Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

Early in the twentieth century, L. C. Westenek, a governor of Sumatra, received a written report about an encounter with a Sedapa wildman. The overseer of an estate in the Barisan Mountains, along with some workers, observed the Sedapa from a distance of 15 yards. The overseer said he saw “a large creature, low on its feet, which ran like a man, and was about to cross my path; it was very hairy and it was not an orang-utan; but its face was not like an ordinary man’s. It silently and gravely gave the men a disagreeable stare and then ran calmly away” (Sanderson 1961, pp. 216–217).

In a journal article about wildmen published in 1918, Westenek recorded a report from a Mr. Oostingh, who lived in Sumatra. Once while proceeding through the forest, he came upon a man sitting on a log and facing away from him. Oostingh stated: “I saw that he had short hair, cut short, I thought; and I suddenly realised that his neck was oddly leathery and extremely filthy. ‘That chap’s got a very dirty and wrinkled neck!’ I said to myself. His body was as large as a medium-sized native’s and he had thick square shoulders, not sloping at all. . . . he seemed to be quite as tall as I (about 5 feet 9 inches). Then I saw that it was not a man.”

“It was not an orang-utan,” declared Oostingh. “I had seen one of these large apes a short time before.” What was the creature if not an orangutan? Oostingh could not say for sure: “It was more like a monstrously large siamang, but a siamang has long hair, and there was no doubt that it had short hair” (Sanderson 1961, p. 220).

In 1918, Mr. Van Heerwarden, a hunter, began finding tracks of the Sedapa in Sumatra. The footprints he saw were shaped like those of a small human being. Van Heerwarden also heard reports about the Sedapa from natives. In October of 1923, he himself spotted one in a tree: “I discovered a dark and hairy creature on a branch. . . . The sedapa was also hairy on the front of its body; the colour there was a little lighter than on the back. The very dark hair on its head fell to just below the shoulder-blades or even almost to the waist. . . . Had it been standing, its arms would have reached to a little above its knees; they were therefore long, but its legs seemed to me rather short. I did not see its feet, but I did see some toes which were shaped in a very normal manner. . . . There was nothing repulsive or ugly about its face, nor was it at all apelike” (Sanderson

1961, pp. 222–223). After observing it for a while, Van Heerwarden allowed the creature to run away.

The presence of large humanlike creatures in the forests of the Indonesian archipelago is relevant to the dating of fossils of Homo erectus found in Java (Chapter 7). Paleoanthropologists assume that fossils displaying Homo erectus morphology must be 800,000 or more years old, even when they are found on the surface. In fact, almost all the fossils of Homo erectus from Java have been surface finds. But if creatures resembling Homo erectus are still roaming the forests of Indonesia, then the general practice of dating a fossil by its morphology is not secure. On January 20, 1986, Bernard Heuvelmans wrote in response to a letter from our researcher, Stephen Bernath: “I am convinced myself that fossils, especially remains of Hominoids, are dated not after the strata they have been found in but after a prejudiced idea of the strata they should have been found in according to the classical scheme of human evolution, which is completely wrong.”

In practice, morphological dating has worked like this. During the 1930s, many fossil skull fragments were found lying on the surface at various locations in Java. The formations in the region have since been dated by the potassiumargon method to the Middle Pleistocene. The potassium-argon method, it may be recalled, is used to date volcanic materials, not the bones themselves. Ideally, for a bone to be assigned a Middle Pleistocene date using this method, it should have been found lying beneath an undisturbed layer of volcanic material. But in Java this was not the case, for almost without exception the fossils labeled Homo erectus were found lying on the surface or in unspecified locations. Scientists have simply assumed that the bones eroded from Middle Pleistocene formations, in which they had supposedly been deposited hundreds of thousands of years ago. The reason scientists feel comfortable in making this assumption is that they are certain that hominids with erectus morphology have been extinct since the Middle Pleistocene. But perhaps not. Heuvelmans stated in his letter of January 20, 1986: “small hairy hominoids, with long straight hair on the head, the Nittaewo, were exterminated at the end of the 18th century in Sri Lanka. According to British leading primatologist Osman Hill (1945), these dwarfs could be modern representatives of Homo erectus.”