When Australian archaeologist Mike Morwood discovered a new species of extinct human on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, he started to refer to it as the ‘hobbit’ because it was ‘a little person who lived in a cosy hole in the ground on an isolated Middle Earth island’.
Since the discovery of the Hobbits of Flores, we have learned more and more about human evolution. Several new species have been discovered and we now know for certain that different species of humans lived alongside one another and even interbred. More and more scientists have been following Morwood in invoking the world imagined by J. R. R. Tolkien in his classic fantasy stories The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion to describe human evolution over the last two hundred thousand years.
In this talk, John Holmes will show how the science of human evolution has been shaped by the imaginary history of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and how Tolkien’s own speculations about evolution and the relationships he imagines between different kinds of people can help us to think about what life might have been like for us and our closest relatives in prehistory.
John Holmes is Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham and an expert on connections between literature and science. His books include Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution (2009), The Pre-Raphaelites and Science (2018) and Temple of Science: The Pre-Raphaelites and Oxford University Museum of Natural History (2020).
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8 сен 2024
