Hobbit hominins in Europe? Ludovic Slimak and his current research

An article published in the Spanish daily El País in its Science section, (read it here, in English) on Feb 16, 2026, was an interview of the French archaeologist and paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak (b. 1973). In the final part of the interview, Slimak mentions an amazing discovery: the possible existence of pigmy hominins that predate the last Ice Age, in France; creatures similar to the Flores Island hobbits (Homo floresiensis).

This is the full text that final part (highlighted text is mine):

"Q. Do you have any new discoveries?
A. Yes. I can’t give out any details because we’re going to publish it in a scientific journal, maybe in two or three years. And I’ll write my next book about this, which will be called something like The People of the Forest. It’s possible that other, completely unknown human populations existed. We’ve found a body in a deep cave. In a layer of soil that predates glaciation. It’s fascinating because the morphology is very specific. It looks like a seven-year-old child, but it’s the body of an adult. From what we’ve seen, there are no Neanderthal features. And we don’t know what it is. It could be a population like the one in Hobbit of Flores, isolated in a very dense forest, as they were at that time. There may be several more bodies. We have work ahead for years. I can’t say more."

Censured and Redacted

The European Hobbit is also mentioned in an article published in Human Evolution News titled Hobbit Neanderthals? Top French Scientist may have revealed a new species of Diminutive Hominin in Europe? (April 27, 2026). It echoes the same theme, mentioning the interview published in El País and adds a suggestive remark: the interview was edited and something was deleted from it: "... according to the channel Highly Compelling, the original version of the interview contained something far more explosive — and it was quietly removed."

Highly Compelling is a video feed on Youtube, and this is the link to the video mentioned above.

The removed part is evident, as can be seen in the current version of the El País' article, that ends as follows (after he mentions the name of the book —People of the Forest:

"...We are working on layers dating back over 100,000 years, corresponding to an Europe covered by vast primary forests. It is a fascinating and still largely unknown phase. We know very little about how human populations lived in those dense, closed landscapes. Our image of Neanderthals is too heavily shaped by the cold and the glaciations, but before the ice, there was forest. These could be populations that developed very specific lifestyles in those environments. We are only just beginning to understand it. We have years of work ahead of us."

The paragraph is very vague and completely different from the original text! No reference to unknown dwarf-like people, only some comments about how different people could have lived in Europe before glaciations, when it was covered by forests, and non-Neanderthal "populations" adapted to that environment.

The following image, shows the original, and the current text, that was redacted.

The video suggests that the search for the hobbit has already begun: The renewed excavations at the Orgnac 3 site in southeastern France implies that they are working on this find. The site's lower levels are around 375,000 to 400,000 years old. Previous digging there in the 1970s described remains of "neanderthal, mostly from juveniles, and lacking clear Neanderthal features" juveniles seem to imply small body size (like a seven-year-old), and the lack of Neanderthal features agree with the comment in El País. The video suggests that they could be Homo habilis or Naledi. They are small and ancient creatures. It hints that pygmy proportions could provide an evolutionary advantage such as less demand for resources, easier mobility in thick forests, quicker reproduction rate. They would compete in a different niche with other hominins and avoid conflict. The change in climate conditions during the glacial periods probably marked their demise. The video also says that the original 1960s excavations found modern-looking teeth that, however, were around 400,000 years old, a "warmer" interglacial period during which the are was forested.

Bahain et al., 2022 provide a good summary about the Ognac-3 site. Another paper by Moncel et al., 2012 about the site mentions the "... several hominin teeth attributed to Pre-Neanderthals" found there. Both are paywalled.

Slimak et al., 2024 describe the teeth (see p. 100 "Hominid Remains") unearthed at the site: "Seven hominid teeth were discovered from Levels 5a, 5b, and 6. An adult upper right canine was discovered in 1962, and two deciduous incisors and 4 deciduous molars were discovered between 1968 and 1971. M.A. de Lumley (de Lumley 1976) reports that two of the deciduous molars come from a juvenile around 9 years old, whereas two incisors come from a juvenile around 5 years old.... Based on these comparisons, M.-A. de Lumley attributed the hominid remains from Orgnac 3 to ‘pre-neanderthal’ (de Lumley 1976). No information is given about the two remaining molars, and no photographs or drawings of any of the specimens have ever been provided, except a photograph of one of the deciduous molars in situ during excavation in 1968 (fig. S3; Combier 1968, 1971)." Are the teeth attributed to the children actually teeth of dwarfish hominins? Does pre-neanderthal imply a primitive variant of hominin?

Closing Comments

Speculating wildly, we can imagine different scenarios to account for these tiny hominins.

First we must consider if Homo habilis was a homo or an australopith (see this post), and the H. naledi probably never left Africa, and maybe isn't even a member of our homo lineage (see this post). This could discard both species as the source of European pygmy hominins.

An interesting alternative could be that the homo group originated in Eurasia instead of Africa (see this post) evolving into the Dmanisi - H. georgicus people in the Caucasus region, and Homo erectus (who have been in Eurasia for around 2 million years).

This ancient Eurasian ancestor, the first of the homo lineage, could be the ancestor of the Flores Island hobbit (H. floresiensis), who, as mentioned in my previous post, Chris Stringer suggests, is "...a relic of an earlier stage of human evolution that got all the way over there" (in Indonesia) before Homo erectus reached that region.

Could those who lived in Western Eurasia be the tiny-bodied hominins mentioned by Slimak?

We will have to wait a couple of years for the paper promised by Slimak to learn more.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Tennessee Pygmies

Back in 1820, in Tennessee, U.S.A., the newspapers reported that some farmers had discovered tombs containing the remains of pygmies! Of course we know there were no pygmies in Tennessee, but the reports about the tiny people refused to go away, and they persisted for decades, well into the late 1800s. Even nowadays they reappear again and again, like when the Flores Island "Hobbit" was discovered in 2004, the Tennesee pygmy resurfaced as an American relative. Let's look into the fake news of these pygmies.

The whole story is very well summarized by Kevin Smith in his article "Tennessee’s Ancient Pygmy Graveyards: The “Wonder of the Western Country" (Tennesee Archaeology, Vol. 7, No. 1, Fall 2013, p.42)↺.

The first report was published in the Nashville Whig on July 5th, 1820, reporting that Mr. Turner Lane, found between 200 and 300 small graves on his farm five miles east of Sparta, Tennessee (TN) - see spot on Google maps, the graves contained small skeletons: "skull bones, about three inches in diameter, nearly sound; the other bones being proportionally small."

John Haywoodin in his "Natural History of Tennesee..." published in 1823 (see p. 200, "Of their Pygmies") gives the account of Lane's findings adding some comments and details: "it seems to be intimated, that there hath been a race of people here in ancient times, whose height was from two feet, ten inches to three feet".

Towards the end of the book, on p. 360, Haywood reports another find:

"In 1818, Mr. Long, the proprietor of a farm on the south side of the Merimac river, fifteen miles from St. Louis, in the state of Missouri, discovered... a number of graves, the size of which appeared uncommonly small. He made a minute examination, which convinced him they were the remains of human beings much smaller than those of the present day."

However, by the 1830s, people were more critical. Robert Montgomery Bird in 1838 (Peter Pilgrim, p. 24) wrote with a more rational tone:

"The belief in the former existence of races of pygmies and giants in the Mississippi Valley is extremely prevalent in many Western communities though the visits of scientific men to the cemeteries of the former have been productive of results that have shaken the faith of many in regard to the pygmies. The celebrated graveyard on the Merameg (sic) river in Missouri was examined by some of the scientific gentlemen attached to Long's Expedition who found bones of men and infants of the ordinary Indian races in great abundance but no others. Bones from the Lilliputian graves in White County Tennessee have also been proved to belong to mortals of ordinary stature."

