Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

Miller and Caccioli (1986, p. 82) reported that they received possible Yeti chest hairs from an elderly woman of Khumjung village in Tibet: “We were told that her son was carrying potatoes along a trail in 1978, and was allegedly attacked by a Yeti. The Yeti was described as a large male, nearly 7 feet tall, and covered with dark and reddish hair. During the course of the attack, the young man took his potato hoe and struck the Yeti across the chest. The Yeti fled into the higher mountain region. The young man struggled back to Khumjung village to his mother, and described his encounter with the Yeti. His wounds were serious, and he later died.”

Figure 10.1. Areas where Yetis have been sighted in Central Asia and the Himalayas are shaded with vertical black bars (after Shackley 1983, pp. 78–79).

Figure 10.2. Drawing of a Mongolian Almas from a 19th-century Tibetan book (Shackley 1983, p. 97).

 

10.8 The Almas of Central Asia

The Sasquatch and the Yeti, from the descriptions available, are large and very apelike. But there is another wildman, the Almas, which seems smaller and more human. Reports of the Almas are concentrated in an area extending from Mongolia in the north, south through the Pamirs, and then westward into the Caucasus region. Similar reports come from Siberia and the far northeast parts of the Russian republic.

Early in the fifteenth century, Hans Schiltenberger was captured by the Turks and sent to the court of Tamerlane, who placed him in the retinue of a Mongol prince named Egidi. After returning to Europe in 1427, Schiltenberger wrote about his experiences. In his book, he described some mountains, apparently the Tien Shan range in Mongolia: “The inhabitants say that beyond the mountains is the beginning of a wasteland which lies at the edge of the earth. No one can survive there because the desert is populated by so many snakes and tigers. In the mountains themselves live wild people, who have nothing in common with other human beings. A pelt covers the entire body of these creatures. Only the hands and face are free of hair. They run around in the hills like animals and eat foliage and grass and whatever else they can find. The lord of the territory made Egidi a present of a couple of forest people, a man and a woman. They had been caught in the wilderness, together with three untamed horses the size of asses and all sorts of other animals which are not found in German lands and which I cannot therefore put a name to” (Shackley 1983, p. 93).

Myra Shackley (1983, pp. 93 – 94) found Schiltenberger’s account especially credible for two reasons: “First, Schiltenberger reports that he saw the creatures with his own eyes. Secondly, he refers to Przewalski horses, which were only rediscovered by Nicholai Przewalski in 1881. . . . Przewalski himself saw

‘wildmen’ in Mongolia in 1871.”

A drawing of an Almas is found in a nineteenth-century Mongol compendium of medicines derived from various plants and animals. The text next to the picture reads: “The wildman lives in the mountains, his origins close to that of the bear, his body resembles that of man, and he has enormous strength. His meat may be eaten to treat mental diseases and his gall cures jaundice” (Shackley 1983, p. 98).

Shackley (1983, p. 98) noted: “The book contains thousands of illustrations of various classes of animals (reptiles, mammals and amphibia), but not one single mythological animal such as are known from similar medieval European books. All the creatures are living and observable today. There seems no reason at all to suggest that the Almas did not exist also and illustrations seem to suggest that it was found among rocky habitats, in the mountains.”

In 1937, Dordji Meiren, a member of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, saw the skin of an Almas in a monastery in the Gobi desert. The lamas were using it as a carpet in some of their rituals. Shackley (1983, pp. 103 –104) stated: “The hairs on the skin were reddish and curly. . . . The features [of the face] were hairless, the face had eyebrows, and the head still had long disordered hair. Fingers and toes were in a good state of preservation and the nails were similar to human nails.”