The Himalayan Codex

by Bill Schutt

  Our Prince of Pandaya, and his kingdom’s mistake, is fictional. But a place much like it was recorded by ancient historians to have existed near East India. There, according to legend, a royal harbor city was lost during a great flood—approximately where we have let Pliny’s expedition find it (or rather, its ruins). Pliny the Elder made mention of the capital city (which he sometimes called Korki Pattinam) while trying to compile reports about the hidden realm of the “Chera” kingdom (our Cerae). A generation earlier, Augustus Caesar received an emissary from the still-intact city in 13 b.c. The historical Pandion (Pandyan)/Tamil capital was shifted after the destruction. This surviving remnant, whose people were said to have been descendants of Hercules, moved south to the island of Sri Lanka (Taprobane) and were known much later as the “Tamil Tigers.”

  In the time of Emperor Augustus, the people of the doomed city were known as a source of luxuriant textiles, fleece, and spices. Pliny the Elder mentioned a wealthy “Pandu” port that belonged to the “Chera,” of whom he wrote that he was unable to learn anything. (Bear in mind that a reason for multiple spellings of the same place, or people, is inevitable in texts that were bound to pick up variations when preserved mainly by recopying, mostly by hand and by monks, throughout several centuries and across different languages.) A contemporary of Pliny, Periplus, referred to an independent district of the Tamil ancestors (Pandu), which, as a civilization, fell under the mysterious “Chera/Chola/Cerothra” (whom we simply call Cerae). In a.d. 640, the Chinese explorer Yuan Chwang described this same mysterious (Chola) region, home to a once-powerful trading city wiped from the world, unpopulated except for a few lingering savages who lived a sorrowful, troglodyte existence.

  There really was, in China, a belief that legendary apelike creatures in the mountains possessed flesh and bones that, if consumed, held curative powers. This, of course, became the basis for the ill-fated expedition into which our character, Wang, was drafted. Additionally, certain fossil remains from apelike denizens of the East actually have led to speculation about lost or undiscovered species as the origin of the still ongoing Yeren and Yeti “sightings.” The abduction of poor Dr. Wang by something akin to a cannibal army in 1946 is thus not entirely beyond reason.

  In 1935, Dutch paleontologist Gustav von Koenigswald came across a yellowish molar among the “dragon bones” for sale in a Hong Kong pharmacy. Traditional Chinese medicine had long maintained that certain fossilized remains possessed curative properties when ground into powder and ingested. Over the next several decades, researchers recovered several hundred similar teeth and even a few of the lower jawbones that held them. Eventually, and although no cranial or postcranial bones were recovered, anthropologists named the new primate Gigantopithicus because of its immense size. Initially thought to be a human relative, scientists determined the creature to be an ape, most closely related to modern orangutans. Certainly the most striking feature of Gigantopithicus blackii was its size, with males reaching perhaps ten feet in height and weighing in at nearly 1,200 pounds, actually outsizing MacCready’s “Morlocks.” Females were significantly smaller, with a body mass that might have been half that of males—a textbook example of a phenomenon known as sexual dimorphism.

  Although Gigantopithicus was quite possibly the largest primate that ever lived, it also exemplifies how great body size can become a detriment to a species over time. For at least a million years, as many as three species of Gigantopithicus lived in the forests of southern China, India, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Evidence from their teeth and jaws indicates that their diets consisted of an assortment of plants, including fruit, leaves, roots, and possibly bamboo. To support their massive bodies, Gigantopithicus would have needed to consume large amounts of plant matter, but when glaciers began advancing down from the north around 100,000 years ago, the tropical forests where Asia’s apes thrived gradually gave way to cooler, drier savannas. It has been hypothesized that these altered environments could not provide enough food for the giant forest dwellers and they eventually died out (aided, perhaps, by Homo erectus, the apparent ancestors of modern humans).

