Did Gregory Forth hear about the Flores hobbits before the fossils were announced?

Yes. Gregory Forth first heard of the Nage people's Ebu Gogo in 1984 and took a Lio eyewitness account in 2003, more than a year before Homo floresiensis was announced in October 2004. He also found the Lio name for the creatures, lai ho'a, in a Lio-German dictionary researched in the 1920s by a German missionary and published in 1933. To him that shows the idea did not come from images of the fossil reconstruction.

• Forth says that if he had first heard the stories a year or two later, he probably would not have written the book.
• The fossils were found in September 2003 at Liang Bua cave in western Flores, far from the Lio region where he works.

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on The Joe Rogan Experience (2026-11-05). Read the whole episode summary →

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