via Popular Mechanics, 02 May 2023: Anthropologist Gregory Forth believes it’s possible that the Homo floresiensis, an early type of human whose bones were discovered on Indonesia’s Flores Island, could have survived the past 50,000 years in the isolated region, and has published a book titled “Between Ape and Human: An Anthropologist on the Trail of a Hidden Hominoid,” however, paleoanthropologists are far from convinced.
While doing fieldwork on Indonesia’s Flores Island in the early 2000s, anthropologist Gregory Forth frequently spoke to the locals living in the mountains. They told him that they sometimes caught glimpses of a small humanoid animal, a kind of “ape-man,” short in stature and hairy.
Forth believes it’s possible that an early type of human—whose bones paleoanthropologists discovered in a mountain cave on Flores—could have survived the past 50,000 years in the isolated region. In 2022, he published a book, Between Ape and Human: An Anthropologist on the Trail of a Hidden Hominoid, about what he learned from the Flores islanders.
However, paleoanthropologists, who look for evidence explaining human evolution, are far from convinced. The chances that Flores could be home to living descendants of an extinct human species is vanishingly small, because no solid evidence of such reported “ape-men” exists, paleontologists say.
Source: Homo Floresiensis: Why No Hobbits Still Live on Flores Island
