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Use code ROGEN10 for 10% off, select jump starters at n-o-dot-c-o. 2:13 The Joe Rogan Experience. 2:16 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. 2:22 Thank you very much for being here. I'm really excited to talk to you. I am fascinated by this little hobbit creature, this homofloreansis. 2:31 Am I saying it right? Florens? Florensiansis? Florensiansis. 2:35 Yeah, so it's like floor and then the answers right I've been fascinated from 2:40 2003 when it was announced when they well when it was an announced they discovered it in 2003 and September 2003 announced October 2:49 2004 so so for people that don't know what we're talking about is the 2:54 supposed hobbit people from the island of force is a very small 2:58 tiny 3:00 It's in the 3:00 homo genus, right? So it's relative of human beings. That's what they, that's a 3:07 little fella right there. And what is fascinating about your work is that you 3:15 were on that island quite a bit before that and you were investigating the 3:20 possibility of this existing a long time before that. Yeah, no that's correct. I 3:26 I first began field research on Flores as an anthropologist, a cultural anthropologist 3:32 in 1984. 3:35 I was interested in the people and the culture and the languages generally, but quite early 3:41 in my stay. 3:42 In fact, in 1984 during my first visit, I heard about these small hominoid human-like 3:52 creatures, which were known locally. Actually, at that time I was working right in the central 3:58 part of the island in a place called Nage. According to the Nage people, there were a 4:05 group of these who used to live close by in a cave, high upon a nearby volcano. But 4:13 But they had become extinct about 200, 300 years previously. 4:18 So in that particular area, that particular part of Flores, they weren't supposed to be 4:22 around anymore. 4:23 But then subsequent to that visit, I began to hear about similar creatures further to 4:34 the east in a place called Leo. 4:37 And those are the ones I write about in the book. 4:41 Yeah. 4:42 In the book, you discuss two distinct, at least possible, different species. 4:48 One of them being homophoresiensis, and the other one being this one from Leo. 4:55 No. 4:56 Well, in a way, you could say that, I mean, there's homophoresiensis which lived on the 5:03 island of Flores for a long time, and must have lived in places other than the single 5:08 discovery site. And then there are the claims, the descriptions offered by Leo people about 5:19 creatures they say are still around, rare, but still present in their territory in which 5:24 some people claim to have seen and have given quite vivid description of. And they seem 5:32 very similar if I may just expand a bit. There has been discovered after a deliberate search 5:42 by paleoanthropologists, if you'll appreciate that distinction. Also in the central part 5:50 of Flores, in fact, in a place where decades ago there were discovered stagodons, kind 5:58 of primitive elephant, bones in large numbers, and there was evidence that something had, 6:05 if not killed these things, these stagodons had at least eaten them, eaten their carcasses. 6:14 A very long, intensive study was done in what, was it the 2000s, into the 20 teens, looking 6:31 for some kind of human, some kind of hominid remains. 6:36 And finally, after a concentrated effort, they found pieces of jaw, pieces of teeth that 6:48 belonged to something far older than Fluoresiensis, going back about 700,000 years ago, and contemporaneous 6:56 with what were taken to be stone tools, which is what kind of set them in motion in the 7:01 place, which were even smaller than floresiensis. And it is kind of presumed that these are possible 7:13 ancestors of floresiensis. Again, going back further hundreds of thousands of years, 700,000, 7:22 600, 700,000, something like that. But there's also stone tool evidence or stones taken to 7:29 be possible tools that takes us back even further to like a million years ago, maybe 7:37 even earlier. 7:40 I mean, there's still a big mystery as to how these things ever got on the island. 7:43 Right. 7:43 Yeah. 7:44 And are these stone tools clearly formed, like an arrowhead or a spearhead, or are 7:49 they ambiguous? 7:52 Some of them, you know, this is not my area. 7:54 I should confess straight away. 7:55 Of course. 7:56 But some of them are ambiguous. 8:00 There have been different interpretations. 8:03 Some authorities in, you know, paleoanthropology, 8:07 archeology would suggest that they're not artifacts at all. 8:14 They're not things that have been made by any hominin. 8:19 So here's, Jamie, we pulled up some examples 8:21 from Indonesia. 8:23 Yeah. 8:23 And this is some potential tools that they believe homophoresiensis 8:29 Used and you could see they they are tool-like, but it's a little yeah, it's a little odd 8:36 It's hard to say. It could be just flakes of 8:40 Chips yeah, well to mention right away there is that there was some overlap between 8:47 Fluoresiensis and ourselves 8:50 Homo sapiens, and it is a well-known generalization, certainly in that part of the world, that 9:00 you can't distinguish species on the basis of stone tool industries, as they're called. 9:07 In other words, you need skeletal evidence in close association with anything that 9:13 is a stone tool or might be to say what species probably made these things. 9:18 So yeah, none of these can we securely attribute 9:22 to homophoresiensis. 9:25 It's, there's been some fascinating recent studies, 9:30 actually, on stagodon bones 9:35 close to the location of the discovery site. 9:39 Is that a pygmy elephant? 9:41 Is that a small elephant? 9:41 Yeah, those would have been the ones 9:43 that they preyed on or scavenged. 9:46 Yeah, a pygmy stagodon, but size of a cow, so if you can think of an elephant the size 9:53 of a cow. 9:55 Still pretty formidable if you're only three feet, three and a half feet tall. 10:02 But then again, I mean, the recent interpretation analysis has suggested that these stagodons, 10:13 It may have been consumed by Fleurisiansis, but were killed, not by Fleurisiansis, not 10:18 hunted by Fleurisiansis, but instead were killed by Komodo dragons, which is the world's largest 10:28 lizard, growing up to 10 feet long and a formidable animal, venom glands, you know, 10:42 and terrifically sharp teeth and a deadly tail. 10:45 So they were probably scavenging 10:47 or potentially scavenging what was left. 10:49 That's the idea. 10:50 And anything that could be taken for a cut mark, 10:53 well, the bones that have been studied, 10:56 they show marks, but mostly from Dragon's teeth, 11:01 Komodo Dragon teeth. 11:05 Komodo monitor teeth to use another name. 11:11 Those that don't look like Komodo dragon teeth marks 11:17 have been interpreted as, yeah, 11:19 possible stone tool marks used by Floresiensis, 11:25 but merely to scrape meat off the bones, 11:28 not to kill the animal. 11:29 But were there humans living on the island of Flores 11:33 at the same time? 11:34 If I'm not mistaken, well, when Floresiensis was 11:38 was discovered, the oldest date for Homo sapiens on the island was 11,000 years ago and whereas 11:47 now I think that's been pushed back to 50,000 or so, so there was overlap. 11:53 So this overlap is impossible that it was humans that were predating on these pygmy 11:59 elephants? 12:01 That's certainly possible, yeah. 12:04 Which would? 12:04 would leave, yeah, although, again, if I've got this right and if I'm up to date on this, 12:11 I'm not sure that there is clear evidence from bones that any of the elephants were killed 12:23 by homo sapiens. 12:26 Right, like spear marks and a rib cage. 12:28 Well, a cat march when you're butchering, that sort of is the big guy. 12:31 Yeah, so it's more like something smaller and smaller tools just scraping meat away. Yeah, which would indicate the little animals 12:39 so the date of the actual 12:43 The the group that they found that was in that cave. Yeah, was it was it 50,000 60,000 years old? 12:51 How old were they that's yeah? Well, of course initially it was 12:56 It was reckoned they're only 12 13,000 years old that the youngest right 13:01 Right, right, right. 13:02 But that was a big problem for the paleos. 13:04 That was a big problem. 13:05 They said so as well. 13:07 Well, it would be a real big problem if they found a live one today. 13:10 Well, yeah, no, that you're certainly correct there, although one of the senior investigators, 13:21 the original find, said memorably that just the discovery of something like homophoresiensis 13:30 said, you know, 13,000 years ago, or even a bit older, it was more surprising, it was 13:39 a kind of gobsmacking than would be, he said, the discovery of a space alien. 13:46 So that just shows you how out of the blue this paleontological discovery was. 13:53 Well, it is pretty crazy that this myth has gone on for so long all over the world, 13:58 all over that part of the world, I should say, 14:01 like the Orang Pendek, right? 14:04 That one's what, is that Vietnam or is that? 14:06 Orang Pendek is in the southern Sumatra. 14:11 Sumatra. 14:12 So very close to Malaysia. 14:14 And it's a very similar description. 14:18 Yeah, on the whole, I would say so. 14:21 I've written a bit about that as well, 14:23 but the difference, I guess, 14:27 Well, a couple of differences with Fluoresiensis is that with Fluoresiensis we have fossil evidence 14:36 for something that could have survived until much more recently was in Sumatra that the 14:44 fossil evidence for orang pendic is not there. 14:50 And also, of course, on Sumatra you have all kinds of primates that could be, shall 14:56 always say mistaken or taken for a very small human, orangutans for one thing. 15:04 But Flores does not. 15:05 Flores has only one species of monkey and no apes and the monkey, a macaque, a long-tailed 15:14 macaque was introduced by humans thousands, just a few thousands of years ago. 15:20 So no native apes, no native monkeys either. 15:25 So, these people, when you first went in the 1980s, how frequent were their sightings and 15:32 were they in a very specific area and what did they say the encounters were like? 15:38 Well the sightings have been entirely or nearly entirely in the Leo region towards the eastern 15:47 end of the island, mostly in high-altitude mountainous areas, mountain forest, and thus 16:03 in a well away from human settlements for the most part, how frequently it's difficult 16:11 to say. I mean, I recorded over 30 reports of encounters, some of them not terribly credible, 16:25 others, you know, a dozen or so much more interesting. 16:29 Can I ask you this? When you say not entirely credible, the aspects of it that seemed 16:33 like mythological, like what was not entirely credible? 16:37 It's not necessarily mythological, but it sounded like they could well have been identifying 16:45 monkeys. 16:48 Another, well, one reason for that was what they described. 16:54 Another reason was that a lot of those less credible ones were in circumstances when you 17:02 expect a human to encounter anything like floresiensis, and likely close to the coast where most 17:12 people live and have lived for a long time, whereas, yeah, all indications are that the 17:21 Lai Hoa, as they're called, of the local hominoids are much higher up in unsubtle parts 17:29 of the mountains. 17:29 So, that would indicate that there's a food supply for them up there. 17:35 And are they primarily vegetarian? 17:39 They seem to be very much so. 17:43 Yeah. 17:43 I mean, the dentition on the type specimen, the scalded teeth, suggests a vegetarian herb 17:56 if you will. The best specimen, the type of specimen as it's called, doesn't really show 18:06 any definite canines. Molas are fine. In great shape by the way, for the age. But yeah, so 18:19 or not say they didn't have pronounced canines as do chimpanzees, for example, 18:26 even though chimpanzees are also largely vegetarian. 18:32 Largely, but they apparently prefer to eat monkeys. 18:36 Oh, yeah. No, that's what, like humans, I mean, 18:39 humans during most of our history have of necessity eaten, you know, grains and vegetables 18:47 and so on, because they couldn't afford the meat, but nevertheless meat has usually been 18:54 a prized food. 18:57 Yeah. 18:58 Well, we're clearly omnivores, right? 19:01 But if you were a creature that lived in this mountainous terrain, it's probably not 19:10 a wide variety of mammals, right? 19:12 Like so and if they didn't really have weapons they had very small stone tools 19:18 There there's seems to be no indication. They have anything they could throw or anything along those lines 19:23 They could they could throw stones throw rocks 19:26 Good luck being successful at killing a deer throwing rocks. They'll take you a long time to get one 19:35 Deer are also a recent import. Oh, is it in fact Flores is is mammal poor 19:42 The only indigenous native mammals are bats, as you'd expect, because they can fly freely 19:47 to the island and rodents. 19:51 So what are the dragons eating? 19:54 The dragons were... 19:55 Because they're huge. 19:56 Well, it's interesting because at one time they were eating the godons, certainly. 20:01 I think they made them extinct, perhaps, because it's a small island. 20:07 Well, they could have contributed to that, yeah, along with other factors. 20:12 But besides, besides dragons, there were other large rats. 20:20 Oh, that's right. 20:20 They had one very aggressive tree rat, right? 20:23 No, that guy is still around, as I know. 20:26 Oh, really? 20:27 Photos, yeah. 20:28 That thing's huge, right? 20:29 It is a huge rat. 20:30 A couple feet long? 20:32 It's at least, I think, in terms of metrics. 20:37 So, yeah. 20:39 Oh, that's what it looks like. 20:40 Oh, there it is. 20:40 The size of that sucker. 