I’m pleased to have this opportunity to highlight certain features of my recent book, Between Ape and Human (2022), which may be of particular interest to a cryptozoological audience, and to reflect on how the book was written and the circumstances that led me to write it.
Though it may sound hackneyed and is certainly quite unoriginal, I could quite accurately be called an ‘accidental cryptozoologist’. Like most people of my generation, as a youngster I heard about such cryptids as sasquatch (or bigfoot), the yeti or ‘abominable snowman’, and the Loch Ness monster. Yet I never took any special interest in these figures, and to the extent that I held any definite view of them, I probably accepted the common opinion, that they reflected either deliberate falsehoods (hoaxes) or mistaken identification of other phenomena.
My views didn’t change much while I was studying anthropology as an undergraduate in Canada and a post-graduate at Oxford. I was, by the way, an undergraduate in 1967, when the Patterson-Gimlin film hit the headlines (see FT360:32-39). But that did not significantly increase my interest in mystery hominoids, nor did it inspire me to start reading about the topic. Though I’d done courses in palæoanthropology and archæology, I should also mention that my training has mostly been in social anthropology (in North America it’s called cultural anthropology), so searching for old bones or material remains of former cultures has never been my forte. Even my current book’s subtitle, ‘an anthropologist on the trail of a hidden hominoid’, refers not to an actual search for a mystery creature but to an intellectual journey.
Things started to change, however, after I became involved in ethnographic fieldwork in Indonesia. On Sumba Island, where I conducted doctoral research from early 1975 to the end of 1976 – on quite different topics, I should add – I heard about large hairy hominoids which, to my amazement, sounded very much like sasquatch. But as with the thoroughly supernatural forest spirits that the Sumbanese also talk about, I wasn’t convinced of their existence, and in the book that resulted from my thesis, I mentioned them only briefly, and then in a chapter on spiritual beings. However, in 1984, I began a new project – again on matters non-cryptozoological – on the neighbouring island of Flores. About this time, I also began developing interests in ethnobiology and more specifically ethnozoology (or ‘folk zoology’), that branch of anthropology concerned with
