Nearly every region in the world has a Wildman figure, a creature somewhere between animal and human which inhabits the remote areas people don’t live – think of the North American sasquatch and the Himalayan yeti, Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman.
In the inhospitable mountain regions of western Mongolia, there exists a similar creature, known simply as the almas.
Amongst all Wildman figures on earth, the almas is unique. While most exist only in legend, or perhaps in grainy, inconclusive photos, the almas have been documented and observed for centuries, not only by ordinary people, but by scientists and explorers, government officials and military personnel.
It has been said that the almas “stands at the crossroad of science and legend.”
The question is, where does this crossroad lead?
The Almas of Mongolia
For as long as anyone in western Mongolia can remember, a creature known as the almas has been a part of local culture.
It is said to be a terrifying beast, standing 5-6 ½ feet tall and walking upright on two legs, covered in thick reddish-brown or black hair everywhere but its hands and face, with a huge, muscular body giving the almas enormous strength and incredible running and climbing abilities. Its face, meanwhile, is similar to that of a human, but with a protruding forehead and eyebrow ridges, a wide, flat nose, and powerful jaws.
Across the region, almas appear in many well-known and often repeated urban legends. One of the most popular tells of a young man named Samdan, who, the story goes, was kidnapped by a female almas and imprisoned in her cave. There, she licked him every night until he grew his own coat of thick hair all over his body, at which point she forced him to father a child with her.
Eventually, having gained the trust of his captor, Samdan was able to escape, fleeing through thick forest back towards his village. As he did, the almas pursued him, holding their child in her arms. When Samdan reached a lake and swam across, the almas did not follow, instead shrieking horribly from the opposite bank, before tearing the child in half with her bare hands and throwing it into the water.
Returning to his village, Samdan’s family did not believe at first that the hairy creature he had become was their long-lost son. Luckily, a local medicine man knew of an ancient herbal concoction which caused the hair to fall out and returned Samdan mostly to normal. Not totally to normal though – for the rest of his life, he was left with a thick strip of hair running down his back, leaving him forever known, as he is in urban legend today, as Maned Samdan.
Many similar tales exist across western Mongolian culture. But the thing is, stories of the almas go far beyond local legend.
Johann Schiltberg's Accounts of the Almas
Johann Schiltberger was born in 1380 into a Bavarian noble family near Munich. At 14 years old, he entered into military service under the Hungarian king Sigismund, who had summoned European Christians to fight off an invasion from the Muslim Turks.
At the decisive battle at Nicopolis in 1396, during which Sigismund was defeated by the Turkish Sultan Bajazet, Schiltberger was wounded and taken prisoner. While nearly all prisoners were executed, Schiltberger was miraculously spared on the orders of the Sultan’s son, who believed that he might prove useful. Instead of execution, Schiltberger was enslaved and pressed into service as a foot runner for the Sultan, accompanying his army across Asia minor and Egypt.
After six years, the Turks were defeated in battle by the Mongols, and Schiltberger was passed into the possession of the Mongol Khan Timur the Lame. With this Khan, then his son, then his brother, Schiltberger accompanied armies and trade expeditions across the known world, through Mongolia and Siberia, across Ottoman dominions like Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey, through the lands of Arabia and Mesopotamia, even India. For more than 20 years Schiltberger traveled, learning new languages and earning an increasingly favorable position in his ruler’s entourage as he went.
Through it all, he “diligently recorded his experiences and observations,” making notes on the many countries and kingdoms he visited, recording the manner and customs of the people, and documenting geography, plants, and animals.
Finally, after more than 30 years as a slave, Schiltberger was able to escape captivity by stowing away on an Italian ship leaving Constantinople in 1427. Upon his return to Munich, Schiltberger set about compiling everything he had recorded into a book, which was eventually published in 1460.
In the book’s forward, Schiltberger teased “many interesting and strange adventures, which are worth listening to.” And surely the work delivered. It spoke of Siberian dog sleds and Indian war elephants, of the strange customs and religions of exotic peoples; it described cities at that point off limits to Europeans and their great wonders. The book immediately became hugely popular across Europe, earning Schiltberger the nickname, “The German Marco Polo.”
