Joe Rogan Experience #2577 - Gregory Forth

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That's drink a g1.com slash Joe The Joe Rogan experience 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 Florence? Florence Yeah, so it's like floor and then the answers right I've been fascinated from 2003 when it was announced when they well when it wasn't announced they discovered it in 2003 September 2003 announced October 2004 so so For people that don't know what we're talking about is the supposed hobbit people from the island of horrors a very small tiny it's in the Homogeneous, right? So that's right relative of human beings. That's what they that's a little fella right there 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 on Flores as an anthropologist a cultural anthropologist in 1984 I was interested in the people in 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 Actually at that time. I was working right in the central part of the island place called Naga And the Naga people according to the Naga people There were a group of these used to live close by and in a cave high up on a nearby volcano But they had become extinct about two three hundred years Previously so in that particular area that particular part of Flores they weren't supposed to be around anymore but then subsequent to that visit I began to hear about similar creatures Further to the east in a place called Leo And those are the ones I write about in in in the book in the book you discuss two distinct at least possible different Species yeah one of them being a homo floresiensis and the other one being this the one from Leo 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 But and and then there are the claims the descriptions Offered by Leo people about Creatures they say are still around rare But but still present in their territory in which some people claim to have seen and have given You know quite quite vivid description of and and and they they seem very very similar If I may just expand a bit the There has been discovered after a deliberate search by Paleoanthropologists if you'll appreciate that distinction In 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 It was a soon and there was evidence that something had if not killed these things these stegodons had had at least Eaten them eaten their carcasses A very long intensive study was done in what? The night as 20 was it the 2000s into the 20 teens Looking for some kind of human some kind of hominid remains and Remains and finally after you know a concentrated effort they found Pieces of jaw pieces all right teeth That belonged to something far older than fluorescences going back about 700,000 years ago and Contemporaneous with what would take to be stone tools, which is what kind of set them in motion in the first place Which were even smaller than Fluorescences so and it is yeah, I kind of presumed that these are possible ancestors of fluorescences Again, you know going back further and hundreds of thousands of years 700,000 600 700 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 Even earlier. I mean, there's still a big mystery as to how these things ever got on the island, right? Yeah, and as the are these stone tools clearly formed like an arrowhead or a spearhead or are they? ambiguous There's some of them. I you know, this is not my area. I should confess straight away, but some of them are Ambiguous that there have been different interpretations some authorities in you know, paleo anthropology archaeology would would suggest that that they're That they're not artifacts at all as they're not things that have been made by any Any hominin, so here's Jamie pulled up some examples from Indonesia Yeah, and this is some potential tools that they believe homo florescences Yeah Used and you can see they they are tool like but it's a little yeah, it's a little odd It's hard to say could be just flakes of Chips, you know, well to mention right away. There is that there was some overlap between florescences and ourselves Homosapiens And it is a well-known generalization It's only 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 right made these things So yeah, none of it. None of these can we securely attribute to homo florescences, it's There's been some fascinating recent studies actually on stegodon bones Close to the Location of the discovery site. Is that a pygmy elephant? Is that a small? Yeah, those would have been the ones that they they preyed on or scavenged. Mm-hmm. Yeah pygmy Pygmy stegodon, but size of a cow So if you can think of an elephant the size of a cow Still pretty formidable if you're only three feet three and a half feet tall before yeah, but then again, I mean that the the recent interpretations analysis has suggested that These Stegodons Which may have been consumed by florescences what were killed not by florescences not hunted by Florescences, but instead were killed by Komodo dragons, which is is the the world's largest lizard growing up growing yeah up to 10 feet long and Formidable formidable animal venom glands. Mm-hmm Terrifically sharp teeth and a deadly tail 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 mark but mostly from dragon's teeth Komodo dragon teeth. Mm-hmm Komodo monitor teeth to Use another another name those that Don't look like Komodo dragon teeth marks have been Interpreted as yeah possible stone tool marks. Yeah used by florescences But but merely to to scrape meat off the bones not right kill the animal But were there humans living on the island of flora's at the same time if I'm not mistaken If I'm not mistaken Well when florescences was was discovered the 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 a lot Yeah, 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 would leave? Yeah, although if again if I've got this right and if I'm up-to-date on this I I'm not sure that there are a clear evidence. There's clear evidence from bones that The Any of the elephants were killed by Homo-sapiens, right like spear marks When you're butchering that is the big guy. 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 was it 50,000 60,000 years old? How old were they? That's well, of course initially it was It was reckoned. They're only 12 13 thousand years old the youngest right, right, right That was a big problem for the paleo. That's a big problem They said so as well. Well, it'd be a real big problem. They found a live one today. Oh, well, yeah. No that that you're certainly You're certainly correct there. Although one of the senior investigators the original find said memorably that that they're just the discovery of something like homo floresiensis that You know 12 13,000 years ago even a bit older Would be was more surprising. It was a guy gobsmacking Then would be he said the the discovery of a space alien. So That that just shows you how out of the blue this this paleontological Discovery was 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 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 the 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. Also, of course, on Sumatra you have all kinds of primates that could be, shall we say, mistaken or taken for a very small human, orangutans for one thing. 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 and what did they say the encounters were like? Well, the sightings have been entirely or nearly entirely in the Leo region towards the eastern end of the island, mostly in high altitudes, mountainous areas, mountain forests and thus well away from human settlements for the most part. How frequently? It's difficult to say. I mean, I recorded over 30 reports of encounters, some of them not terribly credible, others a dozen or so much more interesting. 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, okay. 