Anthropology – or at least one kind of anthropology – hasbeen in the headlines for the last several months. In lateOctober, palaeoanthropologists and archaeologistsworking on the eastern Indonesian island of Floresannounced the remarkable discovery of a new species ofthe genus Homo, a new kind of human dubbed Homo flo-resiensis. Found at Liang Bua, a site in the western Floresdistrict of Manggarai, the type specimen is a 30-year-oldfemale who died some 18,000 years ago, while remains ofother individuals are as recent as 13,000 years ago.1 Asboth dates are well within the period in which Homosapiens has been established in the Indonesian islands, it isextremely likely that ‘Flores man’ lived in close proximityto (and in all probability interacted with) modern humans.This fact alone is quite amazing, for it indicates that,within geologically very recent times, two distinct speciesof humans were contemporary in at least one part of theworld – thus furthering the view that human evolution isby no means unilinear, and that having two or morespecies of the genus alive at the same time may be thenorm.2

So we are not alone – or were not so alone – as we oncethought. But the find has more specific implications, andalso a history. Building on earlier discoveries by TheodorVerhoeven, a Dutch missionary-archaeologist whounearthed fossil stegodons (an ancestral elephant) andassociated lithic artefacts in central Flores in the 1960s, aninternational research team made up largely ofIndonesians and Australians was excavating at Liang Buain the hope of uncovering remains of the tool-makers andelephant hunters. According to one interpretation, fossiland lithic evidence for stegodon hunting may date to asearly as 840,000 years ago; if correct, the hunters wouldhave been not Homo sapiens but Homo erectus. But asFlores has been an island for as long as anyone can deter-mine, this left palaeontologists with a major question –namely, how such an archaic hominid had ever got there.That problem remains to be solved. And before the recentdiscovery, direct evidence for pre-sapiens hominids of anysort was also lacking.

What the excavators actually found at Liang Bua wastruly astonishing, for instead of a classic erectus, theyrecovered remains of a hominid3 that stood just over ametre tall and had a brain capacity of only 380cc, the sizeof a chimpanzee’s. Not only is this small in absolute terms,it is small even in relation to the diminutive body size(Mirazon Lahr and Foley 2004). On this basis, Homo flo-resiensis has been interpreted as a new species altogether,evolved from Homo erectus by way of endemic dwarfingresulting from isolation on an island. Although dwarfing isa process well known in other animals, it is unusual formembers of the genus Homo, whose normal mode of adap-tation has always been thought to be primarily cultural andtechnological. And yet another surprise: an interpretationof the archaeological context suggests that the tinyhominids may have fashioned sophisticated stone toolsand hunted pygmy stegodons (similarly dwarfed animalsthat became extinct on Flores some 12,000 years ago, pos-sibly around the same time as Homo floresiensis alsoceased to be). It has even been speculated that they hadlanguage. Although the linguistic and technological attri-butions have been questioned on the grounds of the crea-

ture’s small brain, a recent endocast analysis of the cra-nium has indicated a hominid with highly convolutedfrontal lobes, suggesting cognitive capabilities superior tothose of Homo erectus and more comparable to Homosapiens (Falk et al. 2005, Balter 2005).

Some implications for social and culturalanthropologyThe unexpected character of Homo floresiensis wassummed up rather dramatically by one of the palaeonto-logical investigators, Peter Brown, when he claimed hewould have been less surprised by the discovery of a spacealien (Gee 2004). As several commentators have pointedout, the diminutive denizens of Liang Bua raise new ques-tions concerning the definition of humanity and the sup-posed singularity of our own species, Homo sapiens. Theirdiscovery also has radical implications for our under-standing of human evolutionary biology and the kind ofphysical equipment required for the development of cul-ture and language – especially given the tiny yet dispro-portionately complex brain. Particularly now that acounter-view of the type specimen as a microcephalicpygmy Homo sapiens has largely been discredited, itseems that, one way or another, the proverbial book willhave to be rewritten.