Buried within the work, was one account in particular which aroused the curiosity of readers. In the mountains of Mongolia, Schiltberger wrote,
“There are savages, who are not like other people, and they live there. They are covered all over the body with hair, except the hands and face, and run about like other wild beasts in the mountain.”
Schiltberger had even seen these strange creatures up close, after “a man and a woman from among these savages” were captured by a local warlord.
Who were these mysterious creatures, many wondered, and were they man or beast?
The question remained unanswered as slowly Schiltberger’s work faded from popular view. Then, in the 1800s, his book was republished under the title The Bondage and Travels of Johann Schiltberger, first in German in 1814, then in English in 1879. Again, his incredible journey and the things he had seen entered public consciousness, at, it would turn out, precisely the right time.
Nikolay Przewalski's Accounts of the Almastg
In the early 1870s, a Russian geographer of Polish descent named Nikolay Przewalski set off on an historic journey through central and east Asia, regions at that point still mostly unexplored by Europeans. He would travel across Siberia and Mongolia, through the Gobi Desert and down into China and Tibet, surveying some 7,000 square miles.
When he finally returned to Russia, Przewalski brough with him an incredible treasure trove of natural samples he had collected along the way – some 5,000 plants, 1,000 birds, 3,000 insect species, as well as 70 reptiles and 130 mammal skins. A number of the species he had found were at that point unknown to European science, including, most famously, the unusual Mongolian steppe horse which would become known as “Przewalski’s Horse.”
Przewalski would write five major books detailing what he’d found, earning in the process the highest awards possible from Russian Imperial Geographical Society and the Royal Geographical Society in England, while being ceremonially promoted to Lieutenant-General in the Red Army and appointed to the Tsar’s General Staff. In short order, Przewalski would become on of the most famous, well-known scientists in all of Europe and the world.
Among all of the unusual things Przewalski described in his work, there was one which stood out. During his time in one western Mongolian province, he wrote,
“We heard from the Mongols of some extraordinary animal which ranged through this province, and was known to the inhabitants under the name of kung-guressu, i.e. ‘manbeast.’ We were told that it had a flat face like that of a human being, and that it often walked on two legs, that its body was covered with a thick black fur, and its feet armed with enormous claws; that its strength was terrible, and that not only were hunters afraid of attacking it, but that the inhabitants removed their habitations from those parts of the country which it visited.
When we questioned them if it were not a bear they shook their heads, and assured us it was not, adding that they knew well enough what a bear was like.”
Despite his skepticism, Przewalski found that this mysterious beast was included in Mongolian and Tibetan medical books, next to thousands of other plants and animals which were known and recorded. In one such book, a sketch of the creature was accompanied with the rather mundane caption,
“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.”
Why, Przewalski wondered, would these books contain thousands of real species, but one mythical creature, if it too was not real?
Unfortunately, Przewalski passed away in 1888, just as he was planning another journey east to explore this, and other, questions further. However, this time, it would not take 400 years for someone to pick up the thread.
Other Almas Sightings
In the early 1900s, a geographer named B. B. Baradiin was sent by the Russian Geographical Survey to conduct a survey of the remote regions of Mongolia and Tibet. One evening in 1906, while traveling in a caravan across the Gobi Desert, Baradiin would experience an encounter which would change his life, and ultimately alter the course of Russian science.
Having just stopped for the night, Baradiin was alarmed when his caravan’s leader suddenly let out a “startled cry.” There, on a sand dune looking down into their camp was an “apelike man with long hair,” lit by the rays of the setting sun. For a few minutes the creature merely looked at the group, who gawked at its muscular hair-covered body, before it turned and disappeared into the dunes.
Immediately, Baradiin implored his guides to go after the creature and capture it, so that it might be studied. One of these guides, the best athlete of the group, took off running in pursuit. When he could not locate the creature, Baradiin insisted that the group pursue it on their camels, but still they could not track it down.
Finally, defeated, Baradiin asked his guides about the creature. They told him they knew what it was; it was called an almas.
