Canadian anthropologist Gregory Forth told Joe Rogan this week that villagers on the Indonesian island of Flores were describing small, ape-like “hobbit” creatures to him more than a year before scientists announced the bones of Homo floresiensis, the extinct human relative nicknamed the hobbit, and that he thinks the creatures could still be alive in the island’s mountains. Forth, who wrote the 2022 book Between Ape and Human, appeared on episode #2577 of The Joe Rogan Experience, released Thursday.
Forth said he began fieldwork on Flores in 1984 and first heard stories of small, human-like creatures that year, among the Nage people in the middle of the island, who described them as extinct for two or three hundred years. Further east, among the Lio people, the stories were of creatures “still around, rare, but still present.” He told Rogan he recorded “over 30 reports of encounters, some of them not terribly credible, others, you know, a dozen or so much more interesting”, and that the less credible ones tended to come from the coast, where people could have mistaken monkeys for the creatures.
The sequence is what Forth leans on. Rogan asked how the first account he heard compared with the bones. Forth answered that it came “certainly prior, not very long before, a couple of months, but certainly, yeah, well over a year before the Floresiensis discovery was announced in the media.” The fossils were announced in October 2004. He also said the Lio name for the creature appears in a Lio-German dictionary researched in the 1920s and published in 1933, which he took as a sign the notion “hadn’t come from the fossil discovery.” In all, he said he spoke to “well over 120, 130 people.”
Forth also covered the fossil record. He described a decades-long search in central Flores that finally turned up jaw fragments and teeth “far older than Floresiensis, going back about 700,000 years ago”, which he said are presumed to be possible ancestors of the hobbit. Those are not new: the Mata Menge fossils, a jaw fragment and six teeth, were reported in two Nature papers on June 8, 2016, and National Geographic noted researchers “can’t yet be certain” they belong to the same species. Forth also cautioned that stone tools on the island cannot be tied to the hobbit without skeletal evidence: “none of these can we securely attribute to Homo floresiensis.”
Peter Brown, who reviewed the book in October 2022, wrote that Forth has never seen one, that the Lio have no physical remains, and that the only material he was shown was parts of a long-tailed macaque skeleton.
Forth told Rogan he is “not a firm believer in anything, really,” but that the match between the reconstructed hobbit and what the Lio told him is so close that “unless there’s been some huge, well-hidden conspiracy designed entirely to fool little old me,” it is hard to explain. He allowed, “coincidences do happen, including remarkable ones, so maybe that’s it. But even so, I think, yeah, it’s worth further exploration.”
Forth said a man in the Netherlands, whom he did not name, has already visited one volcano on Flores, set traps and taken photos, and wants to go back “late next year” with a team, possibly using drones. Forth also said he expects to speak with Les Stroud, and told Rogan he is not up for the climb himself: “it’s a bit of a challenge going anywhere these days.”
