The Asian Wild Man

by Jean-Paul Debenat

  The expression “Yeti of the Caucasus” seemed appropriate in view of the close relationship between the two snowmen, and brings to mind Odette Tchernine’s comment: “Local folk knew in former days all about the Almas, or Yeti-Snowman; the majority of scholars and of cials in the towns did not.”5

  One should however look closely at what is meant by “snowman” in the Russian–Asiatic context. MarieJeanne Koffmann has repeatedly asserted that the yeti is an anthropoid ape, a relative of the orangutan living in the high forest of the Himalaya, and NOT in the snows. It would frequent snowy areas only while passing from one forest to another.

  In spite of her extensive investigations in the 1960s, Marie-Jeanne Koffmann never managed to see the snowman herself.6 Odette Tchernine summarizes Koffmann’s research:

  Ode e Tchernine, member of the Royal Geographical Society. PHOTO: Author’s le

  “Doctor Koffmann’s eld work in the Caucasus suggests by her down-to-earth eye-witnesses’ reports, and the careful evidence of her own team, that the Almas, Snowman, Yeti, “wild man” is there, and is neither legend, hallucination, nor Shaitan.”7

  Witnesses of all ages reported sightings. One of these came from an old man who was keeping an eye on a eld of sun owers that had been repeatedly visited by an intruder. This eld bordered on a river, near Nal’chik, the capital of Kabardino–Balkaria. The old watchman red his gun and scared off a stocky almass of medium stature, which ran away, crushing sun owers in his ight.

  In their research, Marie-Jeanne Koffmann’s team found two dens and a “pantry” holding two pumpkins, eight potatoes, a halfeaten corn cob, the remains of a sun ower, blackberries and three apple cores. Not to forget four horse droppings, which suggest that the almasty enjoy these excrements because of their salt content. This short inventory suggests that the almasty of the Caucasus are mostly vegetarian.

  Koffmann also remarked on the curiosity shown by the almasty, who do not hesitate approaching new objects—tents, clothing, utensils—and to manipulate them under cover of darkness.

  Kabardino–Balkaria, a constituent republic of the Russian Federation and the home of Kabards and Balkars, is a rather special region where almasty live in the proximity of villagers. The country is a sort of eld laboratory for wild-man research. One particularly interesting report is that of a Russian zoological technician who worked in the area in 1956. She roomed in the house of an employee of the kolkhoz. One evening, during a wedding celebration at the neighbor’s house, she was resting in her room with the door open. Suddenly, hearing a sharp cry, she noticed a hairy creature, squatting in the middle of her room, staring at her. She yelled, “Where did you come from?”

  The creature rushed out, leaving behind a fetid smell. The next day, the Russian woman was told that it was an almasty that lived in the house next door, formerly owned by an old woman who had tamed it. Odette Tchernine thinks this anecdote has “a curious dreamlike quality about it, a connotation with fables of monsters, phantoms and the like…”8

  Marie-Jeanne Koffmann gathered hundreds of more classical rst-hand reports. The following example has been selected because of the time of the event, the nature of the witness, and the presence of his colleagues in the police force.

  The event occurred in October 1944, while a detachment of mounted police was crossing a hemp eld. The witness was right behind the leading horseman when the latter shouted, “Look! An almasty!”

  The creature stopped chewing on hemp stems and ed quickly towards a shepherd’s hut. The policemen encircled the small building. They were moving in, shoulder to shoulder when the almasty rushed out, broke the circle and ed into a ravine, disappearing in the bushes bordering the river. The hirsute and robust individual, his face covered with hair, was wearing a ragged caftan. Sometimes almasty visit people’s houses and are given food or some old garment.

  Another interesting testimony is that of a physician, Dr. Vazghen Karapetian, cited in Dimitri Bayanov’s book In the Footsteps of the Russian Snowman. While a military physician in the Caucasus, Karapetian examined a strange creature. The authorities suspected the individual to be a saboteur in the pay of the German army. However, he was wearing neither overcoat nor furs; his hair was his own and covered his whole body. About 1.80 meters tall (6 ft), he made sounds unrelated to any known articulated language.

  Founders of Russian Hominology in

  1968.