In a similar vein, in 1852, Dr. Samuel Morton in his Physical Type of the American Indians,in "Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the... Indian Tribes of the United States", p. 318), reports that he analyzed remains from the "pygmy Cemetery" in White County, Tennessee, and is categorical in declaring they are not pygmys at all:

"...these facts are to me an additional and convincing proof of what I have never doubted viz that the asserted Pygmies of the western country were mere children who for reasons not precisely known but which appear also to influence some communities of even our own race were buried apart from the adult people of their tribe."

In 1869, H.C. Williams wrote about them: "I think in the year 1825 in the Review a printed at Sparta the seat of justice of White County... Fiske and some other gentleman made an examination of an ancient cemetery near that town and finding no of adults came to the conclusion that the country had been by a race of pigmies. The graves were numerous covering more than an acre were generally three feet long and eighteen inches deep with a fin of slaty rocks. The bones were so much decomposed that they fell to pieces after a few moments exposure to the atmosphere."

The Smithsonian intervenes

Nevertheless, the belief in these pygmies continued (see Edward J. Wood, 1868, Giants and Dwarfs, p. 247, or Harper's Magazine, 1869, p. 208) so the Smithsonian Institution sent someone to investigate the findings, the sites and clarify the situation.

An article published by the Smithsonian Institution on January 20, 1876, (The Academy. The Tennessee Pygmies) mentions that the institution sent a person to investigate the "recent revival of the tradition... recent diggings unearthed the remains which have given origin a new to the recent reports." The search in Sparta TN where it had been said that 300 skeletons of "Tiny Folk" had been found during the past ten years only yielded "very few skeletal remains, all collected not filling more than a small box. The fragments thus sent proved on examination to be in no way abnormal... and and were evidently the remains of children between three and four years old... With the human remains forwarded were teeth of the beaver, the costal segments of a turtle, some rough pottery and broken valves of unios. These suggest the ordinary Indian sepulture"

The article says that the idea about pygmies comes from the size of the graves rather than their contents. The graves were small, 2 feet long (61 cm) and 14 inches wide (36 cm) and 12 in. deep (31 cm). They were covered with slabs of sandstone. They lie below the surface of the ground and are discovered when a farmer plows the land. Then they are removed, to clear the fields.

Another piece published in the American Naturalist, June 1876 conveys similar information:

"The following evidence that no pygmy race left their remains in this part of our country must be conclusive... Mr WM Clark employed during the last year by the Smithsonian Institution to investigate the same subject ... distinctly proves that the little slab graves are either those of children or are ossuaries... the most convincing proof brought forward from the examination of hundreds of graves that the small cists are either children's graves or ossuaries..."

Tennesee Pygmies in a Smithsonian article from 1875. Source

A publication from 1883 (Tennesee Pygmies, The Comic Liar, 1883) mocked the idea of pygmies and compared them to the finding of giant skeletons in Kentucky:

"... their discovery of a grave yard contain ing the skeletons of seventy five thousand pygmies of the average height of three feet each. What are the three nine foot giants of Kentucky in comparison with so great a cloud of pygmies. If we may judge from the price usually paid by circus managers for living giants and dwarfs a three foot dwarf is decidedly more valuable than a nine foot giant and if the same standard governs the price of fossils the seventy five thousand Tennessee pigmies are worth fully twenty five thousand times as much as the three Kentucky giants."

In 1910, Bennett H. Young published in his work The Prehistoric Men of Kentucky: A History of what is Known of Their Lives and Habits, and on p. 24, he mentions pygmies as follows "Small stone cists measuring not more than two feet in length by fifteen inches and even less in breadth, are frequently unearthed. In these the bones of the dead, after having been disarticulated, were placed in a mass. The small size of these graves in former days gave rise to the belief that the valleys of the Cumberland and Green rivers were once the home of a race of pygmies." This shows that the myth about small folks spread northwards from Tennessee into Kentucky!

The myth lives on

But old myths, like conspiracy theories seem to fascinate us, and even if proven false, they take a long time to die. Some, like this one, manage to revive based on pseudoscientific factoids.

In 1992, an online magazine (Science Frontiers Online) published a note about American Pygmies which dismisses the children bones theory and promotes genuind pygmies that somehow reached America from Asia, small folk related to the Aeta negrito people of the Philippines. It mentions a paper by Pilapil, Virgilio R. MD., (The Aetas In America, B.C.. Journal of Filipino American Historical Society, University of Hawai'i Press, Vol. 2, 1992 pp. 30-35. 🔒) about this theory, its abstract states that:

"... Among the archeological finds were also hundreds of fragmented human bones from 600 burials which were dug from sites in east Tennessee... These pygmies with small, round heads (brachycephalic) and prominent, projecting (prognathous) jaws are similar to the pygmies of the Philippines and Malaysia, who probably originated in southern Mongolia. The pygmy bones and those of the other races present in the burial were in a similar state of preservation indicating that the pygmies were contemporary with the other races. Carbon-14 dating with carbon-13 correction done on the bone collagen yielded an age of 2,160 +- 135 years, putting these pygmies at about the third century B.C..."

Another website - Archaeology General Index hosted at the University of California, Riverside, in one of its many webpage articles European Bronze Age Visitors in America ⁄ Summary of Discoveries of Dr. Barry & René Fell, says the following:

"... it is clear that the pygmies of Tennessee were of Oriental--that is to say, East Asian--origin; and since pygmies are not maritime people, they can have reached the Americas only by the land route.
They must once have been more widely dispersed than our present finds imply. However, since they reached as far east as east Tennessee, and their bones have been found in association with Europoids and inscribed artifacts of Europoid type, such as loom weights and pottery stamps, lettered in ancient Irish (noted as Celtic) and Basque [see Figs. 183, 185, 186, 187 & 189], Fell concluded that there were in fact meetings of the two races, and that therefore the European visitors could well have taken back to Europe some account of these mysterious undersized people. An inscription that Professors Heizer and Martin Baumhoff had recorded from California (Fig. 63), when deciphered as Ancient Irish ogam, seemed also to suggest that early explorers had encountered some pygmy race that they considered dangerous."

This Californian inscription "fig. 63" can be seen in this image which is captioned as follows "A traveler’s warning written in Old Irish ogam, from Inyo County, CA, Site INY-430 of Heltzer & Bassenhoff (1942). The warning states: 'The men [here] are savages, small and ill nourished, but hostile.' (Fell 1982)."

They cite: Fell, Barry. 1982. Bronze Age America. Little, Brown and Co., Boston, Toronto. 304 p.

This blends Celts, Asians, "Europids" and the Tennessee pygmies into a surreal tale, which seems to be based on flimsy facts.

Similar nonsense is posted on a 2024 webpage titled Did Miniature “Moon-Eyed” People Really Inhabit The Appalachian Mountains - Somehow, the Welsh are mixed up in this baffling myth, which suggests that the short white pygmies called "Moon-Eyed" people by the Cherokee people of the Appalachians, were Welsh miners, offspring of the men who accompanied Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd, a Welsh prince c.1170 AD.

In The Lost History of the Little People (2013), (see Chap. 7 - The Wee People among other entries on these pygmies), Susan Martinez mentions the Tennessee pygmies with a distinct culture (they used copper and pearls) that set them apart from the Amerincians, they were the mound builders, an ancient race with large eyes, sensitive to light, that built mounds and pyramids across the planet, and who, in the Appalachians were known to the native Cherokee as "little people". Farfetched? Improbable? Very likely.

