The discovery in 2001 of what appeared to be the remains of a tiny, ancient human being on the Indonesian island of Flores led to speculation about a lost species of ‘hobbits’. Paul Spencer Sochaczewski goes in search of the little people
‘Stop. Over there. See him?’ We hop out of the car to introduce ourselves to a middle-aged guy named Markus, a friendly, articulate, otherwise normal man who happens to stand no taller than my waist. My friend Boedhihartono, a professor at the University of Indonesia and an expert in strange phenomena, and I get into conversation with him. We ask him how he feels to be 1m tall (‘OK’), whether his parents were of a more conventional height (‘Yes’), if he knows about Homo floresiensis (‘What’s that?’).
‘He’s just a little guy,’ Boedhihartono says, ignoring all political correctness. Later I discover that about one person out of 40,000 worldwide can be defined as ‘little’. It is uncommon, but not as rare as the short creatures we were seeking – individuals that skirt the line between imagination and reality.
We had travelled to the eastern Indonesian island of Flores with a simple but elusive goal – to seek orang pendek, the Indonesian name for ‘little people’. These characters are the stuff of legend throughout Southeast Asia, and Flores, a dramatically beautiful volcanic island of 1.4 million people more than twice the size of Bali, is home to three creatures of particular interest to orang pendek researchers: fossil Homo floresiensis, living orang pendek and legendary ebu gogo.
The first reason to visit is the 2003 discovery in a cave in western Flores of a child-sized creature that lived some 18,000 years ago. The scientists who described the find declared these to be a new species of the genus Homo, and named the group Homo floresiensis, for ‘Flores man ’. They said these proto-humans, standing less than one metre tall, with heads the size of grapefruits, were contemporary with Homo sapiens, but were not direct ancestors of our species.
The second reason to travel to Flores is that local people tell tales of the ebu gogo, a yeti-like creature inhabiting the central part of the island.
But the most compelling reason was a statement that Boedhihartono had made a few months earlier, in which he had confidently declared, ‘There are real hobbits living in a village in Flores.’ To which the only appropriate response was: ‘What are you doing this summer?’
The most important prehistoric archeological site in Indonesia today is Liang Bua (‘cold cave’), where Homo floresiensis was discovered. The cave is located 14km north of the Flores town of Ruteng. The cave itself is in the form of a fat crescent, maybe 50m across, with several levels, and opens to a green valley.
It was almost too perfect – I could imagine the site being used as the setting for a caveman movie.
Flores paleoanthropologist Rokus Due Awe describes the eureka moment when the scientists realised that they were dealing with something special. Digging at a depth of some 6m, one of the researchers had found a whitish expression in the clay, according to Rokus. Anxious to see more, the researcher accidentally sliced off what turned out to be the left brow ridge of the skull of the first Homo floresiensis discovered. The skull was very soft, ‘the consistency of wet blotting paper,’ says Rokus. They cut around it and took the block of stone back to the Hotel Sindha.
Room 19 of the Hotel Sindha in Ruteng hardly looks like the control centre for a scientific discovery of this magnitude. It is spacious enough, at about 16sq m, and the price is right – just $10 a night. The room has no hot water, but the staff will boil up a bucketful that you can mix with the cold to take a bath. Before they could study the fossil, the Ruteng crew had to harden the bone, which they did by buying acetone in the local drugstore and mixing it with epoxy glue. The piece of the skull, of a female that was later named Flo, took three days to dry.
Rokus describes those exciting early days: ‘First I thought it was maybe from a 10-year-old child, but after cleaning it we could see that the teeth were very worn, indicating an age of perhaps 28 to 30 [equivalent to an age today of 50 to 60].’ The team understandably dubbed the creature ‘hobbit man’.
Ground zero for orang pendek ‘little people’ stories on Flores is Boawae village in the foothills of Ebu Lobo volcano – at 2,149m a prominent and beautiful landmark. People in this part of Flores tell stories about a sort of local bogeyman, the ebu gogo, which means ‘ancestor that eats anything’. he main ebu gogo story-teller is Pak Epe, the Boawae village headman who describes a creature with a hairy body that lives in caves, eats raw meat and climbs vertical rock faces like a lizard. A female ebu gogo has breasts so long that she can flip them over her shoulder, he adds. Pak Epe has clearly told his story numerous times before, and is particularly keen to show us the business card of a producer from American TV show 60 Minutes who interviewed him several years ago. His story, which he claims is thousands of years old, is simple. Once upon a time, a group of ebu gogo came into a village to steal vegetables from the gardens. For reasons that were not clear, on one occasion they also stole a five-year-old boy. Years later, they sent the wild child back to the village to steal fire, and he was caught. The villagers forced the boy to show them the cave where the ebu gogo lived and the humans proceeded to set fires that killed all but two of the wild people, who escaped to do something, somewhere.
As origin legends go, this is pretty dull stuff. No mythical elements, nothing mystical or sacred, just an old wives’ tale with a hint of Prometheus that would probably sound better when told around a campfire with the rice wine flowing. As I leave, I ask Pak Epe one last question. ‘Do the ebu gogo still exist?’ ‘Probably not,’ he reluctantly replies.
