#2577 - Gregory Forth

Gregory Forth, DPhil, is an anthropologist, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and author of "Between Ape and Human: An Anthropologist on the Trail of a Hidden Hominid."www.pegasusbooks.com/books/between-ape-and-human-9781639361434-hardcoverwww.gregoryforth.com Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. 50% off your first box at https://www.thefarmersdog.com/rogan! Ghost Soldier exclusively in Theatres This Tuesday Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:00Joe Rogan?

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• 2:45Speaker 01

  The Joe Rogan Experience.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 2:53Joe Rogan?

  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 floresiensis. Am I saying it right? Flores?

• 3:04Speaker 03

  Floresiensis.

• 3:05Joe Rogan?

  Floresiensis.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's like flora and theniensis.

• 3:09Joe Rogan?

  Right. I've been fascinated from 2003, when it was announced, when they, well, when was it announced? They discovered it in 2003?

• 3:16Speaker 03

  September 2003, announced October 2004.

• 3:20Joe Rogan?

  So for people that don't know, what we're talking about is the supposed hobbit people from the island of Flores, a very small, tiny, it's in the Homo genus, right?

• 3:34Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 3:35Joe Rogan?

  Relative of human beings. That's what they, that's the little fella right there.

• 3:40Speaker 03

  Fair enough, yeah. Quite good.

• 3:43Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 3:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, that's correct. I first began field research on Flores as an anthropologist, a cultural anthropologist in 1984. I was interested in the people and 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, humanoid, human-like creatures, which were known locally. Actually, at that time, I was working right in the central part of the island, a place called Nage. And the Nage people, according to the Nage people, there were a group of these, used

• 4:37Speaker 03

  to live close by in a cave, high up on a nearby volcano. But they had become extinct about 200, 300 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 the book.

• 5:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, in the book, you discuss two distinct, at least possible, different species. One of them being Homo floresiensis and the other one being this, the one from Leo?

• 5:26Speaker 03

  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. And then there are the claims, the descriptions offered by Leo people about creatures they say are still around, rare, but still present in their territory, in which some people claim to have seen and have given quite vivid description of. And they seem very, very similar. If I may just expand a bit.

• 6:07Joe Rogan?

  Please.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  There has been discovered, after a deliberate search by paleoanthropologists, if you'll appreciate that distinction, 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 assumed, and there was evidence that something had, if not killed these things, these stegodons had at least eaten them, eaten their carcasses.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  A very long, intensive study was done in, what, the 20, was it the 2000s? Into the 20 teens, looking for some kind of human, some kind of hominid remains. And finally, after a concentrated effort, they found pieces of jaw, pieces, oh, right, teeth, that belonged to something far older than floresiensis, going back about 700,000 years ago, and contemporaneous with what would take to be stone tools, which is what

• 7:30Speaker 03

  kind of set them in motion in the first place, which were even smaller than floresiensis. So, and it is, yeah, kind of presumed that these are possible ancestors of floresiensis. Again, you know, going back further, hundreds of thousands of years. 700,000, 600, 700,000, something in that.

• 7:55Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  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.

• 8:14Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:15Joe Rogan?

  And is the, are these stone tools clearly formed, like an arrowhead or a spearhead? Or are they ambiguous?

• 8:23Speaker 03

  Some of them, you know, this is not my area. I should confess straight away. But some of them are ambiguous. There have been different interpretations. Some authorities in paleoanthropology, archaeology would suggest that they're not artifacts at all, that they're not things that have been made by any, any hominin.

• 8:50Joe Rogan?

  So here's, Jamie pulled up some examples from Indonesia.

• 8:54Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 8:54Joe Rogan?

  And this is some potential tools that they believe Homo floresiensis used. And you could see, they are tool-like, but it's a little, it's a little odd. It's hard to say. Could be just flakes of chips of stone.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  Well, to mention right away there is that there was some overlap between floresiensis and ourselves, Homo sapiens. And it is a well-known generalization, certainly 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 made these things. So, yeah, none of these can we securely attribute to Homo floresiensis.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  It's, there've been some fascinating recent studies, actually, on stegodon bones, close to the location of the discovery site.

• 10:10Joe Rogan?

  Is that a pygmy elephant? Is that a small elephant?

• 10:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, those would have been the ones that they preyed on or scavenged. Yeah, pygmy, a pygmy stegodon, about the 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.

• 10:32Joe Rogan?

  Four, yeah.

• 10:33Speaker 03

  But then again, I mean, the recent interpretations, analyses has suggested that these stegodons, which may have been consumed by floresiensis, were killed, not by floresiensis, not hunted by floresiensis, but instead were killed by komodo dragons, which is the world's largest lizard, growing up, growing, yeah, up to 10 feet long and a formidable animal. Venom glands. Um, you know, terrifically sharp teeth and a deadly tail.

• 11:17Joe Rogan?

  So they were probably scavenging or potentially scavenging what was left.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  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.

• 11:34Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  Um, or 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 used by Florisiensis, but, but merely to scrape meat off the bones, not to kill the animal.

• 12:00Joe Rogan?

  But were there humans living on the island of Flores at the same time?

• 12:05Speaker 03

  If I'm not mistaken, well, when Florisiensis was, was discovered, the, the oldest date for Homo sapiens on the island was 11,000 years ago.

• 12:15Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 12:15Speaker 03

  Um, and whereas now, I think that's been pushed back to 50,000 or so, so.

• 12:22Joe Rogan?

  So it coincides, right?

• 12:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:24Joe Rogan?

  So this overlap, is it possible that it was humans that were predating on these pygmy elephants?

• 12:32Speaker 03

  That's certainly possible, yeah.

• 12:35Joe Rogan?

  Which would.

• 12:35Speaker 03

  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 clear evidence, there's clear evidence from bones that, um, the, um, any of the elephants were killed by Homo sapiens.

• 12:57Joe Rogan?

  Right, like spear marks on the rib cage.

• 13:00Speaker 03

  Cut marks when you're butchering, that, that's what is the big, yeah.

• 13:03Joe Rogan?

  So it's more like something smaller and smaller tools just scraping meat away.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:09Joe Rogan?

  Which would indicate the little animals. So the date of the actual, uh, the, the group that they found that was in that cave, was it, was it 50,000, 60,000 years old? How, how old were they?

• 13:24Speaker 03

  That's, well, of course, initially, it was, uh, it was reckoned they're only 12, 13,000 years old. That is the youngest one.

• 13:32Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right.

• 13:33Speaker 03

  But that was a big problem for the paleo.

• 13:35Joe Rogan?

  That's a big problem.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  They said so as well.

• 13:38Joe Rogan?

  Well, it'd be a real big problem if they found a live one today.

• 13:41Speaker 03

  Oh, well, yeah, no, that, uh, that you're, you're certainly, um, you're certainly correct there, although one of the, um, senior investigators, the original find, said memorably that, um, that, that just the discovery of, of something like Homo Florisiensis at, uh, you know, 12, 13,000 years ago, even a bit older, uh, would, was more surprising. It was a kind of gobsmacking than 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.

• 14:24Joe Rogan?

  Well, it is pretty crazy that this myth has gone on for so long all over the world, or, or all over that part of the world, I should say, like the Orang Pender.

• 14:34Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 14:34Joe Rogan?

  Right, that one's what, is that Vietnam or is that?

• 14:38Speaker 03

  Orang Pender is in, um.

• 14:40Joe Rogan?

  Malaysia?

• 14:41Speaker 03

  Mostly southern Sumatra.

• 14:42Joe Rogan?

  Sumatra.

• 14:43Speaker 03

  So very close to Malaysia, yeah.

• 14:45Joe Rogan?

  And it's a very similar description.

• 14:48Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, on the whole, I, I would say so. I've written a bit about that as well, but, um, the, the, the difference, I guess, well, a couple of differences with Florisiensis is that, with Florisiensis, we, uh, we have fossil evidence for something that could have survived until much more recently.

• 15:12Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 15:13Speaker 03

  In, um, in Sumatra, that, the fossil evidence for Orang Pender is, is not there. Um, and, um, also, of course, on Sumatra, you have all kinds of primates that could be, shall we say, mistaken or taken for a, a, a very small human. Um, orangutans for one thing.

• 15:35Joe Rogan?

  But Flores does not.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  Flores has only one species of monkey and, and no apes. Uh, and the monkey, a macaque, a long-tailed macaque, um, was introduced by humans thousands, just a few thousands of years ago. So no, no native apes, no, no native monkeys either.

• 15:56Joe Rogan?

  So these people, when you first went in the 1980s, um, how frequent were their sightings? And were they in a very specific area?

• 16:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:06Joe Rogan?

  And what, what did they say the encounters were like?

• 16:09Speaker 03

  Well, the, the sightings have been entirely, or nearly entirely, in, uh, in the Leo region, towards the eastern end of the, uh, of the, um, of the island. Um, uh, mostly in, in high altitudes, mountainous areas, mountain, mountain forest. Uh, and, and that's, you know, well away from, uh, human settlements for, for the most, uh, most part. How frequently? It's, it's difficult to say. I mean, I, um, I, I, I, I recorded over 30, um, reports of encounters. Um, some of them not terribly credible.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  Um, others, um, you know, a, a dozen or so, much more interesting.

• 17:00Joe Rogan?

  Can I ask you this? When you say not entirely credible, were there, there's aspects of it that seemed like mythological? Like what, what, what was not entirely credible about some of them?

• 17:09Speaker 03

  Not necessarily mythological, but, um, um,

• 17:14Speaker 03

  it sounded like they, they could well have been identifying monkeys seen in.

• 17:18Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  And, and another, well, one, one reason for that was what they described. Um, another reason was that, uh, a lot of those less credible ones were, um, in circumstances when you wouldn't expect a human to encounter anything like Florisiensis. Um, and largely close to the coast, uh, where, where most, most people live and, and have, have lived for, for a long time, whereas, um, yeah, all indications are that, um, that the lahoas, they're called, or the local hominoids, um, are, are much higher up in, in unsettled parts of the mountains.

• 18:01Joe Rogan?

  So that would indicate that there's a food supply for them up there.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:06Joe Rogan?

  And, um, are they primarily vegetarian?

• 18:10Speaker 03

  They seem to be, um, very much, very much so, yeah. Uh, I mean, the dentition on, on the type, um, specimen, the, the, the skull, the teeth, um, suggests, um, a vegetarian, a herbivore, i- i- if you, if you will. Um, the best specimen, um, the type specimen, as it's called, uh, doesn't really show any definite canines.

• 18:40Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 18:40Speaker 03

  Molas are, uh, fine, um, in, in great shape, by the way, for the, for the age. Um, but, but, uh, yeah, so I'd not say they didn't have pronounced, uh, um, canines, uh, as do chimpanzees, for example.

• 18:57Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 18:58Speaker 03

  Even though chimpanzees are also largely, um, vegetarian.

• 19:03Joe Rogan?

  Largely, but they apparently prefer to eat monkeys.

• 19:07Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. No, that's, well, like humans, I mean, humans, uh, during most of our history have, of necessity eaten, you know, grains and, and vegetables and so on, because they couldn't afford the meat. But, um, nevertheless, meat has, uh, has usually been a, a prized, a prized food.

• 19:28Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, we're, we're clearly omnivores.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:32Joe Rogan?

  Right, but, um, if you were a, a creature that lived in this mountainous terrain, it's probably not a wide variety of mammals, right? Like, so, and if they didn't really have weapons, they had very small stone tools, there, there's seems to be no indication they have anything they could throw or anything along those lines?

• 19:55Speaker 03

  They could, they could throw stones, throw rocks.

• 19:57Joe Rogan?

  Stones.

• 19:58Speaker 03

  Um, they're, they're pretty strong.

• 20:00Joe Rogan?

  Good luck being successful at killing a deer throwing rocks. It'll take you a, a long time to get one.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  Deer are also a recent import.

• 20:09Joe Rogan?

  Oh, is it?

• 20:09Speaker 03

  In fact, Flores is, is mammal poor. The only indigenous native mammals are bats, as you'd expect, because they can fly freely.

• 20:19Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 20:19Speaker 03

  To the island, and, uh, and, and rodents.

• 20:22Joe Rogan?

  So what are the dragons eating?

• 20:25Speaker 03

  The dragons were, uh.

• 20:26Joe Rogan?

  Because they're huge.

• 20:27Speaker 03

  Well, it's interesting, because at one time they were eating the gondons, certainly.

• 20:32Joe Rogan?

  You think they made them extinct, perhaps, because it's a small island?

• 20:38Speaker 03

  Well, they could have contributed to that, yeah, along with other, uh, other factors. But, um, besides, um, besides dragons, there are other, uh, uh, large rats.

• 20:51Joe Rogan?

  Oh, that's right, they had that one very aggressive tree rat, right?

• 20:54Speaker 03

  Now, that, that guy is still around, as I know.

