Transcript of #2577 - Gregory Forth

Thank you very much for being here. I'm really excited to talk to you. I am fascinated by this little hobbit creature, this Homo florensis. Am I saying it right? Florens?

Floresiensis.

Floresiensis.

Yeah, so it's like flora and then siensis.

Right. I've been fascinated from 2003 when it was announced. Well, when was it announced? They discovered it in 2003?

September 2003, announced October 2004.

So for people that don't know, what we're talking about is the supposed hobbit people from the island of Flores. A very small, tiny, it's in the Homo genus, right?

That's right.

So it's a relative of human beings. That's what they, that's the little fella right there.

Fair enough, yeah, quite good.

What is fascinating about your work is that you were on that island quite a bit before that, and you were investigating the possibility of this existing a long time before that.

Yeah, no, that's correct. I first began field research on Flores as an anthropologist, a cultural anthropologist in 1984. I was interested in the people and the culture and the languages generally, but quite early in my stay, in fact, in 1984 during my first visit, I heard about these small hominoid, human-like creatures, which were known locally.

Yeah, in the book you discuss two distinct, at least possible different species.

Yeah.

One of them being Homo floresiensis, and the other one being this, the one from Lio?

No. Well, in a way, you could say that. I mean, there's Homo floresiensis, which lived on the island of Flores for a long time and must have lived in places other than the single discovery site. And then there are the claims, the descriptions offered by Lio people about creatures they say are still around, rare, but still present in their territory, which some people claim to have seen and have given quite vivid descriptions of.

Please.

There has been discovered after a deliberate search by paleoanthropologists, if you'll appreciate that distinction, also in the central part of Flores, in fact, in a place where decades ago there were discovered stegodons, kind of primitive elephant bones in large numbers. And there was evidence that something had, if not killed these things, these stegodons had at least eaten them, eaten their carcasses.

Oh, wow.

Hundreds of thousands of years. 700,000, 600,000, 700,000, something in that.

Oh, wow. Wow.

Yeah, but there's also stone tool evidence, or stones taken to be possible tools, that takes us back even further to like a million years ago, maybe even earlier. I mean, it's still a big mystery as to how these things ever got on the island.

Right.

Yeah.

And are these stone tools clearly formed, like an arrowhead or a spearhead, or are they ambiguous?

Some of them, you know, this is not my area. I should confess straight away.

Of course.

But some of them are ambiguous. There have been different interpretations. Some authorities in paleoanthropology, archaeology would suggest that they're not artifacts at all. They're not things that have been made by any hominin.

So here's Jamie pulled up some examples from Indonesia.

Okay.

And this is some potential tools that they believe Homo floresiensis used. And you can see they are tool-like, but it's a little odd. It's hard to say. Could be just flakes of chips of stone.

Yeah. Well, to mention right away there is that there was some overlap between floresiensis and ourselves, Homo sapiens. And it is a well-known generalization, certainly in that part of the world, that you can't distinguish species on the basis of stone tool industries, as they're called. In other words, you need skeletal evidence in close association with anything that is a stone tool or might be to say what species probably made these things.

Is that a pygmy elephant? Is that a small elephant?

Yeah, those would have been the ones that they preyed on or scavenged. Yeah, a pygmy stegodon, but size of a cow. So if you can think of an elephant as size of a cow.

Oh, interesting.

Still pretty formidable if you're only three feet, three and a half feet tall.

Or four, yeah.

But then again, I mean, the recent interpretations, analyses have suggested that these stegodons, which may have been consumed by floresiensis, were killed, not by floresiensis, not hunted by floresiensis, but instead were killed by Komodo dragons, which is the world's largest lizard, growing up, growing, yeah, up to 10 feet long and a formidable animal.

So they were probably scavenging or potentially scavenging what was left.

That's the idea. And anything that could be taken for a cut mark, well, the bones that have been studied, they show marks, but mostly from dragon's teeth, Komodo dragon teeth, or Komodo monitor teeth, to use another name. Those that don't look like Komodo dragon teeth marks have been interpreted as, yeah, possible stone tool marks used by floresiensis, but merely to scrape meat off the bones, not to kill the animal.

But were there humans living on the island of Flores at the same time?

If I'm not mistaken, well, when floresiensis was discovered, the oldest date for Homo sapiens on the island was 11,000 years ago.

Oh, wow.

And whereas now, I think that's been pushed back to 50,000 or so. So there was overlap.

So this overlap, is it possible that it was humans that were predating on these pygmy elephants?

That's certainly possible, yeah.

Which would.

Would leave, yeah, although if, again, if I've got this right and if I'm up to date on this, I'm not sure that there are clear evidence, there's clear evidence from bones that any of the elephants were killed by Homo sapiens.

Right, like spear marks and rib cage.

Well, or cut marks when you're butchering, that sort of is the big, yeah.

So it's more like something smaller and smaller tools just scraping meat away.

Yeah.

Which would indicate the little animals. So the date of the actual, the group that they found that was in that cave, was it 50,000, 60,000 years old? How old were they?

That's, well, of course, initially it was reckoned they were only 12,000, 13,000 years old. That's the youngest ones.

Right, right, right.

But that was a big problem for the paleos.

That's a big problem.

They said so as well.

Well, it'd be a real big problem if they found a live one today.

Oh, well, yeah, no, that you're certainly correct there, although one of the senior investigators, the original find, said memorably that just the discovery of something like Homo floresiensis at 12,000, 13,000 years ago, even a bit older, was more surprising. It was a kind of gobsmacking than would be, he said, the discovery of a space alien.

Well, it is pretty crazy that this myth has gone on for so long all over the world, or all over that part of the world, I should say, like the Orang Pendek.

Yeah.

Right? That one's what? Is that Vietnam or is that?

Orang Pendek is in.

Malaysia?

Southern Sumatra.

Sumatra.

So very close to Malaysia, yeah.

And it's a very similar description.

Yeah, on the whole, I would say so. I've written a bit about that as well, but the difference, I guess, well, a couple of differences with floresiensis is that with floresiensis, we have fossil evidence for something that could have survived until much more recently, whereas in Sumatra, the fossil evidence for Orang Pendek is not there.

But Flores does not.

Flores has only one species of monkey and no apes. And the monkey, a macaque, a long-tailed macaque, was introduced by humans thousands, just a few thousands of years ago. So no native apes, no native monkeys either.

So these people, when you first went in the 1980s, how frequent were their sightings? And were they in a very specific area?

Yeah.

And what did they say the encounters were like?

Well, the sightings have been entirely, or nearly entirely, in the Lio region, towards the eastern end of the island. Mostly in high altitudes, mountainous areas, mountain forest, and thus well away from human settlements for the most part.

Can I ask you this? When you say not entirely credible, were there aspects of it that seemed like mythological? Like what was not entirely credible?

Not necessarily mythological, but it sounded like they could well have been identifying monkeys.

Oh.

And another, well, one reason for that was what they described. Another reason was that a lot of those less credible ones were in circumstances when you wouldn't expect a human to encounter anything like floresiensis. And largely close to the coast, where most people live and have lived for a long time, whereas, yeah, all indications are that the Laihoa, as they're called, the local hominoids, are much higher up in unsettled parts of the mountains.

So that would indicate that there's a food supply for them up there.

Yeah.

And are they primarily vegetarian?

They seem to be, very much, very much so. Yeah. I mean, the dentition on the type specimen, the skull, the teeth, suggests a vegetarian, a herbivore, if you will. The best specimen, the type specimen, as it's called, doesn't really show any definite canines.

Largely, but they apparently prefer to eat monkeys.

Oh, yeah. No, that's, well, like humans. I mean, humans during most of our history have of necessity eaten grains and vegetables and so on because they couldn't afford the meat. But nevertheless, meat has usually been a prized food.

Yeah, well, we're clearly omnivores, right? But if you were a creature that lived in this mountainous terrain, it's probably not a wide variety of mammals, right? And if they didn't really have weapons, if they had very small stone tools, there seems to be no indication they have anything they could throw or anything along those lines.

They could throw stones, throw rocks.

Stones, yeah.

They're pretty strong.

Good luck being successful at killing a deer throwing rocks.

Yeah.

It'll take you a long time to get one.

Deer are also a recent import.

Oh, is it?

In fact, Flores is mammal-poor. The only indigenous native mammals are bats, as you would expect, because they can fly freely to the island, and rodents.

So what are the dragons eating?

The dragons were.

Because they're huge.

Well, it's interesting because at one time they were eating stegodons, certainly.

Do you think they made them extinct, perhaps, because it's a small island?

Well, they could have contributed to that, yeah, along with other factors. But besides dragons, there are other large rats.

Oh, that's right. They have one very aggressive tree rat, right?

Now, that guy is still around, as I know.

Oh, really?

Photos of, yeah.

That thing's huge, right?

It is a huge rat.

Couple feet long?