20:41 Yeah, no, that's that's great 20:43 Mostly or largely tail is a lot of animals, but but it is big as you can see it's 20:50 That lady looks like she's got one as a pet. I'm not sure if that's the same creature. I don't think it is. Oh, okay 20:57 but 20:59 Yeah, now that looks more like it. Yeah 21:04 This episode is brought to you by the farmer's dog, which is exactly what I feed my own dogs 21:10 And you know why? 21:11 It's real food that can make a real difference in their long-term health, and it's totally 21:16 backed by science. 21:18 Every meal is developed by board-certified nutritionists, made to human-grade safety 21:23 standards, and is backed by published research that shows it supports healthy aging. 21:29 And my dogs love it. 21:31 I want my dogs to live as long as possible, and I want them to be healthy. 21:35 So the fact that fresh food from the farmer's dog actually helps reduce the formation 21:39 of harmful compounds associated with age-related decline 21:42 is a huge win. 21:44 Get 50% off your first box of the farmer's dog 21:47 at thefarmersdog.com slash Rogan. 21:51 Plus, you can now add their human-grade, 21:54 crunchy biscuit treats to any plan. 21:56 Try them today. 21:58 Papagomish. 21:59 But if you're a 10-foot-long poisonous lizard, 22:03 it's gonna be hard to sustain that mass just on rats 22:06 unless they're overpopulated with rats. 22:09 Well, I've got to say that once, you know, 22:13 extinction dates for pygmy stagodon or any stagodon, 22:17 well, I can't recall the current figures, 22:20 but you can see they're always changing by then. 22:24 But as soon as you had humans on the island, 22:30 you had pigs and dogs. 22:34 and some of the pigs quite quickly, I think, became feral, which they wild, and then deer 22:45 at one point were introduced by humans, so certainly deer and pigs, and not to mention 22:52 domesticates like goats, even young buffalo and horses are prey to dragons at present. 23:00 So in a sense, it could be Homo sapiens that's kept that creature alive. 23:07 So they could have wiped out the pygmy elephants, and then we could have probably maybe come 23:13 in at a very opportune time with a bunch of domesticated animals, pigs, dogs, and then 23:21 they started eating those. 23:22 I should say, also the little ape man, Leo, for example, described, also repeated 23:29 it occasionally to steal chickens or very small piglets. 23:37 So yeah, not to deny that they wouldn't eat meat if they could get it. 23:41 So when you went there, was it 84, was it the first time you went? 23:45 That was the first time, but I kept going back sometimes every year. 23:51 But when you first went, did you go looking for this specific creature? 23:57 No. 23:57 No. 23:58 No. 23:58 I went because there are parts of Flores, including Nage country, right in the center where I 24:04 first... 24:05 Pull that microphone on. 24:06 ...research. 24:06 Sorry. 24:07 It's okay. 24:07 It moves around a little bit. 24:08 Yeah. 24:09 You can stay where you're sitting. 24:09 No. 24:10 No, that's fine. 24:13 No. 24:15 The reason I went was to visit the people and find out how they lived and what they 24:21 believed in. 24:22 and because they were kind of blank on the cultural anthropological map. 24:29 And it was just incidentally, you know, by accident, you might say, that I had a... 24:34 And with these people, what kind of life are they living? 24:36 A subsistence lifestyle? 24:38 Are they hunter-gatherers? 24:40 Are they...? 24:41 Certainly in the 1980s, yeah, they were still largely subsistence cultivators, small 24:50 farmers who would feed themselves from what they grew. Also hunters, however, the men very 24:57 much value hunting, although not a lot of their food supply comes from that activity. 25:04 And are they hunting animals that have been introduced, like the deer species and pigs? 25:08 Deer and pigs are the two prized types, the most valued types of game, but they'll 25:16 They'll also kill monkeys, wild cats, feral cats. 25:22 Feral house cats? 25:24 Yeah. 25:24 Well, that sounds like what they are. 25:26 I don't think there's any indigenous. 25:29 Yeah. 25:30 But although some people in the past have thought they were, including Alfred Wallace, 25:35 you may know. 25:36 Sure. 25:38 But yeah, but also things like, well, the giant tree rats that you mentioned. 25:44 They hunt those? 25:44 They hunt those. I have said in one or two places, by the way, that it's rather unlikely 25:55 that Floreziansus would have been able to hunt the tree rats because they're very difficult 26:03 to hunt. They're vicious as hell. 26:05 Really? 26:06 Yeah. So you need, well, from what I'm told, what I am told often, was told often by 26:13 The nage, for example, is that you need more than one person, dogs. 26:21 You need dogs. 26:21 You need dogs. 26:22 You need a kind of a prod to knock them out of the tree and so on. 26:26 So it's no ... And it's often reported that people are injured from the teeth of these 26:32 damn things. 26:33 Wow. 26:33 Dropping down from trees. 26:35 Well, you saw how big it was. 26:37 Well, that's a great meal, though. 26:38 If you're a three-foot-tall human-like creature and you eat a two-foot rat. 26:43 Yeah, it's a that's a good catch. Yeah, mind you at the same time 26:48 Let's talk about three senses 26:52 What would possibly have been able to to catch smaller rodents 27:00 Nature or yeah sure so when you first went there 27:05 What was the first story that you heard about these little hairy people that live in the woods? Yeah 27:13 The first story I heard in the Nage region that I've mentioned was kind of local legend 27:19 about how they were wiped out by the ancestors of the Nage and it's a story that whatever 27:29 the basis, in fact, I was clearly embellished, embroidered, you get narrative themes entering, 27:40 including to escaping the extermination and this is an old plot line and you know 27:46 moving to another territory where they sister and brother is usually said where 27:52 they incestuously managed to you know maintain their species but yeah that 28:00 that was the the first first story I mean according to that one these were 28:04 creatures called abu-gogo is a term you may have come across. They were in their habit it said 28:12 of they lived in a cave high on the mountain, but they were in their habit of coming down a bit 28:18 lower downslope and joining in feasts and dancing of villages and they were given food 28:30 food by their reluctant hosts. But they did odd things, like, yeah, they would certainly 28:37 eat the food, but then they'd start biting into the plates, which were made of, well, 28:45 made of traditionally made of sort of pumpkin skin, dried pumpkin skin. So, yeah, you 28:52 can break them with your teeth. I'm not sure that a human could eat them or want to. 28:57 So they were just confused as to where the food ended? 29:00 Well, this is the idea. 29:01 There was that particular category of creature, a bugogo, always interpreted as or represented 29:10 as being stupid. 29:12 Right. 29:12 Yeah, very stupid. 29:14 So they couldn't tell they didn't feed food on a plate. 29:17 They were made drunk. 29:19 They'd given copious amounts of palm wine, palm gin, and then of course eventually they 29:25 they wanted to go back to their cave to sleep it off. 29:28 And what was the timeline for these supposed interactions? 29:31 Well, I suppose one can tell from local genealogies, 29:35 family histories, that sort of thing. 29:37 Yeah, we'd be talking at least 200, 300 years ago. 29:41 So this was like folklore, or at least like legend 29:44 that they would tell the stories of these people. 29:47 And so this was the first story 29:49 that you heard of these creatures? 29:51 That was the first one. 29:54 Yeah, there are other stories, you know, told soon thereafter. 29:58 But so this was the first one where you were explained that at least at one point in time 30:04 there was supposedly a small hairy human-like creature that lived on the island. 30:10 Yeah, that's exactly right. 30:13 Yeah, people are very insistent. 30:16 The storytellers, very insistent that these things weren't like forest spirits or anything. 30:21 They really were a natural animal. 30:23 It was a natural animal, exactly. 30:25 And when did you talk to someone that had had an encounter? 30:32 First of all, that was when I visited the Leo region, 30:40 which is the main topic of the book, as I said. 30:43 Yeah, and that was in the early 2000, 2001, 2003. 30:48 What was your so you had been you'd had this in your mind for a couple of decades at that point 30:55 So yeah 30:56 So what was it like to hear that there was a possibility that these things were still and if people haven't seen the island of 31:04 Flores before no incredibly dense 31:07 Mountainous very difficult to get to there's not like a real like is there a road structure that allows you to get from one 31:13 inside of the island to the other? 31:15 There's the Dutch colonial back in the, but... 31:19 Is it a coastal road or does it just go through the middle? 31:22 It goes wherever it can goes because it's so mountainous. 31:26 It's virtually no straight stretches. 31:29 Right. 31:30 So it kind of snakes all over the place. 31:32 So a lot of it goes through the, 31:34 yeah, a lot of it along the coast, 31:36 but other parts in more central areas. 31:40 Can you see if we can get a photo? 31:43 I'm trying to find the road. Yes. Well, it's insanely dense jungle. So this is where we're looking at. It's just a 3d topograph 31:51 Okay, yeah, I mean we're looking at it from above and 31:56 This if you get a photograph of what it looks like because I've seen some drone photos of the island that are really spectacular 32:03 Because you know, they're above the tree line and you go, okay 32:07 Anything could be out there. It's just it's like parts of the Amazon 32:11 on, where you look at it and you go, well, this is just so dense, just incredibly dense 32:20 and people are not regularly traveling to this area, certainly not westerners who are 32:28 there exploring and doing anthropological work. 32:31 There are a few tourists these days, but yeah, okay, so this is a good representation. 32:35 It's just incredibly dense, mountainous, beautiful, but wildly, you know, uncharted, not uncharted 32:47 necessarily, because we actually know where everything is, but people aren't going and 32:53 making an audit of all the different animals that are there, so it is possible that something 32:58 could, if you looked at it, you're like, well, maybe. 33:02 Well, yeah, I mean, there have been studies by zoologists of certain parts of the local 33:10 wildlife, the local animal life, but, yeah, none explicitly in search of something like 33:20 fluorescence or the Leo ape man, as they call them. 33:24 So, when you first had someone explain to you an encounter, how far was that from the actual 33:34 discovery of the bones? 33:35 Because you had the conversations with people that were telling you that they had encountered 33:41 one prior to them discovering these bones, correct? 33:46 Yeah. 33:48 You're certainly prior. 33:49 Yeah. 33:49 Not very long before, a couple of months. 33:52 But certainly, yeah, well, every year before the Plurisensis discovery was announced in 33:59 the media, including the scientific press. 34:03 That must have been incredibly exciting to hear these stories and go, wow, I've been 34:08 talking to people about these things for 20 years now, and now this guy tells me he 34:13 saw one, and then a couple of months later, they're finding bones. 34:17 You had to be like, wow, this is a real thing. 34:19 I was, I was quite staggered. 34:21 Yeah, I actually, I find it kind of hot in here. 34:23 Can I take my jacket off? 34:24 Yeah, absolutely, of course. 34:26 Yeah, take your jacket off. 34:27 So as we were saying, you had this encounter 34:32 with someone who explained that they had seen one 34:34 in the flesh and then just a few months later, 34:37 they find these bones. 34:39 That had to be incredibly exciting 34:41 because you had in, especially in the early, 34:44 when they were saying it might potentially 34:45 only be 10,000 plus years old. 34:47 Yeah, no, I felt extremely lucky, and I mean, if I'd first heard about these things a year 34:57 or two later, well, I probably wouldn't have written the book, and I wouldn't have taken 35:06 it much further. I would have thought, well, you know, there is a possibility, however 35:11 of a slim that somebody's seen a reconstruction of Florese Jenseth in, you know, a newspaper 35:18 or on television. But, no, yeah. So I was fortunate. One thing I subsequently discovered 35:29 is that the name Leihua is in fact recorded in a Leo language dictionary, Leo German 35:39 as a matter of fact, which was a research for that went on in the 1920s and not long after 35:47 the establishment of a Dutch colonial administration written by a German missionary and it finally 35:55 published in, was published in 1933 and there were mentions of Lai Hoa and some of the 36:03 information, which came from sample sentences of the language, were consistent with what 36:14 people generally were telling me about the Leo Aitman. 36:18 So that was another strong indication that the whole notion of these creatures hadn't 36:26 come from the fossil discovery. 36:29 Was there any encounters or descriptions from missionaries, from ancient missionaries that 36:36 had visited? 36:38 No, not that I've been able to discover, and I've looked for that kind of thing, obviously, 36:43 but no. 36:45 So they had only documented stories? 36:47 Yeah, it's quite remarkable. 36:49 The man I knew for quite a long time, a Dutchman in the Nage region, a missionary, 36:57 Missionary, Catholic Missionary, who'd been there for ages. 37:01 And he'd never heard of the Obugogo, which is the Nage, eight men, and which stories 37:13 about these, like the ones I just described, are pretty widely known in the region near 37:21 the village where these inhabitants were supposed to wipe them out hundreds of years ago, but 37:27 the missionary never heard it. I was surprised and I'm sure he was being honest. 