanimity between it and other societies is related to its tolerance for the full range of human diversity.

This is why the recent discovery from Indonesia is so important. As with biodiversity, human diversity is fundamentally about how many species of humans there are, rather than how many races there are in one species. Not counting the ancestral Homo erectus, there were at least three different ways of being human until about 35,000 years ago. As far as we know, only those like ourselves, a group we mistakenly call “anatomically modern” humans, are alive today.

From this evolutionary perspective, everyone on Earth today is a member of a single species, one that seems to be frittering too much of its time concentrating on political differences as well as selfevident and biologically trivial variations in skin and hair color, body type, genetic markers and skull shape.

In the aftermath of the election, it is time to remind ourselves that the human team needs to follow the same fine example recently set by the Boston Red Sox.

No one on its roster was a Neanderthal. No one was a hobbit from Flores. They won by focusing on their similarities and a common goal, instead of their obvious physical and behavioral differences. Perhaps it’s time for every American to do the same, seeing as how we are all members of the same team, Homo sapiens.