  Similar examples of the disadvantages resulting from large body size can be found elsewhere and throughout history. For example, in South America, changing environmental conditions around ten thousand years ago are thought to have been a contributing factor in the extinction of the giant sloth, Megatherium. Additionally, since they fed exclusively on blood, Desmodus draculae, the large vampire bat inhabiting our novel Hell’s Gate, likely went extinct after the Pleistocene megafauna upon which they preyed (possibly including ground sloths) disappeared.

  For the purpose of this story, we hypothesized what might have occurred if Tibetan branches of some unknown lineage of a once very diversified primate family tree (an ancestor or side branch of Homo erectus or some yet unknown group, perhaps) had come into contact with a substance that allowed them to more quickly adapt to harsh local conditions. This boost to the process of natural selection resulted in the fictional Ceran/Morlock classes (with their thick, insulating fur and masterful climbing ability) encountered by Pliny the Elder and R. J. MacCready. What our fictionalized version of the Roman historian and naturalist characterized as “the key to life itself” was also responsible for the other strange species—like predaceous “snowflakes” and lethal grass mimics.

  The Yeti or abominable snowman (Pliny’s Cerae or Mac’s Morlock species) is a giant, apelike biped, said to inhabit the Himalayan region of Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan. Although the scientific community considers it to be entirely a legend, the Yeti is arguably the most famous creature in all of cryptozoology. The term abominable snowman originated in 1921 with Calcutta newspaper reporter Hendry Newman. Evidently, Newman mistranslated a Tibetan colloquialism metch kangmi (“filthy snowman”)—which was used to describe something rumored to have been seen during a reconnaissance mission to Mount Everest earlier that year. The resulting moniker has had universal appeal, though probably not for primatologists and other scientists attempting to determine if such creatures actually exist. Although there have been hundreds of reported Yeti sightings, photographs of strange footprints in the snow, and “physical evidence” like hair (determined to be from known species, including mountain goats) and even a famed skullcap (also a mountain goat), there is currently no tangible evidence that these creatures have any footing in reality.

  The Yeren, recovered by our Dr. Wang Tse-lin, is one of the legendary “Wildman of Shennongjia,” reputed to live a peaceful existence in the mountainous forests of Hubei, in eastern central China. Reportedly covered by either red or white hair, the Yeren is said to stand between six and eight feet tall. Cryptozoologists have speculated that it may be a relative of Gigantopithicus or a large species of ground-dwelling orangutan.

  The real-life Wang Tselin, also a Chicago-schooled Chinese biologist, wrote a detailed report about an examination he claimed to have performed on a Yeren that had been shot and killed in China’s Gansu region in 1940. He said the specimen was a nursing female, approximately six and a half feet tall, and covered in dense, grayish-red hair. According to the scientist, the specimen’s “face was narrow with deep-set eyes” and it reminded him most of models he had seen of the famous “Peking Man” (a Chinese example of the modern human ancestor Homo erectus, thought to have lived between 1.9 million and 230,000 years ago [see Smithsonian Institution: http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-erectus]). Locals reportedly told Tselin that a pair of Yeren had been observed in the area for more than a month. Unfortunately, there was no follow-up to this story (no photographs, no physical evidence), and it has been difficult to track down additional information on the scientist himself. As the Chinese civil war heated up, he seems simply to have disappeared into history (probably as a casualty). We have taken the liberty of fictionalizing Wang Tselin and his Himalayan adventure, and also given him a more hopeful future.

  As with the Yeti and its North American counterpart, “Bigfoot,” there is cur
rently no physical evidence that the Yeren (as described by Wang) actually exists. Most skeptics believe that Yeren sightings are the result of misidentification. There is strong agreement among scientists from a variety of fields that any suggestion of a Yeti/Bigfoot/Gigantopithicus connection is untenable unless tangible, repeatable laboratory evidence becomes available—such as hair roots with distinctive DNA that does not turn out to come from goats and known species of monkeys (which, so far, has universally been the case).