It's at least, I think, in terms of metrics. So yeah, no.

Oh, that's what it looks like.

Oh, there it is.

The size of that sucker.

Yeah, no, that's great. Mostly or largely, tail is a lot of animals, but it is big, as you can see.

That lady looks like she's got one as a pet.

I'm not sure if that's the same creature. I don't think it is.

Oh, okay.

But yeah, now that looks more like it. Yeah, yeah.

Papagoomies.

But if you're a 10-foot-long poisonous lizard, it's going to be hard to sustain that mass just on rats, unless they're overpopulated with rats.

Well, I've got to say that once extinction dates for pygmy stegodon or any stegodon, well, I can't recall the current figures, but they're always changing. But as soon as you had humans on the island, you had pigs and dogs. And some of the pigs, quite quickly, I think, became feral, which they're wild.

Of course, yes.

So, and yeah, and then deer at one point were introduced by humans. So certainly deer and pigs, and not to mention domesticates like goats, even young buffalo and horses are prey to dragons at present. So in a sense, it could be Homo sapiens that's kept that creature alive, yeah.

Interesting. So they could have wiped out the pygmy elephants, and then we could have probably maybe come in at a very opportune time with a bunch of domesticated animals, pigs, dogs, and then they started eating those.

I should say also the little ape man, the Lio, for example, describe, also reputed occasionally to steal chickens, very small piglets.

Yeah.

So yeah, not to deny that they wouldn't eat meat if they could get it.

So when you went there, was it '84 was the first time you went?

That was the first time, but I kept going back sometimes every year.

But when you first went, did you go looking for this specific creature?

No. No, I went because there were parts of Flores, including Nage country, right in the center, where I first.

Pull that microphone up.

Research. Sorry.

It's okay. It moves around a little bit. You can stay right where you're sitting.

Yeah, no, that's fine. No, the reason I went was to visit the people and find out how they lived and what they believed in, and because they were kind of blank on the cultural anthropological map. And it was just incidentally, by accident, you might say.

And were these people, what kind of life are they living? A cistern lifestyle? Are they hunter-gatherers? Are they?

Certainly in the 1980s, yeah, they were still largely subsistence cultivators, small farmers who would feed themselves from what they grew. Also hunters, however, the men very much value hunting, although not a lot of their food supply comes from that activity.

And are they hunting animals that had been introduced, like the deer species and pigs?

Deer and pigs are the two prized types, most valued types of game. But they'll also kill monkeys, wild cats, feral cats.

Feral house cats?

Yeah, well, that sounds like what they are. I don't think there's any indigenous, yeah. But although some people in the past have thought they were, including Alfred Wallace, who you may know.

Sure.

But yeah, but also things like, well, the giant tree rats that you mentioned.

They hunt those.

They hunt those. I have said in one or two places, by the way, that it's rather unlikely that floresiensis would have been able to hunt the tree rats, because they're very difficult to hunt. They're vicious as hell.

Really?

Yeah. So you need, well, from what I'm told, what I am told often, was told often by the Nage, for example, is that you need more than one person, dogs. You need dogs.

You need dogs to hunt them?

You need a kind of a prod to knock them out of the tree and so on. So it's no, and it's often reported that people are injured from the teeth of these damn things, dropping down from trees. Well, you saw how big it was, so yeah.

Well, that's a great meal, though, if you're a three-foot-tall human-like creature and you eat a two-foot rat.

Yeah.

That's a good catch.

Yeah. Mind you, at the same time, let's talk about floresiensis. Would possibly have been able to catch smaller rodents, native ones.

Sure.

Yeah.

Sure. So when you first went there, what was the first story that you heard about these little hairy people that lived in the woods?

Yeah. The first story I heard in the Nage region that I've mentioned was, well, it's kind of a local legend about how they were wiped out by the ancestors of the Nage. And it's a story that, whatever the basis, in fact, I was clearly been.

Embellished.

Embellished, embroidered, yeah. You get narrative themes entering, including two escaping, the extermination, and this is an old plotline. And moving to another territory where they sister and brother, as he usually said, where they incestuously managed to maintain their species. But yeah, that was the first story. I mean, according to that one, these were creatures called obugogo, is a term you may have come across.

So they were just confused as to where the food ended.

Well, this is the idea. That particular category of creature, obugogo, always interpreted as or represented as being stupid.

Right.

Yeah, very stupid. So they couldn't tell the difference between food and a plate. They were made drunk. They'd given copious amounts of palm wine, palm gin. And then, of course, eventually, they wanted to go back to their cave to sleep it off.

And what was the timeline for these supposed interactions?

Well, as far as one can tell from local genealogies, family histories, that sort of thing, yeah, we'd be talking at least 200, 300 years ago.

So this was like folklore or at least like legend that they would tell.

Legend, these are legends.

The stories of these people.

Yeah.

And so this was the first story that you heard of these creatures?

That was the first one. Yeah, there are other stories told soon thereafter, which also were.

But so this was the first one where you were explained that at least at one point in time, there was supposedly a small, hairy, human-like creature that lived on the island.

Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, people are very insistent, the storytellers very insistent that these things weren't like forest spirits or anything. They really were.

It was an actual animal.

It was an actual animal, exactly.

And when did you talk to someone that had had an encounter?

That was, first of all, that was when I visited the Lio, the Lio region, which is the main topic of the book, as I said. Yeah, and that was in the early 2001, 2003.

What was it, so you had been, you'd had this in your mind for a couple of decades at that point. So what was it like to hear that there was a possibility that these things were still on the island? And if people haven't seen the island of Flores before, it's incredibly dense, mountainous.

Very mountainous, yeah.

Very difficult to get to. There's not like a real, like is there a road structure that allows you to get from one side of the island to the other?

There's the Dutch colonials back in the, but.

Is it a coastal road, or is it just go through the mountains?

It goes wherever it can go because it's so mountainous. It's virtually no straight stretches.

Right.

So it kind of snakes all over the place. So a lot of it goes through the, yeah, a lot of it along the coast, but other parts in more central areas.

Jamie, can you see if we can get a photo?

I'm looking at the map. I'm trying to find the road.

Yes.

Like locating.

Well, it's insanely dense jungle. So this is what we're looking at is just a 3D topographical.

Okay, yeah.

I mean, we're looking at it from above. And this, if you get a photograph of what it looks like, because I've seen some drone photos of the island that are really spectacular, because they're above the tree line, and you go, okay, anything could be out there. It's just, it's like parts of the Amazon, where you look at it and you go, well, this is just so.

Certainly in higher elevations.

Yeah, just incredibly dense. And people are not regularly traveling to this area, certainly not Westerners who are there exploring and doing anthropological work. They're not traveling.

Few tourists these days, but.

Yeah, okay, so this is a good representation. It's just incredibly dense, mountainous, beautiful, but wildly uncharted, not uncharted necessarily, because we actually know where everything is, but people aren't going and making an audit of all the different animals that are there. So it is possible that something could, if you looked at it, you're like, well, maybe.

Well, yeah, I mean, there have been studies by zoologists of certain parts of the local wildlife, local animal life. But yeah, none explicitly in search of something like floresiensis or the Lio ape man, as I call them.

So when you first had an encounter, someone explained to you an encounter, how far was that from the actual discovery of the bones? Because you had the conversations with people that were telling you that they had encountered one prior to them discovering these bones, correct?

Yeah. Yeah. Certainly prior. Not very long before, a couple of months. But certainly, yeah, well over a year before the floresiensis discovery was announced in the media, including the scientific press.

That must have been incredibly exciting. To hear these stories and go, wow, I've been talking to people about these things for 20 years now, and now this guy tells me he saw one, and then a couple of months later they're finding bones, you had to be like, wow, this is a real thing.

I was quite staggered, yeah. Actually, I find it kind of hot in here. Can I take my jacket off?

Sure, sure. Yeah, absolutely, of course. Yeah, take your jacket off. So as we were saying, you had this encounter with someone who explained that they had seen one in the flesh, and then just a few months later, they find these bones. That had to be incredibly exciting, because you had, and especially in the early. When they were saying it might potentially only be 10,000 plus years old.

Yeah. No, yeah, I felt extremely lucky.

Right.

And I mean, if I'd first heard about these things a year or two later, well, I probably wouldn't have written the book, and I wouldn't have taken it much further. I would have thought, well, there is a possibility, however slim, that somebody has seen a reconstruction of floresiensis in a newspaper or on television. But no, yeah, so I was fortunate.

Was there any encounters or descriptions from missionaries, from ancient missionaries that had visited?

No, not that I've been able to discover. And I've looked for that kind of thing, obviously, but no.

So they had only documented stories.

Yeah, it's quite remarkable. The man I knew for quite a long time, a Dutchman in the Nage region, a missionary, Catholic missionary, who'd been there for ages. And he'd never heard of the obugogo, which are the Nage ape men, and which, stories about these, like the ones I just described, are pretty widely known in the region, near the village whose inhabitants were supposed to have wiped them out hundreds of years ago.

