The Almas of Central Asia

Somewhere on the road between a Mongolian folk belief and a Soviet Academy of Sciences commission, the wild man of Central Asia acquired a hypothesis. Not that he existed — plenty of monsters are believed in without theory — but that he was something precise and astonishing: a Neanderthal, one of our vanished cousins, still walking the high valleys of the Caucasus and the Pamirs twenty thousand years after the textbooks said his kind had died out. For a good part of the twentieth century, that idea had the backing of credentialled scientists, and the strange, sad case that anchored it was a woman.

The wild people of the mountains

The Almas — the word is Mongolian, and cognate names appear across a vast arc of Turkic and Caucasian languages — is the Central Asian branch of a story that circles the whole northern hemisphere. He is smaller and more human than the Yeti of the high Himalaya, closer to a feral person than an ape: hairy, mute or nearly so, powerfully built, shy of settlements, glimpsed on scree slopes and at the edge of grazing land from Mongolia’s Altai across to the forests of Abkhazia. Herders described a creature that raided crops, could be frightened off, and sometimes seemed almost to want company. It appears in a fifteenth-century Bavarian nobleman’s account of his captivity in Central Asia, and in Mongolian medical texts that list “wild man” bile among the animal ingredients of the pharmacopoeia — a mundane, matter-of-fact citation that reads less like a legend than like a listing of local fauna.

The Bavarian in question was Johann Schiltberger, a soldier captured at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396 and dragged east through years of servitude to Mongol and Timurid masters. In the memoir he dictated after finally reaching home, he described a mountain range where he saw wild people who had nothing in common with other men, their bodies covered entirely with hair except for the hands and face, grazing the high ground like beasts. He had no folkloric axe to grind and no monster to sell; he was a prisoner writing down what he was told and, perhaps, what he saw. That flat, unsensational register recurs throughout the older Almas material and is part of what lends it its peculiar credibility.

That everyday quality is the first thing that makes the Almas different from the Yeren of the Chinese forests or the Yeti of the snows. Where those creatures live in fog and altitude, the Almas lives among people. The stories are domestic. He is the neighbour who never learned to speak, the relative nobody quite acknowledges. The Yeren of China and the Yeti’s footprints and fur are wilderness beings; the Almas keeps edging toward the human household, and that instinct in the folklore turns out to matter enormously.

The kernel: when the Academy took it seriously

Here is the genuinely remarkable part of the record. In 1958, the Soviet Academy of Sciences convened a Commission for the Study of the Snowman, prompted partly by reports from a Soviet hydrologist in the Pamirs and by the general Himalayan Yeti excitement of the decade. Chairing the intellectual effort was Boris Porshnev, a respected historian and sociologist, a full member of the scholarly establishment, who came to believe with total conviction that the Almas was a surviving population of Neanderthals.

Porshnev’s argument had a kind of grim logic. Neanderthals were real, robust, cold-adapted humans; their extinction date is an inference from an absence of bones, and absence of evidence has a way of hardening into evidence of absence. If a remnant population had persisted in the least accessible valleys of Central Asia, Porshnev reasoned, it would look exactly like the Almas of the herders’ accounts — mute, hairy, human enough to interbreed, shy enough to leave no museum specimen. He gathered sighting reports across the Caucasus and Mongolia, corresponded with the Belgian zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans, and lent the whole enterprise the weight of a serious academic career. The Mongolian scholar Byambyn Rinchen collected native accounts in parallel. This was serious scholarship, pursued in journals, at conferences, with the apparatus of a real scientific question.

Zana

The case that Porshnev believed proved everything was Zana. In the mid-nineteenth century, according to the accounts he assembled decades later, a wild woman was captured in the forests of Abkhazia, in the western Caucasus, and eventually brought to the village of Tkhina. She was described as powerfully built, dark-skinned, covered in reddish-black hair, unable to speak, with a broad face and a heavy jaw. At first she was kept behind a fence and fed like an animal. Over years she was tamed enough to do simple work, to carry millstones, to be trusted around the village.

And Zana bore children — several of them, fathered by local men. The first infants, the stories said, died because she washed them in the cold river as though they were animals. Later children were taken from her and raised by village women, and they survived. They grew up human: they spoke, married, had children of their own. Zana died around 1890. Her son Khwit, a locally famous strongman with an unusually dark complexion and a difficult temper, lived until 1954. Porshnev interviewed elderly villagers who remembered them both, located descendants, and even had Khwit’s skull exhumed for study. For Porshnev, Zana was the living proof: a relict Neanderthal who had walked into a Caucasian village, been put to work, and left grandchildren who could be interviewed.