  The Caucasus area. MAP: Author

  Le to right:

  B.F. Porchnev,

  P.P. Smoline,

  A.A. Machkovtsev, D. Bayanov and M.J.Ko mann. PHOTO: Author’s le

  Following the 1960 creation of the Seminar for Research on Relic Hominoids, in Moscow, Bayanov had the opportunity of hearing Karapetian speak at a number of conferences. Karapetian emphasized three traits that distinguished the creature from human beings:

  1. It easily withstood the cold, which he preferred to the temperature of a heated room. Under normal room temperature (18–20°C [64–68°F]) it sweated profusely.

  2. Its face and look were expressionless, more like an animal than a human.

  3. The creature had unusually large parasites, bigger and different from those found on man.

  Following a detailed examination, Dr. Karapetian concluded that the individual was not a man in disguise, but a “very wild” creature and that its hair was real. Later he learned after enquiring with the authorities that the creature had been shot as a saboteur. Apparently, it had been argued in higher places that after so many years under a Soviet government, the population was civilized and that wild men had long ago disappeared. The strange creature could only be an enemy.

  It also seems that after the Russian Revolution of 1917, wild men would have been collateral victims of battles between Reds and Whites. The Second World War made more victims among these vanishing creatures. It is as if the home of hairy men shrank with the expansion of civilization.

  1 John Heath-Stubbs, Collected Poems 1943–1987, p. 162.

  2 Umberto Eco, as spoken on France Inter, February 15, 1996.

  3 The RMI (Revenu Minimum d’Inser on) was, between 1988 and 2009, a French minimum-wage alloca on.

  4 Pierre Berruer, Ouest-France, 28–29 mars 1992: “La Science traque le Yé du Caucase.”

  5 Ode e Tchernine, op. cit., p. 37.

  6 She missed seeing one in 1959 in Daghestan when fellow inves gators surprised a “kaptar” (another name for the almaas) bathing, but scared it away with a gunshot before taking a photo (cf. Porchnev, 1957, p. 168).

  7 Ode e Tchernine, op. cit., p. 37.

  8 Ode e Tchernine, op. cit., p. 161.

  20. Mystery of the Braided Manes

  Some recent reports are particularly interesting. For example, the following, dating from August 1991, by Gregory Panchenko, a young biologist and close collaborator of Marie-Jeanne Koffmann, who often relates his adventure during her presentations.

  A curious trait of wild men’s behavior is their interest in horses, and in particular their manes and tails. They are said to busy themselves at night with braiding horses’ hair. Various investigators have mentioned this strange habit, including Professor Porchnev and, well before him, William Shakespeare:

  This is that very Mab

  That plaits the manes of horses in the night

  And bakes the el ocks in foul sluttish hairs,

  Which once untangled much misfortune bodes.1

  The appearance of Queen Mab, the Dream Fairy, is a most surprising part of the play, Romeo and Juliet. It suggests that the author, an erudite Renaissance man, was aware of the main features of some very ancient phenomena.

  Romeo and his friends are getting ready for the masked ball, part of the festivities of the Capulet family. As we all know, these maskbearers are in for a tragic fate, which brings to mind the equally tragic and lethal conclusion of another famous event, the Bal des Ardents. On January 28, 1393, the king of France, Charles VI, and members of the court frolicked as wild men, disguised in costumes of oakum
glued with pitch, to simulate a hairy pelt. A torch ignited the costume of one of the courtiers and the re spread among them all. The king was saved (by a woman who covered him with her cloak to choke the

  ames) but four of his guests were roasted alive. The presence of wild men is often taken as an omen of great misfortune, then as now, in Europe as in Asia and elsewhere. The costumes of the Bal des Ardents suggest a probable survival of wild men at the end of the Middle Ages. An important chronicler of the medieval era, Jean Froissart, speaks of such hirsute beings during the reign of French king Jean le Bon (1319–1364). During the presentation of gifts to the queen, a procession of forty prominent Paris burghers paraded through the city. The presents were shown to the spectators from a litter carried “by two strong men, most appropriately dressed as wild men…”2

  We now return to the deeds of wild men in the twentieth century, and more speci cally to the report of biologist Gregory Pachenko, who couldn’t quite swallow the explanations, however plausible, put forward for the braiding of manes. One zoologist had suggested, for example, that a weasel, while hunting for mice, had jumped onto the horse’s back and messed up its mane. It could also happen that a horse, while shaking its head, might braid its mane, especially if the stem of some weed or a blade of grass was caught in its hair.