37:34 Now when you first got the initial report from someone that had encountered one of these 37:42 in real life, did you then start looking for other stories from other people to get 37:49 more confirmation? I did, but not so much in that particular year. That was, as I said, 37:59 summer 2003. Yeah, because I had to return to Canada, I think. It was in the June, and 38:08 I had to return in the July or something like that. So I didn't have a lot of time in that year, 38:15 But after hearing about furriesiensis, of course, 38:19 I did initiate a new project, which enabled, 38:25 gave me funds to go back and talk about a bunch of things, 38:31 not just the hominoids, but certainly to pay much more 38:36 attention to Leo, the Neo region, 38:39 and to these creatures than I'd done previously. 38:43 Seriously. 38:44 And how many reports of encounters you had, like how many different people? 38:49 I interviewed, well, to answer your question, somewhere in the 30s, 32, I think. 38:57 But I talked to more people than that, just about these hominoids in general, what they'd 39:08 cared from their parents or, you know, from whomever, to get, you know, a good idea of 39:13 the kind of local knowledge there was about them. 39:19 And so in total, he has well over 120, 130 people I think I talk to in all. 39:26 That it had encounters? 39:27 No, no. 39:28 No, 30 that had encounters. 39:29 They knew something about, knew what I was. 39:31 But if you talk to 120 people and 30 of them had encounters, that seems like a 39:35 lot. 39:36 I guess it does, yeah, but then there were a lot of people besides who knew virtually 39:44 nothing about Alejo. 39:45 Oh, they didn't want to talk to me or they were scared or whatever. 39:50 Now did they all have similar descriptions? 39:55 Yeah. 39:55 I mean, one thing I show in my analysis, it's been four years now, I think I got 40:03 this right is that the sightings are both the clearest, most detailed, in other ways, 40:09 most credible sighting reports seem more accurate, more in line with the standard image of Ape 40:24 Men than others. 40:27 this. And even as I said, even among the sighting reports, there was some that I was inclined 40:34 to dismiss as being, you know, mistaken monkeys or, yeah. 40:38 Right. Right. So, at least a few of them possibly could have been this actual creature. 40:44 Yeah. 40:44 If they're being honest. 40:45 That's right. And it just takes one out of 30 odd or... 40:49 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you have that many, and also you have bones, and then 40:54 and also how you have a history of these things. 40:59 It's just, what would be required to comb the forest 41:05 to try to find these things? 41:07 Have you ever thought about like 41:08 what kind of resources would be required? 41:10 How many people would be involved? 41:12 Camera traps, like various technologies 41:15 that you could use to potentially find these things? 41:20 Yeah, not so much forests, although forests included, but higher slopes of mountains, of 41:29 which there are many in Leo territory and neighboring districts as well. 41:37 You'd need people who are young and fit. 41:40 And quite a few of them. 41:41 Yeah, you'd need different sorts of expertise, certainly people who could handle the terrain. 41:51 maybe also people who, well primatologists shall we say, people specializing in the study of apes 42:03 and monkeys. That would be helpful. Zoologists working in that area as well. You mentioned, 42:16 you know, camera traps, that would be a good idea. In fact, I'm working, I think you could say, 42:24 at present with a man in the Netherlands who is very keen on doing the sort of thing you've 42:33 just described. And he has visited one area in particular, and there's a story about that, 42:43 but I won't backtrack just yet. He has visited one volcano and placed traps, taken lots of 42:56 photos and so on. He wasn't there for very long. He wants to go back, I think late next year, 43:02 but with a team. He's asked me to investigate people with experience of rugged 43:13 country and that kind of search. 43:17 In fact, he even recommended I talk to you about it, 43:21 but I don't know if we want to talk about it. 43:23 Well, not you, but maybe somebody in your tail, 43:25 somebody you could recommend. 43:28 But in the- 43:29 Some explorer type? 43:30 Yeah, but in the meantime, quite recently, in fact, 43:34 I've been asked for an interview by Les Stroud, who- 43:39 Sure, Survivor Man. 43:40 You made it, yeah, exactly. 43:42 But he's a big believer in Bigfoot. 43:44 Well, yeah. 43:46 But I, yeah, so I'm expecting him on Friday the 13th. 43:51 So just in, well, nine, 10 days time. 43:56 And I think he would be the kind of person to consult on that. 44:01 Well, he could live up there for a few months by himself. 44:03 Yeah. 44:03 Well, maybe I can get him interested. 44:04 Yeah, he would figure out, like, 44:06 that would be a great idea for a series. 44:08 Yeah. 44:08 Because, you know, he's done quite a few episodes looking for Bigfoot to no avail, shocking. 44:13 Never found it. 44:15 But this would be, I think, probably more likely than finding Bigfoot. 44:20 First of all, it's an island. 44:22 It's not just an entire coastline, like if you're in the Pacific Northwest or wherever 44:27 you're searching for Bigfoot. 44:29 And the other thing being that, you know, a guy like Les going solo, because he does 44:36 everything solo with, he doesn't bring a big camera crew, be a smaller footprint, probably 44:41 less likely to make a lot of noise and disturb things. 44:45 Yeah, that's a good feature. 44:47 Yeah. 44:48 And if he found something, boy, ooh, that would be exciting. 44:54 That would be one of the most exciting things that's ever happened in all of anthropology. 44:58 Yeah. 44:59 Yeah. 45:00 No, indeed. 45:01 So, and I think, you know, I'm not a firm believer in anything, really, you might say. 45:10 Good for you. 45:11 But it's a bit skeptical, but the evidence in this case, I mean, the coincidence that 45:16 we were talking about a minute ago between the discovery, the reconstruction of Floreziansis 45:24 And what Leo people and others were describing to me, 45:30 you know, the match is so remarkable that, 45:37 you know, unless there's been some huge, 45:40 well-hidden conspiracy designed entirely 45:44 to fool little old me, I just can't imagine it. 45:49 Well, you know, coincidences do happen, 45:51 including remarkable ones, so maybe that's it. But even so, I think, yeah, it's worth further 46:00 exploration. I mean, back in 2005, when I began to look at the Leihua hominoids in earnest, 46:11 I was already approaching 60 years. I've never been particularly athletic, 46:19 And by the time I left off this piece of research back in 2018, I was already in my 70s. 46:29 So you've seen the country, I mean, there's no way I'm going to be scrambling up a mountain 46:36 side. 46:37 Dangerous, too. 46:38 Yeah. 46:38 I won't go into the particulars of my present physical condition. 46:42 but I, you know, it's a bit of a challenge going anywhere these days, I must confess. 46:50 So yeah, no, the research is worth, well, not, you know, it's a guaranteeing success of any 46:59 sort. 47:00 Now, what about potential use of technology? 47:02 Are they going to use drones or anything along those lines? 47:05 Because they've gotten incredibly good. 47:08 That's right. 47:09 Yeah. 47:09 Yeah. 47:10 Well, yeah, no, this is on the sort of bucket list for this colleague of mine, a young guy, 47:19 financially successful, who has, you know, the time to do this kind of thing. Yeah, 47:29 I think drones are certainly on the list. So, yeah, those would come into play. 47:40 as well. And so how much of the area where they find them? How much of a piece of land 47:49 are we talking about? What is the square kilometers? The Leo region. Can I just grab a, I'm getting 47:57 very dry here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there's water in there, that glass right there, and 48:02 there's coffee in here if you'd like some coffee. Oh, that's great. How big is the 48:07 area where, I mean, is it centrally located where they keep finding these same, the sightings? 48:16 Is it all in the same particular area or is it spread out? 48:20 Yeah. 48:20 Well, I've worked mostly in a place called East Leo, but there's no clear indication 48:31 of the bounds of knowledge, of this kind of creature, so they go to the east and to the 48:40 west. 48:41 They're just mostly avoiding people. 48:45 Yeah, well, certainly the creatures are. 48:49 But the fact is that different people, their knowledge of local wild animals is different 48:59 from, you know, maybe the neighbors or people at another end of the island. There is in 49:09 western Indonesia, in Sumatra, possibly on parts of the Mele Peninsula, close by as well. 49:17 There is a kind of wild rabbit or hare, not the kind of place where you'd expect to find 49:25 rabbits or hares perhaps, but this animal was unknown to most of the local people. 49:35 It was discovered by Western, I think naturalists, and given a scientific name and all that 49:43 kind of stuff. 49:43 Local people didn't have a local name for it, and in fact it's now known mostly, 49:50 And so far, people are aware of it, where the national Indonesian name Kalinci, which 49:58 refers to rabbits that were imported by the Dutch as food a couple of centuries ago. 50:06 So... 50:06 Is that they think the source of these particular wild rabbits on the island? 50:10 No. 50:11 No. 50:11 This is quite a separate species. 50:13 Okay. 50:13 That they would be indigenous. 50:15 Right. 50:16 But again, local people or lots of local groups didn't know about them. 50:22 They're reasonable, they're forest dwelling, and they're quite rare, so no great surprise. 50:32 But if I may, something that I was going to say with regard to my friend who plans to 50:41 back to Flores with an expanded search. 50:47 He became very interested in this particular locality, particular mountain in fact, because 50:54 of reports I received out of the blue about three years ago from two British visitors, 51:06 hikers, outdoorsmen, taking a break on flores and scuba diving and hiking, bit of 51:15 mountain climbing, this kind of thing. They, I have to think about the details 51:22 of this because it was, yeah, like three years back, they finally found their name, 51:28 my name I should say, after doing one of them in particular, found my name 51:34 after doing an internet search concerning apes and monkeys on Flores Island, and I came 51:44 across my name in connection with a creature, central Flores creature called Obugogo, and 51:52 one of them, yeah, he wrote to me, he contacted me first of all across LinkedIn, and asked 52:01 me about monkeys on the island, and I told him, and he described to me what he and his 52:08 friend, both of them at the same time, had seen on the highest slopes of this particular 52:15 mountain. And he said, I think in his first communication, that it sounds like you're 52:23 a boogogo. So naturally I followed this up and had some more conversations by phone 52:31 an email with these two young men and it's nothing they told me to kind of disabuse me 52:38 of that possibility. Now, I should stress that I can't go into all the details or the circumstances 52:46 of our communications, but all indications are that they'd never heard of my writings 52:54 or never read my writings on Flores, they've been before. 52:59 So they just had an encounter and saw it out of an expert? 53:01 They had an encounter. 53:02 They thought it was, yeah, some kind. 53:03 Well, it's interesting because I managed to interview them subsequently, separately, which 53:08 was a good thing. 53:09 And one of them, about the main contact, described what he saw as something very much like 53:19 a Leo Ape man, you know, a little man, a little human, but, you know, monkey-like. 53:26 Bipedal. 53:27 Bipedal, yes. 53:27 that was his impression. The other man described it as looking more like a, you 53:33 know, another sort of primate. In fact, he described it as a monkey, but a very big 53:39 one, an unusually big one. And it's interesting because those two opinions, 53:47 those two interpretations are very much aligned with the range of 53:51 descriptions that I recorded from local people. You know, some descriptions 53:56 had it more monkey-like, there's more human-like, 54:00 and of course naturally there were variations 54:02 in the estimated size of what people would see. 54:05 What's the highest of that? 54:07 The highest comes from a second-hand report of a LIHR, 54:15 and that would have been about 1.4 meters, 54:19 which is, yeah, bigger than four feet, 54:23 just getting four feet, yeah. 54:26 Yeah. Yeah, you're right. 54:28 So this encounter that these gentlemen had, this was only three years ago? 54:33 Well, actually the encounter was in 2019, in March. And, you know, they hadn't followed 54:40 this. I hadn't thought about it. And then, for some reason, they met. This is it. I 54:44 think they were separated for some time, these two guys. And they met and, you know, 54:51 over a drink, started to reminisce about their visit to Flores. 54:55 Now they'd like to go back. 54:57 And one said to the other, well, you know, 55:01 God, do you remember that huge monkey we saw? 55:06 And, you know, went on to discuss that. 55:09 And then one of them, he, yeah, 55:14 he took some time to kind of follow this up 55:17 by looking for information on the internet. 55:20 And it was that way that he finally came across my name and contact details. 55:28 So is that one of the only Westerners, or at least groups of Westerners at the spot of 55:34 these things? 55:35 This episode is brought to you by the movie Ghost Soldier. 55:39 Jim Caviesel plays Fitz, a former American special forces soldier and advanced weapons 55:44 developer. 55:45 As a military veteran, Fitz has a strong code of justice and a natural instinct 55:49 to protect a vulnerable community from a powerful corporation. 55:53 Here's the trailer. 55:59 Listen carefully. 56:00 You made the mistake of thinking you're safe behind money and guns. 56:05 But this land doesn't belong to you. 56:08 I've been paid to end wars and dismantle regimes. 56:12 I'm the man they send to erase problems. 