The Asian Wild Man

by Jean-Paul Debenat

  Enkidu and Gilgamesh ght, but nd themselves of equal strength. After a struggle as furious as that of raging bulls, the two heroes make peace. The king recognizes his double, the friend and brother announced by his dream. Enkidu abandons the company of shepherds in order to live with the king. The wild man becomes the king’s right hand: Neanderthal, for a time, is to be Homo sapiens’ closest companion and a model for all.

  The transformation of the wild man is completed by the act of shaving, prescribed by the king who sent his barbers and surgeons to grind down and polish away the last traces of his savage past.

  Thus emerges an early sign of a mellowing to appear much later, in the Age of Love, after the advent of the Ram, god of justice, meaning Yahveh. But for now, we are still in the Bronze Age, in Mesopotamia, where, under the sign of the bull, people are building cities, pyramids, weapons and jewels…

  Gilgamesh is supposed to combat false gods and the heresy that is shaping up. However he is somewhat off-track: he was supposed to ght Enkidu, not to befriend him! As a king, he nds himself bound by his royal status. The wild man came to help him, giving him a brief taste of freedom and brotherhood.

  In that marvelous article, Marie-Jeanne Koffmann guides the reader through to the rst Chaldean Empire (about 1500 BCE). Quoting from the Epic of Gilgamesh, she strongly recommends it to the reader, encouraging him to discover a cyclical progression of eras— of the Bull (Taurus), the Ram (Aries) and the Fish (Pisces) leading to that of Aquarius. Enkidu, the wild man, has brought us to this view of Sumerian civilization, an unexpected development that nevertheless emerges implicitly from the adventures of the epic.

  1 Annual mee ng, of The Interna onal Society of Cryptozoology at the University of Paris VI. Many chapters of my previous work, Sasquatch/Bigfoot and the Mystery of the Wild Man, refer to Ko mann’s work.

  2 Marie-Jeanne Ko mann, ar cle “Les Hominoïdes reliques de l’an quité,” Archéologia, no. 307, page 34. December 1994.

  3 Savage T.S., Communica on describing the external character and habits of a new species of Troglodytes (T. gorilla). Boston Soc Nat Hist: 245–247, 1847.

  4 Marie-Jeanne Ko mann, op. cit., p. 38.

  5 “Enkidu – a Defec on,” a poem by Ode e Tchernine in The Singing Dust, Neville Spearman, London, 1976, p. 75.

  6 See Georges Ifrah, Histoire Universelle des Chi res, Seghers, Paris, 1981.

  7 See Robert Silverberg, Gilgamesh the King, Arbor House Publishers, New York, 1984.

  22. Dr. Koffmann’s Conclusions

  Koffmann’s conclusions are based on those aspects of the Gilgamesh epic which provide clues as to Enkidu’s real life: a child of the steppe, brought up by a gazelle, nursed with the milk of the wild ass, he is familiar with the forests and the mountains. Other signs expose the primitive features of this wild man, a mere sketch of a hominoid, member of “a population of anthropomorphic creatures.” Far from being the king’s brother, Enkidu was more likely to have been his slave, roped in to shepherd his ocks or perhaps used as a game tracker “helping to track down creatures similar to itself but perhaps even wilder and more beastly.”1

  Drawing from the Bible, Marie-Jeanne Koffmann quotes the words of Jehovah to Rebecca: “Two nations grow in your belly, two people will split apart after emerging from your womb; one will dominate the other; the rst born will serve the younger.” (Genesis 25, 22–24)

  Koffmann interprets: “So, who is the rst-born, which of the two people appeared rst? A hirsute creature covered with red hair… spending all his time running in the wild…some kind of a brute, hardly able to express itself, unable even to give a name to the plate of lentils which he requests, whining, and who, driven by his brutal voracity, does not hesitate to trade in a birthright that he is clearly unaware of.”2

  The brute is, of course, Esau, whom younger brother Jacob tricked out of his birthright. The two brothers are nally reconciled 20 years later (Genesis 33:4). No one can fail to note the similarity with the wild Enkidu.