  Panchenko was about to leave Kabardia, where he had been collecting information about the almasty, when he heard about the braiding of horses’ manes in a collective farm. At the farm, he asked permission to stand on guard in the barn during the night. Above the main double door there was an open window, three meters (10 feet) above the ground. On the left, going in, a mare was tied to a feeding trough; on the right, a bed behind a blanket reached to the ground. From the bed, hidden behind the blanket, Pachenko kept an eye on the mare and on the window. Tired, he fell asleep; suddenly, the mare snorted and woke him up. By the moonlight he saw a silhouette, about 1.70 meters (5 feet 6 inches) tall, its head low on the shoulders, busy braiding the mare’s mane. He watched it for ve to seven minutes; the mare did not react. Suddenly Pachenko felt as if the creature had detected his presence; it jumped, as agile as an ape, onto the edge of the wall and up to the open window before disappearing into the night. Subsequently, Pachenko noticed that the braiding was rather clumsy, perhaps the work of a young and inexperienced almasty.

  Commenting on Pachenko’s

  “planned” encounter with the hominoid,

  another prominent Russian investigator,

  Dimitri Bayanov, thought that both braid

  ing techniques were real, one being natu

  ral (the weasel, the shaking of the horse’s

  head), the other arti cial, as explained by

  folklore, the local traditional knowledge

  which attributes to the almasty a fascina

  tion for horses and the habit of braiding

  their manes.

  Bayanov has devoted much of his

  life to proving the existence of wild

  men. He collaborated with Boris Porch

  nev, Marie-Jeanne Koffmann, Gregory

  Panchenko, Igor Bourtsev, Maya Byk

  ova and many other “hominologists” Bayanov’s Russian Snowman. worldwide. In his words, “The lessons PHOTO: Dmitri Bayanov

  of this event are momentous and have to

  be thoroughly learned.”3

  Shakespeare brings to the stage a supernatural creature, Mab, the Queen of Fairies. Bayanov and the people of Kabardia describe an almast; is it a creature close to Homo sapiens or a being escaped from the world of spirits? Among many so-called traditional people, the distinction between the world of the living and that of spirits is not as sharp as one might imagine.

  For now, let’s look more closely at the work of Dr. Koffmann. We have already seen that she works, within the Russian sphere, with devoted collaborators ready to face the hardships of eldwork and a harsh climate. That is truly the price to pay to approach and understand the local people and the fauna.

  1 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene IV.

  2 Jean Froissart as quoted by Chris an Le Noël in La Race Oubliée (tome 2), p. 216. Chris an Le Noël adds: “This proves again that Wild Men were s ll numerous at that me and well known to the general public.”

  3 Dimitri Bayanov, In the Footsteps of the Russian Snowman, p. 62

  21. Myth and Reality

  “I am not the one who projected a myth onto reality; quite the contrary!” So did Marie-Jeanne Koffmann exclaim at a conference in Paris in 1984.1 Following her predecessors and collaborators, she delved deeply into the realm of mythology. It is a pleasure to be able to quote one of her few publications. While her oral presentations were models of clarity and literary quality, one can only deplore the paucity of her written works, equally rich and precise:

  In 1957, when Soviet investigators began, with great circumspection, to consider the problem of the so-called Snow Man, their rst step was to look into mythology and to turn to the past: the absence of any trace of such beings in those domains would have put to rest any hypothesis as to their current existence. The initial results of their enquiry exceeded their expectations: everywhere, throughout history, the Wild Man, be it Homo sylvestris or Homo troglodytes, is found side by side to this other biped, Homo sapiens, feeding the superstitious fears of shepherds, the curiosity of naturalists, the embarrassment of theologians, and the ruminations of philosophers. It is present in all mythologies.2

  Marie-Jeanne Koffmann selected remarkable examples. For example, a Phoenician cup describing a hunting scene, an artifact dating from the sixth century BC, found in the Kourion trove in Cyprus between 1865 and 1876. Prehistoric frescoes are well known for their realism, the wall paintings of Lascaux being one example among many others. The renderings of animals by the artists of antiquity follow that tradition and delight both the amateur and the professional zoologist. In this scene, the climax of the hunt focuses on the ight and subsequent capture of a hairy biped, eventually tied up and felled with an axe.

