Then I spent 3 hours hanging with John Beauchamp, this 83 year old artist, former U of MN Professor, who is a total beat-nik, bohemian radical. Without prompting him he ranted against the Pope, former Nazi; the Baptists, and God knows who else.

Anyway you’d like to know I’m sure that Beauchamp was hanging in a Parisian cafe with William Burroughs in 1962. I’m helping Beauchamp plan a paleo-art trip to the caves in France with stops in primitive art museums at Amsterdam and Paris. The dude rocks.

Did he/ she convert you?

Residual disturbance in “the force” perhaps?

I couldn’t have said it better!

On the one hand, the possibility is that pygmy-types were once much more widespread, but through displacement, loss of habitat (such as forest), and other factors survived as a distinct identity only in tropical forests in Africa. However, they seem unlikely to be a source of myths, because “normal” size humans in Africa also had stories of small powerful beings separate and apart from the pygmy of the forest.

The other possibility could be something like the Flores island remains, usually known as the “Hobbit” - these have been interpreted by some to show that a separate bipedal species had developed in parallel to Homo sapiens. So something like that could be one base of the stories.

But whatever the source - one fact remains. All human cultures irrespective of their location and environment have some collective anxiety towards the existence of a smaller separate species - in a similar way to an anxiety to larger bipeds as well (e.g., giants).

It may be a deep-seated retained primeval anxiety towards the existence of the “others”. We, as a species seem very insecure - we want to believe that we are the pinnacle of evolution and the top species of the Earth, but we still have an anxiety about other bipedal “predator” lurking about, as if these posed some real challenge to displace us from our perceived pinnacle or pedestal at the summit of the “pyramid” of our own psychological creation.

I suppose that when the Earth no longer seemed to pose such a threat or challenge, we turned to the sky to seek (and fear) that “other” or better…even if they come from other planets.

In modern times, the perceptions of aliens have encompassed all three major anxieties of “other bidpeds”:
- those who are smaller humanoids;
- those who are larger humanoids; and
- the third one (which I did not mention yet): bipedal reptillianoids…