A hobbit-forming image

Credit: P. SCHOUTEN

The ‘wild man of the woods’ (Homo silvestris) regularly featured in Renaissance and later illustrations of ‘primitive men’. He tended be rather hairy, but less so than a typical ape. Before Darwin's time, these primitive men did not routinely exhibit ape-like features; they were basically like us, only ruder in aspect.

By contrast, post-darwinian ‘missing links’ have been portrayed as just that, exhibiting bodily and facial features stranded somewhere between contemporary apes and modern humans. Darwinian ‘ape-men’ are almost invariably portrayed as miserable and destitute, living in grinding discomfort, clearly waiting desperately for evolution to happen — even if not in their lifetimes.

These portrayals of prehistoric humans are now joined by the image of Homo floresiensis painted by the Australian artist Peter Schouten, which achieved front-page coverage in international newspapers towards the end of October. ‘Lifelike’ reconstructions meet a basic human instinct to see what someone looked like, whether it be William Shakespeare or a Stone Age labourer. Such images flourish in the popular domain but tend to be denigrated within science, although few palaeontologists can ultimately resist the temptation to visualize extinct creatures in living flesh and blood.

Scientists will readily recognize that Schouten, like any artist relying largely on bones, had to make some key assumptions, not least with respect to fleshy and surface features, including secondary sexual characteristics. For a historian of images, a series of questions arise about the ‘character’ with which the envisaged figure is endowed. We cannot portray any figure without giving it some kind of definite persona, however subjectively its characteristics may be read by different spectators. The features that speak most powerfully to us — the eyes, nose and mouth — are among the most speculative.

Schouten's diminutive man is hairier than a modern human. He is male — early women rarely appear outside a family or tribal context. He returns from the hunt, with tethered trophy and multi-purpose digging stick; wooden weapons have long since been standard equipment for hairy men. We almost never show primitive men carrying bunches of fruit or doing anything less than macho. He does not quite share the standard look of down-and-out melancholy, but seems to manifest a certain stoic acceptance of his condition. In any event, he does not look like a bundle of fun.

For the historian, the circumstances behind the production and use of such an image are integral to understanding both why it looks the way it does and how it is viewed. Schouten has specialized in such reconstructions, having illustrated A Gap in Nature by Tim Flannery, director of the South Australian Museum. Flannery suggested to Richard ‘Bert’ Roberts of the University of Wollongong that Schouten be asked to produce a picture of Flores Man. The resulting painting was purchased jointly by the university and the National Geographic Society, and the society then acquired the image rights (their television channel will air a programme on the discovery early next year). The image was released to the public as soon as the original scientific papers appeared in Nature (431, 1043–1046, 1055–1061, 1087–1091; 2004) on 28 October.

The illustrations published in Nature remained impeccably within what would be widely accepted as ‘scientific’: an evolutionary tree in two formats; graphs of relative brain and body sizes and of relative skeletal dimensions; sets of osteological photographs (one on the cover); and a computer-generated section. The main article by Peter Brown and co-workers is rigorously sober in its cataloguing of the skeletal remains, with judicious extrapolations about the hominin's diminutive stature.

But the battered skull and bony fragments do not stick in our memory in the way that Schouten's skilful painting does. The process of discovery and publication has thrown up an instant icon that will be very hard to dislodge. We can change our mind about recorded facts, but a potent image, for good or for ill, tends to become indelible.