Now, when you first got the initial report from someone that had encountered one of these in real life, did you then start looking for other stories from other people to get more confirmation?

I did, but not so much in that particular year. That was, as I said, summer 2003. And yeah, because I had to return to Canada, I think it was in the June, and I had to return in the July or early August, something like that. So I didn't have a lot of time in that year, but after hearing about floresiensis, of course, I did initiate a new project, which gave me funds to go back and, yeah, talk about a bunch of things, not just the hominoids, but certainly to pay much more attention to Lio, the Lio region, and to these creatures than I'd done previously.

And how many reports of encounters had you had? Like how many different people?

I interviewed, well, to answer your question, somewhere in the 30s, 32, I think.

Wow.

But I talked to more people than that, just about these hominoids in general, what they'd heard from their parents or from who am I to get a good idea of the kind of local knowledge there was about them. And so in total, yeah, well over 120, 130 people, I think, I talked to in all.

That had had encounters?

No, no.

No, 30 that had encounters.

That knew something about, knew what a Laihoa was.

But if you talked to 120 people and 30 of them had encounters, that seems like a lot.

I guess it does, yeah. But then there were a lot of people besides who knew virtually nothing about a Laihoa, or they didn't want to talk to me, or they were scared, or whatever.

Right, right, right. Now, did they all have similar descriptions?

Yeah, I mean, one thing I show in my analysis, and it's been four years now, so I think I got this right, is that the sightings are both the clearest, most detailed, in other words, most credible sighting reports seem more accurate, more in line with the standard image of ape men than others.

Right, right. So at least a few of them possibly could have been this actual creature, if they're being honest.

Yeah, that's right. And it just takes one out of 30 odd or.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, if you have that many, and also you have bones, and then also you have a history of these things, it's just, what would be required to comb the forest to try to find these things? Have you ever thought about what kind of resources would be required, how many people would be involved, camera traps, like various technologies that you could use to potentially find these things?

Yeah, not so much forests, although forests included, but higher slopes of mountains, of which there are many in certainly in Lio territory and neighboring districts as well. You'd need people who are young and fit.

And quite a few of them.

Yeah, you'd need, yeah, you'd need different sorts of expertise. I mean, certainly people who could handle the terrain. Maybe also people who, well, primatologists, shall we say, people specializing in the study of apes and monkeys. That would be helpful. Zoologists working in that area as well.

Talk to me about it.

Well, not you, but maybe somebody in your team, or somebody you could recommend. But in the.

Some explorer type?

Yeah, but in the meantime, quite recently, in fact, I've been asked for an interview by Les Stroud, who.

Sure, Survivor Man.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, he's a big believer in Bigfoot.

Well, yeah. But yeah, so I'm expecting him on Friday the 13th, actually, so just in, what, 9, 10 days' time. And I think he would be the kind of person to consult on that.

Well, he can live up there for a few months by himself.

Yeah, well, maybe I can get him interested.

Yeah, he would figure out, like, that would be a great idea for a series. Because he's done quite a few episodes looking for Bigfoot, to no avail. Shocking. Never found it. But this would be, I think, probably more likely than finding Bigfoot. First of all, it's an island. It's not just an entire coastline, like if you're in the Pacific Northwest or wherever you're searching for Bigfoot. And the other thing being that a guy like Les, going solo, because he does everything solo, he doesn't bring a big camera crew, it'd be a smaller footprint, probably less likely to make a lot of noise and disturb things.

Yeah, that's a good feature.

Yeah, and if he found something, boy, ooh, that would be exciting. That would be one of the most exciting things that's ever happened in all of anthropology.

Yeah, yeah, no, indeed. And I think, you know, I'm not a firm believer in anything, really, you might say.

Good for you.

But I was a bit skeptical. But the evidence in this case, the coincidence that we were talking about a minute ago between the discovery, the reconstruction of floresiensis, and what Lio people and others were describing to me, the match is so remarkable that, you know, unless there's been some huge, well-hidden conspiracy designed entirely to fool little old me, I just can't imagine it.

Dangerous too.

Yeah, I won't go into the particulars of my present physical condition, but it's a bit of a challenge going anywhere these days, I must confess. So yeah, no, the research is worth, well, not guaranteeing success of any sort, but.

Now, what about potential use of technology? Are they going to use drones or anything along those lines? Because they've gotten incredibly good.

That's right.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, yeah, no, this is on the sort of bucket list for this colleague of mine, a young guy, financially successful, who has the time to do this kind of thing. Yeah, I think drones are certainly on the list. So yeah, those would come into play as well.

And so how much of the area where they find them, how much of a piece of land are we talking about? What is the square kilometers?

The Lio region, can I just grab a, I'm getting very dry here.

Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there's water in there, that glass right there. And there's coffee in here if you'd like some coffee.

Oh, that's great.

How big is the area where, I mean, is it centrally located where they keep finding these same, the sightings, is it all in the same particular area, or is it spread out?

Yeah, well, I've worked mostly in a place called East Lio. But there's no clear indication of the bounds of knowledge of this kind of creature. So they go, yeah, to the east and to the west.

They're just mostly avoiding people.

Yeah, well, certainly the creatures are. But the fact is that different people, their knowledge of local wild animals is different from maybe their neighbors or people at another end of the island. There is in Western Indonesia, in Sumatra, possibly on parts of the Malay Peninsula close by as well, there is a kind of wild rabbit or hare, not the kind of place where you'd expect to find rabbits or hares, perhaps.

Interesting.

Yeah, and in fact, it's now known mostly, so far as people are aware of it, with the national Indonesian name, kelinci, which refers to rabbits that were imported by the Dutch as food a couple of centuries ago. So.

Is that, they think, the source of these particular wild rabbits on the island?

No, no, this would be quite a separate species. They would be indigenous, yeah. But again, local people or lots of local groups didn't know about them. And reasonable, they're forest dwelling, and they're quite rare. So no great surprise. But if I may, something that I was going to say with regard to my friend who plans to go back to Flores with an expanded search, he became very interested in this particular locality, particular mountain, in fact, because of reports I received out of the blue about three years ago from two British visitors, hikers, outdoorsmen, taking a break on Flores and doing scuba diving and hiking, but mountain climbing, this kind of thing.

So they just had an encounter and just sought it out.

They had an encounter, they thought it was, yeah, some kind of, well, it's interesting because I managed to interview them subsequently separately, which is a good thing. And one of them, in fact, the main contact, described what he saw as something very much like a Lio ape man, a little man, a little human, but monkey-like.

Bipedal.

Bipedal, yes. That was his impression. The other man described it as looking more like another sort of primate. In fact, he described it as a monkey, but a very big one, an unusually big one. And it's interesting because those two opinions, those two interpretations, very much align with the range of descriptions that I recorded from local people. Some descriptions had it more monkey-like, others more human-like.

What's the high estimate?

The highest comes from a secondhand report of a Laihoa. And that would have been about 1.4 meters, which is, yeah, bigger than.

Four feet.

It's getting on there, getting four feet, yeah. Yeah, you're right.

So this encounter that these gentlemen had, this was only three years ago?

Well, actually, the encounter was in 2019, in March. And they hadn't followed this, they hadn't thought about it. And then for some reason, they met. This is it, I think they were separated for some time, these two guys. And they met and over a drink started to reminisce about their visit to Flores, now they'd like to go back. And one said to the other, well, God, do you remember that huge monkey we saw?

So is that one of the only Westerners, or at least groups of Westerners, that spotted these things?

There are two of them, of course. No, not quite. I might mention that 2019 was well before the 22 book came out, so that's a factor as well. No, not the only two. There was a man, not Western, but Asian. I won't give any more details of that because he didn't want me to mention this in the book.

And did he describe the same type of creature, the same type of experience?

A big monkey standing upright, no tail, about three feet or more tall. Yeah, there was more than one of them that he saw, the end of a kind of a grown over area, sort of a tunnel that had been created by vegetation. He was trekking through jungle. And he came across these things. And he turned back. Actually, he wanted to find there was a site with certain stone monuments that he'd heard about.

And so his depiction of it was before you had ever had your first description of it given to you.

Yeah, you can say that, but it weren't qualification. My first research in Indonesia was done in the 1970s as a doctoral student.

And you had never heard any of these stories then?

Well, I was working on the island of Sumba, which is not the same as Flores, a big island to the south. Not to be confused with Sumbawa, but this is just Sumba. And there there is a tradition of, well, something that sounds more like the Sasquatch, actually, or the Bigfoot. Because, yeah, these are sort of half-human, half-ape, standing on two legs. But they're much bigger than, well, than us, certainly much bigger than local people.

Oh, the Patterson-Gimlin footage?

Patterson-Gimley, exactly, yeah.