And the ‘real-life hobbits’ that Boedhihartono promised? Conveniently, we had heard that they lived in a village called Kampong Arkel, which is a half-hour walk from Liang Bua, the site where the remains of Homo floresiensis were found. Arkel is a small, poor village without the impressive carvings, statuary, weaving and visible cultural richness found in some other Flores areas. It has no school and no running water. It is a jungle-shrouded end of the line.
We are quickly introduced to four small people, none of whom is taller than 1.3m. They are the living hobbits we had sought. It was all too easy. The clan consists of Margaretha Ndindis, Petrus Bambut, Yohanes Jerahi and Laurensius Jema. Laurensius Jema is kepala adat of the village – the keeper of traditions. He is married to a woman of normal height and has four children; his brother Yohanes has five.
Their elderly aunt, Margaretha Ndindis, asks Boedhihartono for medicine to treat a chronic headache. He obliges, applying a jab of analgesic to her backside while an audience of curious villagers looks on. His medical advice reflects his own personal beliefs – eat lots of pork and drink tea without sugar. While Margaretha is lying on the mat, Boedhihartono gets out his callipers and measures her skull, her nose, her mandible and jaw, as he had done with the short men of the family. Later I ask him whether, based on their cranial measurements, they are hobbits. ‘Well, they are short people,’ is all he is prepared to commit to.
On my last day in Flores, I hear an intriguing story that puts a satisfying closure to this enigmatic trip. In the coastal town of Labuhan Bajo, I am introduced to visiting headman Pak Nico, who says that in his isolated coastal village one night he heard a screeching cry.
‘It sounded like something out of that dinosaur movie,’ he says, referring to Jurassic Park, which apparently has made its way to this distant corner of Indonesia. He did not see anything, but his fellow villagers swore they knew of a dangerous T-Rex-like creature that climbed trees and ate pigs and goats. ‘It is called marengket in the local Mangarai language,’ he adds. I am still sceptical, since tales of orang pendek and their ilk are frequent, but specimens – dead or alive – are a rarity.
Pak Nico adds that several years ago a villager killed one of the animals but neglected to keep the bones. Imagine, a relict dinosaur that lives on the north coast of Flores. And I know where it is – a day’s journey in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, then a couple of hours’ walk. Not far at all. Just over the next hill.
THE LITTLE PEOPLE
Reports of wild orang pendek (‘small folk’), smaller tropical relatives of the more famous ‘yeti’ or ‘Bigfoot,’ have occurred frequently enough in China, Indochina, Peninsular Malaysia, Borneo and Sumatra to merit a sceptical inquiry.
Some respected scientists give cautious credence to the possibility that orang pendek might exist. John MacKinnon, the only scientist to have studied the three great apes in the wild, told me that he found footprints in Sabah, Malaysia, of an unidentified primate that were ‘so like a man’s yet definitely not a man’s that my skin crept and I felt a strange desire to return home.’
Short sighting
In one frequently quoted sighting, an Indonesian ‘short person of the forest’ was reported on the island of Sumatra during the 1920s. A Dutch settler named van Herwaarden, who found an orang pendek in the deep Sumatran forest, was quoted by the Belgian naturalist Bernard Heuvelmans: ‘The very dark hair on its head fell almost to the waist… (its) brown face was almost hairless. The eyes were very lively, and like human eyes.
The nose was broad with fairly large nostrils, but in no way clumsy. Its lips were quite ordinary. Its canines showed clearly from time to time – they were more developed than a man’s. I was able to see its right ear, which was exactly like a little human ear.’
A NEW SPECIES?
Latest analysis, based on fossilised wrist bones, suggests Homo floresiensis really does represent a new species. Australian scientist Michael Morwood, who was part of the research team that excavated the site and published the first scientific papers on Homo floresiensis, has always been convinced, based on the jaw structure, lack of chin, brain capacity, height, relative length of arms and legs and other details, that this is indeed a completely new species.
The counter-argument
Some scientists, notably Indonesian paleoanthropologist Teuku Jacob of Gadjah Mada University, believe that the individuals found were Homo sapiens suffering from microcephaly, a developmental disorder that causes the head and brain to be much smaller than average.
Crypto creatures
Orang pendek inhabit an arena of research called cryptozoology – improbable creatures in the wrong place or time, such as the Loch Ness monster in Scotland or the ninki-nanka, a giant swamp-dwelling reptile reported from the Gambia. While no one can agree on whether orang pendek exist, there are enough real surprises in biology to make us wonder.
Old four-legs
In 1938 the western scientific world was startled to find a coelacanth, a large fish thought to have been extinct for 65 million years, off the coast of east Africa. In 2005 a long-whiskered rat, thought to have been extinct for 11 million years, was found in Laos. These ‘living fossils’ are part of a surprisingly long list of new species that have been discovered in recent years – including a new cat from an island between Japan and Taiwan, two new monkeys in Brazil and one from India, two new lemurs in Madagascar, three new deer in Vietnam, numerous birds and legion insects and amphibians.
