The tomb of the mili mongga Fossils, folklore, and adventures at the edge of reality

Review by Choice Review

Turvey (Zoological Society of London, UK) is a paleontologist who believes that an understanding of the causes of past extinctions (e.g., habitat destruction, invasive species, climate change) can inform today's conservation efforts. The book cover promises a story of scientific discovery, but readers expecting an adventure tale will be disappointed. The first part is a lesson on island biogeography and speciation, sprinkled with a few fossil-hunting scenes from Turvey's expeditions to the Indonesian island of Sumba. When Turvey hears local tales about a wild man, the mili mongga, he decides to investigate, thinking the stories might offer clues about extinct species, maybe even a relative of Homo sapiens. In the second part of the book, he offers scholarly reflection on the sources and preservation of oral traditions about the natural world--particularly those about wild men--found in cultures around the world. Again, he provides just enough adventure scenes to keep readers engaged. Turvey begins the book with a lament for the loss of biodiversity and ends with a lament for the loss of cultural diversity. Summing Up: Recommended. Advanced students and professionals. --Melody Herr, University of Arkansas

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by Booklist Review

A British biologist with extensive field exprience in island biogeography, Turvey shares his interest in Sumba, in Indonesia's archipelago. Like other isolated islands, it is an arena where evolutionary pressures promote species endemic (i.e., unique) to the place. In 2004 a spectacular discovery was made on the nearby island of Flores: fossils of a small-statured, small-brained hominin, Homo floresiensis. Could it have migrated to Sumba? Two days into his arrival on the island, Turvey and his team encounter stories of the mili mongga, described as a hirsute creature resembling a human yet afraid of people and dogs. The mili mongga diverts Turvey from his original mission and induces him to plunge into paleoanthropology and folklore. Guided by local stories, he treks to where mili mongga's traces or bones might be, but they always seem to be over the next ridge. Their elusiveness provokes Turvey's provocative inquiries into the relationship between folk memory and the human evolutionary past, which time's erosions distort into legends of giants, fairies, and mili monggas. Turvey's scientific and cultural adventure will intrigue curious readers.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Turvey (Witness to Extinction), a biology professor at the Institute of Zoology in London, recounts in this spellbinding travelogue the goose chase he undertook into the hinterlands of Indonesia in pursuit of "mythical human-like creatures" known as mili monggas. Folktales among Indigenous people on the island of Sumba, Turvey explains, speak of mili monggas as "hairy wildmen" and women with "long, pendulous breasts" who supposedly dwelt in caves as recently as a century ago. Turvey was skeptical yet captivated and wondered if mili monggas might have been a hunter-gatherer society that predated Austronesian-speaking peoples' colonization of Sumba during the Stone Age, or perhaps a myth invented from the fossil record (skulls of extinct Mediterranean elephants, whose merged nasal openings resemble a central eye socket, are thought to have inspired tales about Cyclopes, he notes). To investigate, Turvey and his student research team journeyed sunbaked miles over rough Sumba roads to listen to Indigenous elders' stories and search caves and forests for remains. The prose is evocative ("Huge tombs sprouted from the old knee-high grass like crumbling grey mushrooms," he writes about visiting a cemetery that allegedly held a 600-year-old mili mongga grave), and Turvey weaves the natural history and folklore into an invigorating treatise on the nature of belief and knowledge. Vivid and transportive, this is a winner. (Apr.)

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