Almost as extraordinary as the discovery itself has beenthe media reaction, involving the immediate attention ofmajor newspapers, news magazines and television net-works – not to mention the flurry of commentariesappearing on the internet. But what, one may ask, does all

1. Details of the discoverywere first published on 28October 2004 in the journalNature, in an article and threeshorter pieces. See MirazonLahr and Foley 2004, Brown etal. 2004, Morwood et al. 2004,Dalton 2004.

2. With regard to finds ofHomo erectus on Java, thisposition is argued at somelength in a semi-popular bookby Curtis et al. (2000).

3. In a newer classification,the term is ‘hominin’ –referring to a member of the‘hominini’, which includes thegenus Homo and several othersbut excludes extant apes.‘Hominid’, however, is stillthe better known general termfor the different species ofHomo.

4. This second teammember was another geologist,Gert van den Bergh, the sameman who in June 2004informed me of the discoveryof H. floresiensis. At that timeand in subsequent emails, wealso discussed my interest inebu gogo, and the possibilitythat the representation mightbe grounded in somezoological reality.

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 21 NO 3, JUNE 2005 13

Hominids, hairy hominoids and thescience of humanity

GREGORY FORTHGregory Forth is Professor inthe Department ofAnthropology at the Universityof Alberta. Since 1984 he hasconducted ethnographicresearch on the Indonesianisland of Flores, and on thebasis of this and previous workon the neighbouring island ofSumba, has published severalbooks and numerous articles.Recent titles include Dualismand hierarchy (OxfordUniversity Press, 2001) andNage birds (Routledge, 2004).Gregory Forth is currentlyalso McCalla ResearchProfessor at the University ofAlberta and is preparing abook project dealing withrepresentations of 'wildmen' inSoutheast Asia and elsewhere.His email isgforth@ualberta.ca.

Fig. 1. The reconstruction ofHomo floresiensis that hasappeared in severalpublications (the individualappears to be carrying aspecimen of the Flores giantrat, Papagomys armandvillei). P

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of this have to do with social or cultural anthropology?Actually, rather more than might at first appear. As iffinding a new species of Homo that survived until at least13,000 years ago were not enough, some members of thediscovery team have gone so far as to suggest that Homofloresiensis may have lived until much more recent times,and may even still be living on Flores. Prominent in thiscontext has been the name ebu gogo, a local term desig-nating short, hairy and coarse-featured hominoids who – inone part of Flores – are locally believed to have surviveduntil just 200 or so years ago. More particularly, it hasbeen suggested that this folk category may reflect amemory of Homo floresiensis, maintained for hundreds ifnot thousands of years.

At this point, I must adopt the first person singular. Ifirst encountered the term ebu gogo after starting ethno-graphic research in the Nage region of central Flores in1984. People in the vicinity of Bo’a Wae (the main Nagevillage), and particularly people descended from inhabi-tants of the old village of ‘Ua (Rua), told me how, severalgenerations before, their ancestors had exterminated agroup of these hairy creatures inhabiting a cave called LiaUla, located not far above old ‘Ua, on the northern slope ofthe volcano Ebu Lobo. Details of this tradition anddescriptions of the physical appearance and behaviour ofebu gogo are recorded in my book, Beneath the volcano(Forth 1998). As I indicate there, a striking feature of the

representation is its apparent historicity and matter-of-factquality; in this regard it differs markedly from Nage repre-sentations of a variety of spiritual beings and mythical fig-ures, and indeed Nage themselves deny that ebu gogo wasanything like a spirit (ibid.). I therefore made the followingobservation:

Without giving full credence to depictions of the wildmen asfully natural beings that are now extinct, one might yet considerthat the idea of ebu gogo[…] may well have some empiricalbasis in a former component of the human population of Floresthat is no longer present[…] (ibid.:105, fn. 9).