Returning home to Russia at the end of his journey, Baradiin quickly informed his superiors of this encounter, expecting this new and previously undiscovered ‘almas’ to arouse interest and warrant further study. Except, instead of being embraced, he was met by skepticism. In fact, he was forced by the heads of both the Russian Imperial Geographical Society and the Imperial Academy of Sciences to omit his encounter with the almas from his official report when it was published in 1908.
Despite its official censure, Baradiin’s account of his encounter passed verbally through educated Russian circles. One man who picked up on the story was a Mongolian scientist and friend of Baradiin by the name of Tysben Zhamtsarano, who had gained prominence as one of the founders of the Mongolian Science Committee. Almost immediately, Zhamtsarano set out on an expedition to explore the mountainous regions of his home country and hunt for the almas.
Over the course of nearly a decade, Zhamtsarano would interview countless people who had experienced an almas encounter, recording their first-hand descriptions and constructing a detailed map which recorded every almas meeting from the end of the 19th century through the 1920s. He even compiled a collection of color pictures by asking each witness to describe the creature then having an artist sketch it.
There was only one problem.
During the time that Zhamtsarano was conducting his work, Russia was undergoing a revolution, the Tsar overthrown, and the Soviet Union founded. As Joseph Stalin rose to power in the 1920s, work on the almas was, like so many other ideas at the time, deemed “bourgeois-nationalist.”
By the 1930s, both Zhamtsarano and Baradiin would fall victim to Stalinist purges, each being ‘disappeared’ and sent to the gulag to die in 1937, as Zhamtsarano’s incredible record of the almas disappeared with him.
And yet, though the scientists were killed and their research lost, the mystery of the almas suppressed and removed from thought, stories of almas encounters did not stop.
In 1925, while Zhamtsarano was still being permitted to work, the Communist Red Army was working to root out and eliminate the last of the White Army forces whom they’d defeated to take control of the country. In the Pamir Mountains, a detachment of soldiers under the command of General Mikhail Topilski had cornered an encampment of White Army rebels in a cave, when suddenly a commotion was heard inside, and a figure ran out.
In a panic, Topilski’s soldiers shot and killed the figure, yet, when the corpse was brought to the General, he could see that not only was it not a rebel soldier, it wasn’t even a man. Rather, it was some sort of creature with thick hair covering a huge muscular body everywhere but its face and hands. Its face was human-like, but with a prominent brow ridge, sloping forehead, and flat, wide nose.
General Topilski included a description of this strange creature in his official battlefield report, but, in the midst of a war, instead of saving the corpse for study, his soldiers simply buried it under a pile of rocks, and their encounter was forgotten.
Something similar again appeared in the official record in 1941, shortly after the Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union. That year, Lieutenant-Colonel Vargen Karapetyan was called in to examine a strange looking German spy who had been captured in the Caucasus Mountains. As he entered the tent where the prisoner was being kept, he came upon not a man, but a huge, muscular creature covered from head to toe in hair, except on its hands and face.
“He stood before me like a giant, with his mighty chest thrust forward,” Karapetyan would later describe. When questioned, the creature would not, or could not, speak, only looking at the Colonel with “the eyes of an animal.”
Karapetyan searched for answers amongst the local population, who without hesitation told him that this was not a German spy, but a creature known as the almas.
Karapetyan included a description of this creature, this so-called almas, in his official report, but again, in the midst of war, the creature was executed as a German spy, and the incident was forgotten.
In 1955, the almas would expand past Russian military record and into public consciousness when a book titled The Long Walk was published. Written by a man named Slawomir Rawicz, the book told the story of his escape from a Siberian gulag with six others in 1941 and subsequent 4,000-mile trek on foot across Siberia, the Gobi Desert, over the Himalayans, and finally into British India in 1942. So incredible was Rawicz’s story that the book became famous all over the world.
Within its pages, one account stood out, of two creatures Rawicz and his group had come across in the mountains of Siberia.
“Their faces I could not see in detail, but the heads were squarish and the ears must lie close to the skull because there was no projection from the silhouette against the snow. The shoulders sloped sharply down to a powerful chest. The arms were long and the wrists reached the level of the knees.
