Anthropology
Related: About this forumAnthropologist Believes An Ancient Human Species May Have Been Sighted On Flores Island
Theyre scared of us, locals told the anthropologist, and were scared of them.
JAMES FELTON
Senior Staff Writer
Feb 23, 2023 8:53 AM
Did they survive 50,000 years longer than we thought? Image credit: Christopher Mazmanian/Shutterstock.com
A retired anthropologist has revealed a little more about sightings of a Hobbit-like species by the locals of Flores Island.
In 2003, archaeologists looking for evidence of the migration of modern humans from Asia to Australia stumbled across a small, fairly complete skeleton of an extinct human species on the Indonesian island of Flores, which came to be known as Homo floresiensis. Or, as it became more commonly known, the Hobbit, after the small, breakfast-guzzling creatures from J.R.R. Tolkein's The Hobbit.
The species was initially thought to have survived until relatively recently, around 12,000 years ago, before further analysis pushed that date back to around 50,000 years. But one retired professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta says there's evidence that the species' continued existence may have been overlooked, and the Hobbit may still be alive today, or at least within living memory.
In an opinion piece for The Scientist promoting his book Between Ape and Human, Gregory Forth argues that palaeontologists and other scientists have overlooked Indigenous knowledge and accounts of an "ape-man" living in the forests of Flores.
More:
https://www.iflscience.com/anthropologist-believes-an-ancient-human-species-may-have-been-sighted-on-flores-island-67668
COL Mustard
(6,885 posts)Marjorie Taylor Greene. Glad I didn't see that ugly mug first thing this morning!
Judi Lynn
(162,379 posts)Joinfortmill
(16,397 posts)JoeOtterbein
(7,788 posts)Thanks for posting!
Crazyleftie
(458 posts)is almost 2 mil
sounds like another Big Foot legend
cab67
(3,219 posts)...it's unlikely. Really, really, really unlikely. In spite of its terrain and forest cover, Flores just isn't big enough to hide a population of hominids.
That's not to say that local observations should be ignored. People living in central and west Africa were well aware of gorillas and okapis long before western explorers "discovered" them. But the Congo Basin is many times larger than Flores, and between its climate end endemic diseases (especially malaria), Europeans didn't really make it very far into the interior until the 19th century. It wasn't really that long before they saw gorillas and okapis.
Indeed, this could be an example of a sort of cultural "memory" of Homo floresiensis, assuming H. sapiens arrived before its extinction. There are other possible examples. Communities in Madagascar describe mythical animals that, in many ways, resemble some of the extinct megafauna, including a gorilla-sized lemur.
Several years ago, some colleagues were excavating in some caves on a West Indian island. The locals wouldn't go anywhere near the caves because of the ghosts or evil spirits they claimed lived in them. When asked, the locals described these spirits as about 3 feet tall, pale, and making a sort of long moaning sound. During their excavations, the colleagues found the remains of a large flightless owl that appeared to have gone extinct fairly recently - perhaps as recently as the arrival of Europeans (voluntarily) and Africans (involuntarily). The closest living relative of this particular owl is pale and makes a sort of moaning hoot, so it's possible that early sightings of the now-extinct owl formed the basis of existing folklore.
(I don't remember which island was involved here. Several islands in the West Indies had flightless owls, each one descended from a different flying owl ancestor. All the coolest animals that ever existed are extinct.)
The story of the Rukh in Arabian folklore might be based on sightings of the extinct elephant bird, which though flightless and thus unable to carry off an elephant, was nonetheless a huge bird - much bigger than an ostrich - that lived in Madagascar possibly as late as the early period of Arabic contact.
(I described an extinct horned crocodile from Madagascar a number of years ago. It's called Voay robustus. It lived alongside the elephant bird. Alas, there don't appear to be any stories, Arabic or Malagasy, with such a creature.)
Behemoth and Leviathan in Job are generally agreed to be based on elephants and crocodiles, respectively. And the unicorn may have been based, at least in part, on stories told by travelers of Indian elephants, which (unlike their African relatives) have only one horn. (The unicorn described in the travels of Marco Polo is almost certainly based on the Sumatran or Javan rhino.)
So although I don't buy the argument that an earlier species of human persists on Flores, memories of ancient encounters may linger in stories told by people currently living there, nor would I be surprised that people on Flores might sometimes interpret unusual sightings in light of these stories.
Before anyone accuses me of being dismissive - that's not the case at all. I'm just realistic about the chances, and there are plenty examples, in a variety of cultures, of stories that might reflect long-ago encounters with unfamiliar animals. Or people.