In the light of the discovery of Homo floresiensis, thisstatement might now be considered prophetic. Althoughnot convinced that the Nage story was completely factual,so intrigued was I by their representation of ebu gogo, andespecially details pertaining to the putative creatures’physical appearance, that I have continued investigatingthe category during subsequent visits to central Flores withthe aim (also announced in Forth 1998) of producing amonographic study of the Nage image and comparable fig-ures in other parts of Indonesia and Southeast Asia.Coincidentally, I first heard about the discovery of Homofloresiensis in June 2004, while I was in Holland con-ducting library research for this book project.

Following the post-modernist prescription, I have thusrelated ebu gogo to my own biography. Yet recently theNage category has become far more famous than it evercould have through ethnographic attention alone. A fewweeks before Homo floresiensis hit the headlines, anAustralian geologist, Bert Roberts, is reported to have vis-ited an unnamed village in central Flores together withanother member of the palaeontological team (Gee 2004).4

There they heard ‘amazing tales’ about ebu gogo, whichevidently included morphological and behaviouraldescriptions. On this basis, Roberts ‘thinks it is possible’that ebu gogo – here barely distinguished from Homo flo-resiensis – could still be alive. According to what villagerstold him, the creatures stood about a metre tall, were ‘longhaired’ and pot-bellied, had ‘longish’ arms and fingers,walked ‘with a slightly awkward gait’, spoke in murmurs,and engaged in mimicry. They could also climb trees, andwere not known to use stone tools. The last time the cen-tral Florinese villagers had seen the creatures is specifiedas ‘just before Dutch colonists settled that part of Flores inthe 19th century’.5

Considering the apparent brevity of the geologist’senquiries, it is not surprising that some of this informationappears inaccurate. For example, the longish arms andawkward gait, and even the height, do not agree with mostNage descriptions of ebu gogo I have recorded over thepast two decades. It should also be remarked that anyonereading Roberts’ observations might think that tales of ebugogo circulated in the region of Liang Bua, in westernFlores, where the skeletal evidence for Homo floresiensis

5. Actually, the Dutch didnot ‘settle’ Flores – and in thepart of central Flores evidentlyreferred to, they established acolonial administration only inthe early 20th century.According to genealogical andother evidence provided byNage, I estimate that theirextermination of ebu gogowould have occurred sometimebetween 1750 and 1820.

6. These comprise hairyman-like creatures sometimesidentified as ancestors inManggarai clan traditions,including those named Maja,Empo-Wulu, Paju La’e(Verheijen 1967), and RebaRuek (Fointuna 2004). Writingon central Manggarai, vanBekkum (1946) refers to hairyaboriginals named Rua(apparently meaning ‘wild’).Apart from other references,the Manggarai category potiwolo denotes what Verheijendescribes as an ‘ape-man’(1950) or a ‘creatureresembling an orangutan’(1967). (There are nozoologically attestedorangutans or other apes onFlores.)

7. In fact, anotherinconsistency would appear tobe the pot belly, since this issymptomatic of plant-eating,whereas the archaeologicalinterpretation suggests Homofloresiensis was substantiallyengaged in hunting. Also,while Roberts says ebu gogowere ‘about a metre tall’, mostNage describe the creatures asbetween one and 1.25 metres,and some claim their heightdid not differ significantlyfrom that of modern Florinese(who are, however,considerably shorter than mostEuropeans).

8. ‘Spirit’ or ‘spiritualbeing’ can be defined as apolythetic class, the mostcommon criteria of whichinclude a fundamentallyhuman psyche, an ability toassume human or animal form,the ability to change shape,and the power to becomeinvisible or separate from anycorporeal form or limitation.

14 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 21 NO 3, JUNE 2005

Fig. 2. The front cover ofNature (28 October 2004),showing the skull of the typespecimen of H. floresiensis.