Yeah, there's a new documentary out that kind of shows that that had been rehearsed.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, there's a lot of suspicion.

Seems pretty fake.

Although at the time, it's interesting, I know there were a number of, or a few, I know primatologists and so on who thought it credible. But there's that film, and then, of course, there's the phenomenon as a whole. But anyway, from that kind of thing going on in the late '60s, early '70s, yeah, I became interested. Well, I studied anthropology at the time, including prehistory and paleoanthropology, and a lot of talk about the possibility of this kind of thing.

Well, it's an incredibly fascinating idea. And we know from what we know about the fossil record, the fossil record is so incomplete because it's so difficult to make a fossil. So when we find new things, like the Denisovans, which is a very recent discovery, we go, oh, well, there's a totally different branch, and they were larger than people. This is really interesting. So we don't really know because it's so difficult to make a fossil.

That's right. In fact, it's infantessimally remote a possibility of a species, just a whole species, not just an individual animal being surviving, being preserved, being fossilized.

That's why it's so crazy to try to get an understanding or a map of the past with fossils.

Well, it's always changing.

Right, it's always changing. They find a new one, throws a monkey wrench into the whole thing, and you're like, oh, well, ho, look at this. Now we know there's this kind, and now we know Homo julianensis and Homo, you know, there's a whole series of them, the Denisovans.

Yeah, no, and you know if we don't kill ourselves off in the near future, it's likely there'll be more of these discoveries. No, they're made quite by chance. The likelihood of anybody finding these things is remote. So the sample of fossil hominins is certainly not representative. I mean, it's really.

And it seems to be expanding.

It's needles in a haystack.

It seems to be constantly expanding our understanding of how many there were.

Yeah, well, because research continues, that's why. But even so, there are lots of places where people could look. And yeah, we don't know with any species that is declared extinct, we don't know exactly when it died out. We know the most recent date.

Right, well, that's what's really interesting.

And we know the earliest date. When it came into being as well, we don't know.

And when you find something that's 60,000 years old, like those bones that they found in the cave, the odds of those being the last ones that existed are very small.

Very small. Yeah, that's way in the, oh, that's a question of yours I didn't answer. I think that's way in the eastern, sorry, the western end of Flores Island is the discovery site. Whereas I'm working mostly towards the eastern end, central or east-central Flores, so quite a distance away. But no, and let's remember as well that the evidence suggests that what's called Homo floresianensis survived for at least 50,000 years, which is quite a stretch of time.

Especially when we don't really know how they got there.

We don't know how they got there. There is evidence for something much earlier, 700,000 years ago, that could possibly be ancestral to Floresiances. Now, in that space of time, the notion that they were restricted to one small neighborhood is just not credible. They must have been all over the map of Flores.

What is the evidence of the one that's 100,000 plus?

The 700,000 plus, do you mean? Oh, 700,000. Or, oh, I'm sorry, the Floresiances. There's a number of specimens in Liangbua Cave. The most recent were initially reckoned to be 12,000, 13,000. That date was pushed back in a kind of interesting way to 50,000 or 60,000.

Well, how was it pushed back? Was it radiocarbon dating?

Various methods were applied. I can't recall the details. But yeah, I mean, the point is, Joe, that this 12,000, 13,000 date was found to be a big problem.

Sure.

And so a lot of energy was put into retesting the geological situation in the cave.

So is the current dating a certainty?

No, nothing's a certainty.

Right, so is it possible that it's earlier? Or it's newer, rather?

I think it is, simply because we only know one site, a site not much bigger, if any bigger than this building, on an island of that size. So it's interesting, the follow-up research looking for ancestors to Homo floresiances, which turned up the 700,000-year-old fossils, that was all focused on finding something older.

And where was that on?

Not something more recent or younger.

Is that Flores as well?

On Flores also, but in the central part on a large plain.

Well, that's even crazier, right? So how did they get there 700,000 years ago?

Well, there is evidence in the form of possible stone tools, let's just say stone tools, that something was making those artifacts, yeah, a million years ago. So how did they get there? Or what did whatever it was that was living a million years ago look like? It's reckoned that they, well, they wouldn't have had sea craft.

Lower sea level, though, correct? Just particularly during the Ice Age.

Lower sea levels, but not a land bridge. I mean, the stagodons swam over.

Whoa, from how far away?

Not that far, probably from the east or the north.

Maybe they rode the elephants.

Well, actually, somebody suggested that, but not likely.

You're in a boat, and you see a bunch of weird-looking monkey people riding elephants?

Yeah, no, you would check your diet after that.

I'd definitely pull my iPhone out.

Yeah.

Take a video.

Yeah, but it is possible for creatures like Floresiances, apparently, to kind of sail over accidentally on great clumps of foliage. I'm looking for a term now, which I don't have.

Okay, like driftwood, like some sort of a log or something. But I mean, how many miles or kilometers?

A great clump of earth that had been dug up by a tsunami and driven out to sea. There's evidence for this kind of thing happening. So yeah, you would need, of course, more than one of them to get to Flores, and they'd have to be opposite sexes as well. But it's all possible, given the time scale involved.

Yeah, that's the thing that they do when they talk about human populations that they find on these islands that are problematic in age. When they get really, really long ago, before they thought people were sea traveling, they go, okay, how many had to get out here in order to develop a population? So there's a mathematical equation to that, right?

Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. As there are estimates of how many members of a population you'd need for it to be able to survive, continue, breed, and so on.

So if it's such a small island that it's not possible that they evolved there?

Well, I mean, it suggests they did part of their evolution once on the island, yeah.

But once on the island. But how did everything else get there? Like, how did the dragons get there? How did the rats get there? What's the origin of all these various life forms? Because it's very diverse, right?

Well, yeah, I mean, rats seem to be able to get it everywhere. Except Alberta, by the way. We have mice, but no rats.

You guys have no rats?

We're trying to keep them out as well with warming.

You guys have wolves, though.

We have wolves and all kinds of things. They're remarkable.

They're grizzly bears.

Yeah, black bears.

Yeah, a lot of black bears.

Yeah, no mountain lions.

Moose.

Moose, all various members of the deer family.

Big deer, elk, you guys have everything up there. It's gorgeous.

So-called antelope as well.

Yeah, it is a beautiful part of the world.

Yeah, yeah, of course, we've got the two national parks, which are full of protected wildlife. But yeah, no, let me say about the dragons. The so-called dragons, Komodo monitors, great swimmers.

Really?

I mean, now they swim between islands regularly.

Ugh.

Yeah.

That's terrifying.

So they would have no problem getting there.

Right, so they probably just went wherever they smelled food.

Yeah.

They probably smelled something dead over there and just took a hop into the water. So all these various animals, the elephants could swim, the dragons could swim, the rats could figure out a way to get there, birds obviously can fly.

Yeah, bats, lots of bats, they can fly.

And the monkeys came on boats.

No, the monkeys.

They were introduced.

Were introduced, like a lot of other animals. I mean, the only mammals there, sizable mammals, are various species of mice and rats, and then there's the giant rat. You've got, what, pigs.

Right, we talked about all this.

We talked about pigs, yeah.

Well, the things that are introduced by people.

Yeah, a lot of them were introduced by people.

What year was this where they started getting introduced by people?

It varies, and it's controversial. I mean, there's like dogs, for example, there's some evidence that suggested that they haven't been there very, very long, several hundred to thousand years. But it seems likely to me they've been there longer. Pigs, there is a book in which I've written about all this stuff, but I can't remember now the details. Anyway, yeah, you know there are monkeys, porcupines, there are porcupines that were introduced from.

Interesting.

Western, yeah, and they're a game animal.

Really?

Yep.

Wow.

Oh, for sure. Well, they're ultimately rodents, like rats. So if you're going to eat giant rats, a porcupine is certainly also on the menu.

Interesting.

But yeah, you've got to know how to cook them and butcher them, probably.

Yeah, and kill them without getting jabbed.

That's, yeah, again, you need dogs for that. And they have special methods. Well, the dogs have to be clever if they're not going to get injured.

I've seen pictures of dogs with porcupine quills all over their face. It's so sad.

Yeah. Well, that can happen with tigers in India.

I've seen that as well. Look at this poor dog. Oh.

Oh, wow.

Oh, this poor dude.

Yeah, well, it's interesting you should be able to produce those straight away.

Oi, oi, oi.

Yeah.

So the point is, there's a lot of wildlife, and a lot of it came from somewhere else, including the monkeys. And we have no idea if these little hobbit people, we don't have any idea when they got there or how they got there. But it's not just there. But isn't there some evidence, or at least some stories of them from the Philippines as well?

Yeah, there's similar remains on Luzon Island, yeah.

Oh, how long ago was this discovered?

It was discovered after Floresiances.

Oh, so it's fairly recent.

Yeah, Luzonensis, that's called Homo luzonensis.

And it's a separate branch? It's a different animal?