  Marie-Jeanne Koffmann’s strategy consists in extracting from the mythical plane details of the daily life of the wild man. That is indeed the goal of cryptozoologists:

  To bring mythi ed animals back to their normal proportions and especially to discover their true behavior, it is necessary to remove those aspects clearly associated with myth. This is usually rather easy, given the stereotypical character of myth. It then becomes possible to sketch a snapshot capturing both moral as well as physical traits, based on the descriptions by various eyewitnesses, a portrait which of course becomes more detailed and precise in proportion to the number of observations.3

  There is an impressive array of valuable eyewitness reports— over 500 by 1991—arising from the people of the Caucasus. A number of prominent thinkers, such as, for example, Professor Piveteau, a member of the French Academy of Sciences and honorary professor at the College de France, were impressed:

  The general consistency of the reports gathered by Doctor MarieJeanne Koffmann, and the fact that they stem from people of different cultures speak strongly in favor of their veracity…Should the authenticity of the Caucasian hominid be de nitively established, we will face a creature in which humanity and bestiality are intimately joined…This hominid raises the ever-recurring myth of the wild man which, as late as the Age of Enlightenment, was still pictured as a hirsute creature combining human and animal features at the vague limits of humanity.4

  While I would love to quote at greater length from the Caucasian reports gathered by Dr. Koffmann, a few informative elements will have to suf ce. For example, even a listing of the nutritional regimen of the almasty is fascinating:

  • Wild plants: fruits and berries (oak, walnut, mountain ash, dogwood, wild roses, strawberries, blackberries, currants); shelf fungus growing on trees; green plants

  oating on ponds; chervil, hogweed, bugloss, capsella, lichens, sorrel, cohosh • Cultivated plants: all species, without exception (garden plants, fruits, cereals, oleaginous, etc.)

  • Animals: mice, rats, ground squirrels, squirrels, bats, newborn fowl, placenta of domesticated ungulates, carrion, horse droppings, frogs, frog eggs, lizards, turtles

  • Mineral foods: rock salt, concretions along the edges of mineral springs (numerous in the Caucasus), clay, etc.

  • Foods taken directly from people: milk, sour milk, cheese, eggs, bread, our, bran, meat, honey, cooked dishes (soups, stews, etc.), jams

  The almasty are so common that Marie-Jeanne Koffmann does not hesitate to state, “the relic hominoid has become a commensal of man.”

  An old shepherd familiar with the habits of the humanoid declared: “It eats all the wild plants that man used to eat when he was still wild.”5

  There is thus a close kinship between man and the almasty, if only in the realm of alimentation. Reports from local peasants are striking, especially in view of their precision and in the richness of details. Their reports are longer than modern accounts, which strive to keep information as terse as possible, restricted to a couple of sentences. Used to modern media—radio and television—the modern reader must not be bored!

  Marie-Jeanne Koffmann’s description of the eating habits of the almasty was criticized because some areas where almasty have been seen are lacking key elements of their food: they couldn’t survive there. She answered these criticisms through an analysis of the bestknown cases of wild children, normal children surviving in nature following special circumstances: lost in the forest, abandoned, kidnapped.

  A famous case of wild children is that of the girls Kamala and Amala, the “wolf girls of Midnapore,” aged seven to eight years and 18 months, apparently discovered in 1920 in a wolf’s den in East Bengal.6According to the story of the children’s rescue, the wolf protected them as ercely as her own cubs; she had to be killed to rescue the girls, who appeared wilder than the cubs, and who scratched and bit the nuns who approached them. The children hated cooked food, preferring uncooked meat eaten off the oor, a preference countered by Rev. Singh,
the rector of the orphanage that took in the girls, moving the food up. When, in 1921, Amala died of a kidney infection, the survivor, Kamala, turned to a hyena the nuns had been given to keep her company; however, soon she had to be separated from the hyena to humanize her. The Rev. Singh and his wife tried to civilize the little girl, who walked on all fours. They tied sticks to her legs to force her to walk upright. Kamala learned to do it, without abandoning her previous gait, when she wanted to move faster.

  Marie-Jeanne Koffmann remarked that a dog would have been much better than a hyena. In fact, a child is what is made of him or her: when raised among sheep, a child “baahs” and is called a “sheep-child” (in Ireland c.1670); a bear-child in Lithuania, as described by Linnaeus in the mid 1700s as Juvenis ursinus lituanis; and even today in 2009 in Siberia, where ve-year-old Natasha was found living with cats and dogs. She behaved like a dog, jumping and barking.