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 likely close to the coast where most people live and have lived for a long time, whereas, yeah, all indications are that the Lai Hoa, as I called it, 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 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. The molars are fine, in great shape, by the way, for the age. But yeah, so not to say they didn't have pronounced canines, as do chimpanzees, for example, even though chimpanzees are also largely vegetarian. Largely, but they apparently prefer to eat monkeys. Oh, yeah. No, that's... They're 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. They're pretty strong. If you suck being successful at killing a deer, throwing rocks, it'll take you a long time to get one. Deer are also a recent import. Oh, is it? In fact, flora 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 the godons, 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 the one very aggressive tree rat, right? Now, that guy is still around. Because I know I've got photos of... That thing's huge, right? It is a huge rat. A couple of feet long? It's at least, I think, in terms of metrics. So yeah. Oh, that's what it looks like? Oh, there it is. Look at the size of that sucker. Yeah. No, that's great. Mostly or largely tail, as 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. 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Well, I've got to say that once... You know, extinction dates for pygmy stegodon or any stegodon, well, I can't recall the current figures, but you can see they're always changing, by the way. 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 seemed wild. Of course. Yeah. And then, you know, deer at one point were introduced by humans. So, certainly deer and pigs, and not to mention domesticates like goats. Even, you know, 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. Interesting. Yeah. 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. Yeah. And then they started eating those. I should say, also, the little ape man, the Leo, for example, described, 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, you know, 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 researched. Pull that microphone up. Sorry. It's okay. It moves around a little bit. You can stay right where you're sitting. Yeah. That's comfortable. That's fine. No. The reason I went was to visit the people and find out how they lived and what they believed in. Because they were kind of blank on the cultural anthropological map. And it was just incidentally, you know, by accident. And were these people, what kind of life are they living? A subsistence lifestyle? Are they hunter-gatherers? 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. Although some people in the past have thought there were, including Alfred Wallace, who you may know. Sure. Yeah, but also things like 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 Naga, for example, is that you need more than one person. Dogs. You need dogs. You need dogs to hunt the rats? To knock them out of the tree and so on. 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. Yeah. 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. Sure. Yeah. Sure. So when you first went there, what was the first story that you heard about these little hairy people that live in the woods? Yeah. The first story I heard in the Naga region that I've mentioned was, oh, it's got a local legend about how they were wiped out by the ancestors of the Naga. And it's a story that whatever the basis, in fact, has clearly been embellished, embroidered. You get narrative themes entering, including two escaping the extermination. And this is an old plot line. And moving to another territory where they, sister and brother, it's 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 Obugogu, is a term you may have come across. They were in the habit, it said, of, they lived in a cave high on the mountain, but they were in the habit of coming down a bit lower downslope and joining in feasts and dancing of villagers. And they were given food by their reluctant hosts. But they did odd things, like, yeah, they would certainly eat the food, but then they start biting into the plates, which were made of, well, made of, traditionally made of sort of pumpkin skin, dried pumpkin skin. So, yeah, you can break them with your teeth. I'm not sure that a human could eat them or want to. But then... So they were just confused as to where the food ended. Well, this is the idea. They always represent that particular category of creature. Obugogu, 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 were 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, 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 were other stories, you know, told soon thereafter. 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 Leo region, which is the main topic of the book, as I said, yeah, and that was in the early 2000, 2001, 2003. 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 alive? And if people haven't seen the island of Flores before, it's incredibly dense, mountainous, 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 a Dutch colonials back in there. Is it a coastal road or does it just go through the middle? It goes wherever it can goes, because it's so mountainous, there'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. Can you see if we can get a photo? I'm looking at the map. I'm just trying to find the road. 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, cause I've seen some drone photos of the island that are really spectacular because, you know, they're above the tree line and you go, okay, anything could be out there. It's like parts of the Amazon where you look at it and you go, well, this is just so dense. Certainly in higher elevations. Yeah. Just incredibly dense. And people are not regularly traveling to this area. Certainly not, you know, 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. Incredibly dense, mountainous, beautiful, but wildly, you know, uncharted, not uncharted necessarily cause 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 I, 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 Leo ape men as they call them. So when you first had someone explain to you an encounter, how far was that from the actual discovery of the bones? Cause you, you had the, the conversations with people that were telling you that they had encountered one prior to them discovering these bones. Correct? Yeah. Yeah. Prior. 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, in the media, including the, you know, scientific press. That must've been incredibly exciting to hear these stories and go, wow, I've been, 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, I was quite staggered. Yeah. I actually, I find it kind of hot in here. Can I take my jacket off? Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, absolutely. Of course. Yeah. Take your jacket off. 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 an, especially in the early, when they were saying it might potentially only be 10,000 plus years old. Yeah. No, I, I, yeah, I felt extremely lucky. Right. Yeah. And I mean, if, you know, I'd first heard about these things a year or two later, I, well, I probably wouldn't have written a book and I, I, I wouldn't have, you know, taken it much further. I would have thought, well, you know, there is a possibility, however slim, that somebody has seen a reconstruction of Floresiensis in, you know, a newspaper or, or on, on television. But no, yeah, so, so, so I was fortunate. One thing I subsequently discovered is that the name Laihua is in fact recorded in a Leo language dictionary, Leo-German, as a matter of fact, which was, research for that went on in the 1920s and not long after the establishment of a Dutch colonial administration written by a German missionary. And it finally published in, was published in, in 1933 and there were mentions of Laihua and some of the information which came from sample sentences of the language were consistent with, with, you know, what, what people generally were telling me about the, the Leo, Leo apeman. So that was another, another strong indication that, that the whole notion of these, these creatures hadn't come from the, the fossil discovery. Was there any encounters or descriptions from missionaries, from ancient missionaries that had visited? No, not, 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. I, the man I knew for quite a long time, a Dutchman in, in the Nage region, a missionary, a Catholic missionary who'd been there for ages and, and he'd never heard of the Obugogo, which are the Nage apeman and, and which, you know, stories about these, like the ones I, one I just described are pretty widely known in, in, in the region near the village where whose inhabitants were supposed to wipe them out hundreds of years ago. But the missionary never, he never heard it. I was, I was surprised and I'm sure he was being honest. 