Wild Speculation — Multiple Edens and Hominin Marsupials
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
When I was in school, I learned that early man co-existed with and then drove to extinction a similar species, Neanderthals. Later I learned that humans (homo sapiens) evolved in Africa and migrated to what is now Europe, where they encountered Neanderthals, who had evolved separately. Later still, I learned that humans interbred with Neanderthals and that present-day humans have 1–4% Neanderthal DNA. More recently, I’ve seen news articles about the discovery of Denisovans and Hobbits (homo floresiensis, found on the island of Flores in Indonesia) and that they too interbred with humans.
In other words, there were several separate evolutionary paths leading to creatures close enough to humans to interbreed with them. There was more than one Eden.
Now I’m on vacation in Tasmania, reading about the prehistoric fauna here and also watching wallabies and kangaroos play in the yard of the BnB where I’m staying. Wallabies look and behave very much like rabbits in America.
Australia was once dominated by huge marsupials that filled evolutionary niches similar to those of placental mammals of Africa. It seems that, given similar physical circumstances, separate animal families evolve in similar ways
That line of thought led me to speculate that perhaps a marsupial hominid also evolved in Australia, anatomically similar to other hominids, but with a pouch for nurturing the young.
I suspect that with today’s level of scientific knowledge it might be impossible to detect such a pouch from fossil evidence. But perhaps marsupial hominids interbred with Hobbits or Denisovans or homo sapiens, and hence evidence of their existence might be found in human DNA today. Hence the improbable but plausible premise for fiction that someone today might be born with a pouch.