• 20:57Joe Rogan?

  Oh, really?

• 20:58Speaker 03

  I've got photos of, uh, yeah.

• 20:59Joe Rogan?

  That thing's huge, right?

• 21:00Speaker 03

  It is a huge rat.

• 21:01Joe Rogan?

  Couple of feet long?

• 21:02Speaker 03

  It's, uh, at least, I think, in terms of, of, um, metrics, so, uh, um, yeah.

• 21:10Joe Rogan?

  Oh, that's what it looks like?

• 21:11Speaker 03

  Oh, there it is.

• 21:11Joe Rogan?

  The size of that sucker.

• 21:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, that's, that's great. Mostly or largely tail is a lot of animals, but, but it is big, as you can see, it's, uh, um...

• 21:22Joe Rogan?

  That lady looks like she's got one as a pet.

• 21:24Speaker 03

  I'm not sure if that's the same creature, I don't think it is.

• 21:27Joe Rogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  Um, but, um, yeah, now that looks, uh, more like it, yeah, yeah.

• 21:36Joe Rogan?

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• 22:29Speaker 03

  Papa Gomis.

• 22:30Joe Rogan?

  But if you're a 10-foot-long poisonous lizard, it's gonna be hard to sustain that mass just on rats, unless they're overpopulated with rats.

• 22:41Speaker 03

  Well, I, I gotta say that, that once, um, you know, extinction dates for pygmy, stegodon, or any stegodon, uh, well, I can't recall the current figures, but, uh, you know, they're always changing, brother. Um, but, um, as soon as, as you had humans, uh, on the island, you, uh, um, you had pigs and dogs. Um, and some of the pigs, quite quickly, I think, became feral, which they wild.

• 23:11Joe Rogan?

  Of course, yes.

• 23:11Speaker 03

  Um, so, a- and, yeah, and, and then, you know, deer at one point were, were introduced by humans, so certainly deer and pigs, uh, and not to mention domesticates like, uh, goats, uh, even, you know, young buffalo and horses are, are prey to dragons at present. So, uh, in a sense, it could be Homo sapiens that's, that's kept that creature alive, yeah.

• 23:38Joe Rogan?

  Interesting, 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, and then they started eating those.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  I should say also, the little ape-man the, the Leo, for example, described, uh, uh, also reputed occasionally to steal, uh, chickens, or, you know, very, very small piglets.

• 24:06Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  Um, so, yeah, not to deny that they, they wouldn't eat meat if they could get it, so, uh...

• 24:13Joe Rogan?

  So when you went there, was it '84, was the first time you went?

• 24:16Speaker 03

  That was the first time, but, uh, you know, I kept going back, sometimes every year, uh...

• 24:22Joe Rogan?

  But when you first went, did you go looking for this specific creature?

• 24:28Speaker 03

  No, no, I, I went because there are parts of Flores, uh, including Nage country, right in the center where I first, uh...

• 24:36Joe Rogan?

  Pull that microphone up.

• 24:37Speaker 03

  Research, sorry.

• 24:38Joe Rogan?

  It's okay, you can, it moves around a little bit, you can stay where you're sitting.

• 24:40Speaker 03

  No, no, that's, uh, that's, that's fine. Um, no, um, that they, the, the reason I went was to, uh, visit the people and find out how they lived and what they believed in, and, uh, because they were kind of blank on the, on the, uh, cultural anthropological map.

• 24:58Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 24:59Speaker 03

  Um, and it was just incidentally, you know, uh, by accident, you might say.

• 25:05Joe Rogan?

  And with these people, what kind of life are they living? A subsistence lifestyle, are they hunter-gatherers, are they...?

• 25:12Speaker 03

  Certainly in the 1980s, yeah, they, they were still largely subsistence, um, cultivators, um, small farmers who would feed themselves from what they grew. Also hunters, however, the, the men, uh, very much value hunting, uh, although not a lot of their, uh, food supply comes from that, uh, that activity.

• 25:35Joe Rogan?

  And are they hunting animals that had been introduced, like the deer species and pigs?

• 25:39Speaker 03

  Deer and pigs are the two, uh, the two, um, prized types, the most valued types of game. But they'll also kill, uh, monkeys, uh, wild cats, feral cats, um...

• 25:53Joe Rogan?

  Feral house cats?

• 25:54Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, well, that sounds like what they are. I don't think, I don't think there's any indigenous, uh, yeah. But, um, although some people in the past have thought there were, uh, including Alfred Wallace, who you may, you may know.

• 26:07Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm, sure.

• 26:08Speaker 03

  Um, but, um, yeah, but also things like, well, the, the giant tree rats that, that you mentioned.

• 26:15Joe Rogan?

  They hunt those?

• 26:16Speaker 03

  They hunt those. Um, I have, um, said, um, in one or two places, by the way, that, uh, it, it's rather unlikely that, uh, Florisianus would have been, uh, able to hunt the, the tree rats, because they're very difficult to hunt, they're vicious as hell.

• 26:37Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 26:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you need, uh, you need, well, from what I'm told, what I am told often, was told often by the Nage, for example, uh, is, is that you need, uh, you know, more than one person, dogs, you need dogs.

• 26:52Joe Rogan?

  You need dogs to hunt the rats?

• 26:54Speaker 03

  You need a kind of a prod to knock them out of the tree, and, and so on, so it's no... And, and, uh, it's often reported that people are injured from the teeth of these damn things dropping down from, uh, trees. Well, you saw how big it was, so, uh, yeah.

• 27:08Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's a great meal, though, if you're a three-foot-tall, human-like creature, and you eat a two-foot rat.

• 27:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:14Joe Rogan?

  It's a, it's a good catch.

• 27:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, mind you, at the same time, um, let's talk about Florisianus. Um, would, uh, possibly have been able to, uh, to catch, uh, smaller rodents, um, native ones, yeah.

• 27:33Joe Rogan?

  Sure, so, when you first went there, what was the first story that you heard about these little hairy people that lived in the woods?

• 27:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, um, the first story I heard, uh, in the Nage region that I, I've mentioned, uh, was, uh, oh, it's kind of a local legend about how they, uh, they were wiped out by, um, you know, the ancestors of the, uh, the, the, the Nage. And, um, it, it's a story that, whatever the basis, in fact, I was clearly, uh, been, um...

• 28:04Joe Rogan?

  Embellished.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  Been embellished, embroidered, yeah, you, you get, you know, narrative themes entering.

• 28:10Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  Uh, including two escaping, the extermination, and, uh, this is an old plotline, and, you know, moving to another territory where they, uh, sister and brothers, usually said, where they incestuously managed to, uh, you know, maintain their, their species. But, um, yeah, that, that, that was the, the first, uh, first story. I mean, according to that one, these were creatures called abugogo, is a term you may have, uh, come across. Um, they were in the habit, it said, of, uh, they lived in a cave high on the mountain, but they were in the habit of coming down a bit, uh, a bit lower, down slope,

• 28:51Speaker 03

  uh, and joining in feasts and dancing of, uh, of, of villagers. Uh, and they were, they were given food, um, by, uh, by, by their reluctant hosts. Um, but they did odd things, like, uh, yeah, they would certainly eat the food, but then they'd, they'd start biting into the, uh, the plates, which were, were made of, um, well, made of, traditionally made of, uh, sort of pumpkin, uh, skin, dried pumpkin skin. So, yeah, you could break them with your teeth, I don't know that a human could eat them or want to. Um, but, but then...

• 29:29Joe Rogan?

  So they were just confused as to where the food ended?

• 29:31Speaker 03

  Well, this is the idea, they always represent that particular, um, category of creature, abugogo, always, uh, interpreted as, or represented as being stupid.

• 29:43Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, very stupid, so they couldn't tell the difference between food and a plate. Um, they were made drunk, they're given copious amounts of, uh, palm wine, palm gin. Uh, and then, of course, eventually they wanted to, uh, go back to their cave to sleep it off.

• 29:59Joe Rogan?

  And what was the timeline for these supposed interactions?

• 30:02Speaker 03

  Well, as far as one can tell from local, you know, genealogies, family histories, that sort of thing. Yeah, we'd be talking, uh, at least 200, 300 years ago.

• 30:12Joe Rogan?

  So this was like folklore, or at least like legend, that they would tell the stories of these people? And so this was the first story that you heard of these creatures?

• 30:22Speaker 03

  That was the, that was the first, uh, the first one, yeah. There are other stories, you know, told soon thereafter, which also were...

• 30:30Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 30:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, that, that, that's exactly right. Um, yeah, I, people are very insistent, uh, the, the storytellers, very existent, uh, insistent that these things weren't like forest spirits or anything, and they really were...

• 30:53Joe Rogan?

  It was an actual animal?

• 30:54Speaker 03

  It was an actual animal, exactly.

• 30:55Joe Rogan?

  And when did you talk to someone that had had an encounter?

• 31:01Speaker 03

  That was, um, first of all, that was, uh, when I, um, visited the, the Leo, the Leo region.

• 31:10Speaker 03

  Um, which is the, the, the main topic of the, the book, as I said, yeah. And that, that was in the early two thousand, uh, two thousand one, two thousand and three.

• 31:20Joe Rogan?

  What was your, so you had been, you'd had this in your mind for a couple of decades at that point.

• 31:27Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah.

• 31:28Joe Rogan?

  So what was it like to hear that there was a possibility that these things were still on the, and if people haven't seen the Island of Flores before, it's incredibly dense, mountainous.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  Very mountainous, yeah.

• 31:39Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 31:46Speaker 03

  There, there's a Dutch, um, colonials back in there, but.

• 31:50Joe Rogan?

  Is it a coastal road or is it just go through the middle?

• 31:53Speaker 03

  It, it goes wherever it can goes because it's so mountainous. It's, there's virtually no straight stretches.

• 32:00Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 32:01Speaker 03

  So it kind of snakes all over the place. So a lot of it goes through the, um, yeah, a lot of it along the coast, but, but, um, other, other parts in, uh, more central areas.

• 32:11Joe Rogan?

  Jay, can you see if we can get a photo?

• 32:13Speaker 04

  Well, I'm looking at the map. I'm just trying to find the road.

• 32:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:16Speaker 04

  Like locate.

• 32:17Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's insanely dense jungle. So this is where we're looking at is just a, a three D topographical.

• 32:22Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah.

• 32:23Joe Rogan?

  I mean, we're looking at, uh, 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 just, it's like parts of the Amazon where you look at it and you go, well, this is just so dense.

• 32:48Speaker 03

  Higher elevation.

• 32:48Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, just incredibly dense and people are not regularly traveling to this area, certainly not, you know, uh, westerners who are there exploring and doing anthropological work. They're not traveling.

• 33:02Speaker 03

  Few tourists these days, but, uh.

• 33:05Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Okay. So this is a good representation. It's just incredibly dense, mountainous, beautiful, but wildly, you know, un, unchar, not uncharted necessarily because we actually know where, 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.

• 33:34Speaker 03

  Well, I, yeah, I mean, there, there have been studies by zoologists of, um, getting certain, certain parts of the, the local, uh, wildlife, local animal life, but, um, yeah, none explicitly in search of, of, of something like Florisiensis or the Leo ape men, as they call them.

• 33:55Joe Rogan?

  So when you first, uh, had an encounter, someone explained 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?

• 34:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. Prior, certainly prior. Not very long before, a couple of months. Um, but certainly, yeah, well over a year before, uh, the, the Florisiensis discovery was announced, uh, in the, in the media, including the, you know, scientific press.

• 34:34Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  I was quite staggered. Yeah. I actually, I find it kind of hot in here. Can I take my jacket off?

• 34:55Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, absolutely. Of course. Yeah. Take your jacket off. So as we were saying.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:00Joe Rogan?

  Um, 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. Cause you had in, especially in the early, when they were saying it might potentially only be 10,000 plus years old.

• 35:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, I, I, um, yeah, I felt extremely lucky.

• 35:23Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 35:24Speaker 03

  Uh, and, I mean, if, you know, I'd first heard about these things, uh, a year or two later, I, uh, well, I, I probably wouldn't have written the book and I, um, I, I, I wouldn't have, you know, taken it much further. I, I would have thought, well, you know, there is a possibility, however slim, that, uh, somebody's seen a reconstruction of Florisiensis in, you know, um, a, a newspaper or, or on, on television. Um, but, uh, no, um, yeah. So, so, so I was fortunate. I, one thing I subsequently discovered is that, uh, the name La Hua, uh, is in fact recorded

• 36:06Speaker 03

  in, um, a Leo language dictionary, Leo German as a matter of fact, uh, which was, uh, research for that went on in the 1920s and not long after the establishment of, um, uh, a Dutch colonial administration written by a German missionary. Uh, and it finally published in, uh, was published in, in 1933. And there were mentions of La Hua and, and, and some of the information which came from sample sentences, uh, of, of the language, uh, were consistent with, uh, with, um, you know, what, what people generally were telling me about the, the Leo, uh, Leo ape men.

