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By Jonathanrex1
06/12/2009 - 22:31:59

Type: Creature
Rating: 0.08 (Not rated)
Tags: ape, cryptid, hominid, indoneasia, kerinci-seblat national park, sumatra

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Description

"Orang Pendek" literally means "short person" in Indonesian. This is the name given to an animal that people have been seeing for hundreds of years in and around Kerinci-Seblat National Park in central Sumatra. Stories and sightings of this animal are intriguing enough that National Geographic has funded an expedition to Sumatra to capture the first photographic evidence of its existence.Without fail, local witnesses and legends describe Orang Pendek as: 1) an ape, 2) about one meter (~ three feet) tall, 3) with a strong chest and arms, 4) short hair covering its body, 5) that walks bipedally (on two legs). Even though its name means "short person", everyone will tell you that, "Of course it's not a person, it's an animal!" Consider orang-utans, whose name means "forest person". Apes and monkeys have been ascribed human-like qualities throughout history in this region of the world. Consider also that Orang Pendek is almost never described as being magical or spirit-like in nature. We think this is an important point in that, while legends of forest spirits and magical beings abound in the local culture, Orang Pendek is described matter-of-factly as just another animal of the forest. Some suggest that Orang Pendek could be a missing link--a distant relative of ours representing an intermediate stage between us humans and the ancient ape-like primates from which we descended. Could it be a remnant of the genus Australopithecus--a very early, bipedal, hominid ancestor of ours? Orang Pendek's bipedality is certainly a very interesting characteristic to consider. Many paleoanthropologists say that, if members of Australopithecus were alive today, they would be described as bipedal apes. Interest in this question was piqued further after the recent discovery of fossils from a new species of our own genus Homo on Flores, another island in the Indonesian archipelago. These small people, named Homo floresiensis were around a meter tall, created and used fire and tools, and still lived 12,000 years ago--almost yesterday in evolutionary terms. Honestly, we can't answer this question. We do know this, though: to every witness we interview, we ask, "Is Orang Pendek a person or an animal?" Consistently, people insist that it's an animal. Debbie Martyr and Jeremy Holden, as well, maintain that Orang Pendek is a great ape and not a hominid. However, we're not going to speculate either way, and there's no need for us to at this point. There just isn't enough evidence about where Orang Pendek will fit on the evolutionary tree.