Apr 19, 2022 06:49 PM
https://www.the-scientist.com/magazine-i...live-69869
EXCERPTS: In 2004, the scientific world was shaken by the discovery of fossils from a tiny species of hominin on the Indonesian island of Flores. Labeled Homo floresiensis and dating to the late Pleistocene, the species was apparently a contemporary of early modern humans in this part of Southeast Asia. Yet in certain respects the diminutive hominin resembled australopithecines and even chimpanzees.
Twenty years previously, when I began ethnographic fieldwork on Flores, I heard tales of humanlike creatures, some still reputedly alive although very rarely seen. In the words of the H. floresiensis discovery team’s leader, the late Mike Morwood, last at the University of Wollongong in Australia, descriptions of these hominoids “fitted floresiensis to a T.” Not least because the newly described fossil species was assumed to be extinct, I began looking for ways this remarkable resemblance might be explained. The result is a book, Between Ape and Human, available in May 2022.
[...] Unlike other books concerned with hominin evolution, the focus of my book is not on fossils but on a local human population called the Lio and what these people say about an animal (as they describe it) that is remarkably like a human but is not human—something I can only call an ape-man. My aim in writing the book was to find the best explanation -- that is, the most rational and empirically best supported -- of Lio accounts of the creatures. These include reports of sightings by more than 30 eyewitnesses, all of whom I spoke with directly. And I conclude that the best way to explain what they told me is that a non-sapiens hominin has survived on Flores to the present or very recent times.
[...] Our initial instinct, I suspect, is to regard the extant ape-men of Flores as completely imaginary. But, taking seriously what Lio people say, I’ve found no good reason to think so. What they say about the creatures, supplemented by other sorts of evidence, is fully consistent with a surviving hominin species, or one that only went extinct within the last 100 years. Paleontologists and other life scientists would do well to incorporate such Indigenous knowledge into continuing investigations of hominin evolution in Indonesia and elsewhere. For reasons I discuss in the book, no field zoologist is yet looking for living specimens of H. floresiensis or related hominin species. But this does not mean that they cannot be found... (MORE - missing details)
https://youtu.be/jQUJ88WN0Y0
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/jQUJ88WN0Y0
EXCERPTS: In 2004, the scientific world was shaken by the discovery of fossils from a tiny species of hominin on the Indonesian island of Flores. Labeled Homo floresiensis and dating to the late Pleistocene, the species was apparently a contemporary of early modern humans in this part of Southeast Asia. Yet in certain respects the diminutive hominin resembled australopithecines and even chimpanzees.
Twenty years previously, when I began ethnographic fieldwork on Flores, I heard tales of humanlike creatures, some still reputedly alive although very rarely seen. In the words of the H. floresiensis discovery team’s leader, the late Mike Morwood, last at the University of Wollongong in Australia, descriptions of these hominoids “fitted floresiensis to a T.” Not least because the newly described fossil species was assumed to be extinct, I began looking for ways this remarkable resemblance might be explained. The result is a book, Between Ape and Human, available in May 2022.
[...] Unlike other books concerned with hominin evolution, the focus of my book is not on fossils but on a local human population called the Lio and what these people say about an animal (as they describe it) that is remarkably like a human but is not human—something I can only call an ape-man. My aim in writing the book was to find the best explanation -- that is, the most rational and empirically best supported -- of Lio accounts of the creatures. These include reports of sightings by more than 30 eyewitnesses, all of whom I spoke with directly. And I conclude that the best way to explain what they told me is that a non-sapiens hominin has survived on Flores to the present or very recent times.
[...] Our initial instinct, I suspect, is to regard the extant ape-men of Flores as completely imaginary. But, taking seriously what Lio people say, I’ve found no good reason to think so. What they say about the creatures, supplemented by other sorts of evidence, is fully consistent with a surviving hominin species, or one that only went extinct within the last 100 years. Paleontologists and other life scientists would do well to incorporate such Indigenous knowledge into continuing investigations of hominin evolution in Indonesia and elsewhere. For reasons I discuss in the book, no field zoologist is yet looking for living specimens of H. floresiensis or related hominin species. But this does not mean that they cannot be found... (MORE - missing details)
https://youtu.be/jQUJ88WN0Y0