Closing Comments

I must point out that the Cherokee people believed in mythical tiny people which they called yunwi tsunsdi. They were short, and reached the height of a man's knee, they had long hair, were kind and helpful, and lived in caves on the slopes of the hills, some, known as yunwi amaiyinehi, were aquatic. They resemble the beliefs of the ngen spirits of the Mapuche, stewards of the waters, and their Trauco dwarves. Perhaps humans imagine the same mythical beings time and time again, around the world, repeating the same motif as a recurring theme.

Another option is that ancient human beings encountered dwarwfish hominins like those whose remains have been found in Flores Island, or in Palau, and retained this memory in their myths and legends about dwarves, elfs, trolls, etc.

There have been proper scientific papers written about the native burials in Tennessee, like the one mentioned at the beginning of this post, and for instance: Dowd, John T. (2008). The Cumberland Stone-Box Burials of Middle Tennessee. Tennessee Archaeology 3(2):163-180. From which the following images of box-like tombs were taken, notice the sandstone sides (top is similar, but were been removed to show the interior of the graves. They were dated to around 1350 AD.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall © 

Pygmies of Ponape: The Chokalai

The Caroline Islands (or the Carolines - named for the Spanish King Carlos II) consists of around 500 islands located 1,900 km (1,200 mi.) east of the Philippines and south of the Marianas. It spans a wide swath with a west to east alignment, from Yap and Palau in the west to Kosrae in the east (3,500 km - 1,950 mi. long). a widely scattered archipelago of tiny islands in the western Pacific Ocean, to the north of New Guinea.

Like the Marianas, they were a Spanish possession, since their "discovery" in the 1500s, and after the Spanish-American War of 1898, they were sold by Spain to Germany. After WW I managed by Japan under a League of Nations mandate. Following WWII, the UN placed it under a U.S. mandate, and nowadays it forms part of two countries, the Republic of Palau, and the Federated States of Micronesia (the links lead to Google maps of them).

They were settled some 4,000 years ago by people who had developed agriculture, and like the Marianas, the main source of population seems to be Island Southeast Asia followed by an input from Central-Eastern Micronesia (Source) a more recent genetic study from 2022 reported that five migratory streams into Micronesia. Three are East Asian related, one is Polynesian, and a fifth is a Papuan source related to mainland New Guineans that is different from the New Britain–related Papuan source for southwest Pacific populations."

In this post we will explore the "pygmies" that lived on Ponape (now known as Phonpei), little people known as Chokalai, which could probably be linked to the Marianas dwarf.

"Graves of the Little People", Ponape, 1899. F. W. Christian (p. 125)

Chokalai (also "Tsokelai", "Zokelai" and "Sokele")

Google the word Chokalai, and almost all of the bibliography will point to one source: F. W. Christian's article Exploration in the Caroline Islands, published in The Geographical Journal, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Feb., 1899), pp. 105-131. We will quote its mentions of these dwarves below:

"Ponapean traditions of their own origin are tolerably explicit. They mention first the Chokalai, or dwarf aborigines; then the Kona, or giants, otherwise called Ani-aramach, God-men or heroes, two of which, Olosipa and Olosopa, are mentioned as the builder. (p. 112)
[Then, while visiting Nantamarui at Ponial Dell, which means "over the pathway" (see spot in Google maps) Christian visited a site which was a cemetery]
Six graves were found in the lower enclosure, and three on a platform raised five feet above the level of the ground. All were little vaults not exceeding 4 or 4.5 feet in length within —roofed in with massive slabs of basalt, the graves of the fairy folk, little woodland elves, answering to our own pucks and pixies. Ethnologists would style them dwarf negritos, like the Aetas of the Philippines and the Jakou of New Guinea. These Chokalai, according to Ponapean tradition, were the little dwarfish folk who dwelt in the land before the coming of "Kona" and the "Liot," the giants and the cannibals. The two latter terms, as I have already said, probably represent respectively the Malayo Polynesian settlers and the savage Melanesians from the south. The speech of the dwarfs, it is said, was a chattering and a gibber as that of bats; they were dark of skin and flat-nosed. They are believed still to haunt the dark recesses of the forest, and are very malignant and revengeful. I was told that one man who came to this haunted dell to plant kava, was caught up and spirited away by the revengeful goblins, and his lifeless body was found many days afterwards, stretched upon a great flat rock by the seashore off Nantiati point [see on Google maps]. A curious fact concerning this primitive race was supplied me by the Au of Marau shortly before leaving Ponape. The people at the mouth of the Palang river, near the Chokach and Kiti border, [see spot on Google maps] are said to have been descended from the Chokalai, who, it seems, were not everywhere exterminated by the Malayo Polynesian conquerors. The Au's description runs thus: "In the speech of the Palang folk is a most foolish undercurrent of chatter; they are shorter in stature and their skins darker than their neighbours'; their noses are flat, and they are known throughout the tribes as the Paikop-faces. Now, the Paikop is the most ill-favoured of fishes, with wide goggle-eyes and a face as flat as a dish." Unluckily, I had no opportunity of visiting the Palang folk, though they are said to be thieving and treacherous. There seems no reason why the tale of the Au should not be true, and that we have here, overlapped and all but exterminated, the survivors of the Negrito race who made these curious little graves." (p. 124)

Christian and his group opened a grave:

"After clearing away the luxuriant undergrowth, we cautiously removed the basalt slabs at the top of each little vault, and found in the red soil within an abundant deposit of blue mould, promising good results. In the first few minutes a very minute shell adze-head was turned up, and a stone knife. No other results rewarded our efforts, save a few pieces of mouldering bones. All the rest, with the great lapse of time in a damp and hot climate, has literally melted away like sugar. Not one single red or white shell-bead was brought to light in ny of the seven graves opened, although in the central vault of Nan- Tauach we had found a very large number. The graves on the upper platform gave no better return, yielding only a few pieces of mouldering and unsubstantial bone to our most careful search, whereupon Louis shrewdly remarked that the Chokalai must have been either very stupid people who wouldn't work, or very poor and barbarous wretches, not to have any treasures to bury" (p.126)

The same text can be found "The Caroline Islands" by Christian, together with the following:

"The Ponapeans say the bow was used by the Chokalai or dwarf aborigines. The bow was made of Katiu or Ixora wood the bow string of the bark of the Hibiscus the arrows of Hibiscus wood or slips of Alek or reed grass tipped with the spine of the sting ray. Nowadays it is entirely out of use." (p. 137)
... Chokalai. The Kichin Aramach or little people the Trolls or dwarf goblins dwelling in the interior of the island. Doubtless here we have the tradition of dwarf Negrito hill tribes little by little exterminated by the early Malay settlers. (p. 382)

Below is Christian's map of the island of Ponape with some of the spots mentioned in the preceeding text.