• 36:49Speaker 03

  So that was another, um, another strong indication that, that the whole notion of these, uh, these creatures hadn't come from the, uh, the fossil discovery.

• 37:00Joe Rogan?

  Was there any encounters or descriptions from missionaries, from ancient missionaries that had visited?

• 37:09Speaker 03

  No, not, not that I've been able to discover. And I've looked for that kind of thing, obviously, but, uh, no.

• 37:16Joe Rogan?

  So they had only documented stories?

• 37:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's, it's quite remarkable. I, um, the man I knew for quite a long time, a Dutchman, uh, in, uh, in the Nage region, uh, a missionary, Catholic missionary who'd been there for, for ages. Um, and, and he'd never heard of, um, the, the Obugogo, which are the Nage, um, ape men. Um, and, and which, you know, stories about these, like the ones, uh, when I just described, are pretty widely known, um, in, in, in the region, uh, near the village where, whose inhabitants were supposed to wipe them out,

• 37:57Speaker 03

  hundreds of years ago, but the missionary never, he'd never heard it. I, I was, I was surprised and I'm sure he was being honest.

• 38:04Joe Rogan?

  Hmm. Now, when you first got the initial, uh, report from someone that had encountered one of these in real life.

• 38:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:15Joe Rogan?

  Did you then start looking for other stories from other people to get more confirmation?

• 38:21Speaker 03

  I, I did, um, but I, um, I, um, not, not so much in that particular year. That was, uh, as I said, summer twenty or three. Um, and, um, yeah, cause I had to return to, uh, Canada, I think it was in the June. I had to return in the July or early August, something like that. So I didn't have a lot of time, um, in that year. But I, I, after the, after hearing about Florisiensis, of course, I did, um, I, I did initiate a new project which enabled, gave me funds to, uh, to go back. And, um, yeah, I talk about a bunch of things, not, not just the, uh, the hominoids.

• 39:05Speaker 03

  Um, but, but certainly to pay much more attention to, to Leo, the Leo region, uh, and to these creatures than, than I'd done, uh, um, previously.

• 39:15Joe Rogan?

  And how many reports of encounters had you had? Like how many different people?

• 39:20Speaker 03

  I interviewed, um, well, uh, to answer your question, somewhere in the thirties, thirty two, I think.

• 39:28Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 39:29Speaker 03

  Um, but I, I talked to more people than that, just about, you know, um, the, these, these, uh, uh, hominoids in general, what they'd heard from their parents or, you know, from Huamaba, uh, to, to get, you know, a good idea of, of the kind of local knowledge there was about, uh, uh, about them. And, and so in total, um, yeah, it was well over a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty people I think I talked to in all.

• 39:57Joe Rogan?

  That had had encounters?

• 39:58Speaker 03

  No, no, that, that, that knew something about, knew what a La Hua was.

• 40:03Joe Rogan?

  But if you talked to a hundred and twenty people and thirty of them had encounters, that seems like a lot.

• 40:07Speaker 03

  I guess it does. Yeah. But then there were a lot of people besides who, um, who, you know, knew virtually nothing about La Hua or they didn't want to talk to me or, or they were scared or whatever.

• 40:19Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right. Now, did they all have similar descriptions?

• 40:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. I, I, um, I mean, one thing I, I show in my analysis, uh, and it's been four years now, so, um, I think I got this right, is that the, the sightings are both the, the clearest, most detailed. In other words, most, most credible, um, sighting reports.

• 40:46Speaker 03

  Seem more accurate, more in line with the standard image of ape men than, you know, others. And even, as I said, even among the sighting reports, there were some that I was inclined to dismiss as being, you know, mistaken monkeys.

• 41:08Joe Rogan?

  Right, right. So, so at least a few of them possibly could have been this actual creature.

• 41:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:15Joe Rogan?

  If they're being honest.

• 41:16Speaker 03

  That's right. And it just takes one out of thirty odd or.

• 41:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you have that many, 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?

• 41:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. Not so much forests, although forests included, but, you know, higher slopes 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.

• 42:10Joe Rogan?

  And quite a few of them.

• 42:12Speaker 03

  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

• 42:49Speaker 03

  be a good idea. In fact, 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've 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 volcano and placed traps, taken lots of photos and so on. He wasn't there for very long. He wants to go back, I think,

• 43:32Speaker 03

  late next year, but, but with a team. And he's asked me to investigate people with experience of, you know, rugged country and, and that kind of search. In fact, he even recommended I talk to you about it, but I don't know.

• 43:53Joe Rogan?

  Talk to me about it.

• 43:54Speaker 03

  Well, not you, but maybe somebody in your town, somebody you could, you could recommend. But in the.

• 44:00Joe Rogan?

  Some explorer type?

• 44:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. But in the meantime, quite recently, in fact, I've been asked for an interview by Les Stroud, who.

• 44:10Joe Rogan?

  Sure, Survivor Man.

• 44:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 44:12Joe Rogan?

  Well, he's a big believer in Bigfoot.

• 44:15Speaker 03

  Well, yeah. But I, yeah, so I'm expecting him on Friday the thirteenth, actually, so just in, what, nine, ten days' time. And I think he would be the kind of person to consult on that.

• 44:31Joe Rogan?

  Well, he could live up there for a few months by himself.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, maybe I can get him interested.

• 44:35Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 44:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:45Joe Rogan?

  Never found it. But this would be, I think, probably more likely than finding Bigfoot. First of all, it's an island.

• 44:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:53Joe Rogan?

  It's not just an entire, like, coastline, like, if you're in the Pacific Northwest or wherever you're searching for Bigfoot.

• 44:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:00Joe Rogan?

  And the other thing being that, you know, a guy like Les, going solo, because he does everything solo, he doesn't bring a big camera crew, be a smaller footprint, probably less likely to make a lot of noise and disturb things.

• 45:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a good, good feature.

• 45:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. And if he found something, boy, whoo, that would be exciting. That would be one of the most exciting things that's ever happened in all of anthropology.

• 45:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. No, indeed. So, and I think, you know, I'm not a firm believer in, in anything, really, you might say.

• 45:41Joe Rogan?

  Good for you.

• 45:42Speaker 03

  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 Florisianus, and what Leo people and others were describing to me, you know, the match.

• 46:04Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 46:05Speaker 03

  Is so remarkable that, you know, unless there's 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 remarkable ones, so maybe that's it. But even so, I, I think, yeah, it's worth further exploration. I mean, back in 2005, when I began to look at the Laohua hominoids in earnest, I was already approaching sixty years. I've never been

• 46:47Speaker 03

  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 seventies. So, you know, and you've seen the country, I mean, there's no way I'm going to be scrambling up a mountain, mountainside.

• 47:08Joe Rogan?

  Dangerous, too.

• 47:09Speaker 03

  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, no, the research is worth, while not, you know, guaranteeing success of, of any sort, but.

• 47:31Joe Rogan?

  Now, what about potential use of technology? Are they going to use drones or anything along those lines? Because they've gotten incredibly good.

• 47:39Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 47:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, yeah, no, 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, into play as well. Yeah.

• 48:14Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 48:24Speaker 03

  The Leo region. Can I just grab a, I'm getting very dry here.

• 48:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, there's water in there, that glass right there. And there's coffee in here, if you'd like some coffee.

• 48:35Speaker 03

  Oh, that's great.

• 48:37Joe Rogan?

  How big is the area where, I mean, is it centrally located where they keep finding these same sightings? Is it all in the same particular area? Or is it spread out?

• 48:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I've worked 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.

• 49:12Joe Rogan?

  They're just mostly avoiding people.

• 49:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. The, yeah, well, certainly the creatures are. But, you know, the fact is that different people, their knowledge of local wild animals is, is different from, you know, maybe their neighbors or people at another end of, of the island. There is in Western Indonesia, in Sumatra, possibly on parts of the Malay Peninsula close by as well, there is a kind of wild rabbit or hare. Not the kind of place where you'd expect

• 49:56Speaker 03

  to find rabbits or hares, perhaps. But this, this animal was unknown to most of the local people. It was, it was discovered by Western, many 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.

• 50:18Joe Rogan?

  Interesting.

• 50:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. And in fact, it's now known mostly, and so far as people are aware of it, with the national Indonesian name, Kalinci, which refers to rabbits that were imported by the Dutch as food a couple of centuries ago. So.

• 50:37Joe Rogan?

  Is that, they think, the source of these particular wild rabbits on the island?

• 50:41Speaker 03

  No, no, this would be quite a separate species.

• 50:44Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 50:44Speaker 03

  That they'd be indigenous, yeah. But again, local people, or lots of local groups, didn't, didn't know about them. Reasonable, they're forest dwelling, and they're, you know, quite, quite, quite rare.

• 50:59Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 51:00Speaker 03

  So, no, no, no great surprise. But if I may, something that I was going to say with regard to my, my friend who plans to go back to Flores with an expanded search.

• 51:17Speaker 03

  He became very interested in this particular locality, a particular mountain, in fact, because of reports I received, out of the blue, about three years ago, from two British visitors, hikers, outdoorsmen, taking a break on Flores, and doing scuba diving and hiking, a bit of mountain climbing, this kind of thing. They, I have to think about the details of this, because it was, yeah, like, three years back.

• 51:56Speaker 03

  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 a creature, Central Flores creature, called Obugogo. And one of them, yeah, he wrote to me, he contacted me, first of all, across LinkedIn, and asked me about monkeys on the island, and I told him, and he described to me what

• 52:39Speaker 03

  he and his friend, both of them at the same time, had seen on the higher slopes of this particular mountain. And he said, I think, in his first communication, that it sounds like you're Obugogo. So naturally, I followed this up and had some more conversations by phone and email with these two young men. And there's 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

• 53:18Speaker 03

  communications, but all indications are that they'd never heard of my writings or had never read my writings on, you know, Flores ape men.

• 53:30Joe Rogan?

  So they just had an encounter and sought out an expert?

• 53:32Speaker 03

  They had an encounter, they thought it was, yeah, some kind, well, it's interesting, because I managed to interview them subsequently separately, which was a good thing. And one of them, in fact, the main contact, described what he saw as something very much like a Leo ape man, you know, a little man, a little human, but, you know, monkey-like.

• 53:57Joe Rogan?

  Bipedal?

• 53:58Speaker 03

  Bipedal, yes. That was his impression. The other man described it as looking more like, 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 align with the range of descriptions that I recorded from local people. You know, some descriptions had it more monkey-like, others more human-like, and, of course, naturally, there were variations in the estimated size of what people had seen.

• 54:37Joe Rogan?

  What's the highest estimate?

• 54:38Speaker 03

  The highest comes from a second-hand report of a laihoa, and that would have been about 1.4 meters, which is, yeah, is bigger than Flores.

• 54:53Joe Rogan?

  Four feet, ish?

• 54:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's getting, getting on there, getting four feet, yeah.

• 54:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're right.

• 54:59Joe Rogan?

  So this encounter that these gentlemen had, this was only three years ago?

• 55:03Speaker 03

  Well, actually, the encounter was in 2019, in March. And, you know, they hadn't followed this, they hadn't thought about it, and then, for some reason, 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 and how 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, went on to discuss that.

• 55:40Speaker 03

  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 was that way that he finally came across my name and contact details, so...

• 55:59Joe Rogan?

  So is that one of the only Westerners, or at least groups of Westerners, that spotted these things? This episode is brought to you by the movie Ghost Soldier. Jim Caviezel plays Fitz, a former American special forces soldier and advanced weapons developer. As a military veteran, Fitz has a strong code of justice and a natural instinct to protect a vulnerable community from a powerful corporation. Here's the trailer.

• 56:26Speaker 05

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• 56:52Joe Rogan?

  Now, that doesn't sound like a guy you want to mess with. Ghost Soldier is a fun action film that demands to be seen in theaters, which opens nationwide on Veterans Day, November 11. Rated PG-13.

• 57:07Speaker 03

  There are two of them, of course. No, not, not quite. I might mention that 2019 was well before the 22 book came out, so, you know, that's a factor as well. No, not the only two. 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, tracking back towards up slope, a village he was staying in.

• 57:49Speaker 03

  He got a bit lost, actually, and managed to find his way, and he saw something which was described, certainly interpreted by local people, as having been one of these ape men. That would go back to, I guess, yeah, the last century, 1990s, maybe. But he's a person I know quite well. 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.

• 58:29Speaker 03

  He was working on the neighboring island called Sambawa, which is immediately east of Flores, another big island, lots of mountains, and so on. And he had a similar sighting back in the, similar experience, I should say, back in the 1980s, and was, you know, 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 the book, in fact, in more than one book.

• 59:08Joe Rogan?

  And did he describe the same type of creature, the same type of experience?

