-:- little vision tricksters -:-
-:- ebu gogo - the hobbit of flores island -:-
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It has been known for about fifty years now that a large-boned, upright-walking and tool-using hominid known as Homo erectus was the most likely candidate to be one of mankind’s immediate predecessors on this planet. This species of man left Africa around two million years ago and slowly spread across the whole globe – evolving into new forms of erectus as it did so – before being replaced by our immediate ancestors in a second wave from Africa .
What has also been known for some time is that on some of the islands of Indonesia , isolated populations of erectus had survived the constant onslaught of modern man’s arrival and settlement until as late as 20,000 years ago – comparatively late in evolutionary terms.
But the announcement that came in 2004 from palaeoanthropologists working on the island of Flores, Indonesia, truly sent shock waves around the academic world.
A small, three foot tall hominid skeleton had been found which bore all the hallmarks of being an erectus child. However, on examining the pelvis of the creature and finding it to have been female, scientists also noted that it appeared to be full grown. That is, the little three foot child actually seemed to be an adult.
As if to compound this conclusion, more skeletons began turning up in a cave towards the centre of the island, including those of children. Clearly this was a new, miniaturised species of man, and one that had evolved from Homo erectus, and taxonomists gave it the Latin name Homo floresiensis – ‘Man of Flores’.
More was yet to come. When fragments of bone were sent to laboratories for radio-carbon dating, the results astonished even the most radical of evolutionary theorists: the skeletons were found to be barely more than eleven or twelve thousand years old. In fact, by investigating the general geology of Flores Island and the archaeology of the cave, scientists were able to suggest that what had actually finished these little hobbit-men off was a major volcanic eruption on the island sometime in the region of eleven thousand years ago.
So much for evolutionary history – what was all the more surprising for scientists and journalists covering the story was that the islanders all began reporting that they had expected these skeletons to be found eventually, and simply confirmed what they had always believed: that the island had once been home to a group of little mischievous folk who were barely three feet tall, and that they had all died out comparatively recently.
Could this have been a long-preserved folk memory of the little hominids?
The Flores islanders regularly tell their stories of the Ebu Gogo (“Ancestors Who Eat Everything”), reporting that they were covered in hair, ears that stuck out and pronounced pot-bellies. They lived in caves inland from the coast, walked somewhat awkwardly and could often be heard ‘murmuring’ in their own language. Additionally, the Ebu Gogo had the ability to repeat what was said to them in a kind of ‘parrot-like’ fashion but effective communication between humans and these folk never occurred.
Remarkably, the islanders additionally said that until a few years ago, there were actually people alive who could remember the Ebu Gogo, and that they were certainly alive at the time when the Dutch visited the island in the 1600s. In modern day villages all over Flores , it is generally agreed that the last Ebu Gogo died out some 150 years ago.
It is said that a group of villagers from the south came and burned the last few survivors out of their caves, believing that the Ebu Gogo had stolen and eaten one of their babies.
What can this all mean? On the surface it appears that we can effectively identify the Ebu Gogo with Homo floresiensis and state confidently that the scientists have yet to uncover later skeleton finds that would prove the islanders’ story (*1). We could say that there is no way that the islanders could have known about these skeletons before they were uncovered in 2004 and thus there is likely to be more than just a mere grain of truth in the Ebu Gogo tales.
On the other hand, it is decidedly questionable whether the folk memory of a single people – no matter how conservative they may be – can record any clear or accurate details for a period of time on the order of 11,000 years, especially since the archaeology of the region suggests that modern man may have only arrived on Flores some ten thousand years ago.
The Ebu Gogo may simply therefore represent the folk memory of a much more recent supplanted or ancestral population of modern humans who once lived on Flores, and the resemblance between them and the subsequently discovered Homo floresiensis is mere coincidence.
The problem with all these explanations is that the existence of such spooks as the Ebu Gogo is near universal in cultures throughtout mankind. Although they are not endowed with any form of magical powers and do not regularly visit Floresians in dreams or visions (and when they do, the phenomenon is treated with a fair amount of scepticism), their small stature and ‘wild man’ appearance does tend to put them in the same category as many of the other ‘little people’ found across the world.
And unlike the Ebu Gogo, many of the world’s little people do possess magical powers, and they do regularly visit people in dreams. More alarmingly, they often are just as amalevolent and mischievous as they are wise or benevolent.
This is the key problem we are faced with, then, when studying many of the spook stories and beliefs in the literature. Do they represent something deep within the hyuman psyche relating to wisdom, mischief and the sense of the remote and the unknown, or are they more simply a half-remembered and much emebllished folk memory of a landscape’s previous inhabitants?
To many people in the world today and in days gone by, they often represent both.
(c) Bruce Rimell, June 2005
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