  Wild children, whether really raised by animals or rendered wild by abusing adults, show remarkable physical strength and adaptability. After studying their lives, Marie-Jeanne Koffmann concluded that the almasty are even better prepared to face the elements, and they can be just as frugal and survive on a limited diet when forced by circumstances.

  Koffmann found the case of Victor of Aveyron of particular interest because it clearly showed the results of the work of Dr. Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, a physician who spared no effort and showed a surprising degree of imagination in his struggle to humanize the wild child. When Victor walked out of the woods on January 9, 1800 near Saint-Cernin sur Rance, a small village of 350 people in France, he was 11 to 12 years old and walked upright, but everything else about him was animal. As such, he was not really different from the known cases (300 or so) of Homines feri. What distinguished him, the famous enfant de l’Aveyron, was the rapport that he developed with his mentor, Dr. Itard.7

  When Victor was caught, he was in the act of digging out vegetables in a tanner’s garden. He was offered a plate of meats, both cooked and raw, rye and wheat bread, pears, grapes, nuts, chestnuts, acorns, potatoes and an orange. He grabbed the potatoes, threw them into the re and then picked them out of the embers without pain.

  Such an instance of survival on a restricted diet illustrated the remarkable resilience of wild children, in support of Koffmann’s views.

  1 Marie-Jeanne Ko mann, Archéologia, no. 307, p. 39, Dec. 1994.

  2 Marie-Jeanne Ko mann, op. cit., p. 40.

  3 Bernard Heuvelmans, Le Dossier des Hommes Sauvages et Velus d’Eurasie, unpublished manuscript, 1997, pers. comm. to the author.

  4 Communica on from Jean Piveteau (June 10, 1987) to Marie-Jeanne Ko mann who inserted it in her ar cle “L’Almasty, Yé du Caucase,” Archéologia, no. 269, June 1991, p. 37.

  5 Marie-Jeanne Ko mann, “L’Almasty du Caucase – Mode de vie d’un humanoïde,” Archéologia, no. 276, Feb. 1992, p. 57.

  6 See Michael Newton, Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children. Faber and Faber, 2002.

  7 See Lucien Malson, “Les Enfants Sauvages,” édi ons 10 –18, Paris, 2003. Also Roger Sha uck, The Forbidden Experiment —The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron, Kodanska Interna onal, New York, Tokyo, London, 1994.

  23. The 1992 Almasty Expedition

  Here we are in Paris in 1992; preparations for the Franco-Russian expedition are well underway. Movie director Sylvain Pallix is in charge of logistics as well as of lming a documentary. The lm, Almasty, Yéti du Caucase, was aired on the France-3 television channel on February 13, 1993.

  Dr. Koffmann is the scienti c leader of the expedition. Although 73 years old, she is t and spry, thanks to her background as an alpinist. Some of the members of the expedition’s lm crew, on the other hand, will have dif culty following the steep trails of the Caucasus, up and down ravines and nearly impassable gorges.

  Marie-Jeanne Koffmann has been a regular visitor to a region stretching between the Black Sea and the Caspian, more speci cally Kabardino–Balkaria, which she knows well. The almasty, of course, know nothing of human boundaries and roam over hundreds, even thousands, of kilometers. Today, the countries where they have been seen are troubled by violent con icts: the Caucasus is in ames!

  To this day, there is no photo of the almasty. Marie-Jeanne Koffmann explains to the journalists that Causasian peasants, just as those at home, do not burden themselves with cameras when they work in their elds. In the mountains of the Caucasus one nds mainly farmers and shepherds. Their life is hard, the standard of living modest and luxuries are unknown. A variety of electronic gadgets, common in richer countries, are a novelty for the locals. The Caucasian villagers are put off by the extravagance of supplies and equipment, and especially by the arrogant attitude of the lm crew and of the various technicians. Marie-Jeanne Koffmann already complained about the media hubbub preceding their departure. She told a journalist, “For these simple and wonderfully welcoming people, the existence of the almasty is obvious. They have to be rewarded materially. I’m sure we will not need two months…”1

  Koffmann, normally patient and careful, is optimistic. Is she perhaps impressed by the wealth of equipment made available, hoping to bene t from its deployment? Of course, she hopes to be able to rely, as she has always done, on the local people, who have long known her. Undoubtedly, they will willingly trade their stories for some reasonable remuneration. A ruble is a ruble everywhere, especially when times are tough.

