My guest for this episode is Gregory Forth, who joined me to discuss his book Between Ape and Human: An Anthropologist on the Trail of a Hidden Hominoid.
Gregory received his doctorate at Oxford and was a professor of Anthropology at the University of Alberta for more than three decades. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and is the author more than one hundred scholarly papers and several academic books. Between Ape and Human is his first book for a general audience.
While doing fieldwork in the Lio region of the Indonesian island of Flores, he came across people talking about half-apelike, half-humanlike creatures called Lai Ho’a that once lived in a cave on the slopes of a nearby volcano. Over the years he continued to record what locals had to say about these mystery hominoids while searching for ways to explain them as imaginary symbols of the wild or other cultural representations.
In 2003 however, skeletons of a small-statured early human species named Homo Foresiensis were excavated in a cave in western Flores. In view of this timing and the striking resemblance of floresiensis to the mystery creatures described by the islanders, Gregory began to think about the creatures reported to him as possibly reflecting a real species, either now extinct but retained in ‘cultural memory’, or perhaps even still surviving.
I begin the interview by talking with Gregory about how his interest in researching ape-man encounters in Flores started, and then the discussion moves to the book itself, which across four sections examines the space the Lai Ho’a occupy in islanders’ culture as both natural creatures and as supernatural beings.
Between Ape and Human is published by Pegasus Books - for further details go to http://pegasusbooks.com/authors/gregory-forth. You can purchase a copy from the publisher or by ordering it from your favourite bookseller.
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