The Tomb of the Mili Mongga

February 19, 2024
Turvey (Witness to Extinction), a biology professor at the Institute of Zoology in London, recounts in this spellbinding travelogue the goose chase he undertook into the hinterlands of Indonesia in pursuit of “mythical human-like creatures” known as mili monggas. Folktales among Indigenous people on the island of Sumba, Turvey explains, speak of mili monggas as “hairy wildmen” and women with “long, pendulous breasts” who supposedly dwelt in caves as recently as a century ago. Turvey was skeptical yet captivated and wondered if mili monggas might have been a hunter-gatherer society that predated Austronesian-speaking peoples’ colonization of Sumba during the Stone Age, or perhaps a myth invented from the fossil record (skulls of extinct Mediterranean elephants, whose merged nasal openings resemble a central eye socket, are thought to have inspired tales about Cyclopes, he notes). To investigate, Turvey and his student research team journeyed sunbaked miles over rough Sumba roads to listen to Indigenous elders’ stories and search caves and forests for remains. The prose is evocative (“Huge tombs sprouted from the old knee-high grass like crumbling grey mushrooms,” he writes about visiting a cemetery that allegedly held a 600-year-old mili mongga grave), and Turvey weaves the natural history and folklore into an invigorating treatise on the nature of belief and knowledge. Vivid and transportive, this is a winner.