• 59:12Speaker 03

  A big monkey standing upright, no tail, about three feet or more tall. Yeah, there was more than one of them that he saw, at the end of a kind of a grown-over area, sort of tunnel that had been created by vegetation. He was trekking 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 heard about, and, you know, villagers down below had sort of pointed him in the right direction.

• 59:54Speaker 03

  He followed the trail they'd indicated, and he was still in his 20s at this time, and was in pretty good shape. And then he came to this, this area, which was grown over, grown over to the extent that he had to go on all force to continue, continue climbing. And it was at the end of this tunnel where there was just some light, of course, sunny day, where he saw several of these creatures, mostly kind of silhouettes, you know, given

• 1:00:32Speaker 03

  the lighting conditions, they made sounds, which were unlike local monkeys. And there you have it. Yeah, he wrote it up in his field notes, which he showed me. Much tidier than my field notes, I can, I can tell you. And, you know, what he'd written at that time accorded with what he told me. So, again, you know, we talk about Florisianus, I mean, 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...

• 1:01:16Speaker 03

  On other islands.

• 1:01:18Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  Around and about, you know.

• 1:01:21Joe Rogan?

  And this, so his depiction of it was before you had ever had your first description of it given to you?

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can say that, but with one qualification. My first research in Indonesia was done in the 1970s.

• 1:01:39Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  As a doctoral student.

• 1:01:42Joe Rogan?

  And you'd never heard any of these stories then?

• 1:01:44Speaker 03

  Well, I was working on the island of Sumba, which is not the same as Flores, a big island of the south, not to be confused with Sumbawa, but this is just Sumba. And there, there is a tradition of, well, something sounds more like the Sasquatch, actually, or the Bigfoot.

• 1:02:03Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:04Speaker 03

  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

• 1:02:49Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:03:10Joe Rogan?

  Oh, the Patterson Gimlin footage?

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  Patterson Gimlin, exactly, yeah.

• 1:03:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, there's a new documentary out that kind of shows that that had been rehearsed.

• 1:03:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, there's a lot of suspicion.

• 1:03:22Joe Rogan?

  Seems pretty fake.

• 1:03:24Speaker 03

  Although at the time, it's interesting, I know there were a number of, or a few, I don't know, 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, you know, 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 so I became aware

• 1:04:09Speaker 03

  at that point that there were, there were reports of things still alive that kind of looked like, you know, Homo erectus or some of these physically primitive forms of Homo, of humans.

• 1:04:25Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's an incredibly fascinating idea, and we know, from what we know about the fossil record, fossil record's so incomplete, because it's so difficult to make a fossil.

• 1:04:38Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:04:39Joe Rogan?

  So when we find new things, like the Denisovans, which is a very recent discovery, we go, oh, well, there's a totally different branch.

• 1:04:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:47Joe Rogan?

  And they were larger than people, this is really interesting. So the, we don't really know, because it's so difficult to make a fossil, and...

• 1:04:57Speaker 03

  That's right, in fact, it's infinitesimally, infinitesimally remote, a possibility.

• 1:05:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:05Speaker 03

  Of a species, just a whole species, not just an individual animal being, you know, surviving, being preserved, being fossilized.

• 1:05:15Joe Rogan?

  It's why it's so crazy to try to get an understanding or a map of the past with fossils.

• 1:05:21Speaker 03

  Well, it's always changing, this is the...

• 1:05:22Joe Rogan?

  Right, it's always changing, they find a new one, throws a monkey wrench into the whole thing, and you're like, oh, well, ho, look at this.

• 1:05:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:29Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 1:05:39Speaker 03

  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, these discoveries. No, they're made, you know, quite by chance.

• 1:05:51Joe Rogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:52Speaker 03

  The likelihood of anybody finding these things is remote, so the sample of fossil hominins is certainly not representative, I mean, it's really...

• 1:06:03Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:06:03Speaker 03

  It's needles in a haystack.

• 1:06:06Joe Rogan?

  It seems to be constantly expanding, our understanding of how many there were.

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  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, when it died out. We know the most recent date.

• 1:06:29Joe Rogan?

  Right, well, that's what's really interesting.

• 1:06:30Speaker 03

  And we know the earliest date, when it came into being as well, we don't know.

• 1:06:34Joe Rogan?

  And when you find something that's 60,000 years old, like those bones that they found in the cave.

• 1:06:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:39Joe Rogan?

  The odds of those being the last ones that existed are very small.

• 1:06:43Speaker 03

  Very small, yeah, that's way in the, oh, that's a question of yours I didn't answer, I think, that's way in the eastern, sorry, the western end of Flores Island is the discovery site, whereas I'm working mostly in, towards the eastern end, central or east-central Flores, so quite a, 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, at least 50,000 years, which is quite a stretch of, quite a stretch of time.

• 1:07:25Joe Rogan?

  Especially when we don't really know how they got there.

• 1:07:27Speaker 03

  And 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're restricted to one small neighborhood is just not, is not credible, they must have been.

• 1:07:45Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:07:46Speaker 03

  All over the, all over the map of Flores.

• 1:07:49Joe Rogan?

  What is the evidence of the one that's 100,000 plus?

• 1:07:53Speaker 03

  The 700,000 plus, see me, oh, 700,000, or, oh, I'm sorry, the floresiensis, there's a number of, a number of specimens in Liangbuwa 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 or 60,000.

• 1:08:17Joe Rogan?

  But how was the pushback, was it radiocarbon dating?

• 1:08:19Speaker 03

  Various methods were applied, I, I can't recall the details, but, yeah, I mean, the point is, Joe, that this 12,000, 13,000 date was found to be a big problem.

• 1:08:34Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 1:08:35Speaker 03

  And so a lot of energy was put into retesting the geological situation in the cave.

• 1:08:45Joe Rogan?

  So is the current dating a certainty?

• 1:08:47Speaker 03

  No, nothing's a certainty.

• 1:08:48Joe Rogan?

  Right, so is it possible that it's earlier, or it's newer, rather?

• 1:08:54Speaker 03

  I think, I think it is, simply because we only know one, one site, a site, you know, not much bigger, if any bigger than this building.

• 1:09:06Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

  On an island of that, 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.

• 1:09:30Joe Rogan?

  And where, is that on...

• 1:09:31Speaker 03

  Not something more recent or younger.

• 1:09:33Joe Rogan?

  Is that Flores as well?

• 1:09:35Speaker 03

  On Flores also, but in the central part, on a large plain.

• 1:09:38Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's even crazier, right, so how did they get there 700,000 years ago?

• 1:09:42Speaker 03

  Well, there is evidence in the form of possible stone tools, let's just say stone tools, that something was making those, those artifacts, yeah, you know, a million years ago.

• 1:09:58Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:09:58Speaker 03

  So how did they get there? They, 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, no land bridges, by the way, that anybody knows about, so they would have had to come somehow by sea.

• 1:10:19Joe Rogan?

  Lower sea level, though, correct, particularly during the Ice Age?

• 1:10:22Speaker 03

  Lower sea levels, but not, you know...

• 1:10:26Joe Rogan?

  Not enough to traverse.

• 1:10:27Speaker 03

  Not a, not a, a land bridge, I mean, the stegodonts swam over.

• 1:10:32Joe Rogan?

  Whoa, from how far away?

• 1:10:35Speaker 03

  Not that far, probably from the east or the north.

• 1:10:37Joe Rogan?

  Maybe they rode the elephants.

• 1:10:40Speaker 03

  Well, I guess somebody, somebody suggested that, but uh.

• 1:10:45Joe Rogan?

  That would be hilarious.

• 1:10:46Speaker 03

  Not, not likely.

• 1:10:48Joe Rogan?

  You're in a boat and you see a bunch of weird looking monkey people riding elephants?

• 1:10:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, you would check your diet.

• 1:10:56Joe Rogan?

  I'd definitely pull my iPhone out.

• 1:10:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:59Joe Rogan?

  Take a video.

• 1:11:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it is possible for um creatures like the, like Florisiensis apparently to um to, to kind of sail over um accidentally uh on great clumps of uh of uh foliage. I'm looking for a term now which I don't have.

• 1:11:20Joe Rogan?

  Like some sort of a log or something, but I mean, how many miles or kilometers?

• 1:11:24Speaker 03

  A great clump of, of earth that had been, you know, dug up by a tsunami and, and driven out to sea. There's evidence for this kind of thing uh happening. So uh, yeah, you would need, of course, more than one of them to get to Floris and they'd have to be opposite sexes as well. But it's all possible, given the time scale involved.

• 1:11:44Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, there's, that's the thing that they do with um, when they, 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?

• 1:12:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:01Joe Rogan?

  And there's, so there's a mathematical equation to that, right?

• 1:12:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. As, as there are estimates of how many um, you know, members of a population you'd need for it to be able to survive.

• 1:12:14Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:12:14Speaker 03

  Continue, breed and so on.

• 1:12:16Joe Rogan?

  So if it's such a small island that it's not possible that they evolved there.

• 1:12:21Speaker 03

  Well, um, I mean, it suggests they did part of their evolution once on the island, yeah.

• 1:12:27Joe Rogan?

  But they, once on the island, but how did everything else get there? Like, how did the dragons get there? How did the rats get there? Like, what is, what is uh, what's the origin of all these various life forms? They're very diverse, right?

• 1:12:40Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I mean, rats um seem to be able to get it everywhere.

• 1:12:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:46Speaker 03

  Except Alberta, by the way. We have, we have mice, but no, no rats. We're trying to keep them out as well with, you know.

• 1:12:53Joe Rogan?

  Wolves, though.

• 1:12:54Speaker 03

  We have wolves and all kinds of things, remarkable.

• 1:12:56Joe Rogan?

  Grizzly bears.

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, black bears.

• 1:12:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, a lot of black bears.

• 1:13:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, uh, mountain lions.

• 1:13:03Joe Rogan?

  Moose.

• 1:13:03Speaker 03

  Moose, all various members of the deer family.

• 1:13:06Joe Rogan?

  Huge deer, elk, you guys have everything up there, it's gorgeous.

• 1:13:09Speaker 03

  So-called antelope as well.

• 1:13:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it is a beautiful part of the world.

• 1:13:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, oh yeah, of course, we've got the two national parks, which are full of uh protected wildlife, you know. But um, yeah, no, let me say about the dragons, the so-called dragons, like Komodo monitos.

• 1:13:26Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:13:26Speaker 03

  Great swimmers.

• 1:13:27Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:13:28Speaker 03

  I mean, now they swim between, between islands regularly.

• 1:13:31Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 1:13:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, so uh, they would have no problem getting there.

• 1:13:35Joe Rogan?

  Right, so they probably just went wherever they smelled food.

• 1:13:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:39Joe Rogan?

  They probably smelled something dead over there and just took a hop into the water. So all these various animals, the, the elephants could swim, the dragons could swim, the rats could figure out a way to get there, birds, obviously, could fly.

• 1:13:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, bats, lots of bats, they can fly.

• 1:13:54Joe Rogan?

  And the monkeys came on boats.

• 1:13:55Speaker 03

  No, the monkeys uh.

• 1:13:56Joe Rogan?

  They were introduced?

• 1:13:57Speaker 03

  Were, were introduced, like a lot of other animals. I mean, they, they're only mammals there, uh, you know, sizable mammals, of various species of uh of mice and rats, and then there's the giant rat. Um, you've got uh, what, pigs?

• 1:14:13Joe Rogan?

  Right, we talked about all this.

• 1:14:14Speaker 03

  We talked about pigs, yeah.

• 1:14:15Joe Rogan?

  Things that were introduced by people.

• 1:14:16Speaker 03

  A lot of them were introduced by people.

• 1:14:18Joe Rogan?

  What year was this, where they started getting introduced by people?

• 1:14:20Speaker 03

  It varies and it's controversial. I mean, there's like dogs, for example, there's some evidence that suggested that uh they haven't been there very, very long, several hundred to thousand years, but there's uh, it seems, seems likely to me they've been there, they've been there longer. Um, pigs, there is a book in which I've written about all this stuff, but I can't remember now the details. Um, anyway, yeah, you know, they're, they're um monkeys, porcupines, there are porcupines that were introduced from.

• 1:14:54Joe Rogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:14:55Speaker 03

  Western, yeah, and they're, they're a game animal.

• 1:14:58Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:14:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:00Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:15:00Speaker 03

  Oh, for sure. Well, they're ultimately rodents like rats, so if you're gonna eat giant rats.

• 1:15:06Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:07Speaker 03

  A porcupine is certainly also on the menu.

• 1:15:11Joe Rogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:15:11Speaker 03

  But uh, yeah, um, you gotta know how to cook them and butcher them probably.

• 1:15:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and kill them without getting jammed.

• 1:15:18Speaker 03

  That, that's, yeah, again, you need dogs for that.

• 1:15:21Joe Rogan?

  Oh, poor dogs.

• 1:15:23Speaker 03

  Special, special, well, the dogs have to be clever uh if they're not gonna get injured, but.