56:17 And tonight, you're the problem. 56:24 Now that doesn't sound like a guy you want to mess with. 56:26 Ghost Soldier is a fun action film that demands to be seen in theaters, which opens nationwide 56:32 on Veterans Day, November 11, rated PG-13. 56:37 There are two of them, of course, no, not quite, I might mention 2019 was well before 56:45 the 22 book came out, so that's a factor as well, no, not the only two. 56:55 There was a man, not Western, but Asian. 57:02 I won't give any more details of that because he didn't want me to mention this in the book. 57:07 But he came across something in the dark, tracking back towards Upsloop, a village she 57:17 was staying in. 57:18 He got a bit lost, actually, and managed to find his way. 57:20 And he saw something which was described, something interpreted by local people as having been 57:29 one of these eight men. 57:32 That would go back to, I guess, yeah, the last century, 1990s maybe, but as a person 57:40 I know quite well. 57:42 But also, well, somebody who became a friend of mine sadly passed away a few years ago, 57:51 was working on the neighboring island, he was an anthropologist. 57:58 He was working on the neighboring island called Sombaba, which is immediately east 58:04 of Flores, another big island, lots of mountains and so on. 58:09 And he had a similar sighting back in the – similar experience, I should say, back 58:17 in the 1980s and was very, very open about the whole thing and gave me detailed descriptions 58:25 on more than one occasion. 58:30 Now, that he did allow me to mention in the book, in fact, in more than one book. 58:37 And did he describe the same type of creature or the same type of experience? 58:41 A big monkey standing upright, no tail, about three feet or more tall. 58:49 Yeah, there was more than one of them that he saw. 58:51 The end of a kind of a grown-over area, sort of a tunnel that had been created by vegetation. 59:01 He was trekking through jungle, and he came across these things. 59:06 and he turned back after he wanted to find there was a site with certain stone monuments 59:14 that he'd heard about, and villagers down below had sort of pointed him in the right 59:22 direction. He followed the trail they'd indicated, and he was still in his 20s at this time. 59:29 was in pretty good shape. And then he came to this area, which was grown over. Grown over 59:40 to the extent that he had to go on all force to continue climbing. And it was at the end 59:49 of this tunnel where there was some light, of course, a sunny day, where he saw several 59:55 of these creatures, mostly kind of silhouettes, given the lighting conditions, they made sounds 60:05 which were unlike local monkeys. And there you have it, he wrote it up in his field notes 60:18 which he showed me much tidier than my field notes I can I can tell you and you 60:25 know what it what he'd written at that time accorded with what he told me so 60:31 again you know it talk about floresiensis I mean there's no reason that 60:35 that species or something very much like it is not present or wasn't at one 60:42 time present also on other islands, around and about. 60:50 So his depiction of it was before you had ever had your first description of it given to you? 60:59 Yeah. 61:00 You can say that, but we weren't qualification. 61:04 My first research in Indonesia was done in the 1970s as a doctoral student. 61:11 And you'd never heard any of these stories then? 61:14 Well, I was working on the island of Sumba, which is not the same as Flores, 61:17 there's a big island to the south. 61:20 Not to be confused with Sumba, but this is just Sumba. 61:23 And there, there is a tradition of... 61:28 Well, something sounds more like the Sasquatch, actually, or the Bigfoot. 61:33 Because, yeah, these are sort of, you know, half human, half ape, 61:39 standing on two legs. 61:40 But they're much bigger than, well, than us, certainly much bigger than local people. 61:47 So they're talking about, you know, two to three meters in height. 61:55 And I must say, the evidence for them is not as good as for, you know, my flores, eight 62:02 men. 62:03 But so I'd heard about this. 62:04 Also, I might mention that I did my first degree in Vancouver at Simon Fraser University, 62:12 my undergraduate degree, at Simon Fraser, in the late 60s and into the 70s. 62:20 This was a time when there was a lot of interest in locally, in British Columbia, in Bigfoot. 62:28 It was also at that time, yeah, late 60s, very late 60s, that there was the film supposedly 62:36 made in Northern California. 62:39 Oh, the Patterson Gimli footage? 62:41 Patterson Gimli, exactly. 62:42 Yeah. 62:43 There's a new documentary out that kind of shows that had been rehearsed. 62:48 Yeah. 62:49 Yeah. 62:49 Oh, yeah. 62:50 There's a lot of suspicion. 62:52 Prefake. 62:52 Although at the time it's interesting, 62:55 I know there were a number of, or a few at any rate, 62:58 primatologists and so on who thought it credible. 63:06 But there's that film, and then of course there's 63:08 the phenomenon as a whole. 63:11 But anyway, from that kind of thing going on 63:13 in the late 60s, early 70s, I, 63:18 yeah, I even became interested. 63:20 It was, I studied anthropology at the time, 63:21 including you know prehistory and paleoanthropology and a lot a lot of 63:28 talk about the possibility this kind of thing and yeah I was just kind of studying 63:34 human evolution and all the rest of it and I became aware at that point that 63:39 there were reports of things still alive that kind of looked 63:44 like, you know, Homo erectus or some of these physically primitive forms of Homo, of humans. 63:54 Well, it's an incredibly fascinating idea. 63:57 And we know from what we know about the fossil record, the fossil record's so incomplete 64:05 because it's so difficult to make a fossil. 64:07 So, when we find new things like the Denisovans, which is very recent discovery, we go, oh, 64:14 there's a totally different branch, and they were larger than people. 64:18 This is really interesting. 64:19 So we don't really know because it's so difficult to make a fossil. 64:25 And that's right. 64:27 In fact, it's infinitesimally remote possibility of a species, just a whole species, not 64:37 It's an individual animal being, you know, surviving, 64:42 being preserved, being fossilized. 64:44 That's why it's so crazy to try to get an understanding 64:47 or a map of the past with fossils. 64:50 Well, it's always changing, this is it. 64:51 Right, it's always changing. 64:52 They find a new one, throws a monkey wrench 64:54 into the whole thing, and they're like, 64:55 oh, well, ho, look at this. 64:57 Now we know there's this kind, 65:00 and now we know homo juliensis, 65:02 and homo, you know, there's a whole series of them 65:06 that done the soul burns. 65:08 Yeah, no, and you know, if we don't kill ourselves often in the near future, it's likely there'll 65:15 be more of these discoveries. 65:18 No, they're made quite by chance. 65:21 The likelihood of anybody finding these things is remote. 65:24 So the sample of fossil hominins is certainly not representative. 65:31 I mean, it's really. 65:33 And it seems to be expanding. 65:34 It's needles in a haystack. 65:35 Yeah. 65:35 It seems to be constantly expanding, our understanding of how many of there were. 65:39 Yeah, well, because research continues, that's why. 65:43 But even so, there are lots of places where people could look and, yeah, we don't know. 65:47 With any species that is declared extinct, we don't know exactly when it died out. 65:56 We know the most recent date. 65:58 Right. 65:58 Well, that's what's really interesting. 65:59 We know the earliest date. 66:00 When it came into being, as well, we don't know. 66:02 And when you find something that's 60,000 years old, 66:06 like those bones that they found in the caves, 66:08 the odds of those being the last ones 66:10 that existed are very small. 66:12 Very small. 66:14 Yeah, that's way in the, 66:16 or that's a question of yours I didn't answer. 66:18 I think that way in the eastern, 66:20 sorry, the western end of Flores Island 66:24 is the discovery site. 66:26 Whereas I working mostly in towards the eastern end, 66:30 central or east-central flora. So quite a distance away. But no, and let's remember 66:38 as well that the evidence suggests that what's called homophoresiensis survived for at least 66:47 50,000 years, which is quite a stretch of time. 66:54 Especially when we don't really know how they got there. 66:56 We don't know how they got there there is evidence for something much earlier. It's seven seven hundred thousand years ago 67:02 That could possibly be ancestral to through the answers now in that space of time 67:07 The notion that they were restricted to one small neighborhood is just not it's not credible 67:13 They must have been right all over the all over the map of florida's. What is the evidence of the one that's a hundred thousand plus? 67:22 the 67:22 700,000 plus. See me? Oh, 700,000. Oh, I'm sorry. Fluorescensis. There's a number of 67:32 specimens in Liangbuo Cave. The most recent were initially reckoned to be 12,000, 13,000. 67:40 That date was pushed back in a kind of interesting way to 50,000 or 60,000. 67:46 But how was the pushback? Was it radiocarbon dating? 67:48 various methods were applied. I can't recall the details, but yeah, I mean, the point is, 67:57 Joe, that this 12,000, 13,000 date was found to be a big problem. Sure. And so a lot of energy 68:07 was put into retesting the geological situation in the cave. So is the current 68:14 Isn't dating a certainty? 68:16 No, nothing's a certainty. 68:17 Right. 68:18 So is it possible that it's earlier or it's newer rather? 68:23 I think it is simply because we only know one site, a site, you know, not much bigger if 68:33 any bigger than this building on an island of that size. 68:39 So, it's interesting, the follow-up research, looking for ancestors to homophoresiensis, 68:49 which turned up the 700,000-year-old fossils, that was all focused on finding something 68:57 older. 68:59 And where was that? 69:00 Not something more recent or younger. 69:02 Is that flores as well? 69:03 On flores also, but in the central part, an alert plane. 69:07 Well, that's even crazier, right? 69:08 So how did they get there 700,000 years ago? 69:11 Well, there is evidence in the form of possible stone tools. 69:17 Let's just say stone tools, that something 69:20 was making those artifacts a million years ago. 69:27 So how did they get there? 69:31 Or what did whatever it was that was living 69:34 a million years ago look like? 69:37 It's reckoned that they, well, they wouldn't have had, like, a seacraft. 69:42 There are no land bridges, by the way, that anybody knows about, so they would have to 69:47 come somehow by sea. 69:48 Lower sea level, though, correct? 69:50 Particularly during the Ice Age? 69:52 Lower sea levels, but not a, you know, not a, not a, not a, not a land bridge. 69:59 I mean, there's stagodons swam over. 70:01 Whoa. 70:02 From how far away? 70:03 Not that far, probably from the east or the north. 70:06 Maybe they rode the elephants. 70:09 Well, I guess somebody suggested that, but not likely. 70:17 Imagine, you're in a boat and you see a bunch of weird-looking monkey people riding elephants? 70:22 Yeah. 70:23 No, you would check your diet out. 70:25 I'd definitely pull my iPhone out. 70:27 Yeah. 70:28 Take a video. 70:28 Yeah. 70:29 Yeah. 70:29 But it is possible for creatures like the like floresiensis that are about to kind of 70:38 sail over accidentally on great clumps of foliage. 70:46 I'm looking for a term now, which I don't have. 70:48 Okay. 70:48 Like driftwood, like some sort of a log or something, but a few miles or kilometers. 70:53 A hump of earth that had been dug up by a tsunami and driven out to sea. 71:00 Oh, there's evidence of this kind of thing happening. 71:03 So yeah, you would need, of course, more than one of them to get to flories, and they'd 71:08 have to be opposite sexes as well, but it's all possible given the time scale involved. 71:13 Yeah. 71:14 That's the thing that they do when they talk about human populations. 71:18 they find on these islands that are problematic in age when they get really, really long ago 71:24 before they thought people were sea traveling, they go, okay, how many had to get out here 71:28 in order to develop a population? And so there's a mathematical equation to that, right? 71:32 Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. As there are estimates of how many members of a population 71:40 you'd need for it to be able to survive, continue to breed and so on. 71:45 So, if it's such a small island that it's not possible that they evolved there. 71:50 Well, I mean, it suggests they did part of their evolution once on the island. 71:56 But they once on the island. 71:58 But how did everything else get there? 72:00 Like how did the dragons get there? 72:01 How did rats get there? 72:02 Like, what is the origin of all these various life forms? 72:08 Yeah. 72:08 Because it's very diverse, right? 72:09 Well, yeah. 72:10 I mean, rats seem to be able to get it everywhere. 72:14 Yeah. 72:14 Except Elberta by the way 72:17 We have mice but no rats. We're trying to keep them out as well with wolves though 72:23 We have wolves and all kinds of things 72:26 Yeah 72:26 A lot of black bears. Yeah, no mountain lions 72:33 Moose so various 72:36 Dear you guys have everything up there. It's so called antelope as well. Yeah, it is a beautiful part of the world 72:42 Yeah, of course we've got the two national parks which are full of protected wildlife, you know 72:49 But um, yeah, no, let me say about the dragons. Yes, so called dragons are Komodo Molotov great swimmers 72:56 Really now they swim between between islands regularly. Oh, yeah, so 73:01 They would have no problem getting there right so they probably just went wherever they smelled food. Yeah 73:07 They probably smelled something dead over there and just took a 73:11 into the water. So all these various animals, the elephants could swim, the 73:16 dragons could swim, the rats could figure out a way to get their birds, 73:19 obviously they can fly. Yeah, bats, lots of bats, they can fly. And the monkeys came 73:23 on boats? No, the monkeys were introduced, like a lot of other animals. 73:29 I mean, there are any mammals there, you know, sizable mammals of various 73:33 species of mice and rats, and then there's the giant rat, you've got, what, pigs. 73:41 Right, we talked about all this. 73:43 We talked about pigs. 73:44 Well, all the things that are introduced by people. 73:45 Yeah, a lot of them were introduced by people. 73:47 What year was this? 73:48 Were they started getting introduced by people? 73:49 It varies, and it's controversial. 73:51 I mean, there's like dogs, for example. 73:53 There's some evidence that suggested that they haven't been there very long, several 73:59 hundred to a thousand years, but this seems to be likely to me they've been there they've been there 74:06 longer. Pigs, there is a book in which I've written about all this stuff, but I can't remember now 74:14 details. Anyway, yeah, you know, they're monkey's porcupines or porcupines that were introduced 74:22 from Western, and they're a game animal. 74:27 Really? 74:27 Yeah. 74:29 Wow. 74:29 Oh, for sure. 74:31 Well, they're ultimately rodents like rats, so if you're going to eat giant rats, a porcupine 74:37 is certainly also on the menu. 74:40 Interesting. 74:40 But yeah, you've got to know how to cook them and butcher them probably. 74:45 Yeah, and kill them while getting jammed. 74:48 That's, yeah. 74:49 Again, you need dogs for that. 74:50 Oh, poor dogs. 74:50 And they have special, special, well, the dogs have to be clever if they're not going to 74:57 get injured. 74:58 I've seen pictures of dogs with porcupine quills all over their face. 75:02 Yeah. 75:02 It's so sad. 75:03 Yeah. 75:04 Well, that can happen with tigers in India, of course. 75:07 I've seen that as well. 75:07 Look at this poor dog. 75:09 Oh. 75:10 Oh, wow. 75:11 Oh, this poor dude. 75:12 Yeah. 75:13 Well, it's interesting. 75:13 You should be able to produce those straight away. 75:17 Oh. 75:18 Yeah. 75:18 Yeah. 75:19 So the point is, it's, there's a lot of wildlife and a lot of it came from somewhere else, 75:24 including the monkeys. 75:26 And we have no idea if these little hobbit people, we don't have any idea when they 75:33 got there or how they got there. 75:35 But it's not just there, but isn't there some evidence or at least some stories of 75:40 them from the Philippines as well? 75:41 Yeah, there's a similar, similar remains in, there's remains. 75:46 There's remains. 75:46 Luzon Island, yeah. 75:47 Oh, how long ago was this discovered? 75:51 It was discovered after Thereseensis. 75:54 Oh, so it's fairly recent. 75:57 Yeah, Luzonensis, that's called Homo Luzonensis. 76:00 And it's a separate branch? 76:01 It's a different animal? 76:02 It's a different species, yeah. 76:05 But then there are, not sure, 76:08 the present state of interpretation on this one, 76:10 but in China as well, 76:14 in a place called Red Deer Cave, 76:15 There's evidence for small hominoids living in the same region as Homo erectus, which 76:27 was a much bigger hominin. 76:33 And then in Africa, you've got, again, for instance, the discovery of a small species 76:43 called Homo Naladi. That goes back about 200,000 years. But that apparently is small. 76:50 But they're an interesting one, right? Because they buried their dead. 76:54 Yeah, that's right. They had a kind of an unusually elaborate, for their circumstances, 77:04 symbolic culture, evidently. Yeah, nothing like that for Florisiansi. 77:10 And evidence of stone tool used too, correct? 77:13 Yeah, I believe so, yeah. 77:15 And so weren't there the ones that had a specific area in a cave where they would deposit their bodies? 77:21 Yeah, you know, that's right. 77:22 Yeah. 77:22 Fascinating story there. 77:24 Really interesting stuff. 77:26 Because it makes you think, like, well, what else did they have? 77:29 Like, how long ago? 77:30 And they were tiny, right? 77:32 Yeah. 77:32 What's a letter through the answers? 77:34 So there's evidence that this particular type of creature existed all over the world. 77:39 or at least in many parts of the world. 77:42 That's Asia and Africa with Naladi, yeah. 77:47 Of course, the whole of the new world, 77:49 South and North America, 77:51 there's no evidence there for any kind of human or primate 77:59 except for South American monkeys. 78:03 Do we know if South American monkeys were indigenous 78:08 They came from the Old World originally, I can't remember exactly how, I mean this was 78:14 I guess at a time when world geography was a bit different. 78:18 So they were introduced as well? 78:20 Yeah, not by humans though, but they managed to get there and they're quite different in 78:25 many respects from Old World monkeys because, well, the main difference I guess is the 78:35 prehensile tail, they can actually use the tail as a hand for a hole, an extra limb 78:41 where no old world monkey can do that. Really? The whole story of these creatures 78:48 to me is it is so captivating. I really can't get enough of it. And what I 78:56 also thought was really interesting was that when they first found these bones 79:00 of homo-fluorescensis, there was a lot of dismissing of it, and a lot of people thought 79:06 that it was maybe humans that had some genetic abnormality. 79:10 That's right. 79:11 Very good. 79:13 Yeah. 79:13 No, somebody's done your research, oh, you've done your research. 79:17 I'm obsessed. 79:18 Very well. 79:18 No. 79:19 I'm obsessed with this. 79:19 No, that's right. 79:22 I'll tell you, paleoanthropologists themselves can be interesting characters. 79:28 Yeah. 79:28 They can be very contentious for fight among themselves. 79:32 Yeah, for sure. 79:33 A few other academics that are like that. 79:36 But yeah, no, you're right. 79:41 There was a member of the Indonesian, 79:43 well, no, he wasn't a member of the Indonesian team, 79:45 but a very senior Indonesian prehistorian archeologist 79:50 who was resentful of the fact he wasn't on the team 79:54 many. He wasn't consulted early. But anyway, he dismissed this as a new fluorescence, as 80:06 a new species. He claimed that what they'd found were one or more humans who were suffering 80:17 from a brain condition called whether a couple of different possibilities. One's called 80:23 microcephaly, I think. Yeah. So very small craniums, small brains. But this is an abnormality 80:31 and people in this condition, you know, they don't, as individuals, they don't survive. 80:37 Adamently rejected the notion that these were a different species. 80:40 It has been. There was also the problem that these things are, yeah, the fluoresences 80:46 of course were small, small-bodied, which doesn't correlate with microcephaly, which 80:52 just concerns they had, and yeah, I don't think there's many people who support this. 81:01 There is another bone of contention there, so to speak, and that has to do with the classification 81:09 of Homo floresiensis as HOMO or not, and most paleoanthropologists are still seen to 81:19 support Homo. But there are some, including a guy called Chris Stringer at the National 81:30 History Museum in London, who I very much respect, mainly because what he says agrees 81:37 with what I think. But no, he suggested that, for instance, it's something much, much 81:44 more primitive physically and that it derives from something much older, a separate branch, 81:53 going back to somewhere in the region of Australopithecine, so pre-homo. And you know, 82:01 a lot of stuff, a lot of features of the fossils, not least of all the brain size, 82:09 which is about that of a chimpanzee, so pretty small, body size and all the rest of it. 82:15 The lack of evidence for anything in the way of culture, all of these things suggest something 82:23 that is a different kettle of fish altogether. 82:28 together. In fact, there was a senior member of the team that discovered and analyzed and 82:39 interpreted Thoreziensis Fossils, a guy called Peter Brown, an Australian anatomist who proposed 82:50 a different name for his answers. He gave it a new genus. He put it in a new genus, which 82:59 he named, he gave the suggested name Sundanthropus, which would mean something like a man like 83:10 being from the Sunda region, which refers to those islands. 83:19 This was rejected on, I mean, that there were, you know, it was just arguable, this kind 83:26 of stuff. 83:27 But some of the reasons put forward were not particularly credible, I've found. 83:33 I mean, one suggestion was that this thing is so recent, bearing in mind that one specimen 83:39 and was reckoned to be only 12, 13,000 years old at the time, but this speech was too recent, 83:46 so recent that it had to be Omo. But this betrays a very kind of linear, progressive view of not 83:57 progressive in a political sense, but in a time sense of human or hominin evolution. 84:08 And really, I mean, it's ironic because, yeah, it was the discovery of Fleurisiancis that 84:18 threw your monkey wrench into that whole picture of human evolution. 84:23 I mean, it was evidence in favor of a view which had been around a little bit already 84:30 by that time that you didn't have a single line of evolution, whereas in a something 84:35 something bigger and better, more developed and so on, replaced something more primitive 84:44 in a single line of development. Rather, the suggestion was that the view now seems to 84:52 be that the human tree, family tree as it were, is bushy. So, you know, something like 85:04 a Jewish menorah, you know, the thing with the candles, you've got these things coming 85:08 up side by side and, you know, terminating at the same point. 85:14 We have that in everything else. 85:15 It happens in all other sorts of animals. 85:18 The idea that we would be isolated. 85:19 Well, we are, as humans, so used to thinking of ourselves as special, right? 85:25 I mean, everything in our culture, our history of religion as well, suggests that. 85:31 But no, so it's kind of ironic that you still find traces of this progressive linear 85:38 view in certain statements made quite recently by paleo-anthropologists. 85:46 Well, I think it's part of the problem with this. They adapt an idea adopt an idea start 85:53 Saying that this is the fact and then are very reluctant to change their position 85:58 Especially if they've been teaching it if they're professors, they've written books look what the clove is first thing like 86:04 The I forget the gentleman's name who found these stones that indicated that there was people in the Americas far earlier than that 86:11 Oh, yes, he was destroyed. I mean they've ruined this guy's reputation 86:15 They viciously attacked him and it turns out he was correct. Yes. No that this this does happen 86:20 But he was just correct 86:21 He was correct by a long shot like they found evidence of things that were 86:25 10,000 years or close to it the 22,000 years the white sands New Mexico footprints, right, right? 86:32 Yeah, that date keeps being push further and further further going by the right. This is other weird evidence of 86:39 It looks like someone had broken apart mastodon bones or mammoth bones, and that's over 100,000 86:46 years ago. 86:47 Yeah. 86:48 Yeah. 86:48 No, you're quite right. 86:49 I want to say something in defense of science and scientists, actually, I mean, they are 86:57 conservative. 86:58 You're right. 86:59 And they probably should be. 87:00 Exactly. 87:01 What I was about to say. 87:03 Yeah. 87:04 Yeah. So, you know, I mean, there's a lot of uncertainty, obviously, in this field of 87:12 an endeavor that you can't rule out anything as being correct in including the prevailing view, 87:22 at least for the time being. And it does take a lot to change things. And I think on the whole, 87:30 quite rightly. Yeah, I mean, with regard to what I've written, I don't argue, I don't 87:42 attempt to argue that Therese Ansis or something deriving from Therese Ansis, you know, is 87:48 definitely still around. I'm not going to make a statement of conviction like that. 87:56 But all I'm trying to say, and my focus, of course, is on the people, the modern people 88:03 of Florey's Island, and their experiences and how they think, what they say, and all 88:08 that kind of stuff. 88:10 So what I need to explain as an ethnologist, a cultural anthropologist, is the basis 88:18 of some of their claims about things, about creatures, about beings. 88:26 Some of those beings, I'm sure, are super-natural, as they don't exist. 88:39 I mean, I'm thinking of things like forest spirits, various varieties of forest spirits 88:44 which have their names and characteristics, but they are not like animals or modern humans 88:50 because they can't be perceived, certainly they can't be seen, they're invisible and 88:56 as people say this. 88:57 So there is a difference between them on that ground alone and homophoresiensis with what 89:03 I am showing is that there is a possibility that when Leo people make these reports about 89:09 their eight men that their reports are accurately based on some actual experience that a few 89:19 individuals at any rate have had. 89:21 Yes. 89:22 So, when you're talking to these people, is there evidence of psychedelic drug use amongst 89:29 these people? 89:31 You know what I mean, for the forest spirits and stuff like that? 89:34 I thought you were going to ask me if there's any evidence for my use of such substances 89:39 in the field. 89:41 I'll ask that off there. 89:42 A bit of. 89:43 But when you hear people talking about forest spirits, you start thinking about people 89:47 in the jungle that have psychedelic rituals, like in the Amazon with ayahuasca? 89:52 Yeah, well, for one thing, rarely are these things the forest spirits have seen. 89:59 You get the odd, well, you get a category of people, healers in part, shaman, shaman's 90:06 is not bad description, yeah, who claim an ability to see things that other people 90:14 can't. 90:15 But do they have a history of psychedelic drug use? 90:20 No. 90:20 No. 90:20 Because most cultures have some method of perturbing their consciousness. 