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was discovered. The fact is that the category ebu gogo andtraditions concerning this creature belong to the Nage, aculturally and linguistically distinct population residingwell over 100 kilometres to the east (which is a long dis-tance on a mountainous, economically undeveloped islandlike Flores). There are indeed representations of creaturessimilar to ebu gogo from western Flores – that is, theethno-linguistic and administrative region calledManggarai – but, oddly enough, these have not been citedby members of the palaeontological team.6 It is alsocurious that none of the scientific commentators wishingto link ebu gogo with Homo floresiensis has mentioned themain thrust of the Nage legend, and the feature that asmuch as anything lends it an air of authenticity. This is theclaim that ancestors of the Nage, or more specifically thepeople of ‘Ua, exterminated the hairy hominoids severalgenerations ago, after tiring of their stealing from Nagefields and their alleged abduction of children. Nageaccomplished their extinction by trapping the ebu gogoinside a cave and setting fire to a quantity of palm fibrethey had given them to use as clothing (Forth 1998). Ifanyone is interested in local indications of how Homo flo-resiensis – to the extent that the species might be identifiedwith ebu gogo – may have got along with local Homosapiens, then surely this is it.

Referring to what he was told by Florinese villagers,Roberts is quoted as stating that the ‘only inconsistencywith the archaeological evidence [concerning Homo flore-siensis]’ is the idea that ebu gogo did not use stone tools(Gee 2004). Be that as it may, the most prominent feature

of numerous Nage accounts I have recorded is the notionthat female ebu gogo possessed pendulous breasts, so longthat they could throw them over their shoulders.7 Thedimensions of female breasts is, unfortunately, one ofmany things that cannot be gauged from palaeontologicalevidence. (Another is whether a specimen was covered inhair.) At the same time, the breasts are among several fea-tures that the Nage representation shares with legendarycreatures the world over, including the wildman ofEuropean mediaeval art and literature (Bernheimer 1952)and such hominoidal crypto-species as the Himalayan‘yeti’, the ‘sasquatch’ or ‘bigfoot’ of northwestern NorthAmerica (Napier 1972), and the wildman of China (Zhou1982).

Spirits, hominoids and hobbitsHowever much ebu gogo might recall Homo floresiensis(or vice versa), it is therefore clear that the first figureequally resembles characters that are generally consideredto belong to myth and fantasy. (Another fantastic attributeof ebu gogo is their reputed proclivity to swallow thingswhole, including rice mortars, puppy dogs and piglets.)But if some scientific commentators have perhaps beentoo quick to link the skeletal remains at Liang Bua with theNage stories, social anthropologists have always been toomuch inclined to dismiss folk categories like ebu gogosimply as products of the imagination, or as ‘spiritualbeings’. Indeed, I myself may be so accused, insofar as myearlier treatment of ebu gogo is included in a book on‘spirit classification’ (Forth 1998). This inclination toregard the seemingly fantastic images of non-Westernersas ‘spiritual’ largely reflects the Durkheimian legacy,whereby spiritual things are to be explained as symbolicrefractions of social categories and relationships ratherthan as entities grounded in empirical realities external tosociety. Certainly there are problems in interpreting ebugogo as directly reflecting local memories of Homo flore-siensis. Yet whatever the derivation of the Nage represen-tation, ebu gogo really do seem different from the variouscategories of spirits that Nage describe with equalcredulity – and to that extent, I believe the possibilityadvertised by Roberts should be taken seriously. As noted,Nage themselves distinguish ebu gogo from ‘spirits’ (ageneral category contextually designated as nitu), and theydo so explicitly with reference to the hairy creature’s lackof extraordinary powers – for example, the ability to dis-appear, change shape, transform into animals and so on.

To ignore this local distinction, and simply assume thatebu gogo are only spirits after all, would be to follow along-standing anthropological practice that is consistentwith another, equally controvertible view, namely, thatmembers of small-scale, non-Western societies are inca-pable of distinguishing empirical categories, the objects ofordinary intuition, from fantastic images dictated by reli-gious tradition. Yet it may not be members of small-scalesocieties so much as anthropologists who have been guiltyof this lack of discrimination. ‘Spiritual beings’ are,indeed, often grounded in empirical things, includingexperience of natural species. But this does not mean thatpeople recognizing zoologically derived spirits cannot dis-tinguish between ordinary animals and their spiritualtransformations.