It's a different species, yeah.

Wow.

But then there are, not sure the present state of interpretation on this one, but in China as well, in a place called Red Deer Cave, there's evidence for small hominoids living in the same region as Homo erectus, which was a much bigger hominin. Yeah, and then in Africa, you've got, again, since Floresiances, the discovery of a small species called Homo naladi.

But they're an interesting one, right? Because they buried their dead.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's right. They had a kind of an unusually elaborate, for their circumstances, symbolic culture, evidently.

Yes.

Yeah, nothing like that for Floresiances.

And evidence of stone tool use, too, correct?

Yeah, I believe so, yeah.

And so weren't they the ones that had a specific area in a cave where they would deposit their bodies?

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's a fascinating story.

Really interesting stuff. Because it makes you think, like, well, what else did they have? How long ago, and they were tiny, right?

Yeah, well, similar to Floresiances.

So there's evidence that this particular type of creature existed all over the world, or at least in many parts of the world.

Parts of Asia and Africa with naladi, yeah. Of course, the whole of the New World, South and North America, there's no evidence there for any kind of human or primate, except for South American monkeys.

And do we know if South American monkeys were indigenous, or were they?

They came from the Old World originally. I can't remember exactly how. I mean, this was, I guess, at a time when world geography was a bit different.

So they were introduced as well?

Yeah, not by humans, though, but they managed to get there. And they're quite different in many respects from Old World monkeys, because, well, the main difference, I guess, is the prehensile tail. They can actually use the tail as a kind of an extra limb, whereas no Old World monkey can do that.

Really?

Yeah.

The whole story of these creatures, to me, it is so captivating. I really can't get enough of it. And what I also thought was really interesting was that when they first found these bones of Homo floresiances, there was a lot of dismissing of it. And a lot of people thought that it was maybe humans that had some genetic abnormality.

That's right, very good, yeah. Yeah, no, somebody's done your research, or you've done your research.

I myself.

No, no, that's right. I'll tell you, paleoanthropologists themselves can be interesting characters. They can be very contentious for a fight among themselves.

Yeah, for sure.

And there are a few other academics that are like that.

Yeah.

But yeah, no, you're right. There was a member of the Indonesian, well, no, he wasn't a member of the Indonesian team, but a very senior Indonesian prehistorian archaeologist who was resentful of the fact he wasn't on the team, and he wasn't consulted early. But anyway, he dismissed this as a new Floresiances, as a new species.

Adamantly rejected the notion that these were a different species.

Has been. There was also the problem that these things, yeah, the Floresiances, of course, were small, small-bodied, which doesn't correlate with microcephaly, which just concerns their head.

Right.

And yeah, no, I mean, I don't think there's many people who support this. There is another bone of contention, though, so to speak. And that has to do with the classification of Homo floresiancis as Homo or not. And most paleoanthropologists still seem to support Homo. But there are some, including a guy called Chris Stringer at the National History Museum in London, who I very much respect, mainly because what he says agrees with what I think.

Yeah.

So, you know, something like a Jewish menorah, you know, the thing with the candles. You've got these things coming up side by side and terminating at the same point.

Which makes sense. We have that in everything else.

It happens in all other sorts of animals, yeah.

The idea that we would be isolate.

Well, we are, as humans, so used to thinking of ourselves as special, right? I mean, everything in our culture, our history, religion as well, suggests that. But no, so it's kind of ironic that you still find traces of this progressive linear view in certain statements made quite recently by paleoanthropologists.

Well, I think it's part of the problem with this, they adopt an idea, start saying that this is the fact, and then are very reluctant to change their position, especially if they've been teaching it, if they're professors, if they've written books. Look, what the clove is first thing. I forget the gentleman's name who found these stones that indicated that there was people in the Americas far earlier than that.

Oh, yes.

He was destroyed. I mean, they ruined this guy's reputation. They viciously attacked him, and it turns out he was correct.

Yes, no, this does happen.

He wasn't just correct, he was correct by a long shot. Like, they found evidence of things that were 10,000 years or close to it, 22,000 years, the White Sands, New Mexico footprints.

Right, right. Yeah, that date keeps being.

Keeps going.

Pushed further and further.

Further and further.

Going further.

Right, this is other weird evidence of, it looks like someone had broken apart Mastodon bones or mammoth bones. That's over 100,000 years ago.

Yeah, yeah, no, you're quite right. I want to say something in defense of science and scientists. Actually, I mean, they are conservative, you're right.

And they probably should be.

Exactly, exactly, what I was about to say.

Yeah.

Yeah, so, you know, I mean, there's a lot of uncertainty, obviously, in this field of endeavor that you can't rule out anything as being correct, including the prevailing view, at least for the time being. And it does take a lot to change things. And I think on the whole, quite rightly, yeah, I mean, with regard to what I've written, I don't argue, I don't attempt to argue that Floresiances or something deriving from Floresiances is definitely still around.

Right.

Some of those beings, I'm sure, are supernatural. That is to say, they don't exist. I mean, I'm thinking of things like forest spirits, various varieties of forest spirits which have their names and characteristics. But they are not like animals or modern humans, because they can't be perceived. Certainly, they can't be seen, they're invisible. And people say this.

Yes. So when you're talking to these people, is there evidence of psychedelic drug use amongst these people? You know what I mean? For the forest spirits and stuff like that.

I thought you were going to ask me if there's any evidence for my use of such substances in the field, but no.

I'll ask you that off air.

A bit of.

But I mean, when you hear people talking about forest spirits, you start thinking about people in the jungle that have psychedelic rituals, like in the Amazon, with ayahuasca.

Yeah, well, for one thing, rarely are these things the forest spirits have seen. You get the odd, well, you get a category of people, healers in part.

Shamans.

Shamans is not a bad description, yeah, who claim an ability to see things that other people can't.

But do they have a history of psychedelic drug use?

No.

Nothing?

No, no.

Because most cultures have some method of perturbing their consciousness.

Yeah.

Are they using fermented fruits and making any kind of alcohol?

Oh, yeah, making alcohol for sure.

Okay.

Palm wine, palm gin, very powerful stuff, good drink.

Right. Now, are they drunk when they're seeing these forest spirits?

No evidence that they are or were.

Right. But so is that the only documented substance that these people are taking on this island? Is there any particular plants that have any sort of hallucinogenic properties?

Well, certainly traditionally, not so much nowadays among the men, but until quite recently, they would regularly, habitually, excuse me, chew what's called beetle nut, no, yeah, it's not actually a nut, it's an areca nut, it's a palm nut, and beetle, which is either a leaf or a sort of pepper from a vine, together with slaked lime. And this is mildly narcotic.

What was that like?

It was pleasant. It turned my teeth black, as it does with the local people. It's kind of like, I don't know, smoking too many cigars in a row, or.

Okay, so it's like a strong stimulant.

Yeah, I never became physically ill in the stomach, but it made you feel good, like a lot of other things. I wasn't hallucinating. And yeah, so there's that, in addition to the.

You said slaked lime, what is that?

Slaked lime.

Slaked lime?

Yeah, what is that exactly? It has to do with the way it's produced. I mean, it comes out as a.

Here, Janie, you just pulled it up. It's calcium hydroxide powder or paste.

Yeah, I was going to say, it comes out as a kind of a white powder, like talcum powder, yeah. And you take a dab of that with your beetle pepper or leaf and your areca nut, chew it all up, it becomes red. I mean, the plant materials are green.

It's the fourth most commonly used addictive substance in the world, after alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine.

Yeah.

Isn't that wild?

I can't believe that.

That's wild.

Yeah. I don't think I became addictive, even though I had a red mouth a lot of the time.

Did it mess up your teeth?

It made them black.

That's it? But you could brush them off? Oh, wow, look at these people. Oh, that's nasty.

I'll tell you this, so you may not believe it, but I mean, I rarely brushed my teeth for two years on sumber.

Wow.

I was barely intact, my smoking as well.

Oh, boy.

You know, whatever. And I've still lived at the age of nearly 80, so there you go.

You were smoking cigarettes on the island by yourself? How'd you get them there?

Oh, there were cigarettes for sale.

Oh, they had them.

They were very good ones, yeah.

Okay.

And they make their own as well, they grow their own tobacco.

Okay. So there's nothing, my point was, there's nothing that causes hallucinations, so it's part of their culture.

I hope my insurance agent isn't listening to this. Sorry, what was your question?

Are you still smoking?

A small cigar, maybe five or six times a week.

Okay.

Yeah, after lunch only.

I get it.

No more than one a day. Some days, none. I've had one since Monday. No, I enjoy smoking cigars.

I do as well. So, but that was my point. Like, if there was something that would cause them to see things that maybe wouldn't be available under normal.

To other people.

Consciousness.

No, not really. And there's no delay, I mean, with some shamans, people call shamans, in other parts of the world, you have them making deliberate efforts to dissociate, to alter their consciousness.