90:24 Yeah. 90:25 Are they using fermented fruits and making any kind of alcohol? 90:29 Oh, yeah, making alcohol for sure. 90:30 Okay. 90:31 Palm wine, palm gin, very powerful stuff. 90:34 Right. 90:34 Good drink. 90:35 Right. 90:36 Now, are they drunk when they're seeing these forest spirits? 90:38 No. 90:39 Evidence that they are or were. 90:44 Right. 90:44 Right. 90:45 But are the, so is that the only documented substance that these people are taking on this 90:50 island? 90:51 Is there any particular plants that have any sort of housogenic properties? 90:54 Well, certainly traditionally, not so much nowadays among the men, but until quite recently 91:01 they would regularly, habitually, excuse me, chew what's called beetle nut, no, yeah, 91:10 it's not actually a nut. 91:11 There's an eureka nut, there's a palm nut, and betel, which is either a leaf or a sort 91:16 of pepper from a vine, together with slag lime. 91:23 And this is mildly narcotic, I mean, yeah, I consumed it regularly when I was on Sumba 91:32 in the 1970s. 91:36 What was that like? 91:37 It was pleasant. 91:39 It turned my teeth black, as it does with the local people. 91:44 It's kind of like, I don't know, 91:47 smoking too many cigars in a row or... 91:49 Okay, so it's like a strong, stimulant feeling. 91:51 Yeah, I never became physically ill in the stomach, 91:55 but it make you feel good, 91:59 like a lot of other things. 92:01 I wasn't hallucinating. 92:05 And yeah, so there's that in addition to those. 92:09 You said slick lime. 92:10 What is that? 92:11 Slake lime. 92:12 Slake lime? 92:13 Yeah, what is that exactly? 92:15 It's, let's do it the way it's produced. 92:19 I mean, it comes out as a... 92:19 Here, Janie just pulled it up. 92:21 It's calcium hydroxide powder or paste. 92:24 Yeah, I was gonna say it comes out as a kind of a white powder, 92:26 like talcum powder. 92:28 And you take a dab of that with your beetle pepper 92:32 and leaf and your rica nut. 92:36 chew it all up. It becomes red. I mean the plant materials are green. 92:44 It's the fourth most commonly used addictive substance in the world after 92:50 alcohol, nicotine and caffeine. Isn't that wild? I can believe that. That's wild. 92:56 Yeah. I don't think I became addictive even though I had a red mouth a lot of 93:01 the time. Did it mess up your teeth? It made them black. That's it. 93:06 But you could brush them off. Oh, wow, look at these people. Oh, that's nasty 93:10 I'll tell you this so you may not believe it, but I mean I rarely brush my teeth for two years on Sumba. Wow 93:17 I was very intent my goodness my 93:22 Smoking as well. Oh boy, you know whatever and I've still lived at the age of nearly 80 93:27 So there you go. You were smoking cigarettes on the island by yourself. How'd you get them there? 93:31 Oh, there were cigarettes for sale in the other very good ones. Yeah, okay, and they make their own as well 93:37 They grow their own tobacco. Okay, so there's nothing my point was there's nothing that causes hallucinations 93:43 That's part of the I hope my insurance agent didn't listening to this 93:48 Sorry, what are you still smoking? 93:51 I'm a small cigar maybe five or six times a week. Okay. Yeah after lunch only I get it no more than one a day 94:01 some days none. I haven't had one since Monday. No, I enjoy, I enjoy smoking cigars. 94:11 I do as well. So, but that was my point, like if there was something that would 94:16 cause them to see things that maybe wouldn't be available under normal consciousness. 94:24 No, not really and there's no delay, I mean with some shamans, people called shamans in 94:31 other parts of the world, you have them making deliberate efforts to dissociate, to alter 94:40 their consciousness. 94:42 Through ritual? 94:44 Well, it can be through percussion, drumming, chanting, yeah. 94:52 It can be through substances as you've described, rigorous sex even. 94:59 Rigorous. 95:00 Yeah. 95:01 But there's not like psychedelic mushrooms or anything that grows there? 95:06 On flores, no. 95:07 Right. 95:07 Not that I'm aware of, no. 95:08 I'm sure I'd have heard about them if there were, no, there are, of course, in other parts 95:16 of the world. 95:17 And used by shamans as well. 95:18 Of course. 95:19 So that was just my point with this, because you were talking about how there's things 95:23 that they saw that clearly seemed to be mythological or just fiction, the spirits, yeah. 95:31 But then they also saw things that match up with these Hobbit people. 95:35 Yeah. 95:36 I must say, I mean, the Leo people certainly have these religious figures, if you wanna 95:43 call them that. 95:46 And I tended to dismiss their accounts, which were often a bit towards the fantastic ends 95:55 of things. 95:55 Did they have other fantastic accounts, not of primates, but of other things other than 96:01 forest spirits that also existed that seemed to be something that was fiction? 96:07 It seemed to be fiction. Yeah. I mean, one case I go into again in the recent book is 96:17 a creature that we are told, very good at climbing trees. That's not fantastic, but 96:26 But it has multiple testicles, so to speak. 96:32 The females as well as the males, they come in two sexes. 96:37 And it grows an extra pair every year. 96:43 When it's reached a limit, which I think is a dozen, two times six, it will climb 96:48 time a tree, wail all night, and be dead by the morning, or drop dead in the following 96:56 morning. 96:57 Now, that sounds pretty fantastic, I think you say. 97:02 Especially testicles on the ladies. 97:04 It turns out to be the palm civet, which is a well-known animal. 97:10 And with some interpretation, you know, as features that accord with all these exaggerated 97:20 claims. 97:21 Have you ever had that coffee that they make out of the civets done? 97:24 Yes, indeed. 97:26 That's exactly the species. 97:28 I've had that. 97:29 Yeah. 97:29 Very remarkably smooth coffee. 97:31 Yes, very expensive as well. 97:32 It's disconcerting. 97:33 You think that you're drinking coffee, they came out of a civet's butt. 97:36 I guess so. 97:36 No, but I guess there's a weird of things that people eat, I think, or consume. 97:44 No, the species name is hermaphroditus, which relates to certain glands both sexes possess, 97:58 which can be mistaken for testicles. 98:00 Oh. 98:02 Okay. 98:02 So that's the origin of the myth. 98:04 That's the origin of the idea. 98:05 Interesting. 98:06 I mean, I later discovered that this fantastic, well, I was pretty sure beforehand, but it 98:14 later became clear that people put out, oh, here's one of those, and it was a palm civet. 98:20 Right. 98:20 So then you have to take into consideration what other things are they seeing that is 98:24 either getting exaggerated or getting incorporated into the folklore, right? 98:29 Like if they see just a particularly large monkey, and maybe at a distance, maybe 98:34 be through thick brush and then they decide, 98:37 because monkeys will occasionally be bipedal 98:39 for brief periods of time, chimpanzees as well. 98:42 Yeah, well they're apes of course. 98:44 Yes, so it gets to the point where you go, 98:48 okay, if you have 30 people that have these stories 98:53 that seem credible, at least a few of those 98:57 have to be BS, but it gets to the point where, 99:00 if you have enough of them and they're so similar 99:02 And then you have bones and then you don't just have bones there, but you have bones in the Philippines 99:06 You have bones in China and you start in in Africa. You start going. Hey, maybe this is a real thing. Yeah 99:13 and then the real problem is 99:18 What are the what's the ethical? 99:22 Considerations if they captured one like if they capture a monkey you can put the monkey in the zoo 99:28 Yeah, what it gets real squirrely if they captured one of these things and then 99:35 they have to decide what to do with it. 99:36 Cause like, what is that? 99:38 It's not quite a monkey and it's not quite a person. 99:43 Yeah, no, it's, it's well between ape and human. 99:46 Yeah. 99:47 Using human in the sense of- 99:48 I would feel very bad if one of those was in a zoo. 99:51 I feel bad when I see monkeys in a zoo. 99:53 Well, especially chimpanzees, sort of the higher apes, yeah. 99:57 They look like they're in hell. 99:58 Yeah. 99:59 Yeah. 100:00 No, I agree with you. 100:02 I'm very torn myself on this point. 100:06 I mean, obviously, you know, I'd partly like something like that to be discovered. 100:14 I mean, it would ... 100:15 From a scientific perspective, it'd be incredible. 100:17 From a scientific perspective, it'd be incredible. 100:19 It would also kind of vindicate me, I guess. 100:21 You might say, but on the other hand, I think it would be much better if they still 100:26 exist to leave them alone. 100:28 Right. 100:28 But you would have to prove it. 100:30 And how would you prove that they exist other than and especially in this day and age with AI video 100:35 It's almost impossible at this point to discern what's real and what's not and so very right 100:41 Yeah, but if they captured one of them like boy, I would feel bad 100:45 Like especially if you start making noises that sounded like a language 100:49 You know, oh well, then it would be kind of easier. I guess to 100:55 Yeah, you definitely wouldn't put them in a zoo. 100:58 Right. 100:58 Well, not only that. 100:59 What are you going to do even in terms of studying them? 101:03 Do you decide to dart them for a short period of time and sedate them? 101:07 And also, there's complications to that. 101:09 To sedate, who knows what they're allergic to. 101:12 You could potentially kill them accidentally while studying them. 101:16 I mean, that's an issue as well, but I would say the best way to study them 101:22 would be through field research, a primatological field research, a la, what's her name, Jane 101:33 Goodall. 101:34 Yes, yes, yes. 101:34 And there's other ladies, including the one that lived with Mountain Gorillas, and long 101:42 enough so they become habituated to you and so on. 101:48 Yeah, probably would be better if a slightly built female took on that role. 101:59 Something non-threatening that would allow them to come into their community. 102:06 Yeah, but they're not chimpanzees or they aren't. 102:11 So I don't know, gosh, it really ... I mean, we are used to dealing with all these conceptual 102:17 boundaries, right? Like human and animal and so on. And this would, yeah, this would present 102:27 a real philosophical problem, Rokenundrum. 102:30 Yeah. So, Forrest Galant was telling me about a contemporary account of a woman who was 102:38 an anthropologist who's, I just cannot remember where the village was, but this person had 102:44 encountered something I got it here it is I've got it it's a woman named Sabine 102:54 Coogler who wrote this book called child of the jungle her parents were German 103:00 missionaries and a super remote area of Western Papau so it was in New Guinea and 103:07 he did an interview with her and she said that she had seen these little 103:13 people and then she woke up in camp more than one time and they were looming over her and 103:19 around camp. 103:20 And she's a very sane academic, he's saying, not like a jungle person who believes in third 103:27 world superstitions, he says. 103:29 And this woman who is a very sane literary author, cutting-edge scientist, and she 103:35 swears that she saw these little people and she told the exact story. 103:40 And so he says he actually has a recorded zoom call that he could send me of this encounter 103:47 Yeah, but this is a woman who was just like completely stunned 103:53 Encountering these tiny little people in New Guinea. Yeah, so are there accounts in New Guinea that are similar? 104:00 Sure if I may ask she was she was quite young at the time or I don't know 104:04 I mean, it's just something that Forrest sent me. 104:07 He's a wildlife biologist and he does a lot of work trying to find extinct species as well. 104:13 He's looked for the thylacine multiple times. 104:18 The thylacine? 104:19 Yeah. 104:19 Oh, yeah. 104:20 Interesting case, that one. 104:22 Right. 104:22 So, we have video of the last supposed thylacine that was alive in Elzoo. 104:27 Yeah. 104:27 1936. 104:28 But there's quite a few credible reports of sightings. 104:32 Yeah. 104:33 Yeah, there are sightings and if people aren't actually seeing them, there's that bigger, 104:39 more fascinating problem of what they are seeing or where this all comes from. 104:47 The point is, this is Forest's history. 104:49 This is what he does. 104:50 Yeah. 104:51 He has a great YouTube channel, by the way. 104:52 Yeah. 104:53 He documents his journeys. 104:54 I think I've heard of him. 104:56 Really great. 104:56 Great guy. 104:56 If you might follow that up. 104:58 Fascinating guy. 104:59 But the point is, this woman told him the story. 105:02 I think the story is like insane, 105:04 but she actually encountered these. 105:05 So is there a history of them in New Guinea as well? 105:09 I might just point out, not to appear too defensive, 105:13 but I myself have been told similar stories 105:16 by Flores Islanders, 105:20 and I don't want to make clear that to my mind 105:26 that there's not as much difference as you would think 105:29 between Flores Islanders and Westerners who report similar experiences. But you said New 105:36 Guinea, Papua New Guinea, I think. Yeah. There are, again, in the highlands of that very 105:57 Yeah, there have been reports of those people showing up in sort of odd places and walking 106:08 through human settlements as well, also from reported by credible witnesses, I'm writing 106:23 a book on witches. 