#2577 - Gregory Forth

I’ve been hooked on the Flores “hobbit” story since the early two-thousands. Homo floresiensis was found on an Indonesian island that feels like it could still keep a hell of a lot hidden in its steep jungle.

The pronunciation is flo-re-see-en-sis. The fossils were uncovered in 2003 and revealed the following year, but I began working on Flores in 1984 as a cultural anthropologist, concerned with language, belief, and ordinary life rather than ancient people.

Almost immediately, Nage people told me of small humanlike beings once living in a cave high on a volcano, perhaps gone two or three centuries earlier. Later, in Lio country, I heard of similar creatures that some people said were not gone at all.

That’s the wild part: you had local accounts for years before bones of this strange little hominin turned up. And the archaeology pushes the mystery way back.

Researchers found jaw and tooth pieces in central Flores roughly seven hundred thousand years old, with objects interpreted as tools. There may be tool-like stones nearing a million years, though experts disagree over whether all were deliberately modified. You cannot assign a tool tradition to a species merely because it is nearby; you need bones tightly associated with artifacts.

The Flores fossils show a very small-bodied creature, perhaps three to four feet high, sharing the island with pygmy stegodons, elephant relatives about cow-sized. The image is little people bringing down miniature elephants, but recent bone work points more toward Komodo dragons killing or opening carcasses, with possible stone marks from later meat removal.

And modern humans may have overlapped with them. If the first dates had really put Homo floresiensis near twelve thousand years ago, that would’ve been nuts.

Those dates were revised to around fifty or sixty thousand years. Fossils give us a latest known date, not necessarily the moment a species disappeared. Flores had few native land mammals; deer, pigs, dogs, and goats arrived with people, and feral animals became dragon prey. Humans may, in a sense, have helped sustain Komodo dragons after the stegodons vanished.

My first purpose on Flores was not cryptozoology. In the eighties, many communities were subsistence cultivators, though hunting was valued by men. The earliest Nage tale concerned Abu Gogo, supposedly destroyed by Nage ancestors. It has acquired story motifs, but people did not frame Abu Gogo as forest spirits. They insisted these were animals.

When I reached Lio in the early two-thousands, I began hearing first-hand encounter reports almost exactly when Homo floresiensis was about to become public news. A German missionary’s Lio dictionary, based on work from the 1920s and published in 1933, contains the name Lai Hoa and examples consistent with later descriptions. It is difficult to say the idea began with fossil publicity.

I recorded a little over thirty claimed encounters while speaking with perhaps one hundred and twenty people about local knowledge. Not all impressed me. Sightings near settled coasts sounded more compatible with monkeys; the stronger accounts were usually in isolated high mountain forest.

A folklore tradition can absorb exaggeration and misidentification, but one honest encounter out of thirty would still be a big deal if the creature were real.

Quite. I do not claim certainty. Lio people recognize invisible spirit beings, which I do not regard as animals, but their ape-men are visible, embodied creatures. I found no local psychedelic practice that neatly explains them. And I do not accept every remarkable account: a real palm civet’s anatomy was magnified into an extraordinary local tale.

Two British hikers contacted me after a 2019 mountain sighting. They had not read my work. Interviewed separately, one remembered a small upright humanlike figure; the other an unusually large monkey. That spread of interpretation resembles local reports.

A proper search would need fit people accustomed to steep country, local knowledge, primatologists, zoologists, cameras, and probably drones. A Dutch colleague has begun exploring that possibility. I’m nearly eighty and no longer climbing those slopes, but careful investigation is justified—not promised to succeed.

And if somebody found one, it gets philosophically messy fast. You wouldn’t want to stick a being that might be between ape and human in a zoo. With AI making footage easier to fake, proof is hard—but darting or capturing it could be worse.

I’m torn. Discovery would be extraordinary, and perhaps vindicate me a little, but leaving them alone may be preferable. The ideal would be long-term, noninvasive observation, like primate research, though we cannot assume they would behave like chimpanzees.

The fossil record leaves room for humility. We keep finding unexpected branches—Denisovans, Homo luzonensis, Homo naledi—and fossils are unbelievably unlikely to form.

Human evolution is not a ladder leading inevitably to us; it is more like a branching bush. Some researchers argue floresiensis may be outside Homo, from a far older lineage. Either way, seven hundred thousand years on Flores makes confinement to one little cave implausible. How anything arrived remains a puzzle: there were no known land bridges, but over immense time, improbable things happen.

That’s why I find this irresistible. It’s not that every hairy-person story is evidence, but Flores has fossils, distinctive ecology, and long-running reports that predate the media spectacle. That is very different from your average guy saying Bigfoot lives in his freezer.

Villagers on Flores have no comparable incentive to impress me. Still, my argument is modest: some Lio encounter accounts may rest on genuine experiences of an unknown natural creature. That possibility needs explaining.

I loved this. And when your witches book lands, we’ve got to do this again.

It’s called The Wicked Witch, due out on April first. I’m not saying witches are real; accusations and beliefs in harmful supernatural power certainly are. And next time, please arrange a little more connection time in Houston—I missed my flight getting here.