What's A Mili Mongga?

What's a mili mongga? I'd never heard of one and I'm willing to bet that you haven't either? Well, it is, apparently, a yeti like beast that lives on the Indonesian island of Sumba. Seems legit!? The only problem is nobody seems to have ever actually seen one. 

I was in The Bell at Whitechapel with the London Fortean Society (doing the door, as it happens, not the hardest work ever) and Prof Samuel Turvey was there to deliver his talk The Legend of the Mili Mongga (the last LFS talk of 2025) and if it took him an unusual amount of time to get to the mili mongga itself then that wasn't a problem. The journey itself was fascinating.

I'm pretty envious of Turvey's job. He's a Professor of Conservation Biology at ZSL (Zoological Society of London) and he gets to travel to lots of incredibly interesting places and study some amazing animals. Many of them critically endangered. In some cases very possibly already extinct. Animals like the Chinese giant salamander, the highland gibbon, and the Yangtze river dolphin. The latter of which has not been seen now for over twenty years.

When you're researching animals that are possibly, even likely, extinct evidence is, of course, hard to come by. So you need to use supplementary/alternative sources and they come in both archaeological and fossil form as well as in indigenous, local, and historical knowledge.

Turvey mostly works on islands because islands tend to have more biodiversity. It is on islands where small animals, quite quickly - in evolutionary terms, grow much larger and where large animals, conversely, can soon become a lot smaller. The small animals grow bigger when they have less competition from other species (that don't share the island) and yet more from their own species. It is, essentially, an evolutionary imperative although I'm not sure quite sure why the large animals decrease in size.

Turvey spoke about evidence of a tiny ice age elephant that once lived in Malta. An island that also hosted giant swans. In fact the swans and the elephants were roughly the same size. Of course, when humans arrive on islands (sometimes bringing with them dogs, cats, and, er, mongooses) these unusual animals tend to die out pretty quickly. They've not adapted to having predators around and don't have the defence mechanisms to deal with nasty humans and dogs.

Indonesia is made up of over 1,700 islands and that's a lot. Some (Sumatra, Java, Borneo) were, comparatively recently - just twenty thousand or so years back, part of the mainland while others (Lombok, Sulawesi) have been discrete islands for much longer. It's on these latter islands the most distinct fauna can be found. Not least the island of Flores, one of the Lesser Sunda Islands along with Bali and Lombok.

Flores once had small elephants and giant predatory storks and still has a few Komodo dragons (though, unsurprisingly, they're more often found on the nearby island of Komodo as well as the island of Rinca). It's also home to some enormous rats. Have a look at this whopper!

It wasn't just animals that went their own way on the most remote of Indonesian islands. It was humans, or human like creatures, too. Homo erectus, believed to be cannibal head hunters, were known to have lived in Java but in the islands that make up Wallacea (Sulawei, Lombok, Flores, Timor, Sumba - named after the Welsh naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace who had carried out many studies there) people have found tiny human like skulls. They're about fifty thousand years old and believed to come from a Hobbit like archaic human species named Homo floresiensis or Flores Man.

Much of the folklore of these islands revolves around these small human like creatures that tried to talk but could only mumble. It is believed they existed until as recently as two hundred years ago but the humans, or homo sapiens, of the islands believed the Flores Man was taking their children so they, legend had it, shut them all in a cave and burned them to death.

Fun times. The mostly deforested island of Sumba, roughly the same size as Jamaica, is very rural, very poor, and has some very distinct local cultures as it's not easy to travel from one village to the next. They have six different languages across the island and there remains on the island a megalithic culture. You know, like Stonehenge.

When Turvey visited one family he was asked if he would like to meet an elderly nan. He said he would but was rather alarmed that she had been dead for seven years. They hadn't buried her yet and she was kept in the small house with the living family members. In Sumba, it is traditional to hang on to dead bodies until the family have raised enough money to bury them with gold for the afterlife.

Turvey and his team found lots of old bones in local caves but they were mostly giant rat bones and not the bones of the creature they'd heard many on the island talk about:- the mili mongga, a wild man who lives in the woods and is normally reported as being bigger than the average human. Though, in some cases, people say the mili mongga is smaller than them.

Turvey immediately thought that this simply could not be true but as a man with a keen interest in myth, legend, and the paranormal it pricked his interest enough to eventually write a book about the mili mongga. Described most consistently as a large human with dark skin and thick dark fur, it seemed the mili mongga had not been seen by anyone in living memory but many reported that their ancestors, eighty to one hundred years ago, had seen one. Some even claimed descent from the mili mongga.

The mili mongga's favourite snack was the local green snail and the piles of green snail shells that could be found on the island seemed to be sufficient evidence for the many that the mili mongga still lived on Sumba. There was even a story about a couple of mili monggas being fed heated gravel with corn so as to, successfully, kill them.

 

Mili monggas feature in local art and certain tombs are reported to house dead mili monggas. One even has a carving of a mili mongga on it. Some said that juvenile mili monggas had been adopted by locals and raised as human children but if mili monggas exist then what are they? Are they humans? Are they animals? Are they some kind of spirit?

Prof Samuel Turvey doesn't, I believe, think he's discovered a tropical yeti on Sumba. Or at least he's not totally convinced yet. But he did have quite a few thoughts on what might have inspired the story, stories even, of the mili mongga. Do they relate to a late surviving hominim? Could the mili mongga be some kind of relation of Sumba's long tailed macaques? How long can folklore persist?

Is it a case that the mili mongga is simply an imaginary being that has been given the features of 'othered' people? Be they outlaws, criminals, slaves, people with medical conditions or behavioural issues. All seem plausible but none of them quite get to the bottom of the mystery of the mili mongga. Luckily it seems that Turvey is not done with mili monggas yet so watch this space.

Thanks to The Bell, the London Fortean Society, host David V. Barrett, and to Jade, Michael, and Tim for joining me as well as to Pizza Union on City Road for ensuring my stomach didn't rumble during a talk that involved cannibalism but thanks mainly to Prof Samuel Turvey for a rather brilliant talk on a subject that it's probably safe to say not many people know about.