The Asian Wild Man

by Jean-Paul Debenat

  Poirier was just as circumspect as Prof. Zhou Guoxing, whom he mentions in numerous occasions in his publication. Zhou Guoxing had already visited the Shennongjia Forest before: he led the major 1977 expedition mentioned above. Some of the main results of his research are worth noting, rst of all, the various names used in China for the yeren, an umbrella term covering various creatures: bears, orangutan, wild man, etc.:

  • shangui: monster of the hills

  • xing-xing: orangutan

  • shandaren (in Fujian province): a man as tall as the hills, measuring more than three meters (10 feet).

  • feifei (in some areas of Sichuan): a bear-man

  These creatures are of such different statures that it is dif cult to think that there might be just one kind of wild man. Zhou Guoxing notes that in Henan province, a wild man that was captured was skinned and its paws eaten as a delicacy: a gastronomical reminder of the plate of bear paws which has now of cially disappeared from the menu of the best restaurants in China.

  Many scientists seriously doubt that the yeren is anything but a bear or an ape. Many think that its presence is explained by hallucinations or hoaxes. However, Zhou Guoxing, as well as his colleague Wu Dingliang, an anthropologist from Fudan University in Shangai, thinks that the snowman is a tall, undiscovered primate. Zhou adds that it is the subject of numerous legends, not only in Tibet and Sinkiang, but also in the northwest parts of Yunnan, inhabited by descendants of Tibetans. Besides, there are close similarities between many of the witnesses’ reports, suggesting the existence of real creatures. Zhou Guoxing believes that investigations by Chinese scientists in the thickly forested mountainous areas could reveal the existence of an unknown creature that must be described scienti cally.

  Even if the majority of Zhou Guoxing’s colleagues reject the hypothesis of a humanlike being, others suggest that the yeren might be a descendant of Australopithecus, particularly of Australopithecus robustus or Paranthopus, the near-man, which lived two million years ago.

  Chinese langur (Rhinopithecus roxellanae). PHOTO: Author’s le Still others believe it might be an ape, a descendant of the orangutans, which were abundant in southern China during the Pleistocene between two million and 10,000 years ago. It could also be a descendant of Gigantopithecus.

  The 1977 expedition collected casts of footprints, hair and excrement attributed to a creature resembling both a human and an ape. The study of the local fauna and ora, the corpus of mythological tales and legends, and the information gathered among the residents added up to an impressive body of indices. As for the almasty, the yeti or the sasquatch, those researchers who looked and listened without a priori bias reached interesting conclusions. For example, French zoologist François de Sarre:

  One might imagine that many human races survive on our planet under favorable climatic conditions, in spite of the current predominance of Homo sapiens. That has not always been the case, and the situation might change some day. In any case, there is no lack of reports of wild, hairy men throughout the world. These are studied and classi ed by hominologists, a term introduced by Russian researcher Dimitri Bayanov, as well as homins to denote those creatures, anatomically similar to man, but still in the wild. The best known of these, the yeti, is most likely an ape, a relative of the orangutan. However, there might perhaps remain a few Homo erectus in the Himalaya or in the Caucasus, even perhaps neanderthalians (Barmanu) in northeastern Pakistan.6

  Skull of Paranthropus robustus. ILLUSTRATION: Author’s le

  Zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans, who introduced the term cryptozoology, described three distinct types of wild hairy man: • The small yeti, an ape denizen of the Siwalik mountains of India, a range parallel to the eastern Himalayas. That creature, the size of a human adolescent, has thick dark red fur, and a conical skull topped by a bony sagittal crest, as found in gorillas and male orangutans. It is by all evidence an anthropoid ape, a pongid.7

  • The great yeti lives further north, in Tibet, China, Burma and the Malay peninsula, roaming perhaps as far as the Himalaya. Because of its size, one tends to relate it to the fossil Gigantopithecus, whose remains indicate its presence between eight million years and 300,000 years ago. Reports often tell of the great yeti rather than the small yeti, as it is more impressive to have seen a giant. The fossil remains of Gigantopithecus have frequently been found together with those of orangutans and giant pandas, which have survived to this day. Why could a late representative of Gigantopithecus not have also survived?

