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Noted Anthropologist Tells Rogan Indonesian Villagers Described 'Hobbits' Before Scientists Found Their Bones

Published by ZeroHedge · United States 6 h ago
To be or not to be human? That's a question some scholars still feel is up for debate when it comes to Homo floresiensis. STEPHEN HIRD/Reuters/Corbis
To be or not to be human? That's a question some scholars still feel is up for debate when it comes to Homo floresiensis. STEPHEN HIRD/Reuters/Corbis · ZeroHedge

Detailed summary

Noted Anthropologist Tells Rogan Indonesian Villagers Described 'Hobbits' Before Scientists Found Their Bones Canadian anthropologist Gregory Forth told Joe Rogan this week that…

Canadian anthropologist Gregory Forth told Joe Rogan this week that villagers on the Indonesian island of Flores were describing small, ape-like "hobbit" creatures to him more than a year before scientists announced the bones of Homo floresiensis, the extinct human relative nicknamed the hobbit, and that he thinks the creatures could still be alive in the island's mountains. Forth, who wrote the 2022 book Between Ape and Human, appeared on episode #2577 of The Joe Rogan Experience, released Thursday.

Forth said he began fieldwork on Flores in 1984 and first heard stories of small, human-like creatures that year, among the Nage people in the middle of the island, who described them as extinct for two or three hundred years. Further east, among the Lio people, the stories were of creatures "still around, rare, but still present." He told Rogan he recorded "over 30 reports of encounters, some of them not terribly credible, others, you know, a dozen or so much more interesting", and that the less credible ones tended to come from the coast, where people could have mistaken monkeys for the creatures.

The sequence is what Forth leans on. Rogan asked how the first account he heard compared with the bones. Forth answered that it came "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." The fossils were announced in October 2004. He also said the Lio name for the creature appears in a Lio-German dictionary researched in the 1920s and published in 1933, which he took as a sign the notion "hadn't come from the fossil discovery." In all, he said he spoke to "well over 120, 130 people."

Forth also covered the fossil record. He described a decades-long search in central Flores that finally turned up jaw fragments and teeth "far older than Floresiensis, going back about 700,000 years ago", which he said are presumed to be possible ancestors of the hobbit.

Peter Brown, who…

Forth…

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