Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

Reports of such creatures also come from southern Africa. Pascal Tassy (1983, pp. 132–133), of the Laboratory of Vertebrate and Human Paleontology, wrote in a review of Heuvelmans’s Les Bêtes Humaines d’Afrique (which has a chapter on relict australopithecines): “Philip V. Tobias, now on the Board of Directors of the International Society of Cryptozoology, once told Heuvelmans that one of his colleagues had set traps to capture living australopithecines.” Tobias, from South Africa, is a recognized authority on Australopithecus.

According to standard views, the last australopithecines perished approximately 750,000 years ago, and Homo erectus died out around 200,000 years ago.

The Neanderthals, it is said, vanished about 35,000 years ago, and since then fully modern humans alone have existed throughout the entire world. Yet many sightings of different kinds of wildmen in various parts of the world strongly challenge the standard view. Also, recent fossil skulls reportedly display anomalously primitive features. For example, Nature (1908, vol. 77, p. 587) published a report by Dr. K. Stolyhwo on a recent Neanderthal skull, found as part of a skeleton in a tomb that also contained a suit of chain armor and iron spearheads. Stolyhwo said the skull was similar to the Spy Neanderthal skull.

10.12 Mainstream Science and Wildman Reports

Despite all the evidence we have presented, most recognized authorities in anthropology and zoology decline to discuss the existence of wildmen. If they mention wildmen at all, they rarely present the really strong evidence for their existence, focusing instead on the reports least likely to challenge their disbelief.

Skeptical scientists say that no one has found any bones of wildmen; nor, they say, has anyone produced a single body, dead or alive. But as we have seen, hand and foot bones of wildmen, and even a head, have been collected. Competent persons report having examined bodies of wildmen. And there are also a number of accounts of capture. That none of this physical evidence has made its way into museums and other scientific institutions may be taken as a failure of the process for gathering and preserving evidence. The operation of what we could call a knowledge filter tends to keep evidence tinged with disrepute outside official channels.

However, some scientists with solid reputations, such as Krantz, Napier, Shackley, Porshnev, and others, have found in the available evidence enough reason to conclude that wildmen do in fact exist, or, at least, that the question of their existence is worthy of serious study.

Myra Shackley wrote to our researcher Steve Bernath on December 4, 1984: “As you know, this whole question is highly topical, and there has been an awful lot of correspondence and publication flying around on the scene. Opinions vary, but I guess that the commonest would be that there is indeed sufficient evidence to suggest at least the possibility of the existence of various unclassified manlike creatures, but that in the present state of our knowledge it is impossible to comment on their significance in any more detail. The position is further complicated by misquotes, hoaxing, and lunatic fringe activities, but a surprising number of hardcore anthropologists seem to be of the opinion that the matter is very worthwhile investigating.”

So there is some scientific recognition of the wildman evidence, but it seems to be largely a matter of privately expressed views, with little or no official recognition.

Always Something New Out of Africa

Always something new out of Africa. –Pliny the Elder (a.d. 27–79)

The controversies surrounding Java man and Beijing man, what to speak of Castenedolo man and the European eoliths, have long since subsided. As for the disputing scientists, most of them are in their graves, their bones on the way to disintegration or fossilization. But today Africa, the land of Australopithecus and Homo habilis, remains an active battlefield, with scientists skirmishing to establish their views on human origins.

Only in the later decades of the twentieth century did paleoanthropologists shift the main focus of their discipline from Europe and Asia to Africa. But the importance of Africa was foreseen by Darwin (1871, p. 199), who wrote in The Descent of Man: “In each great region of the world the living mammals are closely related to the extinct species of the same region. It is, therefore, probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee; and as these two species are man’s nearest allies, it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere.”