The fork: what the DNA said

For a long time Zana sat exactly on the boundary between a tragic true story and a scientific fantasy, and the folklore could not be prised apart from the fact. Then genetics arrived. In the 2010s the Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes, running a project to test cryptid samples with modern DNA methods, obtained material connected to Zana’s line — descendants, and bone from Khwit’s remains. The results were unambiguous and, in their way, more moving than any monster would have been. Zana’s genetic signature was entirely modern Homo sapiens, and specifically of sub-Saharan African origin.

There was no Neanderthal. There was, in all likelihood, a real woman — African by ancestry, perhaps brought to the Ottoman-influenced Caucasus through the slave trade that ran through the region in the nineteenth century, perhaps escaped or abandoned, surviving alone in the forest, unable to speak the local language, physically unlike anyone the villagers of Tkhina had seen. They looked at a lost human being and, having no category for her, filed her under wild woman. They fenced her. They fed her over a wall. They fathered her children and drowned the first of them in the river. The Almas legend supplied the frame, and a suffering person was made to fit inside it.

The century of sightings

Zana was never the whole case, only its most human face. Running alongside her, from the 1950s onward, was a steady stream of eyewitness reports gathered by researchers who took the fieldwork as seriously as any ethnographer. The most tireless was Marie-Jeanne Koffmann, a French-born surgeon and mountaineer who settled in the Soviet Union and spent decades in the Caucasus republic of Kabardino-Balkaria collecting what the locals called the Almasty. Koffmann interviewed hundreds of herders, recorded descriptions with a physician’s eye for anatomical detail, mapped the sightings, and built a composite portrait so consistent that it convinced her a real animal lay behind it: a nocturnal, solitary, two-legged creature, heavily built, that raided orchards and beehives and vanished before dawn.

The organised expeditions were far less productive than the interviews. The Soviet Snowman Commission’s 1958 push into the Pamirs, mounted with real logistical seriousness, came home with nothing an animal had to explain — no body, no unambiguous track, no photograph. That emptiness split the field. To sceptics inside the Academy it settled the matter; a large mammal that leaves no trace under systematic search is a mammal that is not there. To believers such as Porshnev and Koffmann it proved only how good the creature was at not being found, which is the argument every cryptid eventually forces its defenders to make, and the argument that can never be won or lost. The Almas kept its footing precisely in that gap between a rich testimony and an empty specimen drawer, where a phenomenon can be neither confirmed nor buried.

The journey: from herders’ tale to relict Neanderthal

How did a scattered piece of steppe folklore become a testable claim about human evolution? The answer is a chain of serious people each passing the story to the next with the authority of their own field intact. Zhamtsarano and Baradiin, Buryat scholars early in the century, catalogued Mongolian accounts. Rinchen, a towering figure in Mongolian letters, treated the Almas as a real ethnographic subject. Porshnev, a historian, wrapped it in evolutionary theory. Heuvelmans in Belgium and, later, the British archaeologist Myra Shackley, who wrote sympathetically about relict hominids, carried it into the West. Grover Krantz, an American anthropologist, examined Khwit’s skull and thought he saw unusual features. Each transfer added credibility; none of them, until Sykes, could add a body or a genome.

What is striking is how little the actual evidence changed across a century, and how much its interpretation did. The same herders’ descriptions that sounded, to a nineteenth-century villager, like proof of a demon of the forest sounded, to Porshnev, like proof of a Palaeolithic survivor, and sounded, to a modern reader, like a description of a frightened human stranger. The Almas is a mirror that shows each generation the wild thing it already half-expects to find — a demon, an ancestor, a lost cousin from the caves.

What it is really about

Underneath the Neanderthal hypothesis, the Almas is a story about the border of the human category, and about how badly we treat whoever we put on the wrong side of it. Every culture that tells wild-man tales is really rehearsing a question: who counts as one of us, and what do we owe the being who almost does? The herders of the Caucasus met that question in the flesh when a woman they could not place walked out of the woods, and the answer they gave — the fence, the wall, the drowned infants — is the shadow the myth casts when it touches a living person.

Porshnev’s Neanderthals were, in a sense, the kinder version of the story. He wanted the Almas to be a cousin, a lost relative deserving of scientific tenderness and legal protection, and there is real generosity in a scholar spending his reputation to argue that a “monster” is actually a person owed our care. He was wrong about the bones and right about the heart of it. Zana was a person owed our care. She simply belonged to our own species all along, which is the more uncomfortable truth, because it locates the failure to recognise her in our imagination and in the meagre categories a frightened village had to hand.

The Almas endures because the border he patrols is real and never settles. We still meet strangers we have no category for, still reach for wild when we mean unfamiliar. The wild people of the steppe were always us, seen across a distance we did not know how to close — and the legend survives because that distance has never fully gone away.