Through ritual?

Well, it can be through percussion, drumming.

Chanting.

Chanting, yeah. It can be through substances, as you've described. Rigorous sex, even.

Rigorous.

Yeah.

But there's not like psychedelic mushrooms or anything that grows there?

On Flores, no.

Right.

Not that I'm aware of, no. I'm sure I'd have heard about them if there were. No, there are, of course, in other parts of the world, and used by shamans as well.

Of course.

Yeah.

So that was just my point with this, because you were talking about how there's things that they saw that clearly seemed to be mythological or just.

The spirits, yeah.

Fiction, the spirits, yeah. But then they also saw things that match up with these hobbit people.

Yeah, I must say, I mean, the Leo people certainly have these religious figures, if you want to call them that. And I tended to dismiss their accounts, which were often a bit towards the fantastic ends of things.

Did they have other fantastic accounts, not of primates, but of other things, other than forest spirits that also existed that seemed to be something that was fiction?

Seemed to be fiction, yeah. I mean, one case I go into, again, in the recent book, is a creature that we are told is very good at climbing trees. That's not fantastic, but it has multiple testicles, they tell us. The females as well as the males.

Females.

They come in two sexes. And it grows an extra pair every year.

Whoa.

When it's reached a limit, which I think is a dozen, two times six, it will climb a tree, wail all night, and be dead by the morning, or drop dead in the following morning. Now, that sounds pretty fantastic, I think you'd say.

Yeah, especially testicles on the ladies.

It turns out to be the palm civet, which is a well-known animal, and with some interpretation, has features that accord with all these exaggerated claims.

Have you ever had that coffee that they make out of the civet dung?

Oh, yes, yes, indeed, that's exactly the species, yeah.

Yeah, I've had that. It's very remarkably smooth coffee, but.

Yes, very expensive.

It's disconcerting to think that you're drinking coffee that came out of a civet's butt.

I guess so, but I guess there's weirder things that people eat, I think.

Certainly.

Or consume.

Yeah.

But yeah, no, the species name is hermaphroditus.

Really?

Which relates to certain glands both sexes possess, which can be mistaken for testicles, so there you go.

Oh, okay, so that's the origin.

That's the origin of the idea.

Interesting.

And I mean, I later discovered that this fantastic, well, I was pretty sure beforehand, but it later became clear that people put out here as one of those, and it was a palm civet, as I mentioned.

Right, so then you have to take into consideration what other things are they seeing that is either getting exaggerated or getting incorporated into the folklore, right? Like if they see just a particularly large monkey, and maybe at a distance, and maybe through thick brush, and then they decide, because monkeys will occasionally be bipedal for brief periods of time, chimpanzees as well.

Yeah, apes of course.

Yes.

The closest relative.

Yes. So it gets to the point where you go, okay, if you have 30 people that have these stories that seem credible, at least a few of those have to be BS, but it gets to the point where if you have enough of them, and they're so similar, and then you have bones, and then you don't just have bones there, but you have bones in the Philippines, you have bones in China, and you start, and in Africa, you start going, hey, maybe this is a real thing.

Yeah.

And then the real problem is, what's the ethical considerations if they captured one? Like if they capture a monkey, you could put the monkey in the zoo.

Yeah.

It gets real squirrely if they captured one of these things, and then they have to decide what to do with it, because like, what is that? It's not quite a monkey, and it's not quite a person.

Yeah, no, it's, well, between ape and human.

Yeah.

Using human in the sense of.

I would feel very bad if one of those was in the zoo. I feel bad when I see monkeys in a zoo.

Well, especially chimpanzees, sort of the higher apes.

It looks like they're in hell.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I agree with you. I'm very torn myself on this point. I mean, obviously, I'd partly like something like that to be discovered. I mean, it would.

From a scientific perspective, it'd be incredible.

From a scientific perspective, it would also kind of vindicate me, I guess you might say. But on the other hand, I think it would be much better if they still exist to leave them alone.

Right, but you would have to prove it. And how would you prove that they exist, other than, and especially in this day and age with AI video, it's almost impossible at this point to discern what's real and what's not.

Yeah, very right.

Yeah. But if they captured one of them, like, boy, I would feel bad. Like especially if it started making noises that sounded like a language, you know?

Oh, well, then it would be kind of easier, I guess, to, yeah, you definitely wouldn't put them in a zoo.

Right. Well, not only that, what are you going to do, even in terms of studying them? Like, do you decide to dart them for a short period of time and sedate them? And also there's complications to that. To sedate, who knows what they're allergic to? You could potentially kill them.

Yeah.

Accidentally while studying them.

No, I mean, that's an issue as well. But I would say the best way to study them would be through field research, a primatological field research, ala, what's her name, Jane Goodall.

Yes, yes, yes.

And various other ladies, including the one that lived with mountain gorillas. And yeah, long enough so they become habituated to you and so on. Yeah, probably would be better if a slightly built female took on that role.

Something non-threatening that would allow them.

Yeah, yeah.

To allow to come into their community.

Yeah, but they're not chimpanzees, or they weren't.

Right.

So I don't know, gosh, it really, I mean, we are used to dealing with all these conceptual boundaries, right, like human and animal and so on. And this would, yeah, this would present a real philosophical problem, a real conundrum.

Yeah, so Forrest Galant was telling me about a contemporary account of a woman who was an anthropologist who was, I just cannot remember where the village was, but this person had encountered something. Whoops.

Dude, I've got this woman name.

I got it. Yeah, here it is. I've got it. It's a woman named Sabine Kugler, who wrote this book called Child of the Jungle. Her parents were German missionaries, and in a super remote area of Western Papaw, so it was in New Guinea. He did an interview with her, and she said that she had seen these little people, and then she woke up in camp more than one time, and they were looming over her and around camp.

Yeah.

But this is a woman who is just like completely stunned encountering these tiny little people in New Guinea.

Yeah.

So are there accounts in New Guinea that are similar?

If I may ask, she was quite young at the time, or?

I don't know.

Don't know.

I mean, it's just something that Forrest sent me. He's a wildlife biologist, and he does a lot of work trying to find extinct species as well. He's looked for the thylacine multiple times.

The thylacine?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, so there's.

Interesting case, that one.

Right, so we have video of the last supposed thylacine that was alive in a zoo.

Yeah, 1936.

But there's quite a few credible reports of sightings.

Yeah, there are sightings, and if people aren't actually seeing them, there's that bigger, more fascinating problem of what they are seeing, or where this all comes from, yeah.

Going into this is Forrest's history, this is what he does.

Yeah.

He has a great YouTube channel, by the way.

Yeah, I don't.

He documents his journeys.

I think I've heard of the name.

Really?

I'm not particularly familiar following that up, but.

Fascinating, yeah. But the point is, like this woman told him the story, and like this story is like insane.

Yeah.

She actually encountered these. So is there a history of them in New Guinea as well?

I might just point out, not to appear too defensive, but I myself have been told similar stories by Flores Islanders, and I don't want to, I want to make clear that to my mind, that there's not as much difference as you would think between Flores Islanders and Westerners who report similar experiences. But you said New Guinea, Papua New Guinea, I think?

Yes.

Yeah. There are, again, in the highlands of that very big island, there are what are or used to be called human pygmies, pygmoid populations, who, yeah, there have been reports of those people showing up in sort of odd places and walking through human settlements as well.

Witnesses.

I'm writing a book on witches.

Are you really?

Yeah, no, that's another thing. In fact, I had some difficulty preparing for this interview because I'm working on the proofs, the final proofs and the index, and I did pieces recently on Halloween, and so.

Oh, wow.

That was just a Freudian slip, yeah.

Oh, no worries.

Witnesses, I meant.

So what are the descriptions? Are they human, like heroes?

They are human. They are human.

So they're just like tiny pygmies.

You know, it's interesting, they don't wear a lot of clothes, as a lot of people in New Guinea don't, or didn't. So whether a bodily hair shows up more than it might do, otherwise, can't recall those details, but they are small and they are dark, like most New Guineans. And yeah, well, to be classified as pygmoid, they have to be the average male height has to be less than 1.5 meters, which is like, well, less than five feet, or four foot eleven, that kind of.

So these are.

So they're like African pygmies.

But these are people. This is very different.

They're extraordinarily different.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, not to confuse with Floresiances.

So that may be what this woman encountered. So that might be.

Very possible. We'd need more details of what she remembers seeing.

Are these documented populations?

Yes.

So this is something that we know exists currently.

Oh, for sure. I mean, there are detailed ethnographic, cultural, anthropological details of their socioeconomic systems and everything else.

This is a totally different kind of thing.

Yeah, of course, they speak languages like the rest of us, yeah.

Okay. So as far as little tiny hairy creatures, you said Sumatra, the Philippines, Indonesia.

Yeah.

