Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

In 1957, Alexander Georgievitch Pronin, a hydrologist at the Geographical Research Institute of Leningrad University, participated in an expedition to the Pamirs, for the purpose of mapping glaciers. On August 2, 1957, while his team was investigating the Fedchenko glacier, Pronin hiked into the valley of the Balyandkiik River. Shackley (1983, p. 120) stated: “at noon he noticed a figure standing on a rocky cliff about 500 yards above him and the same distance away. His first reaction was surprise, since this area was known to be uninhabited, and his second was that the creature was not human. It resembled a man but was very stooped. He watched the stocky figure move across the snow, keeping its feet wide apart, and he noted that its forearms were longer than a human’s and it was covered with reddish grey hair.” Pronin saw the creature again three days later, walking upright. Since this incident, there have been numerous wildman sightings in the Pamirs, and members of various expeditions have photographed and taken casts of footprints (Shackley 1983, pp. 122–126).

We shall now consider reports about the Almas from the Caucasus region. According to testimony from villagers of Tkhina, on the Mokvi River, a female Almas was captured there during the nineteenth century, in the forests of Mt. Zaadan. For three years, she was kept imprisoned, but then became domesticated and was allowed to live in a house. She was called Zana. Shackley (1983, p. 112) stated: “Her skin was a greyish-black colour, covered with reddish hair, longer on her head than elsewhere. She was capable of inarticulate cries but never developed a language. She had a large face with big cheek bones, muzzle-like prognathous jaw and large eyebrows, big white teeth and a ‘fierce expression.’” Eventually Zana, through sexual relations with a villager, had children. Some of Zana’s grandchildren were seen by Boris Porshnev in 1964. In her account of Porshnev’s investigations, Shackley (1983, p. 113) noted: “The grandchildren, Chalikoua and Taia, had darkish skin of rather negroid appearance, with very prominent chewing muscles and extra strong jaws.” Porshnev also interviewed villagers who as children had been present at Zana’s funeral in the 1880s.

In the Caucasus region, the Almas is sometimes called Biaban-guli. In 1899, K. A. Satunin, a Russian zoologist, spotted a female Biaban-guli in the Talysh hills of the southern Caucasus. He stated that the creature had “fully human movements” (Shackley 1983, p. 109). The fact that Satunin was a well-known zoologist makes his report particularly significant.

In 1941, V. S. Karapetyan, a lieutenant colonel of the medical service of the Soviet army, performed a direct physical examination of a living wildman captured in the Dagestan autonomous republic, just north of the Caucasus mountains. Karapetyan said: “I entered a shed with two members of the local authorities. When I asked why I had to examine the man in a cold shed and not in a warm room, I was told that the prisoner could not be kept in a warm room. He had sweated in the house so profusely that they had had to keep him in the shed. I can still see the creature as it stood before me, a male, naked and bare-footed. And it was doubtlessly a man, because its entire shape was human. The chest, back, and shoulders, however, were covered with shaggy hair of a dark brown colour. This fur of his was much like that of a bear, and 2 to 3 centimeters [1 inch] long. The fur was thinner and softer below the chest. His wrists were crude and sparsely covered with hair. The palms of his hands and soles of his feet were free of hair. But the hair on his head reached to his shoulders partly covering his forehead. The hair on his head, moreover, felt very rough to the hand. He had no beard or moustache, though his face was completely covered with a light growth of hair. The hair around his mouth was also short and sparse. The man stood absolutely straight with his arms hanging, and his height was above the average—about 180 cm [almost 5 feet 11 inches]. He stood before me like a giant, his mighty chest thrust forward. His fingers were thick, strong and exceptionally large. On the whole, he was considerably bigger than any of the local inhabitants. His eyes told me nothing. They were dull and empty—the eyes of an animal. And he seemed to me like an animal and nothing more” (Sanderson 1961, pp. 295–296). Significantly, the creature had lice of a kind different from those that infect humans. It is reports like this that have led scientists such as British anthropologist Myra Shackley and Soviet anatomist Dr. Zh. I. Kofman to conclude that the Almas may represent a relict population of Neanderthals or perhaps even Homo erectus (Shackley 1983, p. 114). What happened to the wildman of Dagestan? According to published accounts, he was shot by his Soviet military captors as they retreated before the advancing German army.