  • The third type of wild man is found from the Caucasus through Siberia

  all the way to the

  Malay peninsula. A

  specimen examined by Heuvelmans, which he named Homo pongoides was said to come from Vietnam.8

  Clearly, the hypothesis put forward by Marie-Jeanne Koffmann and Bernard Heuvelmans that a great ape—either of the pongid (orangutan) family or perhaps a cousin of Gigantopithecus—might have survived is shared by many Chinese investigators.

  One cannot simply brush aside these hairy creatures, anatomically different and behaviorally incompatible with any Homo sapiens. The list of reports keeps growing. New observations surface, sometimes from the same places. Twenty years after Professor Zhou Guoxing’s 1977 expedition, an article in China Daily describes a creature half-man half-ape, dubbed “bigfoot.” In September 1999,

  Skull of Homo erectus, Java. PHOTO: Author’s le

  Professor Zhou Guoxing. PHOTO: Courtesy of Prof. Zhou Guoxing

  a team of scientists, journalists and local worthies trekked deep into the Shennongjia Natural Reserve and found (40-centimeter [16-in]) tracks, chewed up corncobs, brown hair at the spot where a hunter had seen a strange “beast.”9 Yuan Zhenxin, a paleoanthropologist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences af rmed that the tracks were not those of a bear.

  Professor Zhou Guoxing remains doubtful as to the existence of the wild man in China. However, even though he might reject 95 percent of the evidence, he holds it necessary to study the remaining 5 percent.

  In China, as in the Caucasus, Tibet or Nepal, the professional explorer, faced with the mystery of the wild man, progresses at a snail’s pace and must learn to be content with minimal clues. The giant of the forest and the mountains has become rarer, although less so than the vegetal species that cover the summits of the Shennongjia, shrouded in mystical mists.

  Shennong is the name of a god-king. Shennong, the divine farm

  Shennong, the divine farmer. ILLUSTRATION: Author’s le er, creator of agriculture, invented, among other things, the axe, the hoe and the plow. The word jia means “scaffold,” which had to be built as a giant ladder, rising day by day to reach the summit of the mountain where grew the medicinal plants. After a year the subjects of God-King Shennong nally reached their goal. The king tasted all the plants and it is said that he discovered a tea that was the antidote to at least 70 toxic plants, which he tried on himself, all in the same day. As the

  father of Chinese medicine, he is also credited with the invention of acupuncture. The forest harbors splendid specimens of tulip trees, rising up to 40 meters (130 feet). Magni cent dove trees, Davidia involucrata, named after Father Armand David, sport large white bracts which surround owers looking like folded handkerchiefs. Groves of arrow bamboo, Pseudosasa japonica, ve to six meters (16–20 feet) sometimes create impassable curtains, providing shelter to animals and a treat to the giant panda. The metasequoia, or Chinese sequoia, rst identi ed in 1943, dates back to the Pleistocene. It is a living fossil, the only existing metasequoia reaching 50 to 60 meters (160–200 feet) in height.

  Why is there so much interest in the trees of the Shennongjia? Because the wild man lives in nature, and preferably in the forest; it nds there its subsistence as well as the air it breathes. Its environment—the terrain, the fauna, ora and people that surround it—is mine and yours to discover, humble researchers that we all are. This discovery shall be the reward of our quest.

  1 That book is S ll Living? (1983) by Myra S
hackley, Bri sh archaeologist and world traveler. The book speaks of the ye , the sasquatch and the enigma of the Neanderthal.

  2 Myra Shackley, ll Living? p.83

  3 Myra Shackley, op. cit., p.90.

  4 Suzanne Cachel, “Book Reviews” in Cryptozoology, vol.4, 1985, p.95.

  5 Frank E. Poirier et al, “The Evidence for Wildman in Hubei Province, People’s Republic of China,” Cryptozoology vol.2, Winter 1983, p. 25.

  6 François de Sarre, “La Théorie de la Bipédie Ini ale,” Bipédia, no. 26, Jan. 2008.

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

  8 This creature truly deserves to be called a wild man, for Heuvelmans describes it as “undoubtedly hominid.” For more details on this sub-species of Homo neanderthalensis, see L’Homme de Néandertal est toujours vivant.

  9 “Big search for ‘Bigfoot’ under way.” China Daily, Monday, December 6, 1996, p. 1.

