Between Ape and Human by Gregory Forth

Peter Tallack

Pegasus

3 May 2022

LENGTH 336 pages

• World English Language (Pegasus)

A remarkable investigation into the hominoids of Flores Island, their place on the evolutionary spectrum and whether they still survive

In the 1980s, while doing fieldwork on the remote Indonesian island of Flores, anthropologist Gregory Forth came across people talking about half-apelike, halfhumanlike creatures that once lived in a cave on the slopes of a nearby volcano. Over the years he recorded what locals had to say about these mystery hominoids, and also began to investigate reports from the Lio region of the island where locals described ‘ ape-men ’ as still living. Dozens claimed to have even seen them.

Then along came fossils of the ‘hobbit’, discovered in a cave in western Flores in 2003. Named Homo floresiensis, this small archaic human was initially believed to have lived until as recently as 12,000 years ago – possibly overlapping with the appearance of Homo sapiens on Flores. That got Forth thinking. Could the creatures described by the islanders reflect a real species, either now extinct or even still surviving?

In BETWEEN APE AND HUMAN, we follow Forth on the trail of this mystery hominoid and the space they occupy in islanders’ culture as both natural creatures and as supernatural beings. In a narrative filled with adventure, local culture and language, zoology and natural history, he comes to a startling conclusion: that a primitive human species may well have survived into recent times.

Gregory Forth retired in 2019 as a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta, Canada, after serving there for over 33 years. Between 1974 and 2018, he completed 22 field research trips, with much of his time spent in Indonesia, especially on the eastern islands of Flores and Sumba (where he lived continuously for two years). As well as reading Dutch, Indonesian, German and French, he is fluent in the Indonesian national language and several eastern Indonesian local languages. A fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, he has published over 100 academic articles and 11 scholarly books.