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 I, I not, not so much in that particular year. That was, as I said, summer 2003 and yeah, cause 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 I, I, I, after the, after hearing about Floresiences, of course I did, I did initiate a new project which enabled, gave me funds to, to go back and yeah, talk about a bunch of things, not, not just the, the hominoids, but certainly to pay much more attention to, to Leo, the Leo region and to these creatures than, than I'd done previously. And how many reports of encounters you had, like how many different people? I interviewed, well, to answer your question, somewhere in the thirties, 32, I think, but I talked to more people than that just about, you know, these, these hominoids in general, what they'd heard from their parents or, you know, from whomever to get, you know, a good idea of, of the kind of local knowledge there was about, about them. And so in total, yeah, it was well over 120, 130 people I think I talked to in all. That had encounters? No, no. No, 30 that had encounters. They knew something about, knew what a life I 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, who, you know, knew virtually nothing about a life or they didn't want to talk to me or they were scared or whatever. Now did they all have similar descriptions? Yeah. I, I, I mean, one thing I show in my analysis, and it's been four years now, I think I got this right, is that the, the, the sightings are both the clearest, most detailed and otherwise most, most credible sighting reports seem, seem more, more accurate, more in line with the standard image of ape men than, you know, others. And even as I said, even among the, the sighting reports, there was some that I was inclined to dismiss as being, you know, mistaken monkeys or, yeah. Right. Right. So, so at least a few of them possibly could have been this actual creature. Yeah. If they're being honest. That's right. And, and it just takes one out of 30-odd or. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you have that many and, 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 like 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, but, you know, higher slopes of, of mountains of which there are many in certainly in Leo territory and, you know, 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, in that area as well. You mentioned, you know, camera traps. That would be a good idea. In fact, I, I, I'm working, I think you could say, at present with a man in, in the Netherlands who is very keen on doing the sort of thing you've just, you just described. And he has visited one area in particular, and there's a story about that, but I won't backtrack just yet. He has, yeah, visited one, one volcano and, and placed traps, taken lots of photos and so on. He wasn't there for very long. He wants to go back, I think late next year, but, but with a team. And he's asked me to investigate people with experience of, of, you know, rugged country and, and, and, and that kind of search. In fact, he, he even recommended I talk to you about it, but I don't know if we're going to go. Talk to me about it? Well, not you, but maybe somebody in your, somebody you could, you could recommend. 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. Who, He's a big believer in Bigfoot. Well, yeah. But I, yeah, so I'm expecting him on Friday the 13th, actually, so just in, what, nine, 10 days time. And I think he would be the kind of person to, Oh, for sure. Consult on that. Well, he could 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, you know, he's done quite a few episodes looking for Bigfoot to no avail. Shocking. Yeah. Never found it. But this would be, I think, probably more likely than finding Bigfoot. First of all, it's an island. Yeah. It's not just an entire, like, coastline, like if you're in the Pacific Northwest. To wherever you're searching for Bigfoot. Yeah, and the other thing being that You know a guy like less Going solo because he does everything solo with he doesn't bring a big camera crew be a smaller footprint Probably less likely to make a lot of noise and disturb things. Yes, that's a good Good feature. Yeah, and if he found something boy Who that would be exciting that would be one of the most exciting things that's ever happened in all of anthropology Yeah, yeah indeed So and I think you know, I'm not a firm believer in In anything really you might say good for you But I was a bit skeptical but but the evidence in this case The coincidence that we were talking about a minute ago between the discovery the reconstruction of fluorescences and What what Leo people and others were describing to me? you know The match right is so remarkable that You know, and this has been some huge well hidden conspiracy Designed entirely to fool little old me I Just can't imagine it Well, you know coincidences do happen including a remarkable one. So maybe that's it. But even so I I think Yeah, it's worth for further Exploration. I mean back in 2005 when I began to look at the LIHOR Hominoids in earnest I was already Approaching 60 years. I've never been particularly athletic And you know by the time I left left off this piece of research back in 2018 Yeah, I was already In my 70s, so, you know and you've seen the country. I mean, there's no way I'm gonna be scrambling up a mountain Mountain side dangerous to yeah, I won't go into the particulars of my present physical condition, but I you know, it's It's a bit of a challenge going anywhere These days I must confess. So yeah, I know that the research is is work while not not, you know, it's a guaranteeing success of Of any sort but what about potential use of technology? Are they going to use drones or anything? Yeah, those lines because they've gotten incredibly good. That's right Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. No, I did this is on the sort of bucket list for this colleague of mine a young guy Financially successful Who has you know the time to? To do this kind of thing Yeah, I think drones are certainly on the certainly on the list So, yeah that those would come into In the play as well Yeah, 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 Leo region, can I just grab a I'm getting dry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's water in there Oh, yeah, that's right there and there's coffee in here if you'd like some coffee How big is the area where I mean is 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 met work mostly mostly in a place called East East Leo But There's no clear indication of the bounds of Of Knowledge of this kind of this kind of creature so they go yeah to the east and to the west They're just mostly avoiding people the yeah, well certainly that the creatures are but you know, the fact is that that different people that their knowledge of local wild animals is Is different from you know, maybe their neighbors of people