  According to local people, the almasty walks like a human being, but its gait is reminiscent of that of a wild beast. It scares horses, as were those of Patterson and Gimlin when they met a bigfoot (sasquatch) in California on October 20, 1967.

  The peasants say that the almasty turns its head like a wolf, meaning stif y, together with its short but massively muscled neck and shoulders. Like its cousin bigfoot, it emits a strong odor and can run as fast as 40 kilometers per hour (25 mph). Unlike its American cousin however, it does not hesitate to feed a re abandoned by shepherds; but it never lights a re on its own. Sometimes it steals food from people, even clothing, that it sometimes puts on.

  Everyone in these mountains is familiar with the almasty’s habits. Two witnesses speak of the bright, “yellowish red” eyes of the creature.2 Sylvain Pallix’s documentary includes short interviews with people on the village street, at their farms and at home.

  A horseman declares that the almasty can make itself invisible. A certain Micha, keeper of a well, saw an almasty through the window and reached for a weapon, but could not move, as if hypnotized into immobility.

  A man named Hossim says that the almasty never show up during the day. They are rather repulsive, but are similar to people. Hossim also con rms that the almasty turn their head stif y. He actually saw one in a tree in his native village, razed on Stalin’s orders in 1940, a date he has not forgotten. Before the war and the arrival of machines, the almasty used to approach the villages. The exile of the Balkars, forced out of their homes by the dictator’s madness, accelerated the dispersal of the almasty.

  According to another, it is best never to utter the name of the diabolic creature so as not to incur Allah’s wrath.

  The interviews on lm did not turn up anything that wasn’t already known. Nevertheless, the ow of interviews leaves an agreement on facts that may be compared to observations from elsewhere (Tibet, Nepal, Mongolia…).

  Back in Paris, Yves Coppens, Professor at the College de France, had discreetly encouraged Marie-Jeanne Koffmann.3 She could leave on the expedition with as much con dence as one could possibly muster. She was afraid that by revealing the secrets of the almasty, she would contribute to the end of the mystery, especially if one of the relic hominids was captured.

  Her fears were unfounded, but she winced at the behavior of some members of the expedition. She was shocked by their contempt of the local people, to the extent that she long hesitated before returning again to the Caucasus. She believed, wrongly, that her long-time friends would hold her responsible for that misbehavior.

&n
bsp; For Koffmann, the expedition left a bitter taste. She rarely appears in Sylvain Pallix’s documentary, which merely skims the surface of the almasty phenomenon and leaves the viewer quite unsatis ed. Too bad, for there are so few documentaries on the wild man!

  The moving picture, be it documentary or ction, turns out to be particularly ill-adapted to a subject that demands ambition as well as intellectual honesty. In the domain of cryptozoology, which the scienti c establishment, except for some rare exceptions, considers pseudoscience, the French achievements are mediocre and often even coarse. For example, in 2008 Jacques Mitsch completed a lm, Almasty, la dernière expedition, for the Arte cultural channel. It’s hard to imagine a clumsier comedy. Could it be an act of vengeance toward Marie-Jeanne Koffmann? One can only hope that it’s actually an unfortunate coincidence. Mitsch lmed on location—in

  Gasik, Marie Jeanne Ko mann’s jeep. PHOTO: Author’s le the Pyrenees! He represents the Caucasian peasants as mud-stomping rustics. The dance of the shamans is straight out of a summer camp theatricals. The scienti c leader, eaten up by ambition, exudes domineering authority; her teammate is a wimp. Compared to that

  lm even La soupe aux choux (1981) appears as a masterpiece of renement!4 Let’s thus grant to Marie-Jeanne Koffmann the important place that she well deserves and forget as soon as possible those who pretend to lm her life from the wrong side of the lens.

  Originally quite skeptical about her research, for it seemed to her almost absurd that there should exist a humanoid creature in the Caucasus, Koffmann devoted the greatest part of her life to proving the existence of this “anthropoid ape” related to the orangutan. She knew that there was still no formal proof of its existence, but the reasons for continuing to make it the object of scienti c research kept piling up.