Where else? Where else are these credible witness accounts of people experiencing these kind of little tiny ape-like creatures?

Yeah, well, my first inclination is to say, well, Flores and I guess Sumbawa, a neighboring island, and Sumatra as well, the Orang Pendek. But there are reports from North America of by native North Americans of something that sounds familiar, similar.

Right.

It can refer specifically to, mainly to the head hair. But anyway, yeah, no, there are, well, there's one report, I was talking about Sasquatch, which I find fascinating from 1884. It even appeared in an early newspaper in that neck of the woods about a creature that was given the name Jacko. And I can send references to that if you're interested, but that sounded.

I was actually just.

Fairly genuine.

Say it again, what is the name of it?

Which the.

The creature? What is it called?

It was called Jacko. It's just kind of a nickname, which is sometimes a nickname for human beings, like Jack.

Yeah, so Daniel Boone had a description in his memoirs of an encounter that he had with a giant creature that he wound up killing. Do you know that story?

Probably. I know it's Daniel Boone and David Crockett were supposed to have killed a bear when he was only three.

I don't know which one it is, but Daniel Boone.

This was a song on the radio when I was about five years old.

He had an encounter, supposedly, that he documented with him and his son, where they had shot and killed a giant human-like creature. And it was, I believe it was over eight feet tall or nine feet tall, some enormous thing that had a different anatomy than humans. Like instead of having a rib cage, it had like a large plate of bone over its chest area.

Yeah.

I mean, apparently, I sent this to my friend Steve Ranella, and he said Boone also had some tall tales. So I don't know. I don't know how much of this is true or not true.

Yeah.

But the whole Sasquatch thing has always fascinated me because of the amount of different names that Native Americans had for this particular creature. And they didn't have a lot of fake creatures. They didn't have descriptions of things that just didn't exist. And they had a lot of names for a wild man that lives in the woods that's very tall and hairy.

Yeah. No, you're right. In fact, there was a rather interesting paper written on that very issue by a guy, he's at the University of Washington.

Meldrum?

His name, not Meldrum, no, his name, he's long gone now. His name was Wayne Suttles. You'd be interested in the article, just looking at the different names and their derivations and all that kind of thing. No, Meldrum, another person who's passed.

Yes.

Yeah, no, I sort of was acquainted with him for a while.

He was a true believer.

Yeah, but at the same time, he was, you know, his arguments, whatever the basis, are pretty solid. He was a serious physical anthropologist.

Well, you know who really believed in it, at least at one point she did, was Jane Goodall.

Yes, so I understand. Again, I don't know much of the details of that.

She gave interviews where she was saying that she's certain it exists.

Yeah.

I mean, this was quite a long time ago, you know?

Yeah.

So who knows if.

I don't know, she's gone now, of course.

Yeah, but before she died, I don't know if she changed her opinion, or she's probably tired of talking about it, because that might have been the only thing people wanted to talk about.

Yeah.

Tell me more about Bigfoot.

Yeah. No, I mean, there's a number of other primatologists and people who study primates in the field who have also subscribed to, if not Bigfoot, then the Yeti, a guy called Vern Reynolds, who's at Oxford at one time, I think. And a guy called John Napier, who wrote a very interesting book called, I guess, Bigfoot, back in, I don't know, the early '70s.

Yeah.

Yeah, so, you know, I mean, it's not the case that all scientists, to use that broad category, dismiss immediately. And in fact, I know paleoanthropologists, biologists as well, who find my arguments credible. But it's very interesting, you know, they'll never say so in print.

No.

No, because, and again, you know, I talk about conservatism and so on. Somewhat understandably, they like to keep this in a separate kind of.

Completely understandably.

Compartment.

Especially if you're an academic.

Sure.

If you start saying you believe in Bigfoot, you're immediately put into the coop category.

Well, that is that, but more practically speaking, I guess your funding will.

Yes.

Quite rapidly dry up.

Exactly.

So.

Yeah, there's a fine line between eccentric and foolish.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, however eccentric I might be, I'm pleased to report that I never had, as a cultural anthropologist, particularly studying other people's experiences, beliefs, values, all this kind of thing, I never had that problem from my colleagues, or I may have been more ignored than I would have been otherwise, but I've never had to put up with what.

What's fascinating.

What Meldrum did, for example.

Well, Meldrum was like a full believer. I asked him if he could chop one of your fingers off to find out if Bigfoot was real, would you do it? He said yes. I was like, oh my God, man.

Yeah.

But the point is, it's like as a cultural anthropologist, it is absolutely, at least the mythology of these things is absolutely a part of culture. And a fascinating aspect of it, because there's so many stories and they're so uniform. It's all like eight foot plus, nine foot tall, enormous, hairy, ape-like creature that seems to be very human in a lot of ways. It doesn't have the arm length and leg length of an ape. It seems to be built more like a large, hairy person.

Yeah. Well, I would agree with you, except for one particular. These details, well, talking about Flores, these details don't show up in so much in what we call mythology or myths, or even legends to make that distinction. The naturalistic descriptions come from, well, mostly from supposed eyewitness encounters.

Right.

If you look at general knowledge, then you do start to get kind of fantastic features, right? And also secondhand accounts, they passed man to hand. They kind of tend more in the supernatural direction, which in itself is fascinating. It's a kind of evidence for the eyewitnesses especially, having had an actual experience and referring to a natural creature.

Yes.

Yeah, I mean, there's always.

If they had found that in North America, like if they had found a Bigfoot evidence, it would change the whole conversation. Then the conversation would be, is this an extinct, like imagine if they had found some Bigfoot jawbone in a cave somewhere that was an unknown primate that is 8,000 plus years old.

Yeah.

Then you'd have to go, okay, now what are we talking about? Are we talking about something that's extinct, or are we talking about a very small population of intelligent creatures that has thus far evaded being captured on film and.

Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, that would, I mean, it would get a lot more publicity than Floresiances, which.

Oh my goodness.

Happening in the modern West and in the US, or even Canada. It would have the same coverage.

Well, the problem is, unlike Homo floresiances or florescienses.

Florescienses.

There are so many hoaxes in America. There are so many gods like, I found Bigfoot, he's in my freezer, and like a big frozen doll that they're saying.

Yeah.

There's like so many kooks that have said, and so many people have done it for stories and just to create a hoax.

Yeah. Well, this is something that I, well, it's the first thing, one of the first things I discuss in the book is the different cultural contexts, circumstances, of on the one hand, people in Flores, ordinary villagers, reporting what they once saw. The culture or the circumstances, all that kind of stuff on the one hand, and the culture, the socioeconomic system in which people who claim to have observed Bigfoot live are different kinds of interests.

Right.

By telling me what they've seen, whatever it may have been.

Right.

Whereas with Bigfoot in North America, then you become rich and famous.

I don't know about rich, but you probably.

Maybe not rich, but famous.

You might be able to parlay it. I mean, look, you could get on finding Bigfoot. I mean, they did, how many seasons did they do a finding Bigfoot? They never found Bigfoot.

Never did, no.

Spoiler alert.

No.

You watch a lot of hours-long television waiting for them to find it, and they never find it.

Well, that's an excellent point, because there's never been such a search on Flores.

Right.

And no local interest in such a thing either.

That's probably pure, it's probably better that they don't do it that way. I think, but a real true scientific search, not a reality show search, would be absolutely fascinating.

Yeah. Yeah, no, and.

Maybe Forrest would be interested in doing it. He's fascinated by the subject.

Worth doing is what I'm saying. Yeah.

Certainly worth doing. Now, when you were doing this whole investigation of Bigfoot, did you find any evidence or anything, any stories, anything that you thought was compelling?

Well, I mentioned the 1884 report, which was actually published in one of the few newspapers in British Columbia at that time. This is a wild frontier, right? In fact, the thing that was seen was actually, yeah, no, it was reputedly captured alive, that's right. But it was when the Canadian Pacific Railway was going through, and this was about a hundred odd miles from the coast in a very, a place called Yale, as a matter of fact, or near a place called Yale.

How small was it?

I think it was maybe four foot two, something like that.

So it's similar in size to Homo floresiances.

A bit bigger, a bit bigger.

A little bigger.

Yeah, but certainly small for a modern human or for a Neanderthal, for that matter.

But there are North American or Native American tribes that have stories of small, hairy people that live in the woods as well.

There are. Well, just the one at any rate that I mentioned earlier. So yeah, obviously by comparison with the Indonesian stuff.

What did they wind up doing with this? Because photography existed at the time, right?

It did, but I'm not sure how many cameras were.

Right.

Were available. And so no pictures were taken.

Jamie's got it here.

It's just a story of a potential hope.

Oh, four foot seven, I was wrong.

Okay.

Anyway, shorter than that.