  Historians remind us that during his 425 BC voyage of exploration, Carthaginian navigator Hanno had reached the Gulf of Guinea, as related in the account of his voyage, the Periplus, preserved in a Greek translation. Some specialists maintain, however, that Hanno did not reach further than the Canary Islands.

  Nevertheless, Hanno mentions his encounter, on an island, with wild men that his interpreters called Gorillaï. The explorers captured and killed three females, bringing back their skins to Carthage. The term Gorillaï,

  rst encountered in the Greek text , originally applies to hairy human beings before becoming the “gorilla” of zoological nomenclature thanks to the American, Thomas S. Savage (1847).3

  Assuming that Hanno could not travel far enough to actually see gorillas—whose rst authenticated skeleton was found in 1852—who were these hairy creatures? “If people of antiquity weren’t aware of the existence of gorillas, did they know about the existence of large, surprisingly human-like large primates?”4

  Next, Marie-Jeanne Koffmann draws on a 5000-year-old Sumerian literary masterpiece, the Epic of Gilgamesh:

  A stylized bison, Lascaux cave pain ng. PHOTO: Author’s le Enkidu, since you were humanised and left What man has done to the animals That trusted, and that drank with you At the desert pool!

  We are not beautiful as they are,

  We are not true.

  Our innocence and trust went with Enkidu When he deserted his friends for love of man.5

  The Sumerians lived in the fth millenium BC and were the inventors of cuneiform writing, drawn with reeds on soft clay tablets. Their brilliant civilization left rich traces on the people who followed them in what later became Persia (Iran–Iraq): Hammurabi’s

  rst code of law, the dazzling architecture of temples, the towers and ziggurats that crowned them. Not to forget that the Sumerians probably invented written account-keeping before the development of actual writing. From then on, transactions could be easily and faithfu
lly recorded.6 Equally elaborate was the mythology of the country that later became Babylonia and Assyria. Who could forget the moon goddess Ishtar, or Marduk, the bull god?

  What really matters here, however, is the hero of an epic poem, Gilgamesh, a historical king from the third millenium BC, said to be one-third human and two-thirds divine. When his subjects complained to the gods about his despotic rule, the latter created, as a counterbalance to his authority, a wild man, the friend of the animals. The king told his mother about the dream that haunted his nights. She answered that the dream informed him that a companion was chosen for him, a brave comrade who used to help his friends in need. The man would come to him.

  In his skillful interpretation of the epic, American writer Robert Silverberg relates the “fantastic and supernatural” adventures of Gilgamesh in a realistic fashion, so that the purely mythical elements stand out sharply. Enkidu, the wild man, is described as going naked, an enormous hirsute brute covered with coarse hair, closer to beast than to man, a savage creature of the wild. He behaved like an animal. He grunted, and squatting, ran easily and with agility on all fours on clenched sts and feet.7

  Enkidu browses with the gazelles and drinks from the same springs as they do. He destroys the hunters’ traps and nets. Marie-Jeanne Koffmann comments that he protects wild life, albeit “strangely.”

  King Gilgamesh knows the recipe that will tame this beastly creature. He orders a sacred prostitute, the very one that initiated him, to transform Enkidu and prevent him from reverting to savagery. In the embrace of a woman, he becomes like a man—this woman with her long lustrous hair who appears, behind the guise of the sacred courtesan, as a shadow of the future Mary Magdalen.

  The courtesan leads Enkidu to the gate of Uruk and introduces him to the shepherds, who welcome him and offer him bread and wine. He leaps with joy! He is the messenger of the gods, awaited by the people, the one who will take a stand against the arrogant and unfair ruler. At a nobleman’s wedding, Enkidu prevents the king from insisting on his “droit de cuissage,” the Lord’s right of rst night with the bride.