at another end of the island there is in Western Indonesia in Sumatra Possibly on parts of the male a peninsula close by as well. There is a kind of wild rabbit or hair not the kind of Place where you'd expect to find rabbits or hairs perhaps but this this animal what was Unknown to it to most of the local people. It was it was discovered by by Western Dutch I think naturalists and you know given a scientific name and all that kind of stuff local people didn't have a local name for it Yeah, and in fact, it's now known mostly and so far people are aware of it where the the national Indonesian name Kalinchi which refers to rabbits that 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 is quite a separate species. Okay that they would be Indigenous. Yeah, but again Local people or lots of local groups didn't didn't know about them unreasonable their forest dwelling and They're you know, quite quite quite quite rare, right? So no, no, 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 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 two British visitors hikers outdoorsmen taking a break on Flores and Doing scuba diving and hiking but a mountain climbing this kind of thing They I Have to think about the details of this because it was yeah, like three years back They finally found their name my name I should say after doing One of them in particular found my name after doing an internet search Concerning apes and monkeys on Flores Island And they came across my name in connection with the creature central Flores creature called Abugogo and One of them Yeah, he wrote to me. I think he contact me first of all across LinkedIn And asked me about monkeys on the island and I told him and He described to me what he and his friend both of them at the same time had seen On the highest slopes of this particular mountain and He said I think in his first communication that it sounds like you're Abugogo So naturally I followed this up and had some more conversations by phone and email with with these two young men and Is nothing they told me to kind of disabuse me of that Of that Possibility now, I should stress that I can't go into all the details or the circumstances of our communications, but All indications are that they'd never heard of my writings or never read my writings on You know Flores a man so they just had an encounter and they had an encounter. They thought it was yeah some kind Well, it's interesting because I I managed to interview them subsequently Separately, which is a good thing and one of them About the main contact described Described what he saw as Something very much like a Leo eight man, you know a little man a little human But you know monkey like bipedal bipedal. Yes. That was his impression the other man described it is looking more like a you know You know 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 aligned with the range of descriptions that I recorded from Local people, you know some descriptions. I had it more monkey like there's more Human like and of course naturally there were variations and the estimated size of what was the highest The highest comes from a second-hand report of Elijah And that would have been about 1.4 meters which is Is yeah bigger than? It's getting getting on there getting four feet. Yeah. 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, okay March and You know, they hadn't followed this I then thought about it and then for some reason that they met this is it I think they were separated for some time these two guys and they met and You know 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, you know, God, do you remember that huge monkey we saw? And you know, we're not to discuss that and then one of them He Yeah, he took some time to kind of follow this up by looking for Information on the internet and it is that way that he finally came across my name and and contact details, so So is that one of the only? Westerners At least groups of Westerners that spot of these things. 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So that's a factor as well No, not the only two That there was 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 But he came across something in the dark Trekking back towards upslope a village. She was staying in he got a bit lost actually he managed to find his way and he saw something which Which which was described certainly interpreted by local people as having been one of these one of these eight men that would that would go back to I Guess yeah the last century 1990s, maybe But as a person I know quite well But but also Well somebody who became a friend of mine Sadly passed away a few years ago was working on the neighboring island. He was an anthropologist He was working on the neighboring island called Zimbabwe Which is immediately east of Flores now the big island lots of mountains and and so on And he had a similar sighting back in the Similar experience I should say back in the the 1980s and was very very open about the whole thing and Gave me detailed descriptions on more than one more than one occasion Now that he did allow me to mention in In the book in fact in more than one one book and he did he describe the same type of creature the same type of A big monkey standing upright no tail About three feet or more tall Yeah, there's more than one of them that he saw that the end of a kind of a Grown-over area sort of sort of tunnel that had been created by vegetation. He was trekking through through jungle And he came across these things and he turned back after he wanted to find there was a site With certain stone monuments that he'd he'd heard about and You know villagers down below had sort of pointed him in the wreck right there Indeed it and he was still in his 20s at this time. He was in pretty good shape. And then he came to this area which was grown over. Grown over to the extent that he had to go on all force to continue climbing. And it was at the end of this tunnel where there was some light of course, a sunny day, where he saw several of these creatures, mostly kind of silhouettes given the lighting conditions. They made sounds which were unlike local monkeys. And there you have it. He wrote it up in his field notes which he showed me. Much tidier than my field notes, I can tell you. What he'd written at that time accorded with what he told me. So again, we talk about Floresiensis. There's no reason that that species or something very much like it is not present or wasn't at one time present also on other islands around and about, you know. And this, so his depiction of it was before you had ever had your first description of it given to you. Yeah, you can say that. We weren't qualification. My first research in Indonesia was done in the 1970s as a doctoral student. And you'd 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 Sumba. And there, there is a tradition of something that sounds more like the Sasquatch actually, or the Bigfoot. Because yeah, these are sort of, you know, half human, half ape, standing on two legs. But they're much bigger than, well than us, certainly much bigger than local people. So they're talking about, you know, two to three meters in height. And I must say, the evidence for them is not as good as for, you know, my Flores ape men. So I'd heard about this. Also, I might mention that I did my first degree in Vancouver at Simon Fraser University, my undergraduate degree at Simon Fraser in the late 60s and into the 70s. And this was a time when there was a lot of interest in locally, in British Columbia, in Bigfoot. It was also at that time, yeah, late 60s, very late 60s, that there was the film supposedly made in Northern California. Oh, the Patterson-Gimlin footage? Patterson-Gimlin, exactly. 