We decided unanimously that we were examining a type of creature of which we had no previous experience in the wild, in zoos or in literature. They appeared to be covered by two distinct kinds of hair – the reddish hair which gave them the characteristic color forming a tight, close fur against the body, mingling with which were slight grayish tinge as the light caught them.
What were they? For years they remained a mystery to me, but since recently I have read of scientific expeditions to discover the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas and studied descriptions of the creature by native hillmen, I believe that on that day we may have encountered two of the animals.”
As The Long Walk grew in popularity, many around the world began to ask, what were these creatures? Had Rawicz come across some sort of Abominable Snowmen? Were these the long-suppressed almas?
With the almas pushed forcibly into public consciousness by The Long Walk, the final straw came in 1957, when a hydrologist from the Geographical Research Institute of Leningrad University named Alexander Pronin had not one but two almas encounters while mapping glaciers in the Pamir Mountains. Pronin’s report of his encounters spread across the world, even being picked up by The New York Times in the United States.
Finally, the Soviet government knew they had to do something. They could not continue to ignore the almas as it was reported by high-ranking military commanders and scientists, pushed into global pop culture by The Long Walk and The New York Times.
By this time, Stalin was dead, and in the post-Stalinist political thaw which was taking place, many ideas which had previously been suppressed were being allowed back into mainstream discussion.
The almas would be one of them.
In 1958, the Soviet government launched an official commission to look into the almas known as the “Commission for the Study of the Snowman Question.” The commission would be headed by Boris Porshnev, a scientist from the Soviet Academy of Sciences and winner of the 1950 Stalin prize whom The New York Times called “an authority on Western European history.”
As he began to put together a background for this commission, Porshnev came across the name of Tysben Zhamtsarano. So thorough was being ‘disappeared’ under Stalin that at first Porshnev was not even sure whether Zhamtsarano was a real person, questioning in his notes whether this was “a fictional scholar?”
Eventually, he was able to learn from those who were old enough to remember that indeed Zhamtsarano had existed and in fact had been a “scholar of world-wide reputation on Mongolian studies” before his disappearance. But with Zhamtsarano dead and records of his work lost, the trail ran dry for Porshnev.
That was until he was able to track down a man named Y. B. Rinchen, a Mongolian scholar with a PhD in linguistics who had been one of Zhamtsarano’s former students, perhaps the only one still alive. In response to Porshnev’s inquiries, Rinchen wrote a letter in which he stunningly proclaimed,
“Yes, you are not mistaken. I am indeed the last man left alive who knows all the details of the interrupted researches of the esteemed Professor Zhamtsarano into the Mongolian Almases. I also know all the details of Professor Baradiin’s sighting which were never published.”
Freed from Stalinist-era restrictions on what he could speak about, Rinchen dramatically told Porshnev and his commission everything he knew about the almas.
He first sent an article he had written in 1958, in which he vividly described the appearance of the almas, and forcefully told the commission, “it is impossible to deny the existence of this distant relative of ours.” In 1959, Rinchen went further, sending the commission a letter with dozens of detailed accounts of firsthand almas sightings he had compiled.
But as Porshnev and the commission took in Rinchen’s information and attempted to decide what to do with it, something else happened which made their work even more pressing.
The Dyatlov Pass Incident
On February 1, 1959, nine students from the Ural Polytechnical Institute disappeared while trekking in the Ural Mountains. When rescue teams were sent to find them a few days later, they discovered a most mysterious, and disturbing scene.
Sticking out of the snow, they found the trekkers’ tent, abandoned with all its supplies left inside – food, vodka, a map, extra clothes and blankets. Strangely, the tent appeared to have been cut open from the inside. Leading away from the tent were footprints, not made by boot, but by foot, suggesting the trekkers had fled from the tent into the freezing mountain temperatures barefoot, leaving all their supplies behind.
What had happened to them, rescuers wondered?
Over the next few months, investigators found evidence of a terrifying incident.
