Noted Anthropologist Tells Rogan Indonesian Villagers Described 'Hobbits' Before Scientists Found Their Bones

Canadian anthropologist Gregory Forth told Joe Rogan this week that villagers on the Indonesian island of Flores were describing small, ape-like "hobbit" creatures to him more than a year before scientists announced the bones of Homo floresiensis, the extinct human relative nicknamed the hobbit, and that he thinks the creatures could still be alive in the island's mountains. Forth, who wrote the 2022 book Between Ape and Human, appeared on episode #2577 of The Joe Rogan Experience, released Thursday.

Forth said he began fieldwork on Flores in 1984 and first heard stories of small, human-like creatures that year, among the Nage people in the middle of the island, who described them as extinct for two or three hundred years. Further east, among the Lio people, the stories were of creatures "still around, rare, but still present." He told Rogan he recorded "over 30 reports of encounters, some of them not terribly credible, others, you know, a dozen or so much more interesting", and that the less credible ones tended to come from the coast, where people could have mistaken monkeys for the creatures.

The sequence is what Forth leans on. Rogan asked how the first account he heard compared with the bones. Forth answere