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.

---

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

Menehune, the pre-Polynesian dwarf people

Besides the fairy like Patupaiarehe of New Zealand, and their Uriukehu offspring, in my previous post, I also mentioned the Manahune or Menenhune, an enslaved group of first migrants to reach the Polynesian Islands.

They were the lowest class in Tahiti, where they were known as "Manahune" (Source). They are found in the ancient oral history of the Polynesians, in Rarotonga, they were known as "little people". There, and among the Maori of New Zealand, the word "manahune" means scab, or mark on the body. They don't appear to have had a different skin color (white, or fair, or black).

In 1897, Percy Smith suggested that the name was due to some ritual scarring that left cicatrices, and writes the following (Source):

"...Fornander [see Abraham Fornander, An Account of the Polynesian Race, Its Origin and Migrations and the Ancient History of the Hawaiian People to the Times of Kamehameha. (1878), Volume 1, p. 55] seemed to be of the opinion that this was a racial name applied by the Polynesians to themselves in ancient times and derived from one of their remote ancestors named Kalani Menehune but from Maori and Rarotonga accounts they appear rather to have been an alien race. The vague notions the Polynesians generally have in regard to the Manahune their living in the mountains and forests the wonderful powers of sorcery &c accredited to them seems to point to their having been a race living in the remote past conquered by the Polynesians and probably often enslaved by them.
There seems to be two possible or probable theories to account for the Manahune. Either they were the first migration into the Pacific or they were one of the races the Polynesians came into contact with in Indonesia or further to the west and some of whom they brought with them in their migrations as slaves. In this latter case the stories of their having inhabited Hawaii and Hawaiki are Indonesian events localised in process of time in the Pacific homes of the Polynesians. The latter theory is probably the more consonant with what is known of the Manahune."

Menehune in Hawaii

Percy Smith also noted that they appear in the traditions of the Hawaiian natives and "they appear to have been at one time very numerous and lived in the mountains but were in a state of subjection to the Hawaiians performing for them many works that required great numbers in order to complete the task at once. Like the Patupai arehe of New Zealand these people are said not to like the daylight but worked at night. Many of the heiaus and some of the loko i a or fish ponds of Hawaii are said to have been built by the Menehune."

There is a remaining structure that is attributed to these Menehune, the "Menehune Ditch", registered in the National Register of Historic Places, from where the following information is taken (Source):

The Menehune, or Peekauai Ditch, also known as Kiki-a-'ola, was built by the junction of the Waiamea and Makaweli rivers, on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai. It is 7,000 ft. long (roughly 2.1 km) and runs along the foot of a cliff or pali and the wall of the ditch was built with blocks of stone. See it in Google maps.

"The ditch was built prehistorically to irrigate the taro (Colocasia esculenta) patches in lower Waimea Valley. Legends and chants tell of Ola, King of Waimea, who, through Pi, his kahuna or priest, caused the great water-lead to be built which is still called Kiki-a-'ola. Pi then chose the location and contacted the Menehunes (legendary race of small people reknown for their overnight construction activities) to construct the ditch features in one night
... The earliest written account of the ditch is by Captain George Vancouver in 1792 when he visited Waimea Valley...
The construction of the causeway is unique in the use of dressed and jointed stones. The other examples of cut stone construction are limited to Kukuipahu Heiau (temple) in North Kohala and several out-of-context stones in Kailua-Kona, both on Hawaii Island. However, Kiki-a-'ola is the only example of jointed stonework and offers a unique example of this type of causeway construction. Additionally, there are three types of joints represented, including double joint, square joint, and notched joint. The prehistoric appearance of the ditch wall would have been impressive with a 24 foot high faced wall of dress and jointed stones. Today, the scale of the causeway is only suggested in the exposed upper two to three courses of stonework."

There is an article (Stories of the Menehunes - Hawaii The Original Home of the Brownies (See p.112) with plenty of information about these people and their buildings (which included ancient temples or "heiaus").

