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Published: June 22nd 2009
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A long time ago when the world was young, there was an island. On the island there were many wonderful animals: a monstrously large lizard, a giant rat, a giant tortoise, and a pigmy elephant. And there was also a little man who walked among the animals and every so often stabbed them with his little spear and ate their flesh. Still, he was only a little man and his stomach wasn't very big so it all worked out all right. But then there arrived on the island a bigger man and he had a big appetite, and he ate all the little elephants and all the big tortoises and he drove the little man into the hills where he hid.
That sounds like a Just So story, but the island was Flores and the little man was a diminutive hominid called
Homo floresiensis, nicknamed "the Hobbit". The skeletal remains of
floresiensis were first discovered in October 2004 in a cave called Liang Bua just out of Ruteng. The original specimen was actually a female who lived only about 18,000 years ago. She was probably about thirty years old when she died and stood just one metre tall. More remains
were found in further digs at the cave, some younger in geological age and some older, but all of a similar height and with the same anatomical characteristics distinguishing them from being just small
Homo sapiens. The discovery caused a sensation, not just in the scientific world but also amongst the general populace who generally don't give a toss about scientific discoveries. This was another species of human who lived alongside us not in the dim distant past but just 12,000 years ago (to put it into context, the pyramids were constructed just under 5000 years ago, and the famous cave paintings at Lascaux in France are about 16,000 years old). There's a very good book all about the amazing finds and the ensuing disputes and debates, including the rather questionable behaviour of Professors Teuku Jacob and Raden Pandji Soejono which I won't go into (read the book: its called "The Discovery Of The Hobbit" by Mike Morwood and Penny van Oosterzee). Suffice to say that the recovered skeletons span a period of 80,000 years and exhibit extremely distinctive and sometimes primitive characteristics that set them well apart from any modern human, and they are certainly not just microcephalic
Homo sapiens as some detractors would suggest. I think Mike Morwood put it best when he wrote that the people claiming the
floresiensis skeletons are just microcephalic
sapiens are basically saying that modern humans arrived on Flores 95,000 years ago but they were all retarded -- and then kept going as an entirely retarded population for the next 80,000 years!
One further very interesting piece of information that came out when
floresiensis was discovered was that the local people on Flores had always had stories in their folklore about tiny wild people called Ebo Gogo, which translates as "the grandmother who eats anything raw". The Ebo Gogo were said to be about a metre tall, to have pot bellies, long hair and proportionately long limbs, and to walk with an awkward gait: which is pretty much a perfect description of what
Homo floresiensis probably looked like in life. The last Ebo Gogo were supposedly seen at the time of the Dutch occupation of Flores in the 19th century. Were the Ebo Gogo stories just folk-memories of
floresiensis or did
floresiensis actually survive right up to the modern day? Are they still out there, hiding in the hills?
On the
morning I went to see Liang Bua there wasn’t a bemo heading that way for another two hours apparently so I took a motorbike instead. I’ve been on more motorbikes than I care to recall since getting to Indonesia but often they’re the only way to get anywhere. There was a live hen hanging by its feet from the handlebars, possibly as some sort of good-luck charm, although obviously not from the hen’s point of view.
The latest edition of Lonely Planet says that Liang Bua is reached via 14km of very rough dirt track that is often impassable after rain, and also that the cave is considered sacred by the locals so you need a guide to visit. Both are rubbish and I suspect the writer never even went there. The road is a perfectly adequate sealed road and there are transport vehicles (bemos and trucks) going past on a regular basis on their way to various villages. There’s a big archway over the road just before the cave saying “Welcome to Liang Bua” and another smaller one right at the cave entrance in front of a barbed wire fence, but neither of the latter two are as
obtrusive as I thought they’d be and the gate in the fence isn’t locked as I’d heard it might be. In the middle of the cave is a table where some kids hang out to take your 5000 rupiah entry fee (less than NZ$1) and they’ll also take you inside the narrow tunnels that burrow into the deep recesses of the earth, supposedly for many kilometres. There’s not much to see at the cave nowadays of course. There are some squares marked out on the ground where the digs took place and some nice stalactite action going on, but otherwise that’s about it. But I knew that before going there, I really just wanted to see the cave where (pre)history was made.
A few minutes back down the road and up a hill is another large cave where there is an interesting formation like raised pools known in local lore as the mandi (bath) of the king and queen and their babies.
Liang Bua is quite a bit lower down the mountains than Ruteng is, and so it’s a lot hotter there. Although I wasn’t actively bird-watching whilst there I did still see a few lower-altitude species in
the vicinity such as the very pretty black-fronted flowerpecker and the flame-breasted sunbird. The latter is also found on Timor but there I’d only managed to see the females which are basically brown and yellow and sort of dull; the males blaze like the sun.
When I got back into Ruteng I found the owner of the Rima Hotel was having a celebration for his brother who was getting married, so I got another free wedding feast. I do like Ruteng!!
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