106:24 Are you really? Yeah, no, that's another thing in fact 106:27 I had some difficulty preparing for this interview because I'm working on the proofs or the final proofs and the index and I've 106:34 And I did a pieces recently on Halloween and sorry. Oh wow. I was just a Freud in slip 106:41 Yeah, no worries witnesses. I meant but um 106:44 So what are the descriptions are they human like they are human 106:49 I'm just like tiny pig me. You know that they it's interested 106:52 they don't wear a lot of clothes as a lot of people in New Guinea don't or didn't so whether 106:58 bodily hair shows up more than it might do otherwise can't recall those details but they are small 107:04 and they are dark might like most New Guineans and yeah well to be classified as pigmoid they 107:21 which is, like, you know, well, less than five feet or four foot 11, that kind of... 107:29 So these are... 107:30 Well, I think African pig music. 107:31 But these are people. 107:33 These are very different. 107:35 They're extraordinary different. 107:37 Yeah. 107:38 Yeah. 107:38 No, it's not to confuse with Florisianus or anything like that. 107:41 So that may be what this woman encountered. 107:43 So that might be that they're living... 107:45 Very possible. 107:45 We'd need more details of what she remembered. 107:49 Are these documented populations? 107:53 So this is something that we know exists currently? 107:55 Or for sure. 107:56 I mean, they're detailed ethnographic, cultural, anthropological details of their socioeconomic 108:03 systems and everything else. 108:06 This is a totally different country. 108:07 Of course, they speak languages like the rest of us. 108:12 So as far as little, tiny, hairy creatures, you said Sumatra, the Philippines, Indonesia, 108:19 Indonesia, where else? Where else are these credible witness accounts of people experiencing 108:30 these kind of little tiny ape-like creatures? 108:33 Yeah. Well, my first inclination is to say, well, you know, Flores and I guess Sumbar, 108:42 neighboring Ireland, and Sumatra as well, the Orang Pendek. 108:51 But there are reports from North America, by Native North Americans, something sounds familiar, 109:07 similar. Nothing terribly detailed, but I know I did some research for another book years 109:17 back on the Bigfoot or Sasquatch in the Pacific Northwest. And I think the Bella Cooler Indians, 109:26 the Bella Bella Indians, the British Columbia Coastal British Columbia had a category of 109:31 for the name of creatures which sounded like small, 109:38 you know, somewhat hairy folk. 109:44 The Lai Hoa, of course, in Flores, 109:50 there are various reports of how much bodily hair they have. 109:56 And, you know, according to some, they're not terribly hairy, 109:59 not like a you know a gorilla or a bear so that that's another kind of kind of 110:06 variable but then you know if you just have the description Harry then you know 110:11 if you don't take that any further and you know investigate more you don't know 110:17 what that means I mean Harry can mean well like the lady in the picture up 110:21 there right I can refer specifically to mainly to the head here so but anyway 110:27 Well, yeah, no, there are, well, there's one report. 110:33 I was talking about Sasquatch, which I find fascinating. 110:37 From 1884, it even appeared in an early newspaper 110:41 in that neck of the woods, about a creature that was given 110:46 the name Jacko. 110:49 And I can send references to that if you're interested. 110:54 But that sounded fairly just. 110:57 fairly genuine what say it again what is the name of it which the the creature 111:03 was a called it was called Jacko it's just kind of a nickname which is you know 111:07 sometimes a nickname for human beings like Jack yeah so Daniel Boone had a 111:18 description in his memoirs of an encounter that he had with a giant 111:24 creature that he wound up killing do you know that story probably I know is 111:29 that Daniel Boone of David Crockett was supposed to kill the bear when he was 111:32 only three I don't know which one it is but Daniel Boone this was a song on the 111:36 radio when I was about five years old he had an encounter supposedly that he 111:42 documented with him and his son where they had shot and killed a giant 111:47 human-like creature and it was I believe it was over eight feet tall 111:53 Or nine feet tall some enormous thing that had a different anatomy than humans like instead of having a rib cage 112:00 It had like a large plate of bone over its chest area. Yeah, I might mean 112:06 Apparently I sent this to my friend Steve Rinella and he said boon also had some tall tails 112:11 So I don't know I don't know how much this is true or not true 112:14 Yeah, but the whole Sasquatch thing is always fascinating me because of the amount of different names that Native Americans had for this 112:23 particular creature and they didn't have a lot of fake creatures it's you know 112:28 they didn't have descriptions of things that just didn't exist and they had a 112:33 lot of names for a wild man that lives in the woods it's very tall and hairy 112:37 yeah no you're right in fact there was a rather interesting paper written on 112:42 that very issue by a guy he's been at the University of Washington Meldrum 112:50 No, his name, not Meldrum, no, his name he's long gone now, his name was Wayne Suttles. 112:56 You'd be interested in the article. 112:57 Just looking at the different names and their derivations and all that kind of thing. 113:04 No, Meldrum, another person who's passed. 113:06 Yes. 113:08 Yeah. 113:08 No, I sort of was acquainted with him for a while. 113:13 He was a true believer. 113:16 Yeah. 113:16 Yeah, but at the same time, he was, you know, his arguments, whatever the basis, I'm pretty 113:22 solid. 113:23 He was a serious physical anthropologist. 113:26 Well, you know who really believed in it, at least at one point she did, was Jane Goodall. 113:31 Yes. 113:32 So I understand. 113:33 Again, I don't know much of the details of that. 113:35 She gave interviews where she was saying that she's certain it exists, you know. 113:41 This was quite a long time ago, you know. 113:43 Yeah. 113:44 Who knows? 113:45 I don't know. 113:45 She's gone now. 113:46 Yeah. 113:46 But before she died, I don't know if she changed her opinion or she's probably tired of talking 113:51 about it because that might have been the only thing people wanted to talk about. 113:54 Yeah. 113:54 Tell me more about Bigfoot. 113:55 Yeah. 113:56 Yeah. 113:56 No. 113:57 I mean, there's a number of other primatologists and people who study primates in the 114:02 field who have also subscribed to, if not Bigfoot, then the Yeti, a guy called 114:10 called Vern Reynolds, who's an Oxford at one time, I think, and a guy called John Napier 114:20 who wrote a very interesting book called, I guess, Bigfoot back in, I don't know, the 114:28 early 70s. 114:29 It was largely partly focused on the Patterson film. 114:36 Yeah. 114:36 Yeah, so it's not the case that all scientists, to use that broad category, dismiss immediately. 114:49 And in fact, I know paleoanthropologists, biologists as well, who find my arguments credible. 114:59 But it's very interesting, you know, they'll never say so in print. 115:06 No. 115:07 No. 115:08 Because, and again, you know, as I've talked about conservatism and so on, somewhat understandably, 115:14 they like to keep this, you know, in a separate kind of compartment. 115:18 Completely understandably, especially if you're an academic, if you start saying you 115:22 believe in Bigfoot, you're immediately put into the category. 115:25 Well, that was that, but more practically speaking, I guess your funding will quite rapidly 115:32 drop. 115:32 Exactly. 115:33 Yeah, there's a fine line between eccentric and foolish. 115:37 Yeah. 115:37 Yeah. 115:38 Well, however eccentric I might be, I'm pleased to report that I never had, as a cultural 115:44 anthropologist, particularly studying other people's experiences, beliefs, values, 115:50 all this kind of thing. 115:51 I never had that that problem from my colleagues or I may have been more ignored than I would have been otherwise 115:58 But I've never had to put up with what what's a fascinating what Meldrum did 116:04 Well now Meldrum was like a full believer. I asked him if you chop one of your fingers off to find out the big foot 116:09 Was real would you do it? He said yes? 116:11 I was like, oh my God, man. 116:15 But the point is it's like as a cultural anthropologist, 116:20 it is absolutely, at least the mythology of these things, 116:23 is absolutely a part of culture. 116:24 And a fascinating aspect of it, because there's so many stories 116:28 and they're so uniform. 116:30 It's all like eight foot plus, nine foot tall, 116:34 enormous, hairy, ape-like creature 116:37 that seems to be very human in a lot of ways. 116:40 it doesn't have the arm length and leg length of an ape. 116:44 It seems to be built more like a large, hairy person. 116:47 Yeah. 116:48 Well, I would agree with you, except for one particular. 116:51 These details, so I'm talking about flores. 116:55 These details don't show up in 117:00 so much in what we call mythology or myths, 117:06 or even legends to make that distinction. 117:10 The naturalistic descriptions come from, well, mostly from, suppose it eyewitness encounters. 117:21 If you look at general knowledge, then you do start to get kind of fantastic features, right? 117:30 And also, second-hand accounts, they put man to hand. They kind of tend more in the supernatural 117:40 direction, which in itself is fascinating, is a kind of evidence for, you know, the eyewitnesses 117:47 especially having had an actual experience and referring to an actual creature. 117:55 And of course that's where the similarities between the different accounts become remarkable. 118:02 And not just that, of course, but the match with the reconstructions of fossils of homophoresiensis. 118:13 Yeah, Mrs. Williams always. 118:14 But they had found that. 118:15 Yeah. 118:16 If they had found that in North America, like if they had found a Bigfoot evidence, which 118:22 changed the whole conversation, then the conversation would be, is this an extinct, like 118:27 Imagine if they had found some Bigfoot Jawbone in a cave somewhere that was an unknown primate 118:34 that is 8,000 plus years old. 118:37 Then you'd have to go, okay. 118:38 Now what are we talking about? 118:39 Are we talking about something that's extinct or are we talking about a very small population 118:43 of intelligent creatures that is thus far evaded being captured on film and... 118:50 Yeah, yeah, no, I mean that would I mean it would get a lot more publicity than than 118:56 Florezia and switch. Oh my goodness. 118:58 I'm happening in, you know, the modern West and in the the US or even Canada. 119:05 It would have the same coverage. 119:08 Well, the problem is unlike homoflorensis or floresiensis. 119:13 Floresiensis. 119:13 There is so many hoaxes in America. 119:16 There's so many guys like off my own big foot. 119:18 he's in my freezer and like a big frozen doll like so many kooks that have said 119:26 and so many people have done it for stories and you know just to create a 119:30 hoax yeah well this is something that I well there's the first thing one of the 119:34 first things I discuss in the book is the different cultural context circumstances 119:42 of, on the one hand, people in Flores, ordinary villages reporting what they once saw. 119:56 The culture of circumstances, all that kind of stuff, on the one hand, and the culture, 120:04 the socioeconomic system in which people who claim to have observed Bigfoot live, 120:17 different kinds of interests. I mean nobody on Flores thinks they're going to become famous 120:22 by telling me what they've seen, whatever it may have been. Whereas with Bigfoot in North America, 120:31 that then, you know, you can become rich and famous. 120:36 I don't know about rich, but you probably, 120:37 Maybe not rich, but famous. 120:39 You might be able to parlay it. 120:41 I mean, look, you could get on finding Bigfoot. 120:43 I mean, they did, how many seasons 120:44 did they do a finding Bigfoot? 120:46 They never found Bigfoot, spoiler alert. 120:49 No. 120:49 You watch a lot of hours of long television 120:52 waiting for them to find it and they never find it. 120:54 Well, that's an excellent point 120:55 because, you know, there's never been 120:58 such a search on Flores. 121:00 Right. 121:00 and no local interest in in such a thing either that's probably pure it's 121:07 probably better that they don't do it that way I think but a real true 121:10 scientific search not a reality show search would be absolutely fascinating 121:14 yeah yeah no and maybe force would be interested in doing it he's fascinated 121:19 by the subject worth doing is yeah yeah certainly we're doing now when you 121:24 were doing this whole investigation of Bigfoot did you find any evidence or 121:28 or any stories, anything that you thought was compelling? 121:31 Well, I mentioned the 1884 report 121:35 that was actually published in one of the few newspapers 121:38 in British Columbia at that time. 121:40 This is a wild frontier, right? 121:42 In fact, this thing that was seen 121:46 was actually, yeah, no, it was reputedly captured alive. 121:55 That's right, but it was when the Canadian Pacific 121:58 Railway was going through. 122:01 And this was about a hundred-odd miles from the coast in a very place called Yale, as 122:08 a matter of fact, near a place called Yale. 122:11 It was small. 122:13 One reason why I mentioned it wasn't a giant. 122:17 I know that subsequent commentators have suggested it was an infant bigfoot. 122:24 How small was it? 122:25 I think it was maybe four foot two, something like that. 122:30 So it's similar in size to the Homo floresiensis. 122:33 A bit bigger. 122:34 A bit bigger. 122:35 A little bigger. 122:35 Yeah. 122:36 But certainly small for a modern human or for a Neanderthal for that matter. 122:42 But there are North American or Native American tribes that have stories of small hairy 122:46 people that live in the woods as well. 122:47 There are. 122:48 Well, just the one at any rate that I mentioned earlier. 122:52 So yeah, obviously by comparison with with the Indonesian stuff. What did they wind up doing with this? 122:57 This is photography existed at the time right? 