Living Ape-Men

Wildmen of China

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"Chinese historical documents, and many city and town annals, contain abundant records of Wildman, which are given various names," states Zhou Guoxing of the Beijing Museum of Natural History (Zhou, G. 1982, p. 13).

Two thousand years ago, the poet-statesman Qu Yuan made many references to Shangui (mountain ogres) in his verses. Li Yanshow, a historian who lived during the T'Ang Dynasty (A.D. 618-907), stated that the forests of Hubei province sheltered a band of wildmen. Wildmen also appeared in the writings of Li Shizhen, a pharmacologist of the Ming Dynasty (A.D. 1368-1644). In the fifty first volume of his massive work on medical ingredients, he described several species of humanoid creatures, including one named Fei-fei.

Li wrote: "'Feifei,' which are called 'manbear,' are also found in the mountainous areas in west Shu (part of Sichuan Province today) and Chu division, where people skin them and eat their palms. The You mountain of Sha county, Fujian province, sees the same ones, standing about one zhang (equal to 3.1 meters [just over 10 feet]) in height and smiling to the people they come across, and are called 'shandaren' (men as big as mountains), 'wildmen,' or 'shanxiao"' (Zhou, G. 1982, p. 13).

In the eighteenth century, the Chinese poet Yuan Mei made reference to strange creatures inhabiting the wild regions of Shanxi province, calling them "monkeylike, yet not monkeylike" (Yuan and Huang 1979, p. 57).

According to Zhou: "Even today, in the area of Fang County, Hubei Province, there are still legends about 'maoren' (hairy men) or 'wildmen.' A local chronicle, about 200 years old, says that 'the Fang mountain lying 40 li (2 li equals one kilometer [.62 mile]) south to the county town is precipitous and full of holes, where live many maoren, about one zhang high and hair-coated. They often come down to eat human beings and chickens and dogs, and seize those who fight with them.' A lantern on which there is an ornament of a 'maoren' figure was unearthed in this area during an archaeological excavation. It has been dated at 2,000 years" (Zhou, G. 1982, pp. 13-14).

There have been many other reports of wildmen from the Hubei province in central China. In 1922, a militiaman is said to have captured a wildman, but there are no further records of this incident (Poirier et al. 1983, p. 32).

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 Home 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, big-browed partial skulls with smashed braincases. They appeared to represent not a relatively advanced protohuman but rather the unfortunate animal-like 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.

Over the years, Academy officials had received many similar reports from the same region of Hubei province. So when they heard about this incident, they decided to thoroughly investigate the matter. A scientific expedition consisting of more than 100 members proceeded to Hubei province. They collected physical evidence, in the form of hair, footprints, and feces, and recorded sightings by the local inhabitants (Yuan and Huang 1979). Subsequent research has added to these results.

Altogether, more than a thousand footprints have been found in Hubei province, some more than 19 inches long (Poirier etal. 1983, p. 34). Over 100 hairs have been collected, the longest measuring 21 inches. Some of the hairs were supplied by persons who claimed to have seen wildmen; others were taken from trees against which wildmen were said to have rubbed. Frank E. Poirier, an anthropologist at Ohio State University, reported (Poirier etal. 1983,p. 33): "The hair was studied by the Hubei Provincial Medical College and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing. The general consensus is that the hair belongs to a higher primate (monkey, ape, or human)." Some have sought to explain sightings of wildmen in the Shennonglla region of Hubei province as encounters with the rare golden monkey, which inhabits the same area. The golden monkey might very well account for reports of creatures glimpsed for a moment at a great distance. But consider the case of Pang Gensheng, a local commune leader, who was confronted in the forest by a wildman.

Pang, who stood face to face with the creature, at a distance of five feet for about an hour, said: "He was about seven feet tall, with shoulders wider than a man's, a sloping forehead, deep-set eyes and a bulbous nose with slightly upturned nostrils. He had sunken cheeks, ears like a man's but bigger, and round eyes, also bigger than a man's. Hisjawjutted out and he had protruding lips. His front teeth were as broad as a horse's. His eyes were black. His hair was dark brown, more than afoot long and hung loosely over his shoulders. His whole face, except for the nose and ears, was covered with short hairs. His arms hung down to below his knees. He had big hands with fingers about six inches long and thumbs only slightly separated from the fingers. He didn't have a tail and the hair on his body was short. He had thick thighs, shorter than the lower part of his leg. He walked upright with his legs apart. His feet were each about 12 inches long and half that broad — broader in front and narrow behind, with splayed toes" (Yuan and Huang 1979, pp. 58-59).

Zhou Guoxing has suggested that the wildman of Hubei province might be a relict population of Gigantopithecus, a large apelike hominid that inhabited southern China during the Middle Pleistocene. Zhou noted that in the forests of Hubei province some types of trees from the Tertiary have survived, as have the panda and other mammals from the Middle Pleistocene (Zhou, G. 1982, p. 22).

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From: Forbidden Archaeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race, Michael A. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson (Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing, 1996).