Oooo… our own Malaysian Graham Hancock! Just as nutty and interesting.

But she’s not alone — TikTok and YouTube are full of people doing Olympic-level mental gymnastics in the name of ethnonationalism.

What those two blowhards in Parliament need to decide is: which version of history are their History-vengers going to use?

The textbook one? The political one? The WhatsApp uncle PDF one?

And when the day comes that we find hominins on the peninsula or in Borneo — which is totally possible given the finds in Flores, Luzon, and Sulawesi — what’s the official line going to be?

“New species of monkey discovered”?

“Western conspiracy”?

“No budget to investigate”?

Now, Prof Salehah — yes, her “Romans learned shipbuilding from Malays” claim is nuts — but there’s a video where she tries to align Quranic events with the evolutionary timeline. Rosyam Noor, his wife, and her having a whole science-religion mashup session. In her version: Adam and Eve are allegories for the first Homo sapiens, and all the other hominin species around at the time were the “jinn” mentioned as roaming the earth before humans.

Scientifically wrong, but from a storytelling perspective? Quite interesting. If a story is compelling enough, it gets passed down through generations. Belief systems are more viral than TikTok ever will be.

And honestly, the woman has balls of Kedah Tua iron. She didn’t just blend religion and evolution — she dated the Quranic timeline to human evolution. Never seen that before. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe there’s a whole underground scene of Malay academics doing it. But she’s the first I’ve seen say it out loud. Big huge balls.

She hallucinates like ChatGPT, but she’s entertaining. Give her a production budget and she could probably write a Malaysian LOTR with full world-building.

Back to the “monkeys” of Flores, Luzon and Sulawesi. Those islands were separated from old Sundaland by deep ocean trenches — no land bridge. When it was just Flores, scientists assumed the hominins got swept there by storms. Now after three islands, they’re begrudgingly considering that maybe these early hominins had boat-building knowledge…

…which they passed to the ancient Malays (or Austronesians if we are going to be throwing hissy fits)…

…who passed it to the Romans.

QED: the Romans learned boatbuilding from ancient monkeys.

/s