• 1:15:29Joe Rogan?

  I've seen pictures of dogs with porcupine quills all over their face.

• 1:15:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:33Joe Rogan?

  It's so sad.

• 1:15:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, that can happen with tigers in India, of course.

• 1:15:38Joe Rogan?

  I've seen that as well. Look at this poor dog. Oh.

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 1:15:42Joe Rogan?

  Oh, this poor dude.

• 1:15:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, it's interesting, you should uh be able to produce those straight away, yeah.

• 1:15:48Joe Rogan?

  Oy, oy, oy.

• 1:15:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:50Joe Rogan?

  Um, so the point is, it's uh, there's a lot of wildlife and a lot of it came from somewhere else, uh, including the monkeys. Um, 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?

• 1:16:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a similar, similar remains in uh.

• 1:16:16Joe Rogan?

  There's remains?

• 1:16:17Speaker 03

  Luzon Island, yeah.

• 1:16:18Joe Rogan?

  Oh, what, how long ago was this discovered?

• 1:16:22Speaker 03

  It was discovered after Florisiensis.

• 1:16:25Joe Rogan?

  Oh, so it's fairly recent.

• 1:16:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:27Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 1:16:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, Luzonensis, that's called Homo Luzonensis.

• 1:16:31Joe Rogan?

  And it's a separate branch? It's a different animal?

• 1:16:33Speaker 03

  It's a different species, yeah.

• 1:16:35Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:16:36Speaker 03

  Um, but then there are uh, not sure the present state of interpretation on this one, but in uh in, in China as well, in a place called Red Deer Cave, there's evidence for uh for um, small uh hominoids uh living, yeah, same region as uh as Homo erectus uh, which was uh, much bigger there.

• 1:17:00Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:17:01Speaker 03

  A bigger hominin, um, yeah, and, and then in Africa, you've got um, again, since Florisiensis's discovery of uh um, a, a small uh species called Homo naladi. That goes back about two hundred thousand years, but that, that apparently, a small.

• 1:17:21Joe Rogan?

  But there's an, they're an interesting one, right? Because they buried their dead.

• 1:17:24Speaker 03

  They, yeah, yeah, no, that's, that's right, that they had a kind of uh an unusually elaborate, you know, for their circumstances, um, symbolic uh culture evidently.

• 1:17:38Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:17:38Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, nothing like that for Florisiensis.

• 1:17:41Joe Rogan?

  And evidence of stone tool use too, correct?

• 1:17:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I believe so, yeah.

• 1:17:46Joe Rogan?

  And so, weren't there the ones that had a specific area in a cave where they would deposit their bodies?

• 1:17:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:17:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:53Speaker 03

  Fascinating story.

• 1:17:55Joe Rogan?

  Really interesting stuff, because it makes you think, like, well, what else did they have? Like, how long ago? And they were, they were tiny, right?

• 1:18:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, so that too, Florisiensis.

• 1:18:05Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 1:18:13Speaker 03

  Asia and, and uh, and Africa with, with naladi, yeah. Of course, the whole of the New World, South and North America, um, there's no evidence there for uh uh, any kind of um, human or, or primate, except for South American monkeys. Um, so um.

• 1:18:35Joe Rogan?

  And do we know if South American monkeys were indigenous or?

• 1:18:39Speaker 03

  They were, they came from the Old World originally, I can't remember exactly how, I mean, this was, I guess, at a time when uh you know, world geography was a bit different.

• 1:18:49Joe Rogan?

  So they were introduced as well?

• 1:18:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, not by humans, though, but they, they managed to, to get there, and they're quite different in, in many respects from uh Old World monkeys. Um, because, well, the, the main difference, I guess, is the uh prehensile tail. They can actually use the tail as a handle or an extra.

• 1:19:10Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:11Speaker 03

  Extra limb, whereas no, no uh Old World monkey can do that.

• 1:19:15Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:19:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:17Joe Rogan?

  That, the whole story of these creatures, to me, is ju, it, it, it is so captivating. I really can't get enough of it. And um, what I also thought was really interesting was that when they first found these bones of Homo Florisiensis, there was a lot of dismissing of it, and a lot of people thought that it was maybe humans that had some genetic abnormality.

• 1:19:42Speaker 03

  Very good, yeah. Yeah, no, uh, somebody's done your research, oh, you've done your research.

• 1:19:48Joe Rogan?

  I'm obsessed.

• 1:19:49Speaker 03

  No, well, they, no, that, that, that's right. I'll tell you, paleoanthropologists themselves can be interesting characters. I mean, they're very, can be very contentious, so, for fight among themselves.

• 1:20:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:20:04Speaker 03

  There's a few other academics that are like that.

• 1:20:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:08Speaker 03

  But um, the uh, yeah, no, you're right, there was a, a member of the Indonesian, well, no, he wasn't a member of the Indonesian team, but a very senior Indonesian prehistoric archaeologist who was resentful of the fact he wasn't on the, the team and he wasn't uh, you know, consulted early. Um, but anyway, he uh, um, he, he dismissed this as a new Florisiensis, as a new species. And he uh, he claimed that these, what they'd found were one or more um, humans uh who were suffering from a, a brain condition called

• 1:20:52Speaker 03

  whether a, a couple of different possibilities, one's called microcephaly, I think, uh, yeah. So very, very small cranium, small, small brains, but this is an abnormality and, and people in this condition, you know, they don't uh, as individuals, they don't survive.

• 1:21:08Joe Rogan?

  Adamantly rejected the notion that these were a different species.

• 1:21:11Speaker 03

  Has been, there was also the problem that these things are, yeah, the Florisiensis, of course, were, were small, small-bodied, which is, doesn't correlate with uh microcephaly, which is just content they had.

• 1:21:25Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:21:25Speaker 03

  Um, and uh, yeah, no, I mean, I don't think there's many people who uh support this. There is another bone of contention there, so to speak. Uh, and that has to do with the classification of Homo Florisiensis as Homo.

• 1:21:44Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:21:44Speaker 03

  Or, or not, and there's uh, I, I, I mean, most paleoanthropologists still seem to support Homo. Um, but there are some, including uh.

• 1:21:58Speaker 03

  A guy called Chris Stringer at the National History Museum in London,

• 1:22:04Speaker 03

  who I very much respect, mainly because what he says agrees with what I think. But, no, he suggested that forisiensis is something much, much more primitive physically and that it derived 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 the brain size, which is about that of a chimpanzee, are pretty small, and body size and all the rest of it.

• 1:22:46Speaker 03

  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 forisiensis fossils, a guy called Peter Brown, an Australian anatomist, who proposed a different name for Homo forisiensis. He gave it a new genus, he put it into a new genus,

• 1:23:30Speaker 03

  which he named, he gave the suggested name, Sunda-anthropus,

• 1:23:39Speaker 03

  which would mean something like a man-like being from the Sunda region, which refers to those islands. And this was rejected on, 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.

• 1:24:21Speaker 03

  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 forisiensis that threw your 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,

• 1:25:05Speaker 03

  whereas something bigger and better, more developed and so on, replaced something more primitive in a single line of development. Rather that the suggestion was that the, and 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.

• 1:25:45Joe Rogan?

  Which makes sense. We have that in everything else.

• 1:25:46Speaker 03

  It happens in all other sorts of animals.

• 1:25:49Joe Rogan?

  The idea that we would be isolate.

• 1:25:51Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:26:17Joe Rogan?

  Well, I think it's a 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, with the Clovis first thing, like, I forget the gentleman's name who found these stones that indicated that there was people in America as far earlier than that.

• 1:26:42Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 1:26:43Joe Rogan?

  He was destroyed. I mean, they've ruined this guy's reputation, they viciously attacked him, and it turns out he was correct.

• 1:26:49Speaker 03

  Yes, no, this does happen.

• 1:26:51Joe Rogan?

  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, 22,000 years, the White Sands, New Mexico footprints.

• 1:27:02Speaker 03

  Right, right. Yeah, that date keeps being pushed further and further, going further.

• 1:27:08Joe Rogan?

  Right, there's other weird evidence of, it looks like someone had broken apart mastodon bones or mammoth bones, and that's over 100,000 years ago.

• 1:27:18Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:27:30Joe Rogan?

  And they probably should be.

• 1:27:31Speaker 03

  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,

• 1:28:06Speaker 03

  yeah, I mean, with regard to what I've written,

• 1:28:11Speaker 03

  I don't argue, I don't attempt to argue that forisiensis or something deriving from forisiensis, you know, is definitely still around.

• 1:28:23Speaker 03

  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 Foris Island, and their experiences, and, you know, 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.

• 1:28:56Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:28:57Speaker 03

  Some of those beings, I am 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,

• 1:29:18Speaker 03

  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 forisiensis. 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

• 1:29:49Speaker 03

  that individuals, a few individuals at any rate, have had.

• 1:29:52Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 1:30:06Speaker 03

  I thought you were going to ask me if there's any evidence for my use of such substances in the field.

• 1:30:11Joe Rogan?

  I'll ask you that off air.

• 1:30:14Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 1:30:23Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:30:35Joe Rogan?

  Ah, shamans.

• 1:30:36Speaker 03

  Shamans is not a bad description, yeah, who...

• 1:30:41Speaker 03

  Um, they claim an ability to see things that other people

• 1:30:44Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:30:45Speaker 03

  People can't.

• 1:30:46Joe Rogan?

  Um. But do they have a history of psychedelic drug use? Nothing?

• 1:30:51Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 1:30:51Joe Rogan?

  Because most cultures have some method of perturbing their consciousness.

• 1:30:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:56Joe Rogan?

  Are they using fermented fruits and making uh any kind of alcohol?

• 1:31:00Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, making alcohol for sure.

• 1:31:01Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 1:31:02Speaker 03

  Palm wine, palm gin, very powerful stuff.

• 1:31:05Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:31:05Speaker 03

  Good drink.

• 1:31:06Joe Rogan?

  Right. Now, are they drunk when they're seeing these forest spirits?

• 1:31:09Speaker 03

  Uh, no evidence that uh that they are or or were.

• 1:31:14Joe Rogan?

  Um. Right. Uh, 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?

• 1:31:25Speaker 03

  Well, certainly traditionally, not so much nowadays among the men. But um, until quite recently, they they would regularly, habitually, excuse me, chew um, uh, what's called beetle nut, no.

• 1:31:40Joe Rogan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:31:40Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, it's not actually a nut, it's an eureka 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. Um, and this is mildly narcotic, I mean, yeah. It's, I I consumed it regularly when I was on Sumba in the nineteen uh nineteen seventies.

• 1:32:06Joe Rogan?

  Uh. What was that like?

• 1:32:08Speaker 03

  It was, it was, it was pleasant, it turned my teeth black, as it

• 1:32:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:13Speaker 03

  as it does with the local people. It's kind of like, uh, I don't know, smoking too many cigars in a row or uh.

• 1:32:20Joe Rogan?

  Okay, so it's like a strong stimulant.

• 1:32:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I never became, you know, like physically ill in the stomach. But uh, it'd make you feel good, like a lot of uh, a lot of other things. I wasn't hallucinating. Um, and um, yeah, so so so there's that in addition to the.

• 1:32:40Joe Rogan?

  You said slick lime, what is that?

• 1:32:41Speaker 03

  Slick lime.

• 1:32:42Joe Rogan?

  Slick lime?

• 1:32:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, uh, what is that exactly? It's um, it has to do with the way it's it's it's produced, I mean, it comes out as a.

• 1:32:50Joe Rogan?

  Here, Janie just pulled it up. It's calcium hydroxide power powder or paste.

• 1:32:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was gonna say, it comes out as a kind of a white powder, like talcum powder.

• 1:32:58Joe Rogan?

  Mmm.

• 1:33:00Speaker 03

  And you you take a dab of that with with your beetle pepper and or leaf and your uh, your eureka nut, uh, chew it all up, it um, it it becomes red. I mean, the plant materials are green.

• 1:33:15Joe Rogan?

  It's the fourth most uh commonly used addictive substance in the world. After alcohol, nicotine and caffeine.

• 1:33:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:24Joe Rogan?

  Isn't that wild?

• 1:33:24Speaker 03

  I can believe that.

• 1:33:26Joe Rogan?

  That's wild.

• 1:33:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. I don't think I became addictive, even though I uh had a red mouth a lot of the time and.

• 1:33:34Joe Rogan?

  Did it mess up your teeth?

• 1:33:35Speaker 03

  It made them black.

• 1:33:36Joe Rogan?

  That's it? Where you could brush them off? Oh wow, look at these people. Oh, that's nasty.

• 1:33:41Speaker 03

  I'll tell you this, so you may not believe it, but I mean, I I rarely brushed my teeth for two years on Sumba.

• 1:33:48Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:33:48Speaker 03

  I I was very intent, my, I got this, my uh, while smoking as well.

• 1:33:54Joe Rogan?