  Our suggestion (in the Epilogue) of a Morlock diaspora was invented to fit certain anecdotal events, actually recorded as far away as Russia. That the Kremlin would be willing (as in this novel) to send military helicopter crews out to investigate rumors of strange creatures is not far-fetched. In the May 29, 2014, issue of the Huffington Post, David Moye reported on a 1959 event involving the Russian military: “Mysterious Deaths of College Students Blamed on Russian Yeti.” If nothing else, the article and the documentary on which Moye was reporting make for interesting reading and viewing.

  While Mac and Yanni have become accidental cryptozoologists, with the exception of very large squids, cryptozoology (certainly in the case of Yeren and their kin) has the curious distinction of being the only field of exploration that has yet to prove that its subject matter actually exists.

  Nonetheless, there are a wide assortment of increasingly fascinating—and surprisingly recently coexisting—side branches of our tree of human lineages to choose from as ancestors to the inhabitants of our story’s mist valley. The origins of humans, Neanderthals, and other human cousins is not a single, classical poster image of descent leading from an apelike fossil called “Lucy” to something resembling “Peking Man,” to Neanderthals, and finally to fully erect “Cro-Magnon Man.” It makes for a visually interesting T-shirt depicting apes walking from left to right along a “ladder of evolution” to become ape-men and erect-walking humans (leading to erect-walking robots). It’s a simple and tidy and popular depiction, but it is also entirely wrong.

  The ascent of man is not a ladder with a few missing links inserted among the rungs. We, and the few apes that remain on the planet today, are merely the surviving branches of a once (and not very long ago) very luxuriant bush. The lost valley in the maze of the eastern Himalayas is, in this story, populated by one of those missing branches, isolated in a place where the actual process of evolutionary change could be altered.

  The complexity of the human family bush is much greater, and more interesting, than previous generations have supposed. The emerging possibility of a human cousin closely related to Peking Man, surviving into recent times in the isolation of an Indonesian island, enhanced the sort of speculative journey we have taken into the isolation of a lost east Himalayan world, as isolated as any island.

  In real life, as in the journey we have all just taken together, the genetic distances between our human branch and branches that used to be called “animals” or “ape-men” are being diminished and even blurred. The lessons from studies of ancient DNA indicate a surprising amount of interbreeding, for example, between Charles Knight’s Neanderthal “cave men” and “archaic humans” from Africa, also between Neanderthals and a species or race traditionally graded as distinctly nonhuman (Homo erectus, “Peking Man”).

  Relevant to the relationship between Severus and a fictional race that looked so physically different as to seem nonhuman, the list of ancient hybrid events is growing: South Africa’s Homo naledi, the “mystery human,” appears to have an ancestry dating back more than two million years (close to the origin of Homo erectus). To judge from their fossils, they looked simultaneously very human yet carried a mixture of less human features even more ancient than H. erectus. Another branch—Homo floresiensis, popularly dubbed “the Hobbit people”—resembled a miniature and more primitive version of “Peking Man,” surviving in parts of Indonesia into very recent times (probably post–Ice Age and even into our Bronze Age). Scarcely had the 2003 “Hobbit” discovery begun to be tested and resolved when yet another branch was unearthed: Denisovan Man, located primarily in Siberia. Though it is Neanderthal-like in appearance, approximately 8 percent of Denisovan DNA seems to have been derived from interbreeding with still another new (presently unidentified) human species from Asia—a branch genetically distinct from both Neanderthals and modern humans. Researchers believe that in the Middle East Neanderthal interbreeding with our modern, more thinly boned ancestors took place along the Jordan Valley.

  In the November 2016 special edition of Scientific American: The Story of Us, Kate Wong and Michael Hammer commented at length on these truly fascinating discoveries. Wong noted that the “mystery human” of South Africa “exhibits a mishmash of traits associated with various hominin species,” including some skull similarities to the more apelike Australopithecus, commonly known as “Lucy.” And yet there is evidence of burial practices and the use of fire, possibly dating back as many as three million years, almost as far back in time as “Lucy.” If so, these people could even oust australopithecines from the lineage leading to us (and, in our fiction, to the Cerae). “It may be,” Wong continued, “[that] H. naledi originated millions of years ago and managed to persist across the ages unchanged, like a coelacanth, overlapping with other Homo ‘species,’ including H. sapiens. . . . Possibly, H. naledi interbred with our ancestors and contributed DNA to the modern gene pool, like Neanderthals and Denisovians did.”