Katharine Luomala in her work The Menehune of Polynesia and other mythical little people of Oceania (see p. 72) mentions the Chokalai, citing Christian and also Paul Hambruch, who in 1910 also visited a cemetery that with small tombs. Hambruch learned about the Chokalai, but spells the name as "Tsokelai" and "Zokelai". He recorded the local lore. Below we quote Luomala's summary citing Hambruch:

"obtained two traditions which describe the little people as small, mischievous, noisy, and thievish evil spirits, who came from a foreign land to settle in certain places on Ponape. One tradition has most of them leaving Ponape after having been punished for stealing yams ; the other has them all moving to new settlements on the island. Another reason given for their uprooting themselves was that the chief was angry with them because they made a terrific racket, singing, dancing, and banging their drums when they drank kava.
The more detailed of the two traditions obtained by Hambruch narrates that the Chokalai came from outside Ponape and settled in Kiti, a district in the southwestern part of the island. Their holy places, now called Pankatara by Ponapeans, were at Rentu village in Uono, a section of Kiti. Other settlements, made as the population increased, were Olopel, Nateuta, and a small place called Panupots. The people to settle on Ponape after the Chokalai were, according to tradition, the giants, whose ruins and graves are still pointed out... Hambruch, like Christian, regards the Chokalai as having perhaps been the aborigines of Ponape. He saw occasional individuals in Palikir who greatly differed from other Ponapeans in being short, dark, curly haired, and broad-faced, with strong prognathism and low foreheads. Eighty years ago, he states, there were people in Palan (Christian’s Palang) who were short and very dark, with high, clear voices and masses of curly hair. They were regarded as survivors of the oldest inhabitants of Ponape. Like Christian, Hambruch mentions the Jokasch (Christian’s Chokach, the district in which Palikir is located) as saying that their neighbors, the Palan people, had Paikop faces."

The full, unabriged and original version of the above text summarized by Luomala can be read online here (see pp. 101-103 in the pdf), it was written in 1936 commissioned by the editor, Thilenius, after Hambruch's untimely death in 1933, to complete the work of the Ponape 1908-1910 expedition. It also describes them:

"They looked like this: they were like people, but they were much smaller and shorter; the legs were completely tatooed. They had beautiful voices and shouted loudly for joy... They always lived under the earth; when people walked over the ground, they heard them beat their drums under the earth...when they meet people, they take possession of them and kill them. And until today they also rove around Pilap; but when it rains they creep into the earth...
This grave place, the only one which could be shown to me of the tsokelai, is not far from Nan Tamuroi, and is on the place of Pon ial (above the path). A basalt column wall approximately 1.20. - 1.50 m, high, which is accessible on the west and measures 30 by 35 meters, forms a rectangle. In the interior, it contains, three platforms in which the small stone box graves, 1 to 1.30 meters in size, lay embedded; unfortunately, they are all destroyed. They were ortginally covered with basalt columns, which were rolled away by Christian, who rummaged these graves with little result"

Yap was the homeland of these dwarves

In his work Tracing Pacific Dwarf Myths throughout the Austronesian Expansion, Dean Karalekas, calls them "Sokele" and citing Peacock (1975) says "they came from Yap in olden times and no one saw them. But we heard that the dwarves settled down in the state of Kitti after coming from abroad..."

Are they Negritos?

So here are people with a different language, smaller, shorter, who used bow and arrows, dark-skinned, flat, broad faces, curly hair who reached Ponape from "a foreign land". Could these people be Negrito? The word negrito is Spanish, and means "small black people" They came across them in the Philippines.

These humans lived in the continental shelf, now submerged, known as Sundaland, between SE Asia, Indonesia and the Philippines around 40,000 years ago. They are found nowadays in the Andaman Islands, the Philippines and Malaysia. Their absence in Indonesia is probably due to their replacement and absorption by later larger, farming groups of people.

The ones living in the Philippines have the highest admixture of Denisovan DNA, even higher than the Papuans. (Source) It is likely that there was "an independent Denisovan introgression event in the Philippines among Negritos that is different from the Denisovan introgression event into the ancestors of Australopapuans" (Source). The similarity in the appearance of negritos and African pygmies is coincidence, and due to convergent evolutionary processes.

The possible presence of pygmies in Palau, an island 880 km (550 mi) east of the Philippines suggests they could have navigated across open ocean.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall © 

Society Islands (Tahiti, Moorea) and the fair-dwarfish pre-Polynesians

The French Polynesia includes many groups of islands, one of the best known is the Society Islands archipelago, which includes Tahiti, Moorea, Bora Bora, Taha'a, Huahine and Ra'iatea, and some more smaller ones (see Google map). Their Polynesian name is Tōtaiete mā

Since my childhood I dreamed about visiting Polynesia, Capt. Troy with his sailing boat in "Adventures in Paradise" showed me the wonders of that region. Later Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard with the "Mutiny on the Bounty" gave me a Technicolor view of Tahiti. Luckily, my wife and I had the chance to visit these islands in 2017, and really enjoyed the experience!

Two views of Taha'a (top) an Huahine (bottom). Copyright © 2025 by Austin Whittall

Were these islands uninhabited?

The current chronology for the peopling of these islands, according to a genetics paper published in 2022 is the following: "Settlers also fanned out from Rarotonga northeast to the Society Islands (represented by Tahiti in our dataset but also containing the culturally significant island Raʻiātea) around 1050 CE, thence northeast to the Tuamotu Archipelago (represented by Mataiva in the Palliser group in our dataset) by 1110 CE." There is no formal records of any previous inhabitants. However, during the late 1800s, the missionaries who lived in the region collected ancient tales and myths about the original "first people" in these islands.

An article published in The Polynesian Society in 1895 included an interesting description of little people in Tahiti by the Rev. John B. Stair, describing the "early Samoan Voyages and Settlement". Under the heading (10. The Sixth Voyage Tangiia to Tahiti Eastward - Discovery of Dwarfs or Pigmies [sic] at Tahiti) says the following:

"In the narrative of this voyage we have a remarkable discovery of pigmies at Tahiti by Tangiia and subdued by him and ruled over by him or his adopted son. They were found at a place called Puna auia and are described as of four classes or tribes called O le Neke O le Mana une O le Kai lila and O le Avakevake They were very ugly and very short
... Dr Pickering makes mention of the wild people who used to inhabit Tahiti as being described to him as those who were accustomed to go all over the mountains by tracks and pathways which were utterly unknown to natives of that day.
... interesting relics of the distant past. Commenting upon the description of these pigmies (sic), S. Percy Smith says 'Probably they are the same as in the Hawaiian stories of the Menehune people said to have been pigmies and the first inhabitants of Hawaii. They are known to the Maoris as a people of Hawaiki under the name of Manahune' which is precisely the name as given in the records as the name of the third of the four classes of little people conquered by Tangiia who are called Manaune; an interesting fact, as showing how much the back history of the different islands is interwoven."

I will look into the Manahune in my next post.

Stair mentions another interpretation given to these ugly people: "it is thought the account must refer to some monkeys that had been seen by Iro [also called Whiro] on some distant land which he is assumed to have visited." which he dismisses stating that it was Tangiia and not Iro who discovered and subjected them to his authority. They were people, not monkeys.

The map above shows the current global range of primates, if someone in Tahiti had to travel to see monkeys, they'd have to head east to the coast of South or Central America, across the Pacific, or west to Sulawesi, Borneo, or the Philippines, and the latter is what some authors have suggested, as we will see below.

Primitive People who had not yet mastered the art of making fire

The story of Whiro - Iro (a Maori god and navigator) and the monkeys, mentioned above, according to J. M. Orsmond, commented by S. Percy Smith, is the following: "The description of the people called Te aitanga a nuku mai tore who lived in trees in the wharawhara plants and amongst the kiekie, and who had small heads, large chests and waists, and who the story says 'were not human beings' seems to be some indistinct recollection of monkeys, the more so as these 'people' were not acquainted with fire. Knowing traditionally Whiro's powers as a navigator it is not improbable that he visited the East Indian Archipelago and brought back stories of monkeys who in process of time have acquired the name given above."