In a sense, then, recent musings about ebu gogo as alatter-day representation of Homo floresiensis refocusanthropological attention on an enduring analytical cate-gory. Although ‘spiritual being’ has often been employeduncritically (including as a catch-all for anything that doesnot accord with the current state of Western scientificknowledge), I do not argue that the category lacks validity.On the contrary, I think it is more useful than has some-times been supposed, designating a class that is an identi-

9. An example of this sortof treatment is the Daily Mailarticle I refer to below, theauthor of which also describesmodern Florinese, quiteinaccurately, as themselvesbarely emerged from caves.Both Richard Dawkins andHenry Gee have criticized theapplication of ‘hobbit’ toHomo floresiensis, although inthe end Gee judges it superiorto other possible pseudonyms– including ebu gogo! I amgrateful to an anonymousreviewer for raising theinteresting question of whetherthis application of ‘hobbit’ byacademic researchers might beconsidered a denigration ofhuman subjects and therefore abreach of professional ethics.

10. The term possiblymeans something like ‘falsemonkey’. According to thearticle, the name is babomamo, but this in fact is a Lioexpression referringcollectively to ‘ancestors’.

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 21 NO 3, JUNE 2005 15

Fig. 4. The chief Nage villageof Boa Wae and the volcanoEbu Lobo. The approximatelocation of Lia Ula, the cavereputedly occupied by ebugogo, is indicated by the arrow.

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fiable psychological property of societies worldwide.8 Atthe same time, how folk categories like ebu gogo and sci-entific categories like Homo floresiensis might be con-nected is a complex question to which anthropologistshave paid insufficient attention. Even if ebu gogo wereempirical beings surviving until about 200 years ago as theNage aver, this does not necessarily mean that these weredescendants of the sub-fossil. They might, for example,have been a former, phenotypically distinct population ofHomo sapiens, or a grossly exaggerated representation ofa no longer identifiable indigenous group that precededNage in their present territories. And even if there were aconnection with Homo floresiensis, the apparently fan-tastic features (e.g. the pendulous breasts) would stillmake the local representation something different from theactual hominid. On the other hand, if it could be shownthat categories like ebu gogo substantially reflect creaturesthat became extinct very much longer ago, then this wouldobviously have implications for the notion of cultural or‘folk’ memory, in relation to the study of legend and mythin general.

Ever since van Gennep (1910) estimated that oralreports survive as accurate accounts of past events for just150 to 200 years, or at most two to three centuries, anthro-pologists and folklorists have maintained widely differentopinions regarding the validity of oral traditions as factualhistorical records (Vansina 1965). This lack of consensus

is hardly surprising, as the speed with which accounts ofevents are transformed in oral transmission has long beenknown to vary according to a number of factors, includingsubject matter, the identity of narrators, and the extent towhich reports are incorporated into established narrativegenres. Nevertheless, if the extinction of ebu gogo isgrounded in actual occurrences, and especially if Nage areright that these took place just a few hundred years ago,then one may reasonably expect at least some features ofthe central characters – the hairy hominoids themselves –to have been faithfully preserved. Clearly, in establishinga link between ebu gogo and Homo floresiensis muchdepends on the discovery of material evidence for the sur-vival of the new species significantly more recently than13,000 years ago.

