Merbeings: The True Story of Mermaids, Mermen, and Lizardfolk
by Mark A. Hall, Loren Coleman, David Goudsward
Anomalist Books, 2023, 200 pp.
The three contributors, each with their own talents, have produced an uneven book, a mix of speculation, interesting stories, and puzzling errors. The late Mr. Hall was an exceptional researcher, Coleman is a prodigious cryptozoological writer and a friend, and Goudsward wrote a very good book on creature tales from Florida. I understand the challenge of trying to mesh the work of three people (most of it by Hall) into a cohesive whole, but I expected a better book.
The book starts with the hypothesis there is a global
species of aquatic primate behind the merbeing stories. Most of the stories of merpeople, as well as some
hard-to-classify animal reports and even “Lizardmen,” refer to some variety of
this species. It’s fair to mention that the late Mr. Hall liked to throw out
provocative hypotheses, and I wasn't always sure how strongly he
believed in them, but this is what we have to work with. If we suspend
disbelief and read with an open mind, the book is entertaining but far from
persuasive.
The authors did their research. The book is filled with
interesting stories, with sources given in the chapter notes. Another good
point is that Indigenous sources are, whenever possible, referred to by tribe
or group names, vs the still-too-common “the Indians around Lake Powell say…”
approach of lazy writers. The writers wisely avoid tying their idea too closely to the
aquatic ape theory proposed by Hardy and expanded on by Morgan: they mention it
just enough to make it a possible source of support without being dragged down
by its universal rejection. Finally, they make a worthy effort to collect
information from all over the world, avoiding being hemmed in by relatively
recent Western motifs. Missteps include stating
the existence of many land primates (meaning sasquatch, yeti, etc.) all over the world as given despite the
nonexistence of hard evidence for any of them and Hall’s championing of Homo gardarensis,
a long-discarded species based on an acromegalic H. sapiens skull.
The supporting accounts are spread all over the world,
decades or centuries apart, often describing creatures quite differently. The
authors suggest there is only one species of marine primate, likely a
descendant of the swamp-liking fossil ape Oreopithecus. The differences are due
to its using ornaments and coverings (including tails) from other mammals and
fish to improve mobility, provide insulation, or express cultural norms. It’s
an imaginative solution, and would be fun for fiction, but without evidence,
it’s much easier to conclude the differences indicate unrelated mistakes, folklore, and
hoaxes. (At one point it is mentioned there might be two species, one genuinely
tailed.)
Tales from fishermen, Indigenous Americans, Western explorers,
and other sources are used, and the hypothesis requires we accept all of them
as true and basically accurate – even the ones about lizardmen jumping on to
the running boards of cars. There is not a whit of evidence besides stories. The
worst choice of an incident to mention concerns huge yellow humanoids (nowhere near water) in
Vietnam. The source account in Martin Caiden’s book Natural or Supernatural?
says American troops blasted the creatures at short range with automatic
weapons without harming them, meaning the story is necessarily a hoax.
The authors never try to condense the accounts into a single
description of the species: size, diet, current range and the reason for it,
reproduction, etc. Nor is there an illustration of such. The book holds that
scientists haven’t discovered the living animal because they are closed-minded
about it and have not collected fossils in the likely places (land once covered by
shallow water), because they weren't looking for them. In any fossil dig,
though, everything is collected and examined, and there have been many digs of
such sites. One might suggest the species was always too rare to have turned up
yet, but if so, it wouldn’t have the necessary worldwide distribution of viable populations.
Hall addresses this by citing a crackpot theory of crustal displacement, which
doesn’t help any.
I don’t think any authors could have made a successful book out of this: the speculation is just too much of a reach, the evidence too thin and scattered to support it. Some of the individual accounts and legends are intriguing, and those plus the references make the book worth having for cryptozoologists, but the boat the authors try hard to build just doesn’t float.
Matt Bille is a writer, historian, and naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com.