  Oh boy.

• 1:33:55Speaker 03

  You know, whatever. And I've still lived at the age of nearly eighty, so there you go.

• 1:33:59Joe Rogan?

  You were smoking cigarettes on the island by yourself? How'd you get them there?

• 1:34:03Speaker 03

  Oh, there were cigarettes for sale.

• 1:34:04Joe Rogan?

  Oh, they have them?

• 1:34:05Speaker 03

  Not very good ones, yeah.

• 1:34:06Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 1:34:07Speaker 03

  And they make their own as well, they grow their own tobacco.

• 1:34:10Joe Rogan?

  Okay, so there's nothing, my point was, there's nothing that causes hallucinations, that's part of the culture.

• 1:34:15Speaker 03

  I hope my insurance agent isn't listening to this.

• 1:34:17Joe Rogan?

  [laughing]

• 1:34:19Speaker 03

  Sorry, what was the question?

• 1:34:20Joe Rogan?

  Are you still smoking?

• 1:34:22Speaker 03

  Um, a a small cigar, maybe five or six times a week.

• 1:34:26Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 1:34:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, after lunch only.

• 1:34:30Joe Rogan?

  I get it.

• 1:34:30Speaker 03

  No more than one a day. Some days, none. I haven't had one since Monday. Uh, no, I I enjoy uh, I enjoy smoking cigars.

• 1:34:42Joe Rogan?

  I do as well. Um, so, but that was my point, like if there was something that would cause them to see things that maybe wouldn't be available

• 1:34:51Speaker 03

  To to other people.

• 1:34:52Joe Rogan?

  Under normal consciousness.

• 1:34:54Speaker 03

  Um, no, not not really, and there's no, I mean, with with some shamans, people called shamans, in other parts of the world, you you have um, them making deliberate uh efforts to dissociate, to alter their consciousness.

• 1:35:13Joe Rogan?

  Through ritual?

• 1:35:14Speaker 03

  Um, well, it can be through percussion, drumming.

• 1:35:18Joe Rogan?

  Mm.

• 1:35:19Speaker 03

  Um.

• 1:35:21Joe Rogan?

  Chanting?

• 1:35:21Speaker 03

  Chanting, yeah, it it can be through substances as you've described. Um, rigorous sex even.

• 1:35:30Joe Rogan?

  Rigorous?

• 1:35:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:32Joe Rogan?

  But there's not like psychedelic mushrooms or anything that grows there?

• 1:35:37Speaker 03

  On Flores, no.

• 1:35:38Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:35:38Speaker 03

  Not that I'm aware of, no, I'm sure I'd have heard about them if there were. Um, no, there are, of course, in other parts of the world.

• 1:35:48Joe Rogan?

  And used by shamans as well. Of course.

• 1:35:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:50Joe Rogan?

  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

• 1:35:58Speaker 03

  The the spirits, yeah.

• 1:36:00Joe Rogan?

  Fiction, the spirits, yeah. But then they also saw things that match up with these hobbit people.

• 1:36:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I I must say, I mean, the the Leo people certainly have these religious figures, if you want to call them that. Um, and and I tended to dismiss their accounts, which were often a bit towards the fantastic ends of things.

• 1:36:26Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 1:36:38Speaker 03

  Uh, seemed to be fiction, yeah, I mean, one case I go into, again, in the in the Reason book, um, is um, a creature that uh, uh, we are told, uh, is very good at climbing trees, that's not fantastic, but uh, it has uh multiple testicles, they tell us. Uh, the females as well as the males.

• 1:37:05Joe Rogan?

  Females?

• 1:37:05Speaker 03

  They come in two sexes. Um, and it grows an extra pair every year.

• 1:37:13Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:37:14Speaker 03

  Uh, 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 uh, in the in the following morning, now that sounds um, that's a pretty fantastic, I think you'd say.

• 1:37:33Joe Rogan?

  Especially testicles on the ladies.

• 1:37:35Speaker 03

  It turns out to be um, the palm civet.

• 1:37:39Joe Rogan?

  Ah.

• 1:37:40Speaker 03

  Which is a well-known animal, and uh, with with some interpretation, uh, you know, has has uh, features that accord with with all these exaggerated claims.

• 1:37:52Joe Rogan?

  Have you ever had that coffee that they make out of the civet dung?

• 1:37:55Speaker 03

  Yes, indeed.

• 1:37:55Joe Rogan?

  Kopi luwak?

• 1:37:56Speaker 03

  Luwak, that's exactly the species, yeah.

• 1:37:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I've had that.

• 1:38:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:00Joe Rogan?

  Very remarkably smooth coffee, but

• 1:38:02Speaker 03

  Yes, very expensive as well.

• 1:38:03Joe Rogan?

  It's disconcerting, think that you're drinking coffee that came out of a civet's butt.

• 1:38:07Speaker 03

  I guess so, but uh,

• 1:38:08Joe Rogan?

  [laughing]

• 1:38:09Speaker 03

  I guess it's a weird thing that people eat, I think.

• 1:38:12Joe Rogan?

  Certainly.

• 1:38:12Speaker 03

  Or consume.

• 1:38:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:14Speaker 03

  But um, yeah, no, um, the the species name uh is Hermaphrodite.

• 1:38:21Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:38:22Speaker 03

  Which relates to

• 1:38:23Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:38:24Speaker 03

  Certain glands, both sexes possess, which can be mistaken for testicles, so.

• 1:38:31Joe Rogan?

  Oh, okay, so that's the origin of the bit.

• 1:38:35Speaker 03

  That's the origin of the idea.

• 1:38:36Joe Rogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:38:37Speaker 03

  And I I mean, I later discovered that this fantastic uh, um, well, I was pretty sure beforehand, but I I later became clear that people put, oh, here's one of those. Um, and and it was a palm civet, so.

• 1:38:51Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 1:38:59Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:38:59Joe Rogan?

  Right, like if they see just a particularly large monkey.

• 1:39:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:03Joe Rogan?

  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. Chimpanzees as well.

• 1:39:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, they're apes, of course.

• 1:39:15Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:39:15Speaker 03

  Our closest relative.

• 1:39:16Joe Rogan?

  Yes, so it gets to the point where you you go, okay, if you have, you know, thirty 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 you start, and in Africa, you start going, hey, maybe this is a real thing.

• 1:39:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:45Joe Rogan?

  And then the real problem is.

• 1:39:50Joe Rogan?

  What are the, what's the ethical considerations if they captured one? Like, if they capture a monkey, you could put the monkey in the zoo.

• 1:39:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:00Joe Rogan?

  What, 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.

• 1:40:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, it's, it's, well, between ape and human.

• 1:40:17Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:18Speaker 03

  Using human in the sense of modern homes.

• 1:40:20Joe Rogan?

  I would feel very bad if one of those was in the zoo. I feel bad when I see monkeys in a zoo.

• 1:40:24Speaker 03

  Uh, well, especially chimpanzees, sort of the higher apes, uh, yeah.

• 1:40:29Joe Rogan?

  It looks like they're in hell.

• 1:40:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:30Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:31Speaker 03

  No, I, I agree with you. I, um, I'm very torn myself on this, uh, on this point. I mean, obviously, um, you know, I, I'd partly like something like that to be discovered. I mean, it would, uh...

• 1:40:46Joe Rogan?

  From a scientific perspective, it'd be incredible.

• 1:40:48Speaker 03

  From a scientific, it'd be incredible. It would also kind of vindicate me, I guess you might, uh... You might say, but on the other hand, I think it would be much better if, if they still exist to, to leave them alone.

• 1:40:59Joe Rogan?

  Right, but you would have to prove it. And how would you prove that they exist other than, 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, and so...

• 1:41:11Speaker 03

  Very right.

• 1:41:12Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 1:41:21Speaker 03

  Oh, well, then it would be kind of easier, I guess, to, uh... Yeah, you would, you definitely wouldn't put them in a zoo.

• 1:41:29Joe Rogan?

  Right. Well, not only that, what are you, what are you gonna 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. You'd sedate, who knows what they're allergic to? You could potentially kill them.

• 1:41:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:45Joe Rogan?

  Accidentally while studying them.

• 1:41:47Speaker 03

  I mean, that's, that's an, uh, an issue as well, but, uh... I would say the best way to study them would be through, uh, um, field research, a primatological field researcher. Allah, um, what's her name? Jane Goodall.

• 1:42:05Joe Rogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:42:06Speaker 03

  And there's other ladies, um, including the one that lived with Martin Guerilla, so... Um, and, uh, yeah, long enough so they become habituated to you and, uh, uh, and so on. Um, yeah, probably would be better if a, a, a slightly built female, uh, took on that, uh, on that role.

• 1:42:30Joe Rogan?

  Something non-threatening that would allow them...

• 1:42:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:34Joe Rogan?

  To allow, to come into their community.

• 1:42:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, but they're not chimpanzees, or they weren't.

• 1:42:40Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:42:40Speaker 03

  Um, so, I, I don't know. Gosh, it really, uh... I mean, we are used to dealing with all these conceptual boundaries, right? Like, human and animal and so on. Um, and, and this would, uh... Yeah, that, this would present a real philosophical problem, a real conundrum.

• 1:43:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, so, uh, Forrest Galant was telling me about, uh, a contemporary account of a woman who was an anthropologist, who was, I just cannot remember where the village was. But this, uh, person had encountered something with... Dude, I've got this woman's name. Yeah, here it is. I've got it. It's a, a woman named Sabine Kugler, who wrote this book called Child of the Jungle. Uh, her parents were German missionaries in, uh, a super remote, uh, area of Western Papua. So, it was in New Guinea. And he did an interview with her, and, uh, she said that she had seen these little people.

• 1:43:45Joe Rogan?

  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, uh, 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. And so, uh, he says he actually has a recorded Zoom call that he could send me of this encounter.

• 1:44:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:19Joe Rogan?

  But this is a woman who was just, like, completely stunned encountering these tiny little people in New Guinea.

• 1:44:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:28Joe Rogan?

  So are there accounts in New Guinea that are similar?

• 1:44:31Speaker 03

  She, if I, I may ask, she was, um, she was quite young at the time, or...

• 1:44:35Joe Rogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:44:36Speaker 03

  Don't know.

• 1:44:36Joe Rogan?

  I mean, it's just something that Forrest sent me. He's a wildlife biologist, and he does a lot of work, uh, trying to find extinct species as well. Like, he's looked for the, uh, thylacine, um, multiple times.

• 1:44:49Speaker 03

  The thylacine?

• 1:44:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:50Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:44:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:51Speaker 03

  Interesting case, that one.

• 1:44:53Joe Rogan?

  Right, so we have video of the last supposed thylacine that was alive in a zoo.

• 1:44:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, 1936.

• 1:44:59Joe Rogan?

  But there's quite a few credible reports of sightings.

• 1:45:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, there, there are, there are sightings, and, and if people aren't actually seeing them, there, there's that, uh, bigger, more fascinating problem of, of, you know, what, what they are seeing, or...

• 1:45:15Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 1:45:16Speaker 03

  Or where this all comes from, yeah.

• 1:45:18Joe Rogan?

  The point is, this is Forrest's, uh, history. This is what he does.

• 1:45:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:22Joe Rogan?

  He has a great YouTube channel, by the way.

• 1:45:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:24Joe Rogan?

  And he, you know, documents his journeys.

• 1:45:26Speaker 03

  I think I've heard of the name, but I'm not particularly, if you may, follow that up, but...

• 1:45:29Joe Rogan?

  Fascinating guy. But the point is, like, this woman told him the story, and like, this story is, like, insane. That she actually encountered these. So is there a history of them in New Guinea as well?

• 1:45:40Speaker 03

  Um, I might just point out, not, not to appear too defensive, but I, um, I myself have been told similar stories by, um, by Flores islanders, you know, and, and I don't want to, uh, I, I want to make clear that, you know, to my mind, um, that there's not as much difference as you would think between Flores islanders and, and Westerners who report similar experiences. But you, you said New Guinea, Papua New Guinea, I think?

• 1:46:09Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:46:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, there are, uh, again, in, in the highlands of that very big island, um, there, there are, uh, what are, or used to be called, um, human pygmies, pygoid, uh, populations. Um, who, um, yeah, I, there, there've been reports of, of, uh, of those people showing up in, in sort of odd, odd places and, you know, walking through, um, human, uh, settlements, uh, as well, uh, you know, also from, uh, um, reported by credible, um, wit- witches.

• 1:46:52Joe Rogan?

  Witnesses.

• 1:46:54Speaker 03

  I'm writing a book on witches.

• 1:46:55Joe Rogan?

  Are you really?

• 1:46:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, that's another thing. In fact, I, I had some difficulty preparing for this interview because I'm working on the proofs, the final proofs and the index, and I've, and I did a pieces recently on Halloween, and so I...

• 1:47:10Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:47:10Speaker 03

  That was just a Freudian slip, yeah.

