Looking For Cryptids in Flores

The best evidence for the existence of a currently extant or recently (i.e. in the last couple of hundred years) extinct archaic hominin species in the world, basically a cryptid, is in or near the island of Flores in Indonesia as an example of the species Homo floresiensis, which solid evidence suggests co-existed with modern humans, at least for an extended period of time on that island.

A new book by Gregory Forth, entitled Between Ape and Human, available in May 2022, explores that possibility. The author, touting his book in the linked article, states:

My aim in writing the book was to find the best explanation—that is, the most rational and empirically best supported—of Lio accounts of the creatures. These include reports of sightings by more than 30 eyewitnesses, all of whom I spoke with directly. And I conclude that the best way to explain what they told me is that a non-sapiens hominin has survived on Flores to the present or very recent times.

Between Ape and Human also considers general questions, including how natural scientists construct knowledge about living things. One issue is the relative value of various sources of information about creatures, including animals undocumented or yet to be documented in the scientific literature, and especially information provided by traditionally non-literate and technologically simple communities such as the Lio—a people who, 40 or 50 years ago, anthropologists would have called primitive. To be sure, the Lio don’t have anything akin to modern evolutionary theory, with speciation driven by mutation and natural selection. But if evolutionism is fundamentally concerned with how different species arose and how differences are maintained, then Lio people and other Flores islanders have for a long time been asking the same questions.