Interestingly, there were tales about the natives of the Mariana Islands, stating that the natives didn't know about fire either! This was first noted by French historian Charles Le Gobien in his Histoire des Isles Mariannes (p. 44), published in 1700 where he states that: "What is even more astonishing, and what will be hard to believe, is that they had never seen fire. This essential element was entirely unknown to them. They knew neither the use nor the qualities, and but they very surprised when they saw it for the first time when Magellan descended upon one of their islands and burned about fifty houses to punish them."

The Chamorro made pottery, so surely they knew how to light fires. However, this story probably reflects some ancient myth of the locals, probably regarding a hominin (like the Flores Island Hobbit, or the Fuegian Yosi) that had not yet learned to manage fire.

French philosopher Voltaire repeated this unusual fact in his Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations (Chapter CXLIX): "These Mariana Islands, located near the line, deserve special attention. The inhabitants did not know fire, and it was absolutely useless to them. They fed themselves on the fruits that their lands produce in abundance, especially coconut, sago (the pith of a type of palm tree that is far superior to rice), and rima (the fruit of a large tree called the breadfruit tree, because its fruit can be used as a substitute for rice)."

The Mu

Another group of small people who didnt master fire were the mysterious Mu people of Hawaii (see p. 25 in Luomala, Katharine, The Menehune of Polynesia And Other Mythical Little People of Oceania, 1951) quoted below. The Mu are sometimes mistaken for the Menehune. But they are different types of dwarves. The Mu are "brown, diminutive (about the same height of the Menehune), stocky and active. Their heads are shaggy and their beards and eyebrows bushy. Their speech -full of strange, uncanny grunts and cries- differs from the Hawaiian. The people are wild, easily frightened... They lack fire."

The Mu are not related in any way to the pseudo-scientific lost continent of Mu in the Pacific, a counterpart of Atlantis in the Atlantic. Mu was "invented" before plate tectonics, and attempted to explain the Polynesian myths and the dispersion of mammals and marsupials, and similar species found in South America and the Western Pacific. So the explanation that was concocted was a continent that vanished under the seas and only small fragments (the islands) survived.

The Fair Fairies of Moorea

There is also another myth, probably linked to the Urukehu and the Patupaiarehe of New Zealand, fair, fairy-like people. According to Frederick William Christian (1910), in his work Eastern Pacific Lands; Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, p. 45, there were blond creatures on Moorea:

"On a placid Sabbath morning we sight Moorea, the island of fairy folk with golden hair.¹
[1] Cf. Paumotan mokorea, a fairy woman with red-gold tresses, a mermaid. Niué, moka, blonde, auburn-haired."

The footnote [1] says "Cf." which comes from the Latin word confer, and means "compare"; and then it gives the word mokorea, used by the people of Paumotan (Tuamotu) and the other word "moka" is used by those of Niué Island which have a similar meaning "golden fair hair".

Moorea is an jungle-covered island that is just 16 km (10 mi.) west of Tahiti, with an extinct volcano, Mount Tohivea standing like a pinnacle over it (height: 1,207 m - 3,960 ft), it has a steep relief, and two large inlets. It is surrounded by an atoll. I have not been able to find any other references to fair haired fairies. Instead, I came across several texts about the Tahitian and Society Islands Manahune people. These have a similar name to Hawaii's Menehune, but were real people. I will write about them in my next post.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall © 

Black dwarves or pygmies in America

This is another post in our series on Armando Vivante's article* (Online here - Spanish) about pygmies in America. In it we will look into the section on "Little Black Men" (section 13, p.250 of his article).

* Vivante, A. (1963). Estado actual de la discución sobre los pigmeos americanos. 1. El primer contexto de este problema. Revista del Museo de La Plata. Nueva Serie. Sección Antropología, Artículos, Vol 5, No 28.

Little Black Men

Vivante cites Lehmann, who in turn cites Nordenskjöld who mentioned a book (Geografí de Colombia - See p. 878) that included a reference about these black pygmies in the Darien, in the border region between Panama and Colombia, which features a thick jungle.

This article was written at the time that Panama was still a province of Colombia (1901) shortly before the U.S. president Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt promoted the independence of Panama (1902) in order to build the transoceanic canal there and exert direct control over it. Below is the text on the Darien people:

"According to reports from one of their main chiefs, in those mountains there existed ten years ago remains of an aboriginal population, small in stature, with black skin, very scarce in my region (100 to 200) and entirely savage: he reported that the Cunacunas took from that people the land they occupy today, after a great massacre, and they fear finding any of those who remained, believing them to be sorcerers and even demons."

The Debunked Negrito-Tasmanian Theory

Vivante then mentions that Italian anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi who studied cranial forms and concluded that America had been populated in different waves, one came from Western Africa, and was comprised by Negrito people, "we can certainly affirm that, besides those of the Tasmanian type, another human branch entered America, this one of short stature, which is usually called pygmy with a short cunciform skull Sphenoidis brevis." (from Gl'indigeni Americane: ricerche antropologiche, Rome, 1928 p.164).

Despite living under Mussolini's fascist regime, Sergi was a pacifist, anti-German, and not at all racist. Unfortunately his theory on "Mediterraneanism" was co-opted by the fascists to back their racist ideology.

These racialist Tasmanian-Negrito-Pygmy migration theories were in vogue in the late 1800s and early 1900s (see, for instance, an article on Pygmies in the U.S. from 1896). Since the mid 1900s, they have been debunked. Closer to Patagonia, Argentine anthropologist José Imbelloni supported a similar notion where South America was populated by several waves of people, and the first were pygmies, ancestors of both the Tasmanians and the Fuegian Yamana people (see Imbelloni, J. The peopling of America. Acta Americana. vol. I, No 3, Jul.-Sept. 1943).

Vivante states that he mentions these theories as potential evidence of an "ancient pygmy layer or layers then fragmented and liquidated, leaving behind reduced nuclei and tiny islands" when the later Amerindians arrived and wiped them out.

Tasmanian. Source

Nowadays the ancient Lagoa Santa remains from Brazil, and the Australasian genetic imprint suggest that the original inhabitants of Southeastern Asia somehow played a role in the peopling of America.

Mythical Dwarfs

Vivante's paper also mentions the mythical dwarves across America, and he also mentions some Patagonian examples, such as a reference from 1863 by Cox about the "peuquenes" close to Puerto Blest in Neuquén, the "'pichuchu', tiny men" (citing Daniel Hammerly Dupuy, 1953. Nahuel Huapi. Panoramas, Leyendas, Historias, Soc. Geogr. Americana, B. Aires, pp. 72-74) and several authors about the "Anchimallén".

Below is an excerpt from my book, on Cox and the Peuquén (also posted here):

"“Peuquen” – the Patagonian gnome
Guillermo Cox is the only reference that I have found regarding the Peuquen. He wrote about them in 1862, calling them “mountain genies […] small men that are clothed in avellano [Gevuina avellana, a native Chilean tree] leaves […] they also have a hat made from its bark, and an axe made of its wood.” Like Trauco, it lives in the forests of Chiloé, chopping trees. Yet like Yosi, it does not use its wood to light fires. Those who come across him face a nasty fate: their heads are turned backward for the rest of their lives. Like Yosi and Trauco, he is a lewd creature and seeks sexual intercourse with women. The children conceived during these trysts are born with their skin like the bark of an avellano, that is, rough and light brown.