So a young ape-like creature of Sasquatch allegedly captured alive near Yale, British Columbia, Canadian Pacific Railway crew, first published in the Daily British Columnist newspaper on July 4th, 1884. The story is widely considered by modern historians and cryptozoologists to be a work of historical journalistic fiction. A newspaper hoax, which is very possible too, because they did a lot of those back then.

Yeah.

Maybe, who knows. So there's that. But is there anything else that you thought was interesting?

I, yeah, certainly there were some writers on Bigfoot, like John Green, who's a newspaper man, in fact, in the Fraser Valley there. He was not quite so dismissive. The main reason I think the cryptos would dismiss Jacker was because he wasn't big enough for a Bigfoot.

Well, also because newspapers would routinely make up stories. Especially.

They would, yeah. But you know the eyewitnesses were all named, including one of the top bosses of the CP Railway. So I'm sure if he'd want to stick his neck out so far, or indeed, you know why he would want to do it. Whatever became of it is a mystery. It sort of disappeared. I know that there's a book published a couple of decades back by a guy whose name escapes me.

A four foot seven chimpanzee?

Well, there you are. Now, I think it had longish head hair as well. But anyway.

Really?

Yeah. But it was, by all indications, naked, although this was not mentioned in the report, kind of interestingly. Bearing in mind this was the height of the Victorian era, you know, where you didn't mention such thing. But yeah, no, the best this author, reasonable author could do is say that it was an escaped chimpanzee. Now, I mean, one thing one can be pretty certain of, very certain of, is that there were no circuses or zoos in that area.

Right.

I don't think there was a zoo anywhere in British Columbia. I may be.

Very remote.

Maybe wrong. Well, yeah, it was a brand new, it was a colony at that time.

Yeah.

It wasn't part of, well, I guess it had just become, had it?

And that area, British Columbia in particular, has a lot of those Sasquatch sightings.

Well, this is the kind of the classic domain of these things, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. I've got to say, no circuses either, I don't think.

No, no circuses. But so do you think that there's a possibility that something like that, at least at one point in time, existed in North America?

I don't want to rule it out. As I say, I mean, the Flores ape men are much more credible because of the fossil evidence and the whole kind of ecosystem.

Of course.

And the region of the world where they are, existence of other primates, if not on the island, then pretty close by, whole evolutionary history of that region. And again, not only are there fossils, but there's a close match between what the fossils indicate and what my colleagues in the field, Leo Villagers, indicate. So yeah, you've got to keep a bit of an open mind anyway.

Yes. Well, it's also my problem with Bigfoot is that it's fun. It's fun to believe.

Yeah.

And so I start looking at my own judgment and going, oh, stop.

Yeah.

Being silly, wasting time.

Yeah. No, I don't find Bigfoot credible. And again, I've said so in print in an earlier book. It's interesting that 1884, I mean, that was a time when great apes, gorillas, and chimpanzees were becoming widely known to a Western public.

Right.

Whereas they hadn't been before.

But the discovery of mountain apes by Westerners wasn't until the late 19th century, right?

The mountain gorilla, I think, was the very early 20th century, was it?

Was it?

Yeah. And the other, the Lolland gorilla as well, was relatively recent.

Yeah, they were thought to be a myth.

Yeah.

Which is quite hard for us to imagine today.

Well, yes and no. I mean, if you look at the culture history and so on, the historical setting and all the rest of it, don't forget Darwin, his ideas only became current in 1859. But I was going to say, with regard to, yeah, kind of general knowledge about apes, these were something new.

That's a part of the problem.

It created it, yeah.

Bears also sometimes walk bipedally.

Yeah.

If you see them in the distance, if it's dusk, if it's very, yeah, if it's very dense woods, it's very difficult to discern what you're actually looking at. And then the mind plays tricks on you and you start.

Indeed.

I did a show with my friend Duncan where we went up into the Pacific Northwest to go looking for Bigfoot, and we were hanging out with Bigfoot hunters. And most of them just seemed like guys that are looking for a hobby. But there was one woman that I talked to, one woman who had an encounter, and I don't know what she saw, obviously, but she was very, at least the way she was communicating, felt very rational, very sane. She was a smart person. She wasn't stupid. And she knew the area.

Yeah.

The problem also with the Pacific Northwest, in that particular area we're talking about, like Mount Rainier, it's so dense that the trees, the way I describe it, it's like a box of Q-tips.

Yeah.

Like, it's insanely dense. You can't see anything.

No.

And the forest floor is filled with pine needles and leaves that have landed and compacted over and over and over. So you're not going to get any footprints.

No. No, indeed.

And these things can walk quietly, because the ground is very soft and everything's wet, because it's just this tremendous rainforest. It's incredibly rich with life. And then you go, OK, I could see how something could hide in here. Like, you're not going to find things. Like, you could only, like, even if you had a team of people, first of all, you'd be making so much noise, they would smell you a mile away.

I say a smell would be a factor as well, yeah.

Yeah, smell you a mile away.

Yeah.

And it's so dense. Like, the kind of forest up there is so incredibly dense that seeing something in the distance would be virtually impossible if you're actually in the woods.

Yeah. Yeah.

But the question is, like, if it's something that, look at that guy.

Have you seen this guy before?

Oh, yes, indeed. In fact.

JoJo, the dog face, boy, he was around.

Some of those pictures are in an earlier book I wrote, yeah.

Yeah, there's people that have that condition today.

Yeah, hypertrychosis.

I stumbled across this guy from this. This is Julia Pastrana. She was around from 1860 and died in 1865 in Moscow, but is from Sinaloa, Mexico.

Yeah.

And was studied left and right by all sorts of people. They called her all sorts of things.

So she was from Mexico. Look at her features. That's crazy. The hair all over her face?

Yeah.

That's wild.

Small. Was a performer?

Whoa.

Her body is still being displayed somewhere.

Oh.

Yeah. But as I'm hearing all these descriptions, I'm like, this would pass for that description you're saying, kind of in some way or other.

Sure.

Sure. If you saw that, if she was tiny and she was running through the woods.

A Bigfoot, you mean, yeah.

Or you know any sort of forest person in some of these other places.

I guess, but then you have to ask why would anybody like that want to be running through the woods in some remote place, presumably naked? How would they get there? How would they get home after?

She was supposedly sold by her uncle after her mother died.

Yeah, no, there's some unfortunate stories attached to these.

Well, didn't they put a man in the Bronx Zoo? There was a man that they put in the Bronx Zoo who was, I think he was a pygmy.

Ah.

And they literally had him in the zoo, like, for observation so people could see him.

The Bronx, it's not impossible. I know there were.

Same time period.

Yeah. There were pygmies, pygmy families who were exhibited at, was it a World's Fair in, where the heck was that? Chicago, St. Louis, somewhere in the United States. Yeah.

It was the same one.

St. Louis World's Fair.

Yeah, same guy.

Yeah. Oh, yes. Booties. Yeah, this is one group of so-called pygmies. Let me tell you about pygmies. One hesitates a bit because the name is no longer politically correct. But we're talking about fully modern humans. Their brains and heads are not as small as their bodies. OK, so their brain size would be comparable to anybody else.

Interesting.

So quite different from something like Homo floresiensis. But the point I wanted to make was that before a guy called Schweinfurth, a German explorer, was able to document the actual existence of African pygmies around the middle of the 19th century. I think it was 1847, so exactly 100 years before I was born.

It's fascinating when we think of, like, how little people knew about the natural world just a couple of hundred years ago.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, indeed, that's a good point. I want to just correct myself. I said before, gorilla were discovered. They were well known to local people in Africa.

Of course. Right. Discovered by the Western world.

With a very ethnocentric approach, which, again, is a matter of habit, right?

Yeah.

I didn't mean to say that. And yeah, likewise with conservative scientists, you get into modes of thought that are not easy to alter. Yeah.

Well, listen, I really enjoyed talking to you. And I'd love to talk to you about witches when that book is done, too.

Oh, wow.

Because that's another very fascinating subject.

April Fool's Day, 1st of April is when there's an official publication date that you can order copies now.

What is it called?

It's called The Wicked Witch. And then there's a subtitle, which is Origins of an Enduring Worldwide Belief. Because one of my main aims is to show that there are very few cultures anywhere that don't have a belief that corresponds very closely, even in the smallest particulars, to what we understand by witches in the West. And I would immediately point out that I don't believe in witches.

100%.

Yeah.

So let's plan on doing that again. We'll do another podcast sometime after the book is out.

Yeah, OK.

And we'll talk about that.

OK.

All right.

Next time, make sure you get me a flight to Austin that gives me more connection time from Houston, because I missed my flight yesterday.

Oh, did you?

Yeah.

Oh, sorry. Yeah. OK, we'll do that. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it.

Well, thank you very much. You gave me the opportunity.

Really fun conversation.

Yeah, no, it's been extremely enjoyable. And I'm very impressed by your question.

Oh, thank you. I'm very impressed by your work.

Thank you.

Perfect. All right. Bye, everybody.