  “The roots of modern humans,” added Hammer, “trace back to not just a single ancestral population in Africa but to populations throughout the world. Although archaic humans have often been seen as rivals of modern humans, scientists now must seriously consider the possibility that they were the secret of H. sapiens’ success.”

  And thus the picture is more complex than you might have supposed. Though it is extremely doubtful that a lost world of Yeti-like Cerae or Morlocks is living and awaiting discovery, we will not be the two people in the room who drop dead from shock if a twig on the human bush looking even stranger than Indonesia’s “Hobbits” or South Africa’s “Mystery Man” is found to have survived in some remote place, into the Bronze Age or even into Pliny’s time.

  Elephants, mammoths, and their cousins have a similarly complex ancestry, now winnowed down to only two recognized species: the Indian and African elephants.

  Mutations of the kind we have described are not entirely unknown. Nearly four thousand years ago, a pygmy elephant smaller than a Shetland pony inhabited the island of Crete in the Mediterranean, contributing to the idea of the Cerae’s mini-mammoths. In Alaska and along some of its offshore islands, the northwest mammoths were still alive when Egypt’s pyramids were being built. Among the last of them was a “pygmy” species.

  There is also real-life precedent for the “twinning” effect on mammoth appendages, in Mac’s time. At the Explorers Club in New York City, visitors to the main lecture hall can examine the fully adult, fully functional-over-a-lifetime quadruple tusks of an extinct woolly mammoth (whether this was a single mutation or a previously unknown type of mammoth continues to be debated). On public display in the same city, at the Ripley’s museum on Forty-Second Street, are the preserved remains of an elephant that grew to adulthood in Botswana, and lived until 2005 with a mutation that produced two fully functional trunks (both confirmed, by DNA tests, as belonging to the same individual). The mutation was clearly imperfect, and no one knows for sure whether the two-trunked elephant would have lived to adulthood if not maintained in a “preserve.” In the opinion of most veterinarians, the mutation was an impediment. We have bypassed this problem in the novel by presenting as if true the mythology of fantastical Himalayan cure-alls—which, in the world of the Cerae and the Morlocks, influenced the tempo and mode of evolution, rendering imperfect mutations perfect. Thus “little Dumbo’s” two trunks become the evolutionary equivalent of giving our human ancestors two hands with opposable thumbs.

  As depicted in the Yanni encounters, elephants really are known to
have a language at least as complex as the communications between cetaceans (whales and dolphins). Most of the communication has been recorded at low frequencies, beyond human hearing. In Africa, actual “tribal dialects” have been identified among these amazing giants. Once again, a group of animals requires us to ask new questions about the identification of intelligent species, and whether we humans really are the only potentially intelligent creatures now being evolved on this planet.

  Sadly (as noted in a September 29, 2016, census summary in the British science journal Nature), elephant populations are being decimated. Worse than decimated. Between 2006 and 2015, ivory poaching alone had dropped the population of African elephants by 111,000, to only 415,000 individuals. And hence, our fitful moments of wishful thinking, on behalf of elephants: In our fable, living with a microbe that modifies life while reducing the frequent evolutionary mistakes in the raw material of natural selection (random variation), the Morlock misfortune became their failure to notice that brain growth was being enhanced for the enslaved and environmentally stressed mammoths.

  When imagining the architecture of a post–Stone Age culture in the eastern Himalayas—where mountains and valleys are being pushed up by the collision of India with Asia—we had to invent architecture with earthquake resistance in mind. As with human architecture, much of the inspiration for long-lived structures comes from nature. One of the most amazing borrowed-from-nature structures on earth is Gaudí’s nature- and forest-based design for the La Sagrada Familia Basílica in Barcelona. Strong by definition, Cerae and Morlock structures needed more flexibility than stone and mortar, and had to be rendered conceivable based on local building materials, including plant matter and ice.