Unidentified Hominids of Africa

Unidentified Hominids of the African Forest Author Dies

The author of Les Hominidés non-identifiés des forêts d’Afrique or The Unidentified Hominids of the African Forest (Edirions Robert Laffont, 1990) has died.

The book, first researched in the 1970s and based on years of fieldwork, brought together seven-five eyewitness testimonies of what the author Jacqueline Roumeguere-Eberhardt called "X" - unknown hominids or "missing links" in some media reports. Roumeguere-Eberhardt identified five quite different types of unknown hairy hominoids existing in Africa.

On May 6, the family of noted French anthropologist Jacqueline Roumeguere-Eberhardt, 78, reported she had died on March 29, 2006, in Nairobi, Kenya. She was "perhaps best known for her marriage to an illiterate Masai warrior and for a controversial theory that prehistoric beings still live in Africa," said Agence France-Presse.

Roumeguere-Eberhardt, a lecturer at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, died of congestive heart failure, her daughter Isabelle told AFP from Paris.

Born in South Africa in 1927, Roumeguere-Eberhardt was initiated into several African tribes in her youth and then moved to Paris. She became a French citizen in 1957 with her marriage to Pierre Roumeguere, an associate of surrealist Salvador Dali.