A decade before the Homo floresiensis find, Gerd van den Bergh, a paleontologist working on the faunal remains who speaks Indonesian, had heard stories from villagers living in several different towns near the foot of the volcano about a race of hairy, three foot tall people, the “ebu gogo” (literally, ‘the grandmother who eats anything’). The ebu gogo were long-haired, potbellied cave dwellers with protruding ears, and long arms and fingers, and they walked with a slightly awkward gait and would climb small trees. The villagers said that the last ebu gogo was seen in the 19th century, when the Dutch settled in central Flores (Roberts, 2004). Although the folklore of many groups around the world mention small people (leprechauns in Ireland, menehune on Hawai'i), the ebu gogo stories are unique among them in matching several specific physical aspects of local subfossil remains.

In the context of the present paper, the most poignant aspect of these stories concerns the putative vocal abilities of the ebu gogo (and by implication, of Homo erectus!) that were observed by the villagers as they tolerated the ebu gogo raiding their crops, and during closer encounters when the villagers provisioned them with grains, vegetables, fruits, and meat, all of which the ebu gogo ate raw. The ebu gogo “murmured at each other and could repeat words verbatim” in a parrot-like fashion; for example, “in response to ‘here's some food’ [in Indonesian], they would respond ‘here's some food’” (Roberts, 2004). Although this evidence is incomplete and indirect, there is an uncanny fit to the scenario introduced above in which modern Homo sapiens style language emerges ‘at the last minute’ from an initial set of auditory and motor system modifications of much greater antiquity that had originally evolved to support nonsemantic, birdsong-like vocalizations. The remote but exciting possibility that the ebu gogo still exist might someday make it possible to test these ideas directly.