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. It's pretty fake. Although at the time, it's interesting, I know there were a number of, or a few at any rate, 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, I, yeah, I even became interested. Well, I was studying anthropology at the time, including prehistory and paleoanthropology and a lot of talk about the possibility of this kind of thing. And yeah, so I was just studying human evolution and all the rest of it. And I sort of became aware at that point that there were reports of things still alive that kind of looked like Homo erectus or some of these physically primitive forms of Homo, of humans. 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 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. And that's right. In fact, it's infinitesimally remote, a possibility of a species, just a whole species, not just an individual animal being, you know, 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, look at this. Now we know there's this kind and now we know Homo juliensis 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 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 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 floresiensis 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 at 700,000 years ago that could possibly be ancestral to Floresiensis. Now, in that space of time, the notion that they 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, see me? Oh, 700,000. Oh, sorry, the Floresiensis. 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. How was the pushback? Was it radiocarbon dating? I can't recall the details, but 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. 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, you know, 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 Floresiensis, which turned up the 700,000-year-old fossils. That was all focused on finding something older, 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, you know, 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 like sea craft. There are no land bridges, by the way, that anybody knows about, so they would have had to come somehow by sea. Lower sea level though, correct? Particularly during the Ice Age. Lower sea levels, but not a land bridge. I mean, the Stegodons 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. Imagine you're in a boat and you see a bunch of weird-looking monkey people riding elephants. Yeah, no, you would check your diet. I'd definitely pull my iPhone out, take a video. Yeah, but it is possible for creatures like Floresiensis, apparently, to kind of sail over accidentally on great clumps of foliage. I'm looking for a term now, which I haven't heard of. Okay, like driftwood, like some sort of a log or something, but 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, they find 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? How did the dragons get there? How did the rats get there? What's the origin of all these various life forms? It's very diverse, right? Well, yeah, I mean, rats seem to be able to get 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. You guys have wolves, though. We have wolves and all kinds of things. You have grizzly bears. Yeah, black bears. Yeah, a lot of black bears. Yeah, no mountain lions. Moose. Moose, so various members of the deer family. Big deer, huge 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, oh 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. I mean, now they swim between islands regularly. Yeah, 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 could fly. Yeah, bats, lots of bats, they can fly. And the monkeys came on boats. No, the monkeys were introduced, like a lot of other animals. I mean, the only mammals there, sizable mammals of various species of mice and rats, and there's a giant rat. You've got, what, pigs. Right, we talked about all this. We talked about pigs, yeah. Well, all 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 long, several hundred to a 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, there are monkeys, porcupines, that were introduced from Western, 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. Yeah, you've got to know how to cook them and butcher them, probably. Yeah, and kill them without getting jammed. That's, yeah, again, you need dogs for that. Oh, poor dogs. 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, of course. I've seen that as well. Look at this poor dog. Oh, this poor dude. Yeah, well, it's interesting you should be able to produce those straight away. 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 a similar remains in Luzon Island. Yeah. Oh, how long ago was this discovered? It was discovered after Theresiensis. 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, I'm 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 much bigger there, a bigger hominin. Yeah. And then in Africa, you've got, again, Theresiensis, the discovery of a small species called Homo naladi. That goes back about 200,000 years, but that apparently a small... But they're an interesting one, right? Because they buried their dead. Yeah. Yeah. Now that's right. They had a kind of an unusually elaborate, for their circumstances, symbolic culture, evidently. Yeah. Nothing like that for Theresiensis. 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, that's right. Yeah. Fascinating story. Really interesting stuff. Because it makes you think, well, what else did they have? And they were tiny, right? Yeah. Well, similar to Theresiensis. So there's evidence that this particular type of creature existed all over the world, or at least in many parts of the world, I should say. 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. Do we know if South American monkeys were indigenous? 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 no old world monkey can do that. Really? 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 floresiensis, there was a lot of dismissing of it. And a lot of people thought that it was maybe humans that had some genetic abnormality. Very good, yeah. Somebody's done your research. Oh, you've done your research. I'm obsessed. No, that's right. I'll tell you, paleoanthropologists themselves can be interesting characters. They can be very contentious, sort of fight among themselves. Yeah, for sure. There are a few other academics that are like that. 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 floresiensis, as a new species. And he claimed that these, what they'd found, were one or more humans who were suffering from a brain condition called, well, there are a couple of different possibilities. One's called microcephaly, I think. Yeah, it's a very small cranium, small brain. But this is an abnormality, and people in this condition, they don't, as individuals, they don't survive. Adamantly rejected the notion that these were a different species. Has been. There was also the problem that these things are, yeah, the floresiensis, of course, were small, small-bodied, which doesn't correlate with microcephaly, which just concerns the 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 floresiensis as Homo or not. And there's, I mean, 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. But, um, no, he suggested that floresiensis is something much, much more primitive, physically, and that it derives from something much older, a separate branch, going back to, I don't know, somewhere in the region of Australopithecine, so pre-Homo. And, you know, a lot of stuff, a lot of features of the fossils, not least of all that the brain size, which is about that of a chimpanzee, so pretty small, and the body size, and all the rest of it, the lack of evidence for, you know, much in the way of, or anything in the way of culture, all of these things suggest something that is a different kettle of fish altogether. And, in fact, there was a senior member of the team that discovered and analyzed and interpreted the floresiensis fossils, a guy called Peter Brown, an Australian anatomist, who proposed a different name for Homo floresiensis. He gave it a new genus, he put it in a new genus, which he named, he gave the suggested name Sundanthropus, which would mean something like a man-like being from the Sunda region, which refers to those islands. And this was rejected. Yeah, I mean that there were, you know, it was just arguable, this kind of stuff. But some of the reasons put forward were not particularly credible, I found. I mean, one suggestion was that, you know, this thing is so recent, bearing in mind that one specimen was reckoned to be only 12,000, 13,000 years old at the time, but this species was too recent, so recent that it had to be Homo. But this betrays a very kind of linear, progressive view of, not progressive in a political sense, but, you know, in a time sense, of human or hominin evolution. Really, I mean, it's ironic because, yeah, it was the discovery of floresiensis that threw a monkey wrench into that whole picture of human evolution. I mean, it was evidence in favor of a view, which had been around a little bit already by that time, that you didn't have a single line of evolution, whereas something bigger and better, more developed and so on, replaced something more primitive in a single line of development. Rather, the suggestion was that the view now seems to be that the human tree, family tree, as it were, is bushy. 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, you know, 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 isolated. 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 adapt an idea, 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 Clovis first thing, like, I forget the gentleman's name, who found these stones that indicated that there was people in the Americas far earlier than that. He was destroyed. I mean, they've 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, the 22,000 years, the White Sands, New Mexico footprints. Right, right. Yeah, that date keeps being pushed further and further. Further and further. Going further. Right. There's 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 what I was about to say. 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, I, yeah, I mean, with regard to what I've written, I don't argue, I don't attempt to argue that Floresiensis or something deriving from Floresiensis is definitely still around. I'm not going to make a statement of conviction like that. All I'm trying to say, and my focus, of course, is on the people, the modern people of Flores Island, and their experiences, and how they think, what they say, and all that kind of stuff. So, what I need to explain as an ethnologist, a cultural anthropologist, is the basis of some of their claims about things, about creatures, about beings. 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. So, there is a difference between them on that ground alone, and Homo Floresiensis, with what I am showing, is that there is a possibility that when Leo people make these reports about their ape men, that their reports are accurately based on some actual experience that individuals, a few individuals, at any rate, have had. 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 like forest spirits and stuff like that. I thought you were going to ask me if there's any evidence of my use of such substances in the field. I'll ask you that off air. A bit of a... But I mean when you hear people talking about like 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. Shaman. 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? So these 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. 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 are the... 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 beetles nut, no, 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, I mean, yeah, I consumed it regularly when I was on Sumba in the 1970s. 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, you know, like physically ill in the stomach, but it'd make 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 slick 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 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. 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 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? 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 Zumba. Wow. What was your breath like? I was very intent, my... My... Well, I was smoking as well. Oh, boy. You know, whatever. And I'm still alive 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 in the United States. Oh, they have them? 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 that's a part of their culture. I hope my insurance agent isn't listening to this. Sorry, what was the 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 haven't had one since Monday. No, I enjoy smoking cigars. I do as well. Yeah. 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 consciousness. To other people. No, not really. And there's no... I mean, with some shamans, people called shamans, in other parts of the world, you have... They're 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 flora, 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 fiction. The spirits, yeah. 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. 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. Kopi Luwak? Luwak, that's exactly the species, yeah. I've had that. Yeah. Remarkably smooth coffee, but it's disconcerting to think that you're drinking coffee that came out of a civet's butt. I guess so. I guess those are the weirder things that people eat, I think, or consume. Yeah, no, the species name is hermaphroditus, which relates to certain glands both sexes possess, which can be mistaken for testicles. Oh, okay, so that's the origin of the name. That's the origin of the idea. Interesting. And I later discovered that this fantastic ... Well, I was pretty sure beforehand, but it later became clear that people were pointing out, oh, here's one of those, and it was a palm civet. 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. Yeah. Chimpanzees as well. Yeah. Apes, of course. Yes. My 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 in Africa, you start going, hey, maybe this is a real thing. Yeah. And the real problem is, what's the ethical considerations if they captured one? Like, if they capture a monkey, you can 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. Yeah. Some of the higher apes. Yeah. They look like they're in hell. Yeah. No, I agree with you. I'm very torn myself on this point. I mean, obviously, you know, I'd partly like something like that to be discovered. I mean, it would- From a scientific perspective, it would be incredible. From a scientific perspective, it would be incredible. 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? 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, you're 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. I would say the best way to study them would be through field research, a primatological field research. Yeah. A la, 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 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? Human and animal and so on. And this would, yeah, this would present a real philosophical problem, a real conundrum. Yeah, so Forrest Gallant was telling me about a contemporary account of a woman who was an anthropologist who's, I just cannot remember where the village was, but this person had encountered something. Dude, I bet this is a woman's name. 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 Papua, 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. And she's a very sane academic, he's saying, not like a jungle person who believes in third world superstitions, he says. And this woman, who is a very sane literary author, cutting edge scientist, and she swears that she saw these little people, and she told the exact story. He says he actually has a recorded Zoom call that he could send me of this encounter, but this is a woman who was just completely stunned, encountering these tiny little people in New Guinea. So are there accounts in New Guinea that are similar? If I may ask, she was quite young at the time? I 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. Interesting case, that one. Right. So we have video of the last supposed thylacine that was alive. 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. This is Forrest's history. This is what he does. He has a great YouTube channel, by the way, and he documents his journeys. I think I've heard of the name, but I'm not particularly sure if you might follow that up. Fascinating guy. But the point is, this woman told him the story, and this story is insane. 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 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, you know, walking through human settlements as well. You know, also from, reported by credible 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 I... Oh, wow. I was just afraid in slip. Yeah. Oh, no worries. But... So what are the descriptions? Are they human? Like careless? 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 bodily hair shows up more than it might do otherwise, I 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, you know, less than five feet or four foot 11, that kind of... So these... They're very small, like African pygmies. But these are people. These are modern humans. This is very different than... They're extraordinarily different. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, not to confuse with Floresiensis or anything like that. So that may be what this woman encountered. So that might be that they lived... Very possible. We'd need more details of what she remains to be. 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. Oh, okay. This is a totally different kind of thing. Yeah. They speak languages like the rest of us. Yeah. Okay. So as far as little tiny hairy creatures, you said Sumatra, the Philippines, Indonesia. Where else? Where else are these credible witness accounts of people experiencing these kind of little tiny ape-like creatures? Yeah. So my first inclination is to say, well, you know, Flores and I guess Sumbawa, a neighboring island, and Sumatra as well, the Orang Pendek. But there are reports from North America by Native North Americans of something that sounds familiar, similar. Nothing terribly detailed, but I know I did some research for another book years back on the Bigfoot or Sasquatch in the Pacific Northwest. And I think it's the Bella Coola Indians, the Bella Bella Indians in British Columbia, coastal British Columbia, had a category of the name of creatures which sounded like small, somewhat hairy folk. The Lai Hoa, of course, in Flores, there are various reports of how much bodily hair they have. And, you know, according to some, they're not terribly hairy, not like a gorilla or a bear. So that's another kind of variable. But then, you know, if you just have the description hairy, then, you know, if you don't take that any further and, you know, investigate more, you don't know what that means. I mean, hairy can mean, well, like the lady in the picture up there. 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 fairly genuine. Say it again. What is the name of it? The creature? What is it called? It was called Jacko. Which is kind of a nickname, which is, you know, 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 is it Daniel Boone or David Crockett was 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. I mean, apparently, I sent this to my friend, Steve Rinella, and he said, Boone also had some tall tails. So I don't know. I don't know how much of this is true or not true. 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. You know, 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 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. You know? And I mean, this was quite a long time ago, you know, so who knows? I don't know. She's gone now, of course, as well. 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. 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 Verne Reynolds who was 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. It largely, partly focused on the Patterson film. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, it's not the case that all scientists, to use that broad category, you know, 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, they're talking about conservatism and so on. Somewhat understandably, they like to keep this, you know, in a separate kind of compartment. Completely understandably. Especially if you're an academic, if you start saying you believe in Bigfoot, you're immediately put into the coop category. Well, that was that, but more practically speaking, I guess your funding will quite rapidly drop. Exactly. 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, you know, 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... Well, it'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, I'm talking about flurries. These details don't show up so much in what we call mythology, or myths, or even legends to make that distinction. The naturalistic descriptions come from, well, mostly from, suppose it, eyewitness encounters. If you look at general knowledge, then you do start to get fantastic features, right? And also, second-hand accounts, from hand to hand, they tend more in the supernatural direction, which in itself is fascinating, is a kind of evidence for the eyewitnesses, having had an actual experience, and referring to an actual creature. And of course, that's where the similarities between the different accounts become remarkable. And not just that, of course, but the match with the reconstructions of fossils of Homo Floresiensis. Yes. Yeah. Well, if they had found that... If they had found that in North America, if they had found a Bigfoot evidence, it would change the whole conversation. Then the conversation would be, is this an extinct... Imagine if they had found some Bigfoot jawbone in a cave somewhere, that it was an unknown primate that is 8,000 plus years old. 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? Yeah. Yeah, no. I mean, that would... I mean, it would get a lot more publicity than Floresiensis, which is happening in the modern West, and in the US, or even Canada, it would have the same coverage. Well, the problem is, unlike Homo Floresiensis, there is so many hoaxes in America. There's so many guys like, I found Bigfoot, he's in my freezer, and like a big frozen doll that they're selling. Yeah. There's like so many kooks that have said... And so many people have done it for stories and, you know, 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, you know, villagers reporting what, you know, they once saw, the culture, 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, different kinds of interests. I mean, nobody on Flores thinks they're going to become famous. Right. By telling me what they've seen, whatever it may have been. Right. Whereas with Bigfoot in North America, then, you know, you can become rich and famous. I don't know about rich. Maybe not rich, but famous. You might be able to parlay it. I mean, look, you could get on Finding Bigfoot. Yeah. How many seasons did they do of Finding Bigfoot? They never found Bigfoot. Never did. 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, you know, 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. Maybe Forrest would be interested in doing it. He's fascinated by the subject. Worth doing. 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 place called Yale, near a place called Yale. It was small. One reason why I mentioned it, it wasn't a giant. I know that subsequent commentators have suggested it was an infant Bigfoot. How small was it? I think it was maybe four foot two. So it's similar in size to Homo floresiensis? 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 available. And so no pictures were taken. Jamie's got it here. It's a story of a potential Homo floresiensis. Four foot seven, I was wrong. 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 Colonist 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. Huh. 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 Jack was because he wasn't big enough for a Bigfoot. Well, also because newspapers would routinely make up stories. They would, yeah. But, you know, the eyewitnesses were all named, including one of the top bosses of the Seapay 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. He's a physical anthropologist. And the book is called Bigfoot Debunked. I mean, he's severely opposed to any suggestion that anything like this could exist. And the best he could do with Jacko is conclude that it was a chimpanzee that had escaped from a circus or a zoo. 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. He didn't mention such a thing. But, yeah. Now, the best this author, recent author, could do is say that it was an escaped chimpanzee. I mean, one thing one can be pretty certain of, very certain of, is that there were no circuses or zoos in that area at the time. I don't think there was a zoo anywhere in British Columbia. Very remote. Maybe. Well, yeah. It was a brand new colony at that time. Yeah. It wasn't part of... Well, I guess it had just become... And that area, British Columbia in particular, has a lot of those Sasquatch sightings. Well, this is 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. I don't think. 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, the Flores ape men are much more credible because of the fossil evidence. Of course. The whole kind of ecosystem. Of course. The region of the world where they are. The existence of other primates, if not on the island, then pretty close by. The 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. I'm looking at my own judgment and going, stop. Yeah. Being silly. You're 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. 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 at the very end of the 20th century, was it? Was it? Yeah. And the other, the lowland 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 their 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 general knowledge about apes, these were something new. And they reached people through, I guess, the popular press, such as it was mainly at the time. Some people would have read books about them, but they would have been probably a minority. So people had only a vague kind of idea of what they looked like. Anybody seeing, I don't know, a very shaggy dog or maybe a small bear in British Columbia at that time might have made a mistake. That's a part of the problem. Bears also sometimes walk bipedally. Yeah. If you see them in the distance, if it's dusk, 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. 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. She lived in the area. And she said she saw this thing and she – for a half a second she goes, that's a gorilla. Like why is there a gorilla in the forest? And she said she only saw it for less than a minute. It was moving through the trees. But she said – she goes, I know what a bear looks like. She goes, I know it. She goes, it did not look like a bear. I think it was a Sasquatch and I think they're real. The problem also with the Pacific Northwest and 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. It's insanely dense. You can't see anything. And it's – 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 is wet because it's just this tremendous rainforest. It's incredibly rich with life. And you're there and you go, OK, I can see how something could hide in here. Like you're not going to find things. Like you can 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'd say smell would be a factor as well. Smell you a mile away. Yep. 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 – look at that guy. Have you seen this guy before? Oh, yes, indeed. In fact – Jojo the dog-faced boy. Some of those pictures are in an earlier book I wrote. 1880s? Yeah. Yeah, there's people that have that condition today. Yeah. I stumbled across this guy from – this is Julia Pastrana. She was around from 1860 and died in 1865 in Moscow but is from Sinaloa, Mexico. Yep. And was studied left and right by all sorts of people. So she was from Mexico. Look at her features. That's crazy. The hair all over her face. Yeah. That's wild. So small. Was a performer. Whoa. Her body is still being displayed somewhere. Oh. Yeah. But as I'm like 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. But then you have to ask why would anybody like that want to be running through the woods, you know, in some remote place presumably naked. You know, how would they get there? How would they get home afterwards? 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 these, we're talking about. fully modern humans, their brains and heads are not as small as their bodies. Okay, so their brain size would be comparable to anybody else. 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. He actually bought one, if you can believe that. I mean, it's horrible as that sounds. But you know, some pygmies were kept as slaves by taller Africans at that time. But before that, Europeans thought that pygmies were a myth, that there was no such thing, that this was a product of Greek mythology, especially, of course, it's from there that the name pygmy comes. So yeah, comparable to our knowledge of, or anybody's knowledge of gorillas, for example, although pygmies were discovered a bit before. It's fascinating when we think of how little people knew about the natural world just a couple of hundred years ago. 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? I didn't mean to say that. But yeah, likewise with conservative scientists, you get into modes of thought that are not easy to alter. Yeah. Well, listen, I really enjoy talking to you, and I'd love to talk to you about witches when that book is done, too, 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. Oh, perfect. What is it 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, whatever I might think about homo floresiensis or present-day descendants that might exist. No, witchcraft exists in accusations. People have accused, still accuse, as a matter of fact, in many places, including in the West, other people of being evil, of being able to harm other people maliciously, wantonly through supernatural means. But there's a lot of other things I've discovered about witches in that journey, which actually began a very long time ago, when I first started to teach anthropology. But I think it's something that would be of interest to your listeners, definitely. 100%. Yeah. So let's plan on doing that again. We'll do that. We'll do another podcast sometime after the book is out, and we'll talk about that. Okay. All right. Well, I'm sure you'll 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. Okay, we'll do that. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. It was a really fun conversation. Oh, thank you very much. You gave me the opportunity. Yeah, no, it's been extremely enjoyable, and I'm very impressed by your questions. Oh, thank you. I'm very impressed by your work. Thank you. Perfect. All right. Bye. Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5. Only at McDonald's for a limited time. Pricing and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than real pricing. Sam's Club is the club for every holiday club. Guess who's joining the club this season? Walmart Plus. Yep, Sam's Club Plus membership now comes with Walmart Plus at no extra cost. Two memberships, one great price. Just $120 a year can save you time and over $700. Want to get in on the membership duo of the century? Visit Sam'sClub.com. Come join us. Sam's Club. 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