If anthropologists have been guilty of uncritically ‘spir-itualizing’ categories like ebu gogo, it is equally remark-able how recent commentators have done somethingessentially similar with the newly discovered species. Inparticular, it has been found appropriate – evidently inorder to communicate effectively with a wider public – toportray Homo floresiensis as a ‘hobbit’ (a choice obvi-ously influenced by the recent Hollywood film versions ofTolkien’s novels). Curiouser still, the designation was nota creation of the popular press, but of the scientific dis-coverers themselves. Bound up with this identification,which has inevitably resulted in a trivialization of theanthropological discovery, has been a transformation ofFlores into an approximation of Conan Doyle’s ‘lostworld’, once the abode of pygmy elephants and still thehome of giant lizards and giant rats (references respec-tively to Varanus komodoensis, or the ‘Komodo dragon’,and the endemic Flores giant rat, Papagomysarmandvillei), and perhaps even of dwarf hominids.9 Butworse than this, casting Homo floresiensis as ‘hobbits’potentially obscures the essential difference between anempirical species, designated a member of the genusHomo like ourselves, and the images of literary fiction.Like hobbits, both Homo floresiensis and ebu gogo areproducts of human imagination, but the images have dif-ferent bases: tangible, skeletal and archaeological evi-dence in one case, and the testimony and traditions of localpeople in the other. Rather than simply assuming that thesetraditions are as fantastical as Tolkien’s fiction, the chal-lenge for social anthropologists is to discover the correctrelationship between the palaeontological and ethno-graphic images and the true source of their resemblance.

Journalism, tourism and (maybe still)ethnographyQuite a different sort of relevance for social anthropologyconcerns the impact of the discovery of H. floresiensis onmodern inhabitants of Flores, and on prospects for furtherethnographic research into local representations of hairyhominoids like ebu gogo. The ink was barely dry on theNature articles (see note 1) before a London tabloid, theDaily Mail, had a reporter on Flores island. Published on 6November 2004, his story described encounters localpeople – apparently all from the Lio district of east centralFlores, though the reporter’s geography is rather imprecise– claimed to have had in recent years with real live ‘hob-bits’ (Shears 2004). Without a doubt, the most startlingstory concerned a local man who had reputedly obtainedthe corpse of a small hairy hominoid that had just beenburied by others of its kind. Wrapping it in cloth, the manhad kept the corpse for years until all he had left was theskull, and – as is all too common with stories of this sort –this too was eventually lost.

Although not mentioned in the newspaper piece, the Lioterm for the creatures is lae ho’a.10 As I was able to learnfrom information I obtained in August 2003 – in fact, from

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Anon. 1932. Levend of dood,een orang pendek. De Gids96(2):257-58.

Balter, M. 2005. Small butsmart? Flores hominidshows signs of advancedbrain. Science 307:1386-89.

Bernheimer, R. 1952. Wildmen in the middle ages: Astudy in art, sentiment, anddemonology. Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress.

Brown, P. et al. 2004. A newsmall-bodied hominin fromthe late Pleistocene ofFlores, Indonesia. Nature431(7012): 1055-1061.

Curtis, G., Swisher, C. andLewin, R. 2000. Java man:How geologists changed thehistory of human evolution.New York: Scribner.

Fig. 5. Nage villagers, with thevolcano Ebu Lobo in thebackground.

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Dalton, R. 2004. Little lady ofFlores forces rethink ofhuman evolution. Nature431(7012): 1029.

Dawkins, R. 2004. The giantleap for our sense ofwonder. The Sunday TimesReview, 31 October.

Falk, D. et al. 2005. The brainof LB1, Homo floresiensis.Sciencexpress.www.sciencexpress.org/03Arch 2005.

Fointuna, Y. 2004. Dwarfs inFlores mythology. JakartaPost, 30 November.http://www.thejakartapost.com/Archives/ArchivesDet2.asp?FileID=20041130.Q02

Forth, G. 1998. Beneath thevolcano: Religion,cosmology and spiritclassification among theNage of eastern Indonesia.(VKI 177) Leiden: KITLVPress.

— 2005. Palaeoanthropologyand local legends: Homofloresiensis in the news.Anthropology Today 21(1):22.

Gee, H. 2004. Our not sodistant relative. TheGuardian 28 October.

Hitchcock, M. 1993. Dragontourism in Komodo, easternIndonesia. In: Hitchcock,M., King, V.T. andParnwell, M.J.G. (eds)Tourism in South-East Asia,pp. 303-316. London andNew York: Routledge.