• 1:47:12Joe Rogan?

  Oh, no worries.

• 1:47:13Speaker 03

  Witnesses, I meant, but, um...

• 1:47:15Joe Rogan?

  So what are the descriptions? Are they human, like, hairless?

• 1:47:19Speaker 03

  They are human, and...

• 1:47:20Joe Rogan?

  So they're just like tiny pygmies?

• 1:47:21Speaker 03

  You know, they, it's interesting, they don't wear a lot of clothes. There's a lot of people in New Guinea don't, or didn't, uh, so, uh, whether bodily hair shows up more than it might do, uh, otherwise, uh, can't recall those details, but they are small and they are dark, like most, uh, um, New Guineans. And, yeah. Well, to be classified as, as pygoid, they, they have to be, the average male height has to be, um, less than 1.5 meters, which is like, you know, um, well, less than, less than five feet, or four foot 11, that, that kind of, uh...

• 1:48:00Joe Rogan?

  So...

• 1:48:00Speaker 03

  So they're small, like, like African pygmies, huh?

• 1:48:02Joe Rogan?

  But these are people. This is very different than...

• 1:48:07Speaker 03

  They're extraordinarily different, yeah. Yeah, no, that's, uh, not, not to confuse with, uh, Floresianthus or anything like that.

• 1:48:13Joe Rogan?

  So that may be what this woman encountered. So that might be that they live...

• 1:48:16Speaker 03

  Very possible. You might, we'd need more, uh, details of what she, uh, remembers seeing.

• 1:48:20Joe Rogan?

  Are these, um, documented populations?

• 1:48:23Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:48:24Joe Rogan?

  So this is something that we know exists currently?

• 1:48:26Speaker 03

  Oh, for sure. I mean, there are detailed ethnographic, cultural, anthropological, uh, details of, of their socioeconomic systems and, and everything else.

• 1:48:37Joe Rogan?

  This is a totally different kind of thing.

• 1:48:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course, they, they speak, uh, they speak languages like the rest of us, yeah.

• 1:48:42Joe Rogan?

  Okay. So, um, as far as little tiny hairy creatures, you said Sumatra, the Philippines, Indonesia. Where else?

• 1:48:54Joe Rogan?

  Where else are these credible witness accounts of, uh, people experiencing these kind of little tiny ape-like creatures?

• 1:49:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, my first, um, my first inclination is to say, um, well, you know, Flores and, and I guess Sumbawa, neighboring island, and, um, um...

• 1:49:19Speaker 03

  Sumatra as well, the Orang Pendek. But there are reports from North America of, by native North Americans of, you know, something sounds familiar, similar. Nothing terribly detailed, but I know, I did some research for another book years back on Bigfoot or Sasquatch in the Pacific Northwest. And I think the Bella Kula Indians, the Bella Bella Indians, the British Columbia,

• 1:49:59Speaker 03

  coastal British Columbia had a category of the name of creatures which sounded like small, you know, somewhat hairy folk. The Laihoa, 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

• 1:50:42Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:50:53Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:50:53Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:51:18Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:51:19Speaker 03

  And I can send references to that if you're interested, but that sounded.

• 1:51:26Joe Rogan?

  I was actually just.

• 1:51:28Speaker 03

  Fairly genuine.

• 1:51:29Joe Rogan?

  Say it again, what is the name of it?

• 1:51:31Speaker 03

  Which the.

• 1:51:33Joe Rogan?

  The creature, what is it called?

• 1:51:35Speaker 03

  It was called Jacko, it's just kind of a nickname, which is, you know, sometimes a nickname for human beings, like Jack.

• 1:51:43Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 1:51:59Speaker 03

  Probably, I know, is Daniel Boone or David Crockett was supposed to have killed a bear when he was only three.

• 1:52:04Joe Rogan?

  I don't know which one it is, but Daniel Boone.

• 1:52:06Speaker 03

  This was a song on the radio when I was about five years old.

• 1:52:09Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 1:52:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:35Joe Rogan?

  It might, 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.

• 1:52:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:46Joe Rogan?

  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. It's, 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.

• 1:53:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, you're right. In fact, there was a rather interesting paper written on that very issue by a guy who used to be at the University of Washington.

• 1:53:19Joe Rogan?

  Meldrum?

• 1:53:21Speaker 03

  His name, not Meldrum, no, his name is long gone now. His name was Wayne Suttles.

• 1:53:26Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:53:27Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:53:37Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:53:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I sort of was acquainted with him for a while.

• 1:53:44Joe Rogan?

  He was a true believer.

• 1:53:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, but at the same time, he was, you know, his arguments, whatever the basis are, pretty solid. He was a serious physical anthropologist.

• 1:53:57Joe Rogan?

  Well, you know who really believed in it, at least at one point she did, was Jane Goodall.

• 1:54:02Speaker 03

  Yes, so I understand. Again, I don't know much of the details of that.

• 1:54:06Joe Rogan?

  She gave interviews where she was saying that she's certain it exists.

• 1:54:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:11Joe Rogan?

  You know, and I mean, this is quite a long time ago, you know, so who knows?

• 1:54:16Speaker 03

  I don't know, she's gone now, of course, as well.

• 1:54:18Joe Rogan?

  Yes, but before she died, I don't know if she changed her opinion, or she was probably tired of talking about it because that might have been the only thing people wanted to talk about, like, tell me more about Bigfoot.

• 1:54:26Speaker 03

  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 Vern 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 seventies. Largely, partly focused on the Patterson film.

• 1:55:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, you know, I mean, it's not the case that old 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.

• 1:55:37Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:55:38Speaker 03

  No, because, and again, you know, I talk about conservatism and so on, somewhat understandably, they like to keep this, you know, in a separate kind of.

• 1:55:49Joe Rogan?

  Completely understandably, especially if you're an academic. If you start saying you believe in Bigfoot, you're immediately put into the kook category.

• 1:55:57Speaker 03

  Well, that was as that, but more practically speaking, I guess, your funding will.

• 1:56:02Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:56:02Speaker 03

  Quite rapidly dry up.

• 1:56:04Joe Rogan?

  Exactly. Yeah, there's a fine line between eccentric and foolish.

• 1:56:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:09Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:56:33Joe Rogan?

  What's fascinating.

• 1:56:34Speaker 03

  What Meldrum did.

• 1:56:35Joe Rogan?

  Well, Meldrum was like a full believer. I asked him, if you 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.

• 1:56:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:47Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 1:57:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I would agree with it, except for one particular. These details, well, talking about Flores, these details don't show up in so much in what we call mythology or myths, or even, you know, legends to make that distinction. The naturalistic descriptions come from, well, mostly from supposed eyewitness encounters.

• 1:57:51Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:57:52Speaker 03

  If you look at general knowledge, then you do start to get kind of fantastic features, right? And also, secondhand accounts, they're passed from hand to hand, they, you know, kind of tend more in the supernatural direction, which in itself is fascinating, is a kind of evidence for, you know, the eyewitnesses especially, 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.

• 1:58:33Speaker 03

  And not just that, of course, but the match with reconstructions of fossils of Homo floresiensis.

• 1:58:42Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:58:43Speaker 03

  So, yeah.

• 1:58:45Joe Rogan?

  Well, they found that. If they had found that in North America, like if they had found a Bigfoot evidence, it would change the whole conversation. Then the conversation would be, is this an extinct, like, imagine if they had found some Bigfoot jawbone in a cave somewhere that was an unknown primate that is 8,000-plus years old.

• 1:59:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:59:08Joe Rogan?

  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 and?

• 1:59:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, that would, I mean, it would get a lot more publicity than floresiensis, which.

• 1:59:28Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my goodness, would it?

• 1:59:30Speaker 03

  Happening in, you know, the modern West and in the US or even Canada, it would have the same coverage.

• 1:59:39Joe Rogan?

  Well, the problem is, unlike Homo floresiensis or floresiensis, there is so many hoaxes in America. There's so many gods like, I found Bigfoot, he's in my freezer, and like, a big frozen doll that they're saying is. You know, 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.

• 2:00:01Speaker 03

  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 context circumstances of, on the one hand, people in Flores, ordinary, you know, villagers.

• 2:00:22Speaker 03

  Reporting what, you know, they they once saw. The the the culture or the circumstances, all that kind of stuff. On the one hand, um, and the the culture, the socioeconomic system in which people who claim to have observed Bigfoot live, different kinds of of interests. Um, I mean, nobody on Flores thinks they're gonna become famous.

• 2:00:54Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:00:54Speaker 03

  By telling me.

• 2:00:55Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:00:56Speaker 03

  What they've seen, whatever it may have been.

• 2:00:58Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:00:58Speaker 03

  Um, whereas with Bigfoot in in North America, then, you know, you can become rich and famous.

• 2:01:07Joe Rogan?

  I don't know about rich.

• 2:01:08Speaker 03

  Maybe not rich, but famous.

• 2:01:09Joe Rogan?

  You get, you might be able to parlay it. I mean, look, you could get on Finding Bigfoot. I mean, they did, how many seasons did they do of Finding Bigfoot? They never found Bigfoot.

• 2:01:18Speaker 03

  Never did, no.

• 2:01:19Joe Rogan?

  Spoiler alert.

• 2:01:20Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:01:20Joe Rogan?

  You watch a lot of hours of long television, waiting for them to find it, and they never find it.

• 2:01:25Speaker 03

  Well, that's an an excellent point, because, you know, there's never been such a search on on Flores.

• 2:01:31Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:01:32Speaker 03

  And no local interest in in such a thing either.

• 2:01:36Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:01:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, no.

• 2:01:47Joe Rogan?

  Maybe Forrest would be interested in doing it. He's fascinated by the subject.

• 2:01:51Speaker 03

  Worth doing, as well, I'd say, yeah.

• 2:01:53Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 2:02:03Speaker 03

  Well, I mentioned the eighteen eighty-four, uh, report, that was actually published in one of the few newspapers in British Columbia at that time. This is a wild frontier, right?

• 2:02:13Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:02:14Speaker 03

  In fact, this thing that was seen, um, was actually, um.

• 2:02:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, it was, it was reputedly captured alive, that that's right. But it was when the way, the Canadian Pacific Railway was was going through. Uh, and this was about a hundred-odd miles from, uh, from the coast in a very, in a place called Yale, as a matter of fact, or near a place called Yale. Um, it was small, but, um, it's one reason why I I mentioned it, wasn't a, um, a giant. I know that, uh, subsequent commentators have suggested it was a, an infant Bigfoot.

• 2:02:55Joe Rogan?

  How small was it?

• 2:02:57Speaker 03

  I think it was, um, it was maybe four foot two, something like that.

• 2:03:02Joe Rogan?

  So it's similar in size to Homo floresianus?

• 2:03:04Speaker 03

  A bit bigger, a bit, a bit bigger.

• 2:03:06Joe Rogan?

  A little bigger.

• 2:03:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, but but certainly small for a, a modern human or for an an Neanderthal, for that matter.

• 2:03:13Joe Rogan?

  But there are North American or Native American tribes that have stories of small hairy people that live in the woods as well.

• 2:03:19Speaker 03

  There are, well, just the the one, at any rate, that I I mentioned earlier. So, yeah, obviously, by comparison with, uh, with the Indonesian stuff.

• 2:03:27Joe Rogan?

  What did they wind up doing with this? Because this photography existed at the time, right?

• 2:03:31Speaker 03

  It did, but I'm not sure how many, um, how many cameras were, uh.

• 2:03:37Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:03:38Speaker 03

  Were available, um, and so no, no pictures were taken.

• 2:03:43Joe Rogan?

  Jamie's got it here.

• 2:03:44Speaker 04

  This is a story of a potential.

• 2:03:46Speaker 03

  Oh, four foot seven, I was wrong.

• 2:03:48Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 2:03:49Speaker 03

  Anyway, shorter than the five feet.

• 2:03:51Joe Rogan?

  So, uh, 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 fourth, eighteen eighty-four. 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.

• 2:04:16Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:04:17Joe Rogan?

  Maybe, who knows? So there's that, but is there anything else that you thought was interesting? With people that.

• 2:04:25Speaker 03

  I, I, um, yeah, I, I certainly there were some, uh, writers on Bigfoot, like John Green, who was, uh, a newspaper man, in fact, uh, in the Fraser Valley there. He he was not quite so dismissive. Um, the main reason I think the cryptos would dismiss, uh, Jacko is because he wasn't big enough for a, a Bigfoot.

• 2:04:48Joe Rogan?

  Well, also because newspapers would routinely make up stories.

• 2:04:53Speaker 03

  They, they would, yeah, but, uh, you know, the, the, um, the eyewitnesses were all named. Uh, including, uh, one of the, the, you know, the top bosses of of the, uh, the CP railway. So, I'm not sure if he'd wanna stick his neck out so far, or indeed, you know, why you'd want to do it. Whatever became of it is is a kind, is a, is a mystery. It it sort of disappeared. I know, um, that there's, there's a book, uh, published a couple of, uh, a couple of decades back by a guy whose name escapes me. He's a physical anthropologist.

