Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

In 1940, Wang Zelin, a graduate of the biology department of Northwestern University in Chicago, was able to directly see a wildman shortly after it was shot to death by hunters. Wang was driving from Baoji, in Shanxi Province, to Tianshui, in Gansu Province, when he heard gunfire ahead of him. He got out of the car to satisfy his curiosity and saw a corpse. It was a female creature, six and a half feet tall and covered with a coat of thick greyish-red hair about one and a quarter inches long. The hair on its face was shorter. The cheek bones were prominent, and the lips jutted out. The hair on the head was about one foot long. According to Wang, the creature looked like a reconstruction of the Chinese Homo erectus (Yuan and Huang 1979, p. 57; Shackley 1983, pp. 79–82).

Ten years later, another scientist, Fun Jinquan, a geologist, saw some living wildmen. Zhou Guoxing stated: “With the help of local guides, he watched, at a safe distance, two local Wildmen in the mountain forest near Baoji County, Shanxi Province, in the spring of 1950. They were mother and son, the smaller one being 1.6 meters [5.25 feet] in height. Both looked human” (Zhou, G. 1982, p. 14).

In 1957, a middle-school teacher of biology in Zhejiang province obtained the hands and feet of a “manbear” killed by local peasants. Zhou Guoxing wrote: “In December 1980, I went to Sui Chang to study these hand and foot specimens. I concluded beyond any doubt, that they belong to a higher primate, and have morphological traits of both ape and monkey. The eyewitnesses thought that they had belonged to a Wildman, or of a manlike ‘strange animal,’ but after examining the specimens, I determined that they were not the hands and feet of a Wildman. They might possibly belong to an enormous monkey (perhaps of a species of macaque not previously recorded in this area). . . . There is no denying the possibility that they came from an unknown primate in the Jiolong Mountain area” (Zhou, G. 1982, p. 18).

Talk of the existence of an enormous monkey, previously unknown, raises interesting questions about the Beijing Homo erectus finds. Beijing man, as generally portrayed in textbooks and films, was quite human and almost civilized, a Middle Pleistocene hunter, fire maker, and cave dweller. But as several dissenting scientists noted, most of the Beijing man fossils were thick, bigbrowed partial skulls with smashed braincases. They appeared to represent not a relatively advanced protohuman but rather the unfortunate animallike prey of some more intelligent hominid. Perhaps the large, hitherto unknown species of macaque posited by Zhou in order to explain away some modern wildman evidence also inhabited China during the Middle Pleistocene, and the smashed skulls in the Zhoukoudian cave belonged to it. Or perhaps the broken skulls of Zhoukoudian belonged to the Homo erectus-like creature described above by Wang Zelin.

In 1961, workers building a road through the heavily forested Xishuang Banna region of Yunnan province in southernmost China reported killing a humanlike female primate. The creature was 1.2–1.3 meters (about 4 feet) tall and covered with hair. It walked upright, and according to the eyewitness reports, its hands, ears, and breasts were like those of a female human. The Chinese Academy of Sciences sent a team to investigate, but they were not able to obtain any physical evidence. Some suggested that the workers had come upon a gibbon. But Zhou Guoxing stated: “The present author recently visited a newsman who took part in that investigation. He stated that the animal which had been killed was not a gibbon, but an unknown animal of human shape. It is worth noting that, over the past 2 years or so, some people in the western border areas of Yunnan Province say that the above-mentioned kind of Wildman still move about, and that another one has since been killed” (Zhou, G. 1982, pp. 15–16).

In 1976, six cadres from the Shennongjia forestry region in Hubei province were driving at night down the highway near the village of Chunshuya, between Fangxian county and Shennongjia. On the way, they encountered a “strange tailless creature with reddish fur” (Yuan and Huang 1979, p. 56). Fortunately, it stood still long enough for five of the people to get out of the car and look at it from a distance of only a few feet, while the driver kept his headlights trained on it. The observers were certain that it was not a bear or any other creature with which they were familiar. They reported the incident in a telegram to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Peking.