Mehune ditch. Source

In my book, I mention that:

"Dwarfish people are deeply rooted in the ancestors of Polynesians and they are found along the route they followed as they made their way across Austronesia: the duwendes of the Philippines, otu dogkek of Borneo, Orang Pendek of Sumatra, lai ho’a of Flores, To Uta of Sulawesi, Kanika of New Guinea, Leimuba of Nendo, Sengalengale of Vanuatu, and ‘autotoe of Samoa, to name a few.
Among the Polynesians, in Hawaii, there was a similar myth to the chélep regarding the Menehune, who were short people, not more than 90 cm tall (3 ft.), yet stocky and strong. They had dark or red skin and lived in the forests; they could work and shape stone skillfully. They built walls, roads, and canals during the night.
This myth probably reflects the encounter of two cultures when Polynesians from Tahiti reached Hawaii ca.900 AD and confronted the first wave of Polynesians from the Marquesas Islands that had settled the islands around 400 AD.
The Hawaiian legend says that: 'The Tahitians found the islands already inhabited by Menehune, and they pushed the Little People all the way back to Kaua’i, the last large island sitting at the edge of the Hawaiian Island chain. Ultimately, the Dwarves were forced to escape into the high mountains and hidden valleys, and outside the world of man'. (Source) This encounter echoes what happened to the Haush when the Selk’nam reached their territory, and to the Teushen or Chüwach a Künna, who were displaced to marginal land by the Tehuelche."

The “Hobbit” and dwarfish hominins

Minute non-human hominids are not unknown to science. For instance, the so-called “hobbit” (Homo florsiensis), just one meter tall (3.3 ft.), was discovered in 2003 on Flores Island, Indonesia; it was alive just 13,000 years ago, and thus co-existed with modern humans. In 2010, the Callao Cave hominin was discovered in Luzon, Philippines, 2,740 km (1,706 mi) north of Fores. Its 67,000-year-old remains show it was a diminutive hominin, which may have been or not a H. sapiens.

Dwarfish hominids have also been found on the Pacific islands of Palau (7°30’ N, 134°30’ E), 1,750 km (1,100 mi.) southeast of Luzon. Their remains are very recent, less than 2,800 years old, and they are minute: these creatures weighed between 29 and 43 kg (64 - 95 lb.)-.

Could it be possible that Yosi, the pre-human Tachwüll of the Tehuelche natives, and the Fuegian people, the Yagan’s post-Deluge dwarves are all an ancient racial memory of the Hobbit imprinted in the minds of the Patagonian natives and perpetuated in their myths? If so, we would have to explain how beings living nearly halfway across the globe from each other could have come into close contact.

Perhaps the Hobbit traveled from Asia to America, being the first hominid to colonize the New World long before the arrival of modern humans, or they could have evolved independently in America from some prior migration of hominids (i.e., Homo erectus). In either case, the Paleo-Indians would have met the Hobbit in America. H. florsiensis is an ancient Homo lineage and related to our distant ancestors Homo habilis and Homo erectus. The Hobbit managed to survive for a long time since it left Africa around 1.75 Ma. and could have reached the New World.

It predates the discovery of fire and would have used primitive Oldowan stone tools of the “core and flake” variety, in which a stone core was hit with a hammer stone, chipping it to produce flakes and leaving a chopper core. Both flakes and core were used to cut, bash, and scrape.

Remarkably, the islands of Palau and Luzon are only accessible by sea, so if the dwarf population on both islands originated elsewhere, then these pygmies were seafarers. Crossing by sea from Southeast Asia and Melanesia to America would avoid the problem of explaining Hobbit survival along the difficult trek from the tropical insular western Pacific to America through tough polar climes. It would also explain the Polynesian dwarf myths.

Fascinatingly, the Australian Aboriginal people also have legends about wild hairy pigmies that they call Gubba; these are very similar to the Fuegian Yosi in appearance and size, being barely one meter tall (3 ft. 4 in.) In the Australian case, the explanation is simple and quite feasible: Flores Island is only 720 km (447 mi.) from northern Australia, so it is very likely that the Aboriginals could have met Hobbits when they first entered Australia, crossing Sunda 50,000 years ago.

---

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.

---

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?

---

Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 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.

---

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