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This week we\u2019re back to Sumatra, that island of mystery, to learn about a mysterious ape called the orang pendek.\n\nA beautiful Sumatran orangutan:\n\n\n\nThis orangutan and her baby have won all the bananas:\n\n\n\nThis picture made me DIE:\n\n\n\nAn especially dapper siamang, a type of gibbon:\n\n\n\nHere\u2019s a walking siamang:\n\n\n\nThe sun bear, looking snoozy:\n\n\n\nThe sun bear, standing:\n\n\n\nFurther reading:\n\nThese are the articles where I got my quotes.\n\nThis one has some general information.\n\nThis one is by Debbie Martyr herself.\n\nShow transcript:\n\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\n\nThe island of Sumatra is a place that keeps popping up in our episodes. We\u2019ve barely scratched the surface of weirdness in Sumatra and nearby islands, but this week\u2019s episode is about a Sumatran mystery ape called the orang pendek. That means \u201cshort person\u201d in Indonesian.\n\nThe story goes that a human-like ape lives in the forests of western Sumatra. It walks on two legs, has short black, gray, or golden fur on its body with longer hair on its head, human facial features, and is shorter than a human but not by much. The people of the remote Sumatran villages where the orang pendek is reported say that it\u2019s enormously strong, and has small feet and short legs but long arms. It mostly eats plants and will raid crops occasionally, but it also eats insects, fish, and river crabs.\n\nMany people think the first report of the orang pendek outside of the Sumatran people is from a 14th century traveler called John of Florence, who visited China around 1342 and many other countries afterwards, including either Java or Sumatra. He reported seeing hairy men who lived on the edges of the forest, but since he also said that the hairy men planted crops and traded with the locals, it\u2019s possible he was talking about a tribe of people who lived on the outskirts of mainstream society.\n\nThe various native groups in Sumatra have stories of creatures that sound like the orang pendek, including a demon-like entity called the hantu pendek, which means short ghost. But as I\u2019ve said before in other episodes, it\u2019s a mistake to treat folktales as if they were scientific observations. People tell stories for lots of reasons, only one of which is imparting knowledge about a particular animal. Plus, those aren\u2019t the only stories of strange people told in the area. There are stories of giants, of people with tails, and many others. For instance, the orang bati is a bat-winged man that\u2019s supposed to live in extinct volcanic craters in Seram, Indonesia, and who flies out at night and steals babies.\n\nThe Dutch colonized Indonesia in the early 19th century, around 1820, after centuries of varying levels of control in what was known as the Dutch East Indies. Colonists reported seeing apes or strange small people in the forest too. One fairly typical report is this one from 1917, from a Mr. Oostingh, who saw what he took to be a man sitting on the ground in the forest about 30 feet away from him, or nine meters. He said,\n\n\u201cHis body was as large as a medium-sized native\u2019s and he had thick square shoulders, not sloping at all. The colour was not brown, but looked like black earth, a sort of dusty black, more grey than black.\n\n\u201cHe clearly noticed my presence. He did not so much as turn his head, but stood up on his feet: he seemed quite as tall as I. Then I saw that it was not a man, and I started back, for I was not armed. The creature took several paces, without the least haste, and then, with his ludicrously long arm, grasped a sapling, which threatened to break under his weight, and quietly sprang into a tree, swinging in great leaps alternately to right and to left.\u201d\n\nExpeditions in the 1920s and 1930s found nothing out of the ordinary. Interest trailed off until around 1990, when a journalist named Debbie Martyr decided she was going to get to the bottom of the mystery. She had traveled to Sumatra in 1989 for a stor...