Inside remote Indonesian island where tiny hobbit-like ancient human could still be roaming

Could a small, hobbit-like “ape-man” survive on a small Indonesian island for a million years… and still be alive?

The idea sounds like a Hollywood fantasy, but anthropologist Professor Gregory Forth has spoken to dozens of local people who believe they have seen the tiny ‘ape man’ in real life on the remote island of Flores.

A recent sighting by tourists could strengthen the idea that a possible human ancestor survived for millennia.

What makes the sightings even more remarkable is that Flores is where researchers in 2003 discovered remains of an ancient species of small people measuring 4 feet tall, thought to have gone extinct 50,000 years ago.

Forth told DailyMail.com that he had heard stories of small ‘ape-men’ from the local ‘Lio’ people on the island, long before the remains of ‘Homo floresiensis’ were found, suggesting that the locals had not heard their stories came up after they were inspired by that discovery.

The remote island of Flores is Indonesia’s tenth largest island and is home to Komodo dragons and the Flores giant rat, the largest in the world: with mountain forests sloping steeply to the sea, the interior of Flores is sparsely populated.

Professor Forth has spent decades speaking to the Lio people, most of whom work as subsistence farmers and live close to the coast.

Dozens of them had stories about a similar-sounding creature, somewhere between an ape and a human, but smaller than a human.

On the island of Flores are the remains of an ancient species of short people, only four feet tall, believed to have gone extinct 50,000 years ago.

Another local tribe had similar stories of a small ape-man, but they thought these had been wiped out years ago, Forth explained.

The Lio people said the creature was hairier than humans, walked upright, but had a monkey-like face.

The Lio people call the creature the “lai ho’a,” and Forth has personally spoken to about 30 people who believe they have seen at least one of the humanoid mammals.

Forth’s book ‘Between Ape and Human: An Anthropologist on the Trail of a Hidden Hominoid’ aimed to answer the question of what the Lio people were talking about when they described small, ape-like creatures in the mountains of Flores.

Forth told DailyMail.com: ‘I first came across conversations about things that sounded physically primitive like humans when I first started researching on Flores 40 years ago, in 1984.’

A local villager explores the caves where the remains of Homo floriensis were found

On Flores, the residents of the remote island usually live close to the coast

‘What could explain their conviction? What they describe is eerily similar to the reconstructions of Homo floresiensis. It is a very small, physically primitive member of the gay group.’

Forth says that, unlike other island folk tales about ghosts, the descriptions of the little ape-man were naturalistic, and the Lio people spoke of them very differently from their stories of ghosts, who were invisible and had supernatural powers.

Forth said: ‘The descriptions all had a fixed form: they varied, as you would expect from different observers, but at the same time all the different accounts made it plausible that some kind of natural kind could exist.

Forth says that although a few individuals he spoke to seemed less than reliable, several observations not only seemed reliable to the narrator, but the description also seemed relatively realistic, if there were some kind of small human living in uninhabited parts of the world. island.

Homofloriensis was vegetarian, meaning it’s more likely the island could support another ‘ape-man’.

A sculpted model of what Homo floresiensis might have looked like at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History

Forth made eight visits to the Lio region between 2005 and 2018 and “began to wonder if we weren’t the only member of the genus gay living on the planet today.”

Professor Forth, an anthropologist, spoke to the Lio people for decades

Forth acknowledges that it is possible that the ‘ape man’ is a new and unknown ape species, or an uncontacted population of modern humans.

But in the absence of other evidence for any of these ideas, the best hypothesis is that a creature similar to an “ape-man” could exist.

Flores completed his research in 2018 and suffered a stroke on a plane over the Pacific Ocean, meaning he has not continued his research but has since received “interesting reports” from other people in the area.

He said: ‘As a matter of fact, two young men from Great Britain had been to Flores, mostly on a snorkelling holiday. And they climbed a mountain that I know of, and they claim they saw something that looked very much like the ape-men.”

Forti said the two young men had not read his book before visiting the island, and initially thought they had encountered a new species of monkey – but found his book and contacted him.

On Flores, the Lio people still live largely from subsistence agriculture

In 2016, further research found teeth and bits of bones from 700,000 years ago, from a smaller hominid that could be an ancestor of Homo floresiensis.

Forth says the new find suggests that if there is an “ape-man” on Flores, he and his ancestors may have lived there for a million years.

Forth says he still communicates with people around the story, although he hasn’t explored the idea further since he retired after his stroke – and that he now feels like he’s part of the story himself, an anthropologist working on his old age was bold. enough to go ‘rogue’.