123:00 It did, but I'm not sure how many 123:04 How many cameras were 123:05 were available and 123:09 So no no pictures 123:11 Oh 123:12 Well, if you said it was a story of a potential hope. 123:16 Oh, four foot seven, I'm wrong. 123:18 Anyway, shorter than that. 123:19 So a young, ape-like creature of Sasquatch allegedly 123:23 captured alive near Yale, British Columbia, Canadian 123:27 Pacific Railway crew, first published in the Daily 123:30 British Colonist newspaper on July 4th, 1884. 123:33 The story is widely considered by modern historians 123:35 and cryptozoologists to be a work of historical 123:38 journalistic fiction, a newspaper hoax, 123:41 which is very possible too. Because they did a lot of those back then. Maybe. Who knows. 123:47 So there's that. But is there anything else that you thought was interesting? 123:55 I certainly, there were some writers on Bigfoot like John Green, who was a newspaper man. 124:03 In fact, in the Fraser Valley there, he was not quite so dismissive. The main reason 124:10 I think that the cryptos would dismiss Jaco's because he wasn't big enough for a big foot. 124:17 Well, also because newspapers would routinely make up stories, especially... 124:22 They would, yeah. 124:24 But the eyewitnesses were all named, including one of the top bosses of the CP Railway. 124:38 So I'm sure if he'd want to stick his neck out so far in, or indeed, why you'd want to do it. 124:46 Whatever became of it is a mystery. It sort of disappeared. I know that there's a book 124:55 published a couple of decades back by a guy whose name escapes me. He's a physical anthropologist 125:04 and that the book is called Bigfoot Debunked. 125:08 I mean, he's sort of virently opposed to any suggestion 125:11 that anything like this could exist. 125:16 And the best he could do with Jacko is conclude 125:22 that it was a chimpanzee that had escaped from a circus 125:26 or a zoo. 125:28 A four foot seven chimpanzee? 125:30 Well, there you are. 125:33 Now, I think it had longish head hair as well, but anyway, yeah. 125:40 But it was, by all indications, naked, although this was not mentioned in the report, kind 125:47 of interesting. 125:48 You know, bearing in mind this was the height of the Victorian era, you know, where you 125:52 didn't mention such a thing. 125:54 But yeah, now the best this author, a recent author could do, is say that it was an 126:00 escape chimpanzee now there I mean one thing one can be pretty certain of very 126:07 certain of is that there were no circuses or zoos in that area right the town 126:14 like I don't think was a zoo anywhere in British club I maybe very remote maybe 126:20 Rob well yeah I was you know it was a brand new it was a colony at that time 126:25 yeah it wasn't part of cat well I guess it had just become about it and that 126:30 That area, British Columbia in particular, has a lot of those Sasquatch sightings, a 126:35 lot of reports. 126:35 Well, this is the kind of the classic domain of these things. 126:39 Yeah. 126:40 Yeah. 126:41 I've got to say no circuses either, I don't think. 126:43 No, no circuses. 126:44 But so do you think that there's a possibility that something like that, at least at one 126:47 point in time, existed in North America? 126:50 I don't want to rule it out. 126:51 As I say, I mean, the Flores, eight men are much more credible because of the 126:58 fossil evidence or the whole kind of ecosystem, the region of the world where they are, existence 127:04 of other primates, if not on the island, then pretty close by, whole evolutionary history 127:09 of that region. 127:13 And again, not only are there fossils, but there's a close match between what the fossils 127:20 and what, you know, my colleagues in the field, 127:26 Leo Villages, indicate, so, yeah, 127:31 you gotta keep a bit of an open mind, isn't ya? 127:33 Yes, well, it's also, my problem with Bigfoot 127:36 is that it's fun, it's fun to believe. 127:38 Yeah. 127:38 And so I start looking at my own judgment 127:41 and going, okay, stop. 127:43 Yeah. 127:44 Being silly, you're wasting time. 127:45 Yeah, no, I don't find Bigfoot 127:50 credible. And again, I've said so in print in an earlier book. It's interesting that 1884, 127:59 I mean, that was the time when great apes, as grillers and chimpanzees, were becoming widely 128:05 known to a Western public. Whereas they hadn't been before. 128:12 But the discovery of mountain apes by Westerners wasn't until the late 19th century, right? 128:18 The mountain grill, I think, was the 20th century, was it? 128:23 Yeah, and the other, the lowland grill as well, 128:25 was relatively recent. 128:28 Yeah, they were thought to be a myth, 128:30 which is quite hard for us to imagine today. 128:34 Well, yes or no. 128:35 I mean, if you look at the culture history 128:39 and so on, that the historical setting 128:44 and all the rest of it, 128:46 And don't forget Darwin, his ideas only became current in 1859. 128:53 But I was going to say with regard to kind of general knowledge about apes, these were 129:07 something new. 129:10 And, you know, they reached people through, I guess, you know, the popular press, such 129:16 as it was mainly at the time. 129:18 Some people would have read books about them, but they would have been probably a minority. 129:26 So, you know, people had only a vague kind of idea of what they looked like. 129:30 Like anybody seeing, I don't know, a very shaggy dog or maybe a small bear in British 129:38 Columbia at that time might have made a mistake or, you know. 129:43 That's the part of the problem. 129:44 It created it, yeah. 129:45 Bears also sometimes walk bipedally. 129:47 If you see them in the distance, if it's dusk, if it's very dense woods, it's very difficult 129:54 to discern what you're actually looking at and then the mind plays tricks on you 129:58 and you start. 129:58 Indeed. 129:58 I did a show with my friend Duncan where we went up into the Pacific Northwest to go looking for Bigfoot 130:06 And we're hanging out with Bigfoot hunters and you know most of them just seemed like guys are looking for a hobby 130:11 But there's a one woman that I talked to one woman who had an encounter and I don't know what she saw 130:18 Obviously, but she was very at least the way she was communicating felt very rational very sane 130:26 She was a smart person. She wasn't stupid. And she knew the area. She lived in 130:31 the area and she said she saw this thing and she for a half a second she goes 130:37 that's a gorilla. Like why is there a gorilla in the forest? And said she said 130:43 she only saw it for less than a minute. It was moving through the trees but 130:46 she said she goes I know what a bear looks like. She was I know it. She was 130:50 it did not look like a bear. I think it was a Sasquatch and I think 130:55 They're real. Yeah, the problem also with the Pacific Northwest in that particular area. We're talking about like Mount Rainier 131:01 It's so dense that 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 131:08 You can't see anything. No, and it's the forest floor is filled with pine needles and leaves that have like landed and 131:16 Compacted over and over and over so you're not gonna get any footprints. No 131:21 No, indeed. 131:22 And these things can walk quietly because the ground is very soft and everything's wet because 131:28 it's just this tremendous rain forest. 131:30 It's incredibly rich with life. 131:32 And then you go, okay, I could see something good hiding here. 131:36 You're not going to find things. 131:38 Even if you had a team of people, first of all, you'd be making so much noise, it 131:43 would smell you a mile away. 131:44 I'd say a smell would be a factor as well. 131:46 Smell you a mile away. 131:48 And it's so dense. 131:49 Like the kind of forest up there is so incredibly dense 131:53 that seeing something in the distance 131:56 would be virtually impossible if you're actually in the woods. 131:59 Yeah, yeah, no. 132:01 The question is like, it's something that, 132:03 look at that guy. 132:03 Have you seen this guy before? 132:05 Oh yes, indeed, in fact. 132:06 JoJo, the dog face point, he was around in 1880s. 132:08 Some of those pictures are in an earlier book I wrote, yeah. 132:12 Yeah, there's people that have that condition today. 132:14 But, yeah, hypotricosis. 132:16 I stumbled across this guy from, 132:17 This is Julia Pastrana. 132:20 She was around from 1860 and died in 1865 in Moscow, 132:24 but is from Sinaloa, Mexico. 132:28 And was studied left and right by all sorts of people. 132:33 They call it all sorts of things. 132:34 So she was from Mexico. 132:35 Look at her features. 132:36 That's crazy. 132:36 The hair all over her face. 132:38 That's wild. 132:39 Small. 132:40 Was it performer? 132:42 Whoa. 132:43 Her body is still being displayed somewhere. 132:45 Ew. 132:46 Yeah. 132:46 But as I'm like hearing all these descriptions, I'm like this 132:50 This would pass for that description. You're saying kind of and sure sure if you saw that if she was tiny and she was running through the woods 132:57 a big foot you mean yeah, or you know 133:01 Any sort of forest person in some of these other places, but then you have to ask why would anybody 133:09 like that 133:11 Want to be running through the woods, you know in some remote place 133:16 presumably naked. You know, how would they get there? How would they get home after? 133:22 She was supposedly sold by her uncle after her mother died. 133:25 Yeah, I know there's some unfortunate stories attached to these. 133:30 Well, didn't they put a man in the Bronx Zoo? There was a man that they put in the Bronx 133:34 Zoo who was, I think he was a pygmy. And they literally had him in the zoo, like for 133:41 or observators so people could see him? 133:43 The Bronx, it's not impossible. 133:45 I know there were, there were- 133:47 Same time period. 133:48 Yeah. 133:49 There were pygmies, pygmy families who were exhibited at, 133:54 was it a World's Fair in, where the heck was that? 133:59 Chicago, St. Louis, somewhere in the United States. 134:05 It was the same one. 134:06 St. Louis World's Fair. 134:08 Yeah, same guy. 134:09 Yeah, oh yes booties. Yeah, these are one group of of so-called pygmies. Let me tell you about pygmies 134:18 One hesitates a bit because the name is no longer, you know politically correct, but 134:25 These we're talking about you know fully modern humans 134:29 In that their brains and heads are not as small as their bodies 134:36 Okay, so their brain size would be comparable to anybody else. 134:40 So quite different from something like Homer for his answers. 134:44 But the point I wanted to make was that before a guy called Schweinfurt, a German explorer, 134:55 was able to document the actual existence of African pygmies around the middle of the 19th century. 135:04 I think it was 1847, so exactly 100 years before I was born. 135:10 He actually bought one, if you can believe that, I mean, as horrible as that sounds. 135:15 But you know, some Pygmies were kept slaves by taller Africans at that time. 135:23 But before that, Europeans thought that Pygmies were a myth, that there was no such thing, 135:29 that this was a product of Greek mythology, especially, and of course it's from there 135:34 that the name Pygmy comes. So, yeah, comparable to our knowledge of, or anybody's knowledge 135:44 of guerrillas, for example, the Pygmies. We discovered a bit before. 135:52 It's fascinating we think of like how little people knew about the natural world just a 135:59 couple of hundred years ago. 136:00 Yeah. 136:01 Yeah. 136:02 Well, no, indeed, that's a good point. 136:04 I want to just correct myself. 136:05 I said before guerrilla were discovered, they were well-known to local people in Africa. 136:10 Of course. 136:12 Discovered by the Western world. 136:13 With a very ethnocentric approach, which again is a matter of habit, right? 136:17 Yep. 136:18 I didn't mean to say that. 136:19 And likewise with conservative scientists, you get into modes of thought that are not 136:27 easy to alter. 136:31 Yeah. 136:32 Well, listen, I really enjoyed talking to you, and I'd love to talk to you about witches 136:35 when that book is done, too, because that's another very fascinating subject. 136:38 Oh, April Fool's Day. 136:39 First of April is when there's an official publication date that you can order copies 136:44 now. 136:45 What is it called? 136:46 It's called The Wicked Witch. 136:47 And then there's a subtitle which is origins of an enduring worldwide belief because one 136:56 of my main aims is to show that very few cultures anywhere that don't have a belief that corresponds 137:03 very closely even in the smallest particulars to what we understand by witches in the West. 137:13 And I would immediately point out that I don't believe in witches, whatever I might think 137:19 about homophoresiensis or present-day descendants that might exist. 137:24 No, a witchcraft exists in accusations people have accused, still accused, as a matter 137:31 of fact, in many places, including in the West, of being evil, of being able to harm 137:40 other people maliciously, wantonly through supernatural means, but there's a lot of other 137:47 things I've discovered about witches in that journey, which actually began a very long time 137:54 ago when I first started to teach anthropology, but I think it's something that would be of 138:00 interest to your listeners definitely. 138:01 100%. 138:02 Yeah. 138:02 So let's plan on doing that again. 138:04 We'll do that. 138:05 We'll do another podcast sometime after the book is out and we'll talk about that. 138:09 Okay. 138:09 All right next time make sure you get me a flight to Austin that gives me more connection time from Houston cuz I miss my flight 138:16 Oh, did you? Oh, sorry 138:18 Yeah, okay, we'll do that. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it 138:21 Yeah, no, it's been extremely enjoyable, and I 138:27 I'm very impressed by your question. Oh, thank you. I'm very impressed by your work. So thank you 138:33 Perfect, all right, bye everybody.
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