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

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.

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.)