• 2:05:34Speaker 03

  Uh, and, um, the, the book is called Bigfoot Debunked. I mean, he's sort of virulently opposed to any, any suggestion that anything like this could, uh, could, um, exist. And the best he could do with Jacko, uh, is, um, is conclude that that it was a chimpanzee that had escaped from a circus or a zoo.

• 2:05:59Joe Rogan?

  A four-foot-seven chimpanzee?

• 2:06:01Speaker 03

  Well, there you are. Um, now, I think it had longish head hair as well, but anyway.

• 2:06:08Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 2:06:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, but, um, it was, by all indications, naked, although this was not mentioned in the, uh, report, kind of interestingly, bearing in mind this was the height of the Victorian era, you know, where you didn't mention such things. But, um, yeah, no, the best this author, reasonable author could do is say that it was an escaped chimpanzee. Now, there, there, I mean, one, one thing one can be pretty certain of, very certain of, is that there were no, uh, circuses or, uh, zoos in that area.

• 2:06:45Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:06:45Speaker 03

  At the town, like, I don't think there was a, a zoo anywhere in British Columbia. I, I, I may be.

• 2:06:50Joe Rogan?

  Very remote.

• 2:06:51Speaker 03

  Maybe, right, well, yeah, it was, you know, it was a brand-new, it was a colony at that time.

• 2:06:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:57Speaker 03

  It wasn't part of, well, I guess it had just become, had it.

• 2:07:00Joe Rogan?

  And that area, British Columbia in particular, has a lot of those Sasquatch sightings, a lot of reports.

• 2:07:06Speaker 03

  Well, this is the kind of the classic domain of these things, yeah.

• 2:07:10Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. I gotta say, no circuses either, I don't think.

• 2:07:14Joe Rogan?

  No, no circuses, but, so do you think that there's a possibility that something like that, at least at one point in time, existed in North America?

• 2:07:21Speaker 03

  I don't wanna rule it out, as I say, I mean, the, um, the, the Flores ape men are much more credible because of the fossil evidence.

• 2:07:30Joe Rogan?

  Of course.

• 2:07:31Speaker 03

  The whole kind of ecosystem.

• 2:07:32Joe Rogan?

  Of course.

• 2:07:33Speaker 03

  The region of the world where they are, existence of other primates, if not on the island, then, you know, pretty close by. Um, whole evolutionary history of, uh, of, of, of that region. Um, and again, you know, the, um, not only are there fossils, but there's a close match between what the fossils indicate and what, um, um, you know, my colleagues in the field, Leo Villagers, uh, indicate, so. Yeah, you gotta keep a bit of an open mind, don't you?

• 2:08:04Joe Rogan?

  Yes, well, it's also, my problem with Bigfoot is that it's fun, it's fun to believe.

• 2:08:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:08:09Joe Rogan?

  And so I start looking at my own judgment and going, stop.

• 2:08:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:08:15Joe Rogan?

  Being silly, you're wasting time.

• 2:08:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I, um, I, I don't, I don't find Bigfoot credible, and again, I've said so in in print in in an earlier book. Um, it, it's interesting that, uh, eighteen eighty-four, I mean, that was the time when, uh, great apes, grillas and chimpanzees were becoming widely known to a, a, a Western public.

• 2:08:40Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:08:40Speaker 03

  Whereas they, they hadn't been, um, before.

• 2:08:43Joe Rogan?

  But the discovery of mountain apes by Westerners wasn't until the late nineteenth century, right?

• 2:08:49Speaker 03

  Uh, the mountain gorilla, I think, was the twentieth, very early twentieth century, was it? Uh, yeah, and and the other, the lowland gorilla as well, was relatively, relatively recent.

• 2:08:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they were thought to be a myth.

• 2:09:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:09:01Joe Rogan?

  Which is quite hard for us to imagine today.

• 2:09:06Speaker 03

  Well, yes and no. I mean, if you look at, you know, their culture history and so on, that, you know, the historical setting and all the rest of it. Don't forget Darwin only, you know, his ideas only became current in 1859.

• 2:09:23Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:09:24Speaker 03

  But I was gonna say, with regard to, with regard to, yeah, no, kind of general knowledge about apes, these were, these were something new. And, you know, they, they reached people through, I guess, you know, 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, you know, people had a, 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

• 2:10:07Speaker 03

  bear in British Columbia at that time, might have made a mistake, or, you know.

• 2:10:14Joe Rogan?

  That's a part of the problem.

• 2:10:15Speaker 03

  Created it, yeah.

• 2:10:16Joe Rogan?

  Bears also sometimes walk bipedally. Yeah. If you see them in the distance, if it's dusk, if it's very, yeah, if it's very dense woods.

• 2:10:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:10:25Joe Rogan?

  It's very difficult to discern what you're actually looking at. And then the mind plays tricks on you, and you start.

• 2:10:29Speaker 03

  Indeed.

• 2:10:30Joe Rogan?

  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, you know, most of them just seemed like guys that were 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 said, she said she only saw it for less

• 2:11:15Joe Rogan?

  than a minute. It was moving through the trees. But she said, she goes, I know what a bear looks like. She goes, I, I know. She goes, it did not look like a bear. I think it was a Sasquatch, and I think they're real.

• 2:11:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:11:27Joe Rogan?

  The problem also with the Pacific Northwest, and that particular area we're talking about, like Mount Rainier, it's so dense, that the, the trees, the way I describe it, it's like a box of Q-tips. You know, like, it's just, it's insanely dense. You can't see anything.

• 2:11:40Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:11:41Joe Rogan?

  And it's, the forest floor is filled with pine needles and leaves that have, like, landed and compacted over and over and over. So, you're not gonna get any footprints.

• 2:11:50Speaker 03

  No. No, indeed.

• 2:11:53Joe Rogan?

  And these things can walk quietly, because the ground is very soft, and everything's wet. Because it's just this tremendous rainforest. It's incredibly rich with life. And you, you're there, and you go, okay, I could see how something could hide in here. Like, you're not gonna find things. Like, you can only, like, even if you had a team of people, you, first of all, you'd be making so much noise, you, they'd smell you a mile away.

• 2:12:15Speaker 03

  I'd say smell would be a factor as well, yeah.

• 2:12:17Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, smell you a mile away. And it's so dense. Like, the, 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.

• 2:12:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:12:31Joe Rogan?

  But the question is, like, if it's something, look at that guy. Seen this guy before?

• 2:12:35Speaker 03

  Oh, yes, indeed. In fact.

• 2:12:37Joe Rogan?

  Jojo the dogface boy, he was around.

• 2:12:39Speaker 03

  Some of those pictures are in an earlier book I, I wrote. Yeah.

• 2:12:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, there's people that have that condition today.

• 2:12:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, hypothyroidosis.

• 2:12:46Speaker 04

  I stumbled across this guy from, this is Julia Pastrana. She was around from 1860 and died in 1865 in Moscow, but was, is from Sinaloa, Mexico.

• 2:12:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:12:58Speaker 04

  And was studied left and right by all sorts of people. They call it all sorts of things.

• 2:13:05Joe Rogan?

  So she was from Mexico. Look at her features. That's crazy. The hair all over her face?

• 2:13:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:13:10Joe Rogan?

  That's wild.

• 2:13:11Speaker 04

  Small, was a performer.

• 2:13:12Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:13:14Speaker 04

  Uh, her body is still being displayed somewhere.

• 2:13:16Joe Rogan?

  Ew.

• 2:13:17Speaker 04

  Yeah. Uh, but I, as I'm like, hearing all these descriptions, I'm like, this, this would pass for that description you're saying, kind of in some way or another.

• 2:13:25Joe Rogan?

  Sure. Sure. If you saw that, if she was tiny, and she was running through the woods.

• 2:13:28Speaker 03

  A Bigfoot, you mean? Yeah.

• 2:13:30Joe Rogan?

  Or, you know, any sort of forest person in some of these other places.

• 2:13:35Speaker 03

  I guess so. But then you have to ask, why would anybody like that wanna 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 after?

• 2:13:53Speaker 04

  She was supposedly sold by her uncle after her mother died.

• 2:13:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. There's some unfortunate stories attached to these.

• 2:13:59Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 2:14:08Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 2:14:09Joe Rogan?

  And they, they literally had him in the zoo, like, for observation, so people could see him.

• 2:14:14Speaker 03

  The Bronx, it's not impossible. I know there were, there were.

• 2:14:18Joe Rogan?

  Same time period. Yeah.

• 2:14:19Speaker 03

  There were, um, pygmies, pygmy families who were exhibited at, was it a world fair? And where the heck was that? Chicago? St. Louis? Somewhere in, in, in the United States. Uh, yeah.

• 2:14:36Speaker 04

  It was the same one.

• 2:14:37Speaker 03

  St. Louis World Fair.

• 2:14:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, same guy.

• 2:14:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, yes. Booties. Yeah, these, that's one group of, of so-called pygmies. Let me tell you about pygmies. Uh, one hesitates a bit, because the name is no longer, you know, politically correct. But, um, they, these, we're talking about, you know, fully modern humans. Um, in, in, their, their brains and heads are not as small as their bodies. Okay, so their brain size would be comparable to anybody else. So, so quite different from something like Homo floresiensis. But the point I, I wanted to make was that before

• 2:15:18Speaker 03

  a guy called Schweinfirth, a German explorer, was able to document the actual existence of, of African pygmies around the middle of the 19th century. I think it was 1847, so exactly 100 years before I was born. Um, he actually bought one, if you can believe that. I mean, horrible as that sounds, but, you know, they, some pygmies were, were kept as slaves by taller Africans at that time. But, but before that, Europeans thought that pygmies were, were a myth, that there was no such thing, that this was a product of,

• 2:16:02Speaker 03

  of Greek mythology, especially. Of course, it's from there that the name, um, pygmy comes. So, um, yeah, comparable to our knowledge of, or anybody's knowledge of, of gorillas, for example. The pygmies were discovered a bit, a bit before.

• 2:16:24Joe Rogan?

  It's fascinating, we think of, like, how little people knew about the natural world just a couple of hundred years ago.

• 2:16:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, indeed, that's a good point. I wanna just correct myself. Um, I said before, gorilla were discovered. They were well-known to local people in Africa.

• 2:16:42Joe Rogan?

  Right. Discovered by the Western world.

• 2:16:44Speaker 03

  With a very ethnocentric approach, which, again, is a matter of, of habit, right?

• 2:16:48Joe Rogan?

  Yep.

• 2:16:49Speaker 03

  I didn't mean to say that. And, um, yeah, likewise with conservative scientists, that you get into, uh, modes of thought that are not easy to, to, to alter. Um, yeah.

• 2:17:03Joe Rogan?

  Well, listen, I really enjoyed 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.

• 2:17:10Speaker 03

  April Fool's Day, 1st of April is when there's an official publication date.

• 2:17:13Joe Rogan?

  Oh, perfect.

• 2:17:14Speaker 03

  That you can order copies now.

• 2:17:16Joe Rogan?

  What is it called?

• 2:17:17Speaker 03

  It's called The Wicked Witch. And then there's a subtitle, um, 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, um, you know, what we understand by, by, by witches in, in, in the West. And I would immediately point out that I don't believe in witches. Whatever I might think about Homo floresiensis, or, you know, present-day descendants that might exist. Um, no, witchcraft exists in, in accusations. People accuse, have accused,

• 2:18:01Speaker 03

  still accused, as a matter of fact, in many places, including in the West. Other people of being able to, of being evil, of being able to, and harm other people maliciously, wantonly through supernatural means. So that's, but, but there's a lot of other things I've discovered about witches in, in that journey. Um, which actually belong, began a very long time ago, when I, I first started to teach anthropology. But I, I think it's something that would be of interest to your listeners, definitely.

• 2:18:33Joe Rogan?

  Hundred percent. So, let's, let's plan on doing that again. We'll do that, uh, we'll do another podcast sometime after the book is out.

• 2:18:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay.

• 2:18:39Joe Rogan?

  And we'll talk about that.

• 2:18:40Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:18:41Joe Rogan?

  All right.

• 2:18:42Speaker 03

  Next time, make sure you get me a flight to Austin. That gives me more connection time from Houston, because I missed my flight yesterday.

• 2:18:47Joe Rogan?

  Oh, did you? Oh, sorry. Yeah. Okay, we'll do that. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. It was really, really fun conversation.

• 2:18:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, it's been extremely enjoyable. And I, I'm, I'm very impressed by your question.

• 2:19:00Joe Rogan?

  Oh, thank you. I'm very impressed by your work. So.

• 2:19:04Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 2:19:05Joe Rogan?

  Perfect. All right. Bye, everybody.