Could a tiny, hobbit-like ‘ape man’ have survived for a million years on a tiny Indonesian island… and still be alive today?
The idea sounds like the stuff of Hollywood fantasy, but anthropologist Professor Gregory Forth has spoken to dozens of local people who believe they have seen the tiny ‘ape-man’ in the flesh on the remote island of Flores.
A recent sighting by tourists could add more fuel to the idea that a possible human ancestor has survived for millennia.
What makes the sightings even more remarkable is that Flores is where, in 2003, researchers discovered remnants of an ancient species of tiny humans 3ft 7in tall who were believed to have gone extinct 50,000 years ago.
Forth told DailyMail.com that he had heard stories about tiny ‘ape men’ from the local ‘Lio’ people on the island long before the remains of ‘Homo floresiensis’ were found, suggesting locals had not made up their stories after being inspired by that find.
The remote island of Flores is the 10th largest island in Indonesia, and is home to Komodo dragons as well as the Flores giant rat, the world’s largest: with mountain forests sloping steeply down to the sea, the inland areas of Flores are lightly populated.
Professor Forth talked for decades to the Lio people, most of whom work as subsistence farmers and live near the coast.
Dozens of them had stories of a similar-sounding creature, half-way between an ape and a man – but smaller than a human.
Could a tiny, hobbit-like ‘ape man’ have survived for a million years on Flores?
The island of Flores is where the remnants of an ancient species of tiny humans just three foot seven tall and believed to have gone extinct 50,000 years ago
Another local tribe had similar stories of a tiny ape man, but they believed they had been wiped out years ago, Forth explained.
The Lio people said that the creature was hairier than humans, walked upright, but had an ape-like face.
The Lio people call the creature the ‘lai ho’a’, and Forth has personally talked to around 30 people who believe they have seen at least one of the man-like mammals.
Forth’s book, ‘Between Ape and Human: An Anthropologist on the Trail of a Hidden Hominoid,’ aimed to answer the question of what the Lio people were talking about when they described tiny, ape-like creatures in the mountains of Flores.
Forth told DailyMail.com, ‘I first came across talk about things that sounded physically primitive humans when I first began research on Flores 40 years ago in 1984 ‘
A local villager explores the caves where the remains of homo floriensis were found
On Flores, the secluded island’s inhabitants tend to live near the coast
‘What could explain their conviction? What they describe is uncannily similar to the reconstructions of Homo floresiensis. It’s a very small bodied, physically primitive member of the homo group.’
Forth says that, contrary to other folk tales on the island about spirits, the descriptions of the tiny ape-man were naturalistic, and the Lio people spoke about them quite differently to their tales of spirits, which were invisible and had supernatural powers.
Forth said: ‘The descriptions all had a fixed form: it varied, as you would expect from different observers, but at the same time, all the different accounts lent plausibility to this idea there might be some kind of natural species.
Forth says that while a couple of individuals he spoke to seemed less trustworthy, several of the sightings not only did the narrator seem trustworthy, the description also seemed to be relatively realistic, if there were a species of tiny human living in uninhabited parts of the island.
Homofloriensis was vegetarian, meaning it’s more likely that the island could support another ‘ape man’.
A sculpted model of what homo floresiensis might have looked like in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History
Forth conducted eight visits to the Lio region between 2005 and 2018, and ‘began to question whether we were not the only member of the genus homo living on the planet today.’
Professor Forth, an anthropologist, talked for decades to the Lio people
Forth acknowledges that it’s possible that the ‘ape man’ might be a new and unknown species of monkey, or an uncontacted population of modern humans.
But due to lack of other evidence for either of these ideas, says that the best hypothesis is that a creature similar to an ‘ape man’ might exist.
Flores concluded his research in 2018, and suffered a stroke in a plane over the mid-Pacific, which has meant that he has not continued his research, but says that he has had ‘interesting reports’ from other people in the area since.
He said, ‘Two young men from the UK, as a matter of fact, had been to Flores, mostly on a snorkeling holiday. And they, they climbed a mountain which I’m familiar with, and they claim they saw something that sounded very much like, very much like the ape men.’
Forth said that the two young men had not read his book before visiting the island, and initially thought they had come across a new species of monkey or ape – but found his book and contacted him.
On Flores, the Lio people still largely live by subsistence farming
In 2016, further research found teeth and bits of bones from 700,000 years ago, from a smaller humanoid which could be ancestral to Homo floresiensis.
Forth says that the new find suggests that if there is an ‘ape man’ on Flores, it and its ancestors may have been there for up to a million years.
Forth says that he still communicates with people around the story, although he has not researched the idea further since retiring after his stroke – and that he now feels that he himself is part of the story, an anthropologist who in his old age has been bold enough to ‘go rogue’.