I cite his work: Cox, G., (2006). Expedición de la Patagonia Norte: un viajero en el Nahuel Huapi: 1862-1863. B. Aires: Continente-Pax. pp.67-69

I also mentioned Kossler-Ilg, Francisco Moreno, Gregorio Álvarez, Father Mascardi, and Parodi regarding the Anchimallén (also posted here). However, this is the first time I hear about "pichuchu" the name applied to a dwarf. The word is used as a friendly, affectionate diminutive for tiny, sounding tender or childlike. But I have never encountered it in the Patagonian dwarves context until now.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall © 

Pygmies and White Indians - von Humboldt

I came across an interesting article about Pygmies in the Americas, written in 1963 by Armando Vivante "Current state of the discussion on American pygmies" (Estado actual de la discución sobre los pigmeos americanos, Vol 5, No 28, Revista del Museo de La Plata. Nueva Serie. Sección Antropología).

Pygmies

I have posted about dwarves in the past, the mythical beings which are evoked in many Patagonian native legends. And in my book, I explored the "pygmy" option to explain the origin of these myths, below is an excerpt on this subject:

"Science, facts, and the Patagonian dwarves
Reports of minute people have surfaced periodically across South America since the arrival of the Spaniards. Mostly fantasies, some may hold some truth in them. For instance, in Cuzco, Perú, the heart of the Inca Empire, Spanish conquistador Pedro Pizarro wrote in 1571 about “three Indians, not seen before, very small, like dwarves.” Closer to Patagonia, in 1612, Ruy Díaz de Guzmán, another conquistador, mentioned “pygmies that live under the ground” in eastern Bolivia.
We could dismiss these stories of dwarves as fantasies of superstitious ill-educated soldiers, but in the early years of the 20th century, some scientists proposed theories about the peopling of America involving a “primitive” dwarf race, the “Diminutive Negroids,” or “Negrito” people.
American archaeologist Harold Sterling Gladwin (1883-1983) advanced the theory that “Diminutive Blacks” were the first people to arrive in America and that later migration from Asia assimilated or annihilated these first arrivals. He suggested that small blacks who had lived in southern China until the Chou dynasty could have moved north and entered America through the Bering Strait.
There are several groups of pygmies scattered around Southeast Asia, such as the Andaman islanders, the Semangs of Malaysia, and the Philippine Aetas. mtDNA studies have proven that these people descend from early human migrants out of Africa, who remained isolated in their specialized environments; but there is no proof that any of these people moved on to America.
Looking for such proof, in the early-20th century, Swiss anthropologist, Dr. Josef Kollmann, found pygmy remains in the Chincha Valley, Perú, and stated that they still survived as the short Changos of northern Chile, whose men were only 1.6 m tall (5 ft. 3 in.) and the women barely 1.45 m (4 ft. 8 in.) Small people indeed, but not dwarves.
The neighboring Mochica people were of a similar height, as shown by a 25-year-old female mummy (Lady of Cao) dating from 450 A.D., which measured 1.48 m (4 ft. 9 in.)
It is interesting to note that the Mochica spoke a language that “appears to be a linguistic isolate” totally unrelated to all other American Indian languages, and it “contains features that are rare both within South American languages and in the languages of the world.”
It seems that there is some reasonable basis for a “short” - but not dwarfish-group of Indians in the Americas north of Patagonia; but what about Patagonia itself?
We have two different pieces of evidence; one was put forward by Father Manuel Molina, who suggested that the Tachwüll dwarves may be based on fact. The other involves a mysterious group of short people in northern Patagonia, the Kofkeche..."

Fair Indians and Pygmies

In his 1963 article, Vivante begins by mentioning some of the literature on the subject and also notes that Alexander von Humboldt wrote about pygmies in the sources of the Orinoco River, but does not provide additional information about it.

So, I looked up Humboldt's journey along the Orinoco and found tha while he was at Esmeralda, Venezuela in the year 1800 (see map), he mentioned pygmies and also "white" Indians! Below is the relevant text from his work Personal narrative of travels to the equinoctial regions of the New Continent during the years 1799-1804.

"...the Oroonoko [sic - Orinoco] receives on the north the Ocamo, into which the Rio Matacona falls. At the sources of the latter live the Guainares, who are much less copper-coloured, or tawny, than the other inhabitants of those countries. This is one of the iribes called by the missionaries fair Indians, or Indios blancos, respecting whom I shall soon treat more at large." (p.559)
...
"I shall here proceed to give some information respecting the tribes of dwarf and fair Indians, which ancient traditions placed for centuries near the sources of the Oroonoko. I had an opportunity of seeing some of these Indians at Esmeralda, and can affirm, that the shortness of the Guaicas, and the fairness of the Guahariboes, whom Father Caulin calls Guaribos blancos, have been alike exaggerated. The Guaicas, whom I measured, were in general from four feet seven inches to four feet eight inches high (ancient measure of France). We were assured, that the whole tribe were of this extreme littleness; but we must not forget, that what is called a tribe constitutes, properly speaking, but one family. The exclusion of all foreign mixture contributes to perpetuate varieties, or the aberrations from a common standard. The Indians of the lowest stature next to the Guaicas are the Guainares and the Poignaves. It is singular, that all these nations are found close to the Caribbees, who are remarkably tall. They all inhabit the same climate, and subsist on the same aliment. They are varieties in the race, which no doubt existed previously to the settlement of these tribes, (tall and short, fair and dark brown) in the same country. The four nations of the Upper Oroonoko, that appeared to me to be the fairest, are the Guahariboes of the Rio Gehette, the Guainares of the Ocamo, the Guaicas of Canno Chiguire, and the Maquiritares of the sources of the Padamo, the Jao, and the Ventuari. It being very striking to see natives with a fair skin beneath a burning sky, and amid nations of a very dark hue, the Spaniards have forged two daring hypotheses, in order to explain this phenomenon. Some assert, that the Dutch of Surinam and the Rio Esquibo may have intermingled with the Guahariboes and the Guainares ; others insist, from hatred to the Capuchins of the Carony, and the Observantins of the Oroonoko, that the fair Indians are what are called in Dalmatia muso di frate, children whose legitimacy is somewhat doubtful. In both cases the Indios blancos would be mestizoes, sons of an Indian woman and a white man. Now, having seen thousands of mestizoes, I can assert, that this comparison is altogether inaccurate. The individuals of the fair tribes, whom we examined, have the features, the stature, and the smooth, straight, black hair, which characterizes other Indians. It would be impossible to take them for a mixed race, like the descendants of natives and Europeans. Some of these people are very little, others of the ordinary stature of the copper-coloured Indians. They are neither feeble, nor sickly, nor albinoes ; and they differ from the copper-coloured races only by a much less tawny skin. It would be useless after. these considerations, to insist on the distance of the mountains of the Upper Oroonoko from the shore inhabited by the Dutch." (p.564)

Back to Vivante and the 1963 article

Vivante looks into the conquistador and Spanich chronicles and notes that the references are vague, racist, and place the pygmies in the upper reaches of the Amazon and Orinoco rivers. He notes the chronicle of Nicolas Federmann (1530-31) who mentioned a tribe of pygmies in that area of Venezuela, the Ayaman people, "a nation of dwarves."

The article then mentions several authors, including Kollman, and Haliburton (Science, 1896) who reported pygmies in the Guyanas (close to Humboldt and Federmann's sightings). Sullivan, in 1898, repeated similar stories about people along the upper Negro River (Amazonia): "I met, while on the Rio Negro, one of the tributaries of the Upper Amazon, a race of remarkably small people". As well as D.G. Brinton (The Dwarf Tribe of the Upper Amazon, American Anthropologist, Vol. 11, No. 10 Oct., 1898, p.319).