At the edge of the surrounding forest, within sight of the tent, they discovered two frozen trekkers wearing only their underwear beneath a cedar tree next to the remains of a fire. The hands of both were found to be a pulpy mess, while forensics teams found chunks of their flesh in the bark of the tree, as if they had frantically tried to climb it to escape something.
When the rest of the trekkers were found, some 250 feet deeper into the forest, the scene got even more gruesome. One had significant skull damage, while two others had their chests caved in, which investigators described as “equal to the effect of a car crash.” Most disturbingly, one of the trekkers, a 20-year-old woman, was found missing her tongue, her eyeballs, and part of her lips.
It was a terrible scene, the type which garnered widespread sympathy internationally – young, athletic people with their whole lives in front of them cut down in a gruesome death.
But what exactly had happened to them, the world wanted to know.
Soviet authorities were unable, or unwilling, to provide a conclusive answer, dismissing the issue by suggesting the trekkers had simply died of hypothermia, and proposing that their injuries could have been caused by an avalanche.
For many, this did not close the issue. Firstly, because investigators had found no evidence of an avalanche at the scene, and in fact, no avalanches had ever been recorded in the area. Moreover, because it did not explain why trekkers were found frozen in only their underwear, or why one woman was missing her eyes and tongue.
Many brought forward their own theories to explain what became known as the Dyatlov Pass Incident, so named after the trekking team’s leader, Igor Dyatlov, ranging from some sort of military coverup, to an attack by local indigenous people, to UFOs.
But in fact, amongst the items recovered at the site was something which perhaps provided a clue as to what really happened. On a piece of notepaper found amongst the carnage, written in large, oversized letters, were the words “From now on, we know there are snowmen.”
What did the trekkers mean by this, and did these so-called ‘snowmen’ have something to do with the gruesome deaths?
The possibility put even more pressure on Boris Porshnev and his commission. The eyes of the world were looking at the Soviet Union, asking if there really were ‘snowmen’ lurking in the mountains.
Expeditions to Find The Almas
With effectively no other choice, the commission would move to devote resources into finding an answer. In short order, Porshnev empowered Y. B. Rinchen to send a team into the mountains of Mongolia to investigate.
From 1960-1964, this team, led by a man named Zhugdariyn Damdin, collected the accounts of “many eyewitnesses who met an Almas.” These eyewitnesses came from all walks of life – hunters and cattle breeders, soldiers and army officers, students and teachers, members of peasant cooperatives, men and women – as Damdin essentially recreated the work of Zhamtsarano which had been lost years earlier.
But Damdin and his team were able to go further than Zhamtsarano thanks to a local man they met during their investigation who told them of an incredible discovery he had come across years prior, while he searched for his lost camels in the mountains.
“Suddenly I saw in the corner of a secluded ravine under two small ammodendron bushes something of a camel colour. I approached and saw a hairy corpse of a robust humanlike creature dried and half buried in the sand. I had never seen such a humanlike being covered by camel-coloured, brownish-yellow short hairs and I recoiled, although in my native land of Sinkiang I had seen many dead men killed in battle. But who was this strange dead thing – man or beast? I decided to return back and thoroughly examine it. I approached once more and looked down from my camel. The dead thing was not a bear or ape and the same time it was not a man like a Mongol, Kazakh, Chinese, or Russian. The hair of its head was longer than on its body. The skin on the groin and armpits wad darkened and shrivelled like a hide of a dead camel.
Fear seized my heart. I remembered the old tales of Vetala vampires and thought I was seeing one of them before me. And I hurried away.”
For ten years the man sat with this secret, until he heard that a man had come to the region specifically to research the almas. Seeking Damdin out and telling him this story, the two men, along with Damdin’s team, returned to the spot where the man had seen the mysterious corpse. While the body had long been removed by animal scavengers, they were able to find the creature’s skull, sitting half buried in the dirt.
This was the discovery Damdin and his team had been waiting for.
Immediately, Damdin wrote a letter to Porshnev, which he sent along with 312 typewritten pages on his findings, including numerous photographs and drawings. At the same time, the skull was packaged up and sent to the Academy of Sciences in Mongolia for further examination.
But then, as these deliveries were on their way, a funny thing happened – the mood in the Soviet Union once again shifted.
By this time, the country was thoroughly in the midst of the Cold War, competing with the United States in both a nuclear arms race and the space race. With this taking up most of the available attention and resources, the ‘snowman question’ lost its importance and was pushed aside. Almost overnight, research on the almas was declared a pseudoscience by the academic establishment, and Boris Porshnev, for so long a scholar of international acclaim, quickly became the target of mockery and scorn from his colleagues.
Worse than that though, much of Damdin’s research was abruptly lost or misplaced, perhaps intentionally, including the groundbreaking skull. It seemed that even though Stalin was long dead, once again suppression would doom research into the almas.
Yet, Porshnev would not drop the idea. Regardless of what the establishment said, he was in too deep to simply stop his investigation. And so, he set out himself into the mountains to research perhaps the most dramatic almas story of all, one he hoped might finally solve the riddle.
Zana - The Almas Woman
In 1850, a group of hunters wandering the forest in the mountainous regions of southwestern Russia came across an unusual creature they had never seen before. It appeared not totally unlike a human woman, except for the thick coat of reddish-black hair covering her “massive” muscular body. Her face certainly seemed human, but with unusual high cheekbones and a low forehead, a wide, flat nose, and eyes of a reddish tinge.
Though the creature was ferocious towards them, the hunters managed to capture her alive and bring her to a local nobleman as a gift. At first, she was like a wild animal, and the nobleman kept her in a cage, throwing raw meat through the bars to keep her fed. But as the years passed, she began to become more tame, until eventually she was allowed to roam about the village freely. She even began to learn some simple tasks like grinding corn and carrying wood.
As she became domesticated, those in the village gave her a name – they called her Zana.
Though she would respond to her name, and was able to follow simple instructions, Zana was never able to speak, only grunting or howling, and would tear any clothes given to her to shreds. But across the region, Zana became legendary for her enormous athletic power, her ability to outrun a horse and swim across a fast-moving local river without trouble, to climb trees effortlessly and carry 80kg sacks of flour uphill from the water mill to the village with one hand.
Unfortunately, also well-known were the abuses Zana suffered at the hands of the men in her village, who would feed her wine then take advantage of her. Through her life, she bore a number of children from a number of men, many of whom didn’t survive birth. However, four of her children did survive, two sons and two daughters, and were given to foster families in the area.
Somewhat surprisingly, these children were outwardly normal, with none of the thick hair of their mother covering their bodies, and ordinary mental capacity. The only thing which set them apart was their immense physical strength, with one son even purportedly able to lift a chair with a man sitting in it with only his jaw.
These children assimilated into regular society, each going on to have families of their own. Zana, on the other hand, died in 1890, without the question of who she was, and where she came from, ever being answered.
That is, until the 1960s, when Boris Porshnev traveled to the region with a team of researchers to look into her story.
Listening to the accounts of locals, including one particularly old man who had actually known Zana, it quickly became clear to Porshnev that what he had suspected must certainly be true – Zana was an almas, captured and domesticated.
For months, he and his team searched for Zana’s grave, hoping that by studying her remains they might learn more about her, and the almas, but they were never able to find her final resting place. However, they were able to find the grave of her son Khwit.
From this grave they removed Khwit’s skull and took it back to Moscow for examination. What they found stunned them. The skull was significantly different than they were expecting, exhibiting, as one anthropologist put it, “an original combination of modern and ancient features.” Another anthropologist went into greater detail, writing,
“The skull discloses a great deal of peculiarity, a certain disharmony, disequilibirum in its features, very large dimensions of the facial skeleton, increased development of the contour of the skull, the specificity of the non-metric features. The skull merits further extended study.”
As it was studied further, no less than six different anthropologists asserted that the skull contained “a mix of ‘primitive’ and ‘progressive’ features,” which suggested that some of Khwit’s genes did not come from modern humans.
But if they did not come from modern humans, where did they come from? Porshnev and his team had an astonishing hypothesis: Khwit and Zana’s genes, the genes of the almas, must have come from a group of pre-humans – the Neanderthals.
Could this really be possible?
This idea was picked up on in the 1970s by Myra Shackley, a professor of archaeology from England. In 1979, Shackley traveled to the mountainous regions of western Mongolia and found that the area was loaded with Neanderthal artifacts. Combined with the hypothesis of Porshnev and his team, this led her to a stunning conclusion.
“the description of Neanderthal man fits the almas really quite well. If you manage to get into the high mountain areas, then there’s no reason why there shouldn’t be adequate breeding populations of Neanderthal man still surviving.”
It was an idea that shook the scientific world, that the Neanderthals, long thought to be extinct, might still exist, recorded for centuries as the legendary almas.
For years the idea bounced around academic circles without definitive proof emerging one way or the other. But as it did, almas stories kept appearing.
In 1993, a team of Russian researchers led by Alexei Sitnikov encountered an almas in eastern Russia while on an expedition to find another legendary creature, a giant serpent said to exist in the region. The story was so bizarre that it made international news.
Again, in 2001, it became international news when a schoolteacher driving in the Altai Mountains was attacked by an almas before it was scared off by her traveling companions, with even the region’s governor weighing in on the incident.
Then, in 2003, a mountain climber named Sergey Semenov discovered a foot and a leg covered in strange hair while climbing in the Altai mountains. At first, many believed the remains simply belonged to a bear, until testing revealed they were not from a bear, and, moreover, as the BBC reported, “attempts to identify the creature they belonged to remain inconclusive.” Many thought for sure that this must be the foot and leg of an almas.
But still, the mystery of the almas, of surviving Neanderthals, would remain unsolved, until a decade later, when finally something happened which would begin to provide the answers people were looking for.
The Almas and The Neandertal Connection
In 2013, a professor of human genetics at University of Oxford named Bryan Sykes conducted tests on saliva samples collected from six of the descendants of Zana. The preliminary results of these tests were shocking – Zana’s DNA was “100% sub-Saharan African.” Almas or not, Zana’s lineage was not from the mountains of Russia.
Many thought there was a simple explanation for this – Zana, or someone in her family tree, must have been slaves brought to the area from Africa by the Ottoman empire. However, this theory was blown out of the water as Sykes continued his work.
In 2015, further results from the saliva samples, as well as additional tests on the tooth of Zana’s son Khwit, revealed that not only was her DNA 100% African, but it did not resemble any known modern group. More than that, results amazingly showed that Zana’s ancestors had come out of Africa some 100,000 years ago, as in, right in the middle of the existence of Neanderthals.
Adding to this, Sykes examined Khwit’s skull, noting, as those before him had, the presence of ancient features, most notably, an extra bone at its base – the so-called “occipital bun” characteristic of Neanderthals.
Taken together, Sykes believed this proved beyond doubt that Zana’s ancestors who had come out of Africa 100,000 years in the past had been Neanderthals, and that their lineage had survived.
Could it be, as Porshnev and Shackley had proposed, that the creatures recorded for centuries as the almas, like Zana, were in fact Neanderthals?
Think about it. Neanderthals existed at the same time as modern humans, before competition drove them to extinction. Maybe some groups did not go extinct, but rather, fled to the inhospitable regions humans didn’t want to, or couldn’t, live, surviving hidden away to this day. Perhaps this is why as modern human civilizations have become more advanced and began to explore these regions, sightings of the almas have spiked.
If it seems hard to believe that a group of Neanderthals could have survived all this time right under our noses, well, it shouldn’t be, because it has happened before.
Like the almas, the African mountain gorilla was long thought to be a myth of local tribes, until it was discovered by Europeans in 1902. The same is true for the Komodo dragon, discovered in 1910, and the giant panda, discovered in 1869, and even the grizzly-polar bear hybrid, which was long thought to be a hoax until it was discovered in 2006. In fact, to this day, previously unknown human tribes are being discovered in the Amazon jungle and elsewhere who had no previous contact with the outside world.
It has happened before, and it will happen again.
And maybe it just has. Maybe the almas not only exist, but are a population of previously undiscovered Neanderthals, a surviving link to deep in the earth’s past.