Mirazon Lahr, M. and Foley,R. 2004. Human evolutionwrit small. Nature431(7012): 1043-1044.

Morwood, M.J. et al. 2004.Archaeology and age of anew hominin from Flores ineastern Indonesia. Nature431(7012): 1087-1091.

Morris, D. 2004. Eton or thezoo? BBC News, 29October, 09.55 GMT/10.55BST.

Napier, J. 1972. Bigfoot: Theyeti and sasquatch in mythand reality. New York: E.P.Dutton & Co.

Shears, R. 2004. How I foundthe Hobbit (well, nearly!).Daily Mail, 6 November,12-13.

van Bekkum, W. 1946.Geschiedenis vanManggarai: II Todo enPongkor. Cultureel Indië 8:65-75.

van Gennep, A. 1910. Laformation des légendes.Paris: E. Flammarion.

Vansina, J. 1965. Oraltradition: A study inhistorical methodology.Chicago: Aldine PublishingCompany.

Verheijen, J.A.J. 1950. Destem der dieren in deManggaraise folklore.Bijdragen tot de Taal-,Land- en Volkenkunde 106:55-78.

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Zhou Guoxing. 1982. The stateof wildman research inChina. Cryptozoology 1:13-23.

some of the same individuals mentioned in the Daily Mail– these beings closely resemble the Nage ebu gogo. In cer-tain respects, moreover, they seem more similar to Homofloresiensis than ebu gogo, being more consistentlydescribed as small and (according to what I was told)lacking the prominent breasts. But the main differencebetween the Lio and Nage creatures, evidently, is that laeho’a are not yet extinct – although some stories I recordedsuggest that local Homo sapiens have been no kinder tothem than were the Nage ancestors.

I relate this tale not so much to raise again the possibilityof a living Homo floresiensis as to consider how local rep-resentations of hairy hominoids may be affected by mediainterest in the ‘hobbit’. Among other things, the DailyMail’s man showed villagers an illustration of the recon-structed hominid that has appeared in numerous publica-tions (see Fig. 1) And of course, what they claimed to havewitnessed (or, in one case, obtained) looked exactly likethis! One therefore wonders what chance there may nowbe of distinguishing indigenous representations frompalaeoanthropological interpretations, especially in theManggarai region where popular interest in Homo flore-siensis is naturally most intense. I certainly feel fortunateto have compiled information on ebu gogo, over a periodof some two decades, before modern Florinese becamefamiliar with Homo floresiensis. In December, anothernewspaper story, this time in the Sydney Morning Herald(6 December 2004), quoted a Nage elder resident in Bo’aWae – a man I have known since 1983 – to the effect thatpeople of his village had, just three weeks previously, cap-tured a female ebu gogo with ‘long, pendulous breasts’.This contradicts everything I have ever heard concerningthe extinction of ebu gogo a couple of centuries ago. It isquite possible that something was lost (or gained) whenmy Nage friend’s statement was translated for theAustralian reporter into English. But it is equally possiblethat a desire to find a ‘real live hobbit’ is transforminglocal traditions in all too predictable ways.

One also wonders about the general impact on Florespeople residing in the vicinity of the cave at Liang Bua.Not long after the discovery was announced, tour opera-tors began offering packages on the internet, advertisingfive-day expeditions to the site from Bali. In this there isobviously much to attract anthropologists interested intourism, but how far Flores’ new-found fame will actuallybenefit the Florinese themselves remains to be seen. If theexperience of Komodo National Park is anything to go by,local people are unlikely to gain much in the way ofemployment opportunities from tourist interest in thehaunts of the new found hominid, even as the creaturebecomes a regional tourist icon to rival the ‘dragons’ ofKomodo (an island located just off Flores’ western tip).On the other hand, also judging by Komodo ‘dragontourism’ (Hitchcock 1993), one may hopefully anticipatean improvement in local communications and an expan-sion of currently scarce facilities for visitors – in this casein Ruteng, the Manggarai capital located some 15 kilome-tres south of Liang Bua. If it hasn’t happened already, onecan also foresee the imminent opening of a ‘Hotel Hobbit’.Just as ebu gogo was ultimately a victim of Nage expan-sion, Homo floresiensis is rapidly becoming a commodityof modern capitalism.