  26. Conclusion

  Why is there such an interest in “monsters?” This question remains relevant today, in the age of science and transparency. The monster surfaces, settles in, ready to haunt us. We are ready to welcome it, eager to feel a shiver of fright. We are keen to see it, be it dinosaur, Loch Ness monster or yeti. The wild man has now morphed from abominable to friendly, thanks to Tintin in Tibet and a plethora of stories about bigfoot and other friendly giants. Friendly? Perhaps not so!

  In the Paci c Northwest, there are a number of reports of aggressive behaviors by sasquatch/bigfoot: attacking hunting Natives, pelting white loggers with big rocks, kidnapping women. The yeti is quite rightly feared: it can bring down yaks. And the almasty is also guilty of sexual harassment, the females being not the least enthusiastic in this matter.

  In their practice of violence, wild men seem to behave as proxies for the genus Homo. Some will suggest, in bitter irony, that this behavior is the proof of their close kinship with man, more precisely with our brutish prehistoric grandfather, Homo sapiens. It is as if, while humanity becomes more re ned, so would its more violent traits. That seems to be the theme of many a cave painting:

  The whole cave was a bone-yard, a gallery of animals in ight, so realistically depicted, so full of life, and so full of the horrible certainty of dying.1

  Such is the vision offered by the spellbinding images found in the caves of the Dordogne, in France, or on the island of Levkas, in Greece. It is on that island in the Ionian Sea that novelist Hammond Innes sets the eldwork of his hero, an anthropologist and a genius, but at the same time a charlatan. The researcher has discovered the genesis of human nature: an inborn aggression, enhanced by a sense of organization, which has allowed Cro-Magnon man to eliminate its Neanderthal competitor.

  After reading that excellent novel, more than 30 years ago, I remained stunned; the author is most convincing and draws on scienti c results (Leakey, Dart…). I was still young and idealistic; that novel shook me up. Since then, I have refused to accept the idyllic vision of the wild man as a kind and benevolent being.

  The impact of Homo sapiens on his environment should be viewed as honestly as possible. His adaptive capacity has made him a fearsome predator and conqueror. To survive, the wild man must remain well hidden. Serious people, especially scientists, nd its presence disturbing. It is too much of a hybrid for many. Some even pretend that it breeds by inseminating human beings! Its mode of locomotion is ill de ned, somewhere between biped and quadruped. What does it do? Does it live in groups? Probably not.

  It shows up so rarely that it is impossible to imagine its daily habits. Do they exhibit some cyclic regularity? It must be affected by the rhythm of the seasons, the changes in temperature and food availability. What about the seasonal patterns described by Peter Byrne in Oregon?

  In the Caucasus, the almasty/wild man has developed neighborly relations with peasants. Such cohabitation is rare, but it is equally unlikely and dif cult with other great apes, or with bears. Impulsively we sometimes wish closer contact with wilderness, only soon to reject it: “It is the bane of wild people to wish to live like civilized people, and similarly that of the civilized to wish to live in wilderness.”2 To wish to live in closer harmony with nature, so often cast aside, is nevertheless a legitimate goal.

  The wild man, a paragon of discretion, stands as a role model. In spite of its size, it treads lightly on the Earth, consuming only the food it needs. Even its footprints are becoming rarer.3 To tread lightly is also the philosophy of Native Americans, which my friend Ed Fusch, known as “Prospector Ed,” summarizes as follows: “Walk softly on the sands of time.”

  The wild man is close to the sorcerer, a creature of the night and of the shaman who communes with the spirits to cure the sick. Through their costumes, these gures merge with the hirsute giants. We have noted the role of the shaman and of the volunteer who dresses as a wild man. We saw that people hesitate to approach him, as he becomes, if only for a moment, the monster responsible for all the ills of the village and must be expelled, at least symbolically.

  In chapter 4, I told the story of the tree with two branches: one branch bearing delicious fruits, the other poisonous ones; how one day a sick villager picked a fruit which cured him, how the other villagers rushed to cut the other branch and how the tree died as a result.

  The wild man is part light, part shadow. When we look for it, are we not also seeking our own re ection, misplaced perhaps, if not entirely lost, as for vampires? Who would agree to lose his soul, if not through a pact with the Devil, out of despair, perversion or bravado?