Dwarf Tribe in the Amazon. Brinton, 1898

Vivante cites those who are in favor of pygmies and those who oppose the idea and criticizes both groups. He also mentions the black dwarves, and the mythical dwarves (including some Patagonian examples). Overall, he seems to favor the idea of an ancient, relictual mutation appearing, fragmented, among certain native groups. However, he suggests further research with objective methods to clarify the matter.

Next Posts...

I found some interesting material in Humboldt's book, and also in Vivante's work, which I will explore and present, with additional information, in the next posts.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall © 

Palau Islands "pygmies"

Two papers on the Palau "pygmies", one in favor, the other against, followed by two more (one in favor, the other by the same author who was against the pygmies, also against them in the second paper -as would be expected).

Both look at a small bodied Homo sapiens remains discovered in the Palauan Islands, in Micronesia. They were dated to a recent age, from 940 to 2890 cal ybp. They appear to represent a case of human insular dwarfism. They also appear to have "primitive" features. One of the papers (Berger et al.) suggest that when human beings shrink in size, the outcome is a modification of some features resulting in a "primitive" appearance, but this does not imply they are in fact primitive like the Flores island Hobbit

The other paper argues that the people are of a normal size (Fitzpatrick, Nelson and Clark).

Yes, they were pygmies

Source: Berger LR, Churchill SE, De Klerk B, Quinn RL (2008), Small-Bodied Humans from Palau, Micronesia. PLOS ONE 3(3): 10.1371/annotation/0b1a375a-ea43-4586-824f-05bc5b359d63. https://doi.org/10.1371/annotation/0b1a375a-ea43-4586-824f-05bc5b359d63

"Our findings do suggest, however, that a number of the morphological features considered either primitive for the genus Homo (e.g., small brain size, enlarged supraorbital tori, and absence of chins) ... may emerge as developmental correlates of small body size in pygmoid populations...
Based on the evidence from Palau, we hypothesize that reduction in the size of the face and chin, large dental size and other features noted here may in some cases be correlates of extreme body size reduction in H. sapiens. These features when seen in Flores may be best explained as correlates of small body size in an island adaptation, regardless of taxonomic affinity."

No, they are not pygmies

The second paper (Fitzpatrick SM, Nelson GC, Clark G (2008) Small Scattered Fragments Do Not a Dwarf Make: Biological and Archaeological Data Indicate that Prehistoric Inhabitants of Palau Were Normal Sized. PLoS ONE 3(8): e3015. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0003015) states that they aren't a group of midget humans, but normal-sized people.

"Current archaeological evidence from Palau in western Micronesia indicates that the archipelago was settled around 3000–3300 BP by normal sized populations; contrary to recent claims, they did not succumb to insular dwarfism."

They argue that Berger et al. used a small sample and is not significant, that they measured "smaller-bodied individuals" which biased the outcome.

Who is right?

A third paper (Gallagher A. Size variation in small-bodied humans from palau, micronesia. PLoS One. 2008;3(12):e3939. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0003939. Epub 2008 Dec 17. PMID: 19088844; PMCID: PMC2596964.) sides with Berger's findings:

"Analyses of within-group variability confirm that Palauan postcrania are neither excessively variable nor excessively small. All specimens included in this study approximate the size ranges of African Pygmies and Southeast Asian Negritos... Evidence overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that the pioneer colonists of Palau were small-bodied."

Further excavations by Fitzpatrick led to another publication in 2017 (Stone JH, Fitzpatrick SM, Napolitano MF. Disproving claims for small-bodied humans in the Palauan archipelago. Antiquity. 2017;91(360):1546-1560. doi:10.15184/aqy.2017.184) which again criticized Berger: "Recent excavation at Ucheliungs Cave in Palau has provided new evidence in the debate concerning the colonisation of the Palauan archipelago... The results of this research here discount earlier claims for insular dwarfism among the earliest inhabitants of these islands."

Palau and Flores Islands. by Austin Whittall

It is interesting how the same evidence can be interpreted in totally different ways! What is your take on these Palauan small-bodied people?

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall © 

The Kofkeche

My previous post explored the genetics of Southern Patagonia. It mentions final migratory wave that finalized around 2,000 years ago. I mentioned evidence supporting the movement of people of Amazonian origin into what is now Argentina, and then, across the Andes into Chile.

I also mentioned the possibility that the Mapuche people were latecomers to the region.

In today's post I will mention the people that the Mapuche displaced.

Kofkeche, the bread people

It is an interesting fact that the island of Chiloé and the Arauco region, home of the Trauco dwarf, were also the home of a branch of the Mapuche people, the “Huilliche” group (southern people).

Before the arrival of the Spaniards, pushed by the other Mapuche groups in Central Chile, these Huilliche left their homeland in the Arauco and invaded Chiloé, where they displaced and absorbed the original Chono “boat people” who lived there.

They also brought along their beliefs, among which was the devilish Trauco. American naturalist, Dillman Samuel Bullock Lytle (1878-1971), excavated the Huilliche’s Arauco homeland during the mid-twentieth century and uncovered funerary urns that were different from those used by the Huilliche and whose size indicated a small race. An adult’s mummy, five hundred years old, recently found in Angol was barely 1.30 m tall (4 ft. .2 in.)

Kofkeche funerary urns. Source

These findings led Bullock to believe that the Mapuche (including the Huilliche) were not the area’s original inhabitants. He assumed that they had originated in the Argentine Pampas and then migrated to Chile. When they arrived there, they came across a race of “small people,” which he named Kofkeche.

Bullock’s archaeological proof and conjectures received corroboration from oral tradition; he uncovered a Mapuche legend that mentioned “small people” or “Kofkeche.” The Mapuche words kofke and che mean “bread” and “people.” They got that name because they were small like country loaves. Bullock also mentioned a story told by an old Mapuche woman named Cayetey Anteu, whose grandmother had told her that “when the first Mapuche arrived, there were people very different from them […] they were short and thick, somewhat fat, and the Mapuche called them Kofkeche.” (Source)

"Land of the Kofkeche" (Tierra de los Kofkeches). Source

Mapuche cosmogony also mentions the Kofkeche; they are evil, dwarfish creatures from an underworld that interact with ours. The Mapuche conceive the universe as a series of platforms piled upon each other in space; below our platform, where the humans live, is another level, the land of the dwarves. It is named Kofkeche Mapu or Laftrache Mapu (land of the tiny people).

Maybe the Kofkeche were related to the other groups of “small” (short statured) people inhabiting the Pacific Ocean coast northwards, into Perú (like the Chinchorro-Chango people), and lived in peace until their destruction by the invading Mapuche groups who migrated to Chile later on.

Argentine historian Rodolfo Casamiquela suspected that the Mapuche of the Arauco area were alluding to the Chono boat people “who are short,” and mentioned that in 1975 they still considered the Chubut natives as “short people, one meter tall [3 ft], who speak another language.”

In other words, the arrival of the Mapuche around 2000 years ago displaced and replaced the Kofkeche, Poya, and Chono people from the Lake District area in Chile's northern Patagonia, between the Bio Bio River and the Gulf of Ancud.

Poyas

The mysterious Poya people are mentioned by different early explorers, but little is known about them. They used canose, and lived by the lakes of this area, and may have been related to the Chonos. I will write about them in a future post.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall © 

The complex Human tree in Africa...

A new paper published in Nature (Ancient West African foragers in the context of African population history, Mark Lipson, Isabelle Ribot, David Reich. Nature 577, 665–670 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-1929-1) tells us about the admixture going on in Africa some thousands of years ago:

The paper's highlights are:

• They sequenced the DNA of four children from Shum Laka in Cameroon buried on two separate occasions (two of the children were buried 8,000 years ago, the other two, 3,000 years ago).
• One of them carried the oldest and most divergent Y chromosome haplogroup: A00
• Their model implies that these children belong to the fourth group that originated modern human lineages. There were three more groups: (i) from which modern Khoisan people descend from. (ii) Ancestral group to the East Africans. (iii) An exinct "ghost" population. These groups are some 250 ky old.

Science tells us more about the extinct group (iii): "Another two-thirds of children’s DNA came from an ancient "basal" source in West Africa, including some from a "long lost ghost population of modern humans that we didn’t know about before" says population geneticist David Reich of Harvard University, leader of the study."

And even more interesting is that "...the Shum Laka individuals are most related to present day rainforest hunter-gatherers [pygmies] and not ancestors of Bantu-speakers is surprising given that Shum Laka was long considered by archeologist[s] as the site where Bantu-speaker culture [was] developing in situ," (from LiveScience)

These four children are therefore not related to the modern Africans living in Cameroon or to the Bantu speakers who spread out across Africa. Instead they are closer to the pygmies of Central Africa!

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2020 by Austin Whittall © 

Relatively quick origin for Homo floresiensis pigmies: 150 to 675 generations to shrink in size

The Flores Island Homini shrunk in height over a relatively short period of time according to an article published on October 9, 2019:

The paper written by José Alexandre F. Diniz-Filho, Lucas Jardim, Thiago F. Rangel, Phillip B. Holden, Neil R. Edwards, Joaquín Hortal, Ana M. C. Santos and Pasquale Raia (Quantitative genetics of body size evolution on islands: an individual-based simulation approach - 15Biol. Lett. http://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2019.0481), simulated models to explain how hominins could have reduced their size over time:

"We applied the model to evaluate body size differentiation in the pigmy extinct hominin Homo floresiensis, showing that dwarfing may have occurred in only about 360 generations (95% CI ranging from 150 to 675 generations). This result agrees with reports suggesting rapid dwarfing of large mammals on islands, as well as with the recent discovery that small-sized hominins lived in Flores as early as 700 kyr ago. Our simulations illustrate the power of analysing ecological and evolutionary patterns from an explicit quantitative genetics perspective."

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2019 by Austin Whittall © 

Australian Pygmies, fact and fiction

Australian pygmies are a source of controversy because mainstream science and the Aboriginal indigenous people oppose the notion that pygmies were the first humans to inhabit the continent.

Right wing supporters on the other hand believe that the pygmies came first and that the Aborigines took the continent from the pygmies.

Their argument goes as follows: Pygmies arrived first, the aboriginal people came later and drove the pygmies to extinction, the British were just another wave of migrants doing what the aboriginal people had done before. So why should invaders such as aboriginals have more rights over the land than the British. After all, the Aboriginals took it from the original Pygmie people.

A quick online search shows that there are not many references to pygmy people in Australia. I didn't manage to find anything recorded by the first European explorers or during the period of British exploration and occupation.

Most of the literature points back to an article published in Quadrant (Keith Windschuttle and Tim Gillin, The extinction of the Australian Pygmies, 2002).

Quadrant is a right-wing magazine (see what mediabiasfactcheck.com has to say about how far to the right they are), so Quadrant would have a reason to back the pygmy theory because it undermines the aboriginal people's claims of being the first people in Australia.

My Search for Pygmies in Australia

This is what I have found out about pygmies down under:

1. Pygmies are part of the Aboriginal people's mythology.

There is an Aboriginal myth, about the origin of the platypus (Source), which mentions the "small people" or "Dinderi". They hunted water snakes in the Brisbane River in what is now Queensland, but these managed to turn them into platypuses. But does this myth mean that there were a tribe of pygmies (the Dinderi)?

You can also read about Short people in Cape York Peninsula, Northern Queensland, Australia.

2. Short stature people lived in Queensland recently.

An article titled Pygmy elder faces eviction, published in 2007 (Queensland CourierMail August 25, 2007), reported that Lizzy Woods, 105 years old, was the "... oldest surviving matriarch of the Jirrbal rainforest people. ... the sole surviving link to the pygmy 'white cockatoo' tribe – most of whom stood less than 122cm (4ft) tall – of the Misty Mountain region near Tully.
... the 110cm-tall [3.6 ft] elder [said] 'I was born in the rainforest. I grew up chasing kangaroo and picking berries off the trees. I belong here. This is my land. The pygmy tribe – that is my mob'."

3. An anthropologist also reported the Dinderi myth.

Lindsay Winterbotham interviewed an Aboriginal man born in 1887, Gaiarbaus and wrote (1957) the book "Gaiarbaus story of the Jinibara tribe of south east Queensland (and its neighbours)", it was never published, but the book exists and you can read its index online, and this index mentions: "Pygmies (Dinderi), beliefs in south east Queensland tribes".

Winterbotham was advised by Norman Tindale during his interviews, and it is Tindale who is quoted in the article published by Quadrant.

3. Tindale and the Trihybrid theory

Tindale and American anthropologist Joseph Birdsell, worked together for over 50 years, starting in 1938. They put forward the theory that: The pygmoid and negrito people(the word negrito is Spanish, and means "small black people") living in the rainforests in Northern Queensland in the 1930s were the remnants of the first wave of humans to reach the vast Australian continent. These tiny people were later pushed in to the island of Tasmania (hence the name of "Tasmanoids" that Tindale and Birdsell gave them) and the deep rainforests by two later waves of humans invading Australia.

The two scientists later renamed them "Barrinean" after Lake Barrine. Yoy can read this theory in this 1953 newspaper article.

This "Trihybrid" theory included a second wave of pale skinned "Murrayians" which were supposed to be linked to the Ainu people of Japan, and the third wave of robust dark skinned "Carpentarians" possibly linked to primitive Indian tribes.

This website has some photos of these three "types" of humans proposed by Birdsell and Tindale as the successive waves that peopled Australia.

This theory has been discredited by later research (see this paper for example), but it was not invented by Tindale, I found an earlier publication suggesting the same idea:

In Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of South Australia, 1922, an article (Cylindro-Conical and cornute stones from the Darling River and Cooper Creek, Robert Pulleine. pp.304-308) mentions Albert Churchward:

"If we accept the views of Churchward, now gaining the attention of anthropologists, that mankind originated in the great lake districts of Africa, we find opened up a path which leads to an understanding of the origin of our aborigines and their beliefs. In his two books, "Signs and Symbols of - Primordial Man" and "The Origin and Evolution of Mankind," he pictures the Pygmy exodus throughout the world and their displacement and annihilation by the people of the second Nilotic exodus to which our aborigines, accord- ing to him, belong. He states that the Pygmies of the first Nilotic invasion were displaced in Australia and eventually only remained in Tasmania. "

Churchward had been writing about pygmies since the early 1900s, so he surely influenced Tindale.

4. There are "pygmies" in New Guinea

New Guinea has small people too, reported as early as 1910 (paper in Nature), as recently as 2013, and in between too (see this paper from 1961 (it mentions the trihybrid theory and Tindale).

Closing Comments

Probably different waves of humans colonized Australia, starting with Homo erectus and ending with the British. The Aboriginal people are without any doubt, the rightful original people of Australia, the first people to successfuly colonize the continent and live there for over 50,000 years. However it is also likely that other groups, linked to the Negrito people of Southeastern Asia and New Guinea also settled in Australia, whether it took place before, during or after the arrival of the Aboriginals is a trivial point.

But what if the Aboriginal myths aren't about the Negrito people, and instead refer to "small people" like the "Hobbits" of Indonesia? A distant relative of us humans.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2019 by Austin Whittall ©