What if Homo floresiensis really did still exist?The question of the continuing existence of ‘Flores Man’signals a rather more profound anthropological relevancefor the discovery. Although not particularly probable, thesurvival of Homo floresiensis in remoter parts of Flores isnot impossible. Having been evolving on the island, pos-sibly for 800,000 years, and having registered its presencea mere 13,000 years ago, there is no reason in principle

why the species could not have hung on for what in geo-logical terms is just a little while longer – even in spite ofthe almost certain contemporaneous presence, for at leastpart of this period, of the little hominid’s more sapientcousin.

I won’t rehearse the obvious moral and humanitarianissues that would be raised by the discovery of livingmembers of another species of the human genus. Thesehave already been broached by several commentators,including Desmond Morris and Richard Dawkins.Dawkins has suggested someone should start looking forthe creature right away. But would it be similarly reason-able, one wonders, to offer a bounty for the capture of aliving Homo floresiensis or, failing that, a corpse (car-case?), as was done in the early 20th century in regard tothe ‘short man’ (orang pendek) of Sumatra (see Anon.1932) – a reputed hairy hominoid roughly the same size asHomo floresiensis, which has recently been interpreted asa possible undiscovered primate? Apart from such moralquestions, anthropologists would also face a major profes-sional challenge. For all the significance we attach to cul-tural difference among Homo sapiens, so far socialanthropologists have had only one biological kind ofhuman to study. An extant population of Homo flore-siensis would change that immediately. We might then, forthe first time, have the opportunity of studying a group thatwas truly ‘other’ – dare one also say, truly ‘primitive’? Bythe same token, we should also have a splendid opportu-nity of discovering far more about what biology con-tributes to the social and cultural life of Homo sapiens.

But one is immediately led to ask: how equipped wouldsocial or cultural anthropologists (as distinct from, say,primatologists or biological anthropologists) be to respondto this challenge? Some might not be particularly inter-ested – tending perhaps to an extreme constructionist viewnot just of cultures but of species, and then denying thatthere is very much new here at all. Largely because I don’treally know the answer (nor, if it proved to be negative,why exactly it should be so), I would leave the questionopen. There is, however, a less hypothetical and moreimmediate question, namely, whether other anthropolog-ical disciplines (such as palaeoanthropology) – and for thatmatter the media – recognize a relevance for social or cul-tural anthropology in all this? Indications so far are thatthey probably do not. Before my own comment appearedin ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY (Forth 2005), over threemonths after the announcement of the discovery of Homofloresiensis, I encountered no published remark by anyprofessional social anthropologist, and certainly none byanyone who had conducted ethnographic research inFlores. In the weeks immediately following the publica-tion of the Nature articles, I was approached by severaljournalists, but only, it seems, because last summer I hap-pened to meet a member of the palaeontological team andhad mentioned my interest in the figure named ebu gogo.

But this is a continuing story, and much remains to belearned. Not all anthropologists accept the interpretationof a new species, not least because of the hypothesis ofhominid dwarfing and development from Homo erectus.Even in spite of the endocast analysis, which has indicatedgreater intelligence than initially suggested by thediminutive brain, major questions have still to be resolvedconcerning attributions of language, collective huntingand the manufacture of tools (which are similar to oneshitherto attributed to local Homo sapiens). Although itseems unlikely, this could yet prove to be something of afalse dawn. And in that case, social anthropologists mightfind an altogether different significance in the ‘discovery’of a new kind of human on an eastern Indonesian island,and its hypothetical linking with local stories of hairyhominoids.

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