  The wild man might be our invisible self, reappearing from time to time, undeniable and belonging to a realm of ever-present giants… or is it perhaps a divine messenger, a forerunner?

  While some seek enlightenment honorably, through initiatory practices, other plunge into the deep shadows of the forest where they hope to meet their fate under the shelter of the tree—some will see here an allusion to the Tree of Evolution.

  I have rediscovered some notes scribbled a dozen years ago about the Neanderthal, sometimes identi ed with the wild man. At that time, I wrote, “these unassuming creatures, free of nuances, fascinate us by their simplicity and their guileless behavior. They are examples of humanity under development, evolving towards sapiens, still without re nement, complication, or duplicity. Some claim that in appearance, dressed as we are today, Neanderthals would go unnoticed on the street.

  Speaking of duplicity, would those creatures be capable of guile or simulation? Would they breathe the fresh innocence of childhood? In any case, primitive creatures are incapable of the self-transformations performed by actors.”

  Might Neanderthal man be suf ciently evolved to pretend and calculate? If so, to what degree? It is certainly industrious and practical, but without pretense. Absolute and unre ned, it stands close to the wild man.

  1 Hammond Innes, Levkas Man, Alfred A. Knopf Publisher, New York, 1971, p. 286.

  2 René Laurenceau, Les Anges et les Démons, p. 11.

  3 And yet, when I look at these plaster casts that I have from Mt. St Helens in Washington, I nd that these feet look a lot like a variant of those of Homo sapiens or neanderthalensis. A large, robust and heavy creature!

  Postscript

  Poster for the play,

  Ye , Ye pas?

  PHOTO: Anima Theater

  I couldn’t possibly nish without alluding to the show Yeti, Yeti Pas? (“Is it or isn’t it there?” a simpli ed phonetic abbreviation of Y est-il ou n’y est-il pas), written in 2005 by two actor/puppet masters, Georgios Karakantzas and my nephew Gilles Debenat.

  In a brief explanatory text, the director, Christian Carrignon, wrote: “These different interpretations of the “Yeh-the”—Tibetan for “the unknown animal of the crags”—are like shards of broken glass which, when put back together, create a mirror in which we can see our own re ection. For it is through the manner in which we look at others that we discover ourselves.�
�

  As a spectator, I was already sold. Nevertheless, I wish to emphasize the literary, poetic and humoristic qualities of this imaginary spectacle/novel/voyage.

  What came to mind then were the words of Bernard Heuvelmans, relishing in advance his forthcoming, and last, major voyage: As for me, next year I shall be tracking the Gigantopithecus in Western Malaysia, Burma (now Myanmar) and in the Shennongjia hills in China; the Orang pendek in Sumatra; the Batutut in Borneo; and perhaps a Neanderthalian just about everywhere over there (although, as far as I am concerned, this issue is closed and no longer a topic of cryptozoological interest).”

  — Bernard Heuvelmans, pers. comm, April 1992.

  Appendix 1 From the Roof of the World to the Mesas of Arizona

  1. Merely random encounters? In 2007, I attended the 19th Montaigu Spring Book Fair, in Vendée, France. Among the many exhibitors, I picked the booth where journalist and author Gilles Van Grasdorff, an expert on Tibet, was signing his books. I bought his L’Attrapeur de Pluie (The Rain Catcher) “a long journey through the world of the Hopi and the Tibetans, where Life never stops,” as the author wrote when signing my book.

  I then spoke to him of my work on the wild man in North America and of my forthcoming book on the wild man in Asia. We spoke only brie y as people were lining up to have their books signed. Fortunately, “the Rain Catcher” kindly answered some of my questions.

  His book is the story of an encounter, one that may perhaps recur. In the beginning, two “worlds meet through two exceptional men, the sixteenth Karmapa and the Hopi chief of the Shungopovi Bear clan.”1

  The encounter occured in 1974 when the sixteenth Karmapa (a Buddhist spiritual leader, like the Dalai Lama) ful lled a prophecy attributed to Padmasambava, the founder of the most ancient lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, in the eighth century. That philosopher, theologian and magician was a medicine man capable of healing the darkest ways of human consciousness. He was also a prophet: