New Yeren Expedition Begins

Researchers will start exploring large areas of primitive forest this month in the Shennongjia region of central China’s Hubei province.

A group of 38 experts from several universities and research institutions will begin the expedition across the Shennongjia reserve on July 8, 2012, according to a statement from the Shennongjia Nature Reserve’s management bureau.

The trip is scheduled to last through August, according to the Chinese news service, Xinhua.

The group will focus on studying the region’s animals, plants and land features and will publish its research results later. Animals in the area include leopards, the Asian golden cat, the golden pheasant, South China tiger, and the Chinese giant salamander. The region is also home to the rare golden snub-nosed monkey, which is on the verge of extinction and was first spotted in Shennongjia in the 1960s. Additionally, there will be an effort to discover more about the Yeren.

Located deep in the remote mountains of Hubei, the Shennongjia Nature Reserve has long been rumored to be the home of an elusive creature known in China as the Yeren, or “Wild Man” in English. Some in the media, worldwide, use the term “Bigfoot” (after the North American unknown hairy hominoids) to discuss Yeren.

If the researchers manage to uncover concrete evidence of the Wild Man, they will have succeeded where two previous major expeditions – one from 1974 to 1981 and one in 2010 – failed.

“I simply want to put an end to the argument that it exists,” said Wang Shancai, of the Hubei Relics and Archaeology Institute, when he set out in 2010.

More than 400 people have claimed to have seen the Yeren in the Shennongjia area over the past century, but no hard evidence has been found to prove the creature’s existence.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) added Shennongjia to its World Network of Biosphere Reserves in 1990.

Part of Chinese folklore, the Yeren or Yeren-like creatures are cited in Chinese literature that dates back more than 2,000 years having said to reside in mountainous regions of southern and central China.  Despite numerous sightings and even some tangible evidence collected, there hasn’t been sufficient data for scientists to conclusively confirm the identity of the mysterious Yeren.



Witnesses typically report the creatures to be covered in reddish colored hair. Some white specimens have also been sighted. Their height is estimated to range from six to eight feet, although some colossal examples allegedly in excess of ten feet tall have been reported. Overall, it is smaller than the American Bigfoot. Like Bigfoot, the yeren is peaceful and will generally quietly walk away when encountering people in the Zhejiang province.

In 2005, Zhang Jiahong, a shepherd in Muyu, near the forest, told state media he had seen two of the creatures, with “hairy faces, eyes like black holes, prominent noses and dishevelled hair, with faces that resembled both a man’s and a monkey’s.”

The Yeren shown appears in Field Guide To Bigfoot, Yeti, & Other Mystery Primates Worldwide By Loren Coleman, Patrick Huyghe and was drawn by Harry Trumbore.

Another explorer, Zhang Jinxing, spent years living as a hermit in the Shennongjia forest, and said he had seen footprints on 19 separate occasions, without ever finding the beast.

Some cryptozoologists have drawn a link between the Yeren and the extinct hominid Gigantopithecus, which formerly inhabited the general region. It has also been suggested that the Yeren is actually a new species of orangutan, one that is ground-dwelling, bipedal and native to mainland Asia instead of Borneo or Sumatra.

It is also thought that the Yeren might just be a legend. The Yeren apparently dwells in a region already rich with superstition and strange phenomena, including an inordinate occurrence of albinism in the local fauna, adding to its mystique. It has been connected with ancient Chinese legends of magical forest ogres and man-like bears.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeren, weeklyworldnews.com/headlines/49723/in-search-of-the-wild-man, cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/yeren2012

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Mystery of Severed “Yeti” Finger from the Pangboche Hand Solved

Set high in a remote Himalayan mountain range stands the Pangboche Buddhist monastery.

During heavy snowstorms, it can be found only by travellers who listen for the monks’ ceremonial horns.

The walls are lined with traditional Nepalese paintings depicting the treacherous tracks to the monastery.

And among them are pictures of the legendary ape-like creature we refer to as the Yeti.

This might seem fanciful until you learn that, for many years, a shriveled hand (about the size of an adult human’s, with long, fat fingers and curling nails) was also on display in the monastery — and revered by the monks, who believed it protected them from bad luck.

A finger was taken from the monastery by Bigfoot researcher Peter Byrne and was smuggled out of the country, so the story goes, by beloved Hollywood actor Jimmy Stewart, who hid it amid his wife’s lingerie.


Jimmy Stewart and Yeti

The monstrous finger ended up in the possession of Dr. William Osman Hill, who had searched for the yeti in the 1950s on behalf of Texas millionaire Tom Slick; Hill later bequeathed the finger to the Royal College of Surgeons, where it has been for more than half a century. .

Turns out, it’s just a regular old human finger — albeit one with a very interesting history.

The yeti is said to be a muscular beast weighing between 200 and 400 pounds and covered with dark grayish or reddish-brown hair. As in the case of its North American counterpart, Bigfoot, most of the evidence of its existence comes from fuzzy sightings, oversize footprints in the snow, or the occasional strand of funny-looking hair.

Abominable Maps

Russian Hominologists such as Igor Burtsev have said that Wildmen types were universally distributed in the world at the advent of modern humans, that we began taking over their territories from the first and pushing them into less desirable areas for habitation, and that this process has been going on throughout history.

Map I (Top - Wildmen Map) intends to show that: the dotted line encompassing East Asia, Southeast Asia and Australia is meant to convey the idea that they once inhabited most of the area but now they only inhabit more irregular areas of refuge within the larger territory. It would be very tedious to indicate all of the smaller territories precisely, so leaving it vague might be the better representation. They are apparently mostly nomadic anyway, and in North America at least they seem to move along major waterways preferentially.
There is no easy way to catalogue how many native names such beings have accumulated over time. A quick count of the listings from George Eberhart’s Mysterious Creatures indicates there are easily 200 or more entries on them, including their giant and pygmy forms. That of course does not mean to imply there are 200 or more types of creatures running around: far from it, there seems to be only one species represented and that one species is most likely our own species, especially if the bulk of them are Neanderthaloid or Heidelburgers and either one of those categories are counted as subspecies of Homo sapiens.

The burden of proof is now on the ones who want to say that such forms of fossil men are really “Not human” and show that to the general satisfaction of everybody else, in terms that are acceptable to all experts. (Such things as proving their brains are too small to count as human or they have no thumbs would be acceptable criteria: saying they are “Too hairy” is NOT an acceptable argument.)

Map II (Middle - Sasquatches and Australopithecines Map) concerns Sasquatch and possible Gigantopithecus types, plus other “Half-Human-Half Ape” types as the Australopithecines. These would technically not all be “Missing Links” but more practically described as kinds of apes that walk normally on their hind legs. The Sasquatch types are either one species that is TransBeringia in its distribution or else two closely related species in East Asia and in Western North America. Further work would need to be done to determine that.

Map III (Middle - Unknown Apes Map) concerns both known and unknown species of apes also both in Eastern Asia and America in two tight bundles of variation: one set of Orangutan-like apes with reddish hair and another type of (large) Lesser apes like siamangs with dark or black hair. The Orangutanlike apes are further divided into residually-primitive terrestial apes that walk flat-footed on the ground and often bipedally, and then the more tropical, more arboreal apes that walk on the sides of their feet when they are on the ground.

Evidently the tropical New World variety of these apes developed into a mostly tree-dwelling ape with a number of unique specializations related to its lifestyle, quite independantly from the Old World orangutans that did the same. At the same time, there are other grounds for suspecting that the standard Indonesian orangutans may have had examples relocated into New Guinea and Northern Australia. The siamang types are also much the same in the New World but they seem to include much larger variants that appear to be moving into the chimpanzee econiche. Siamangs are habitually bipeds on the ground anyway. It is unknown how many species remain to be named and discovered out of this series, but it would seem there are at least four uncatalogued species involved, and names are claimed on at least two of them. In this case the scientific genus name for Yetis shall probably end up being the same as the “Mainland Pongo”, only we don’t really even had a good valid scientific name for that one, either.





Here is a photo of famous “Throwback” Julia Pastrana (Also suggested to be a halfbreed Bigfoot herself: and also somebody that ended up going on an exhibit in a traveling sideshow after death), and then a recap of the “Three types of Yeti” rearranged to correspond to the order of the three maps above.



In my opinion, we are compelled to consider that the “Wildmen” should be of our own species when we have such a situation as we have Julia as a member of our species and she looks exactly like they do. Therefore I would NOT consider Wildmen an unknown species, I would count them as a section of our own species. On the other hand, the Sasquatches are pretty definitely a new species (or two) and the orangutan-like apes are several new species all obviously related to each other but with a range of adaptations that make it necessary for two genera to be involved, and these two genera are different to and additional to the “Known” orangutans. Grover Krantz suggested that Sasquatch is Gigantopithecus and I am willing to go with his suggestion provisionally.

Furthermore he suggested Sasquatch is either the known fossil species  Gigantopithecus blacki or it is a new New World species Gigantopithecus canadiensis . My assessment would be there are two species and the Asiatic one wold be Gigantopithecus blacki  while the New World species would be Gigantopithecus canadiensis . that is a provisional judgement but based on the observation that similar species in both Asia and North America tend to have different species each native to the different continents. And Ameranthropoides is already named and probably sufficiently well enough documented to be granted provisional acceptance. So we have the (probably) two Gigantopithecus  species, one presumably a continuance of the known fossil species and the other a New World derivation of that species, if it is indeed separate.

And then we have two forms of ground dwelling “Fossil Pongo”, one of which is the Yeti and a distant cousin of which is the Skunk Ape, as well as the Neotropical “Pongo-parallel” in the form of the Sisimite and/or Mapinguari, for a total of five “Nearly-known” unidentified species. Please note that these species are relatable to known fossil forerunners and are hence presumably Lazarus taxa, except for the New World siamangs and Pongo-parallel, which are closely similar to the “known” species but cannot be counted as the same species owing to special circumstances. They are thus all of them on the more easily allowable edge for Cryptids as far as their credentials can be checked. It is also true that the “Fossil Pongo” and Gigantopithecus  types share a common ancestor in the Sivapithecines and are both branches of the Pongids, as opposed to the African Apes branch.



Two views of Sivapithecus

Article by Dale Drinnon 22 February 2012 © FRONTIERS OF ZOOLOGY

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The Pangboche Hand is an artifact stolen from a Buddhist monastery in Pangboche, Nepal. Supporters contend that the hand is from a Yeti, a scientifically unrecognized animal purported to live in the Himalayan mountains. Critics argue the artifact is a fraud.

    1 Discovery by outsiders
    2 Tests and analyses
    3 Replica hand
    4 DNA Results

Discovery by outsiders

Oil businessman and adventurer Tom Slick first heard accounts of the possible existence of a “Yeti hand” held as a ritual artifact in the monastery at Pangboche during one of his first “Abominable Snowman” treks in 1957. The Slick expeditions were the first to bring photographs of the hand back to the West.

During later Tom Slick-sponsored expeditions in and around the Himalayas, his associates gathered more information on the “Pangboche hand,” and an effort to further examine it was planned. In 1959 Peter Byrne, a member of Slick’s expedition that year, reportedly stole pieces of the artifact after the monks who owned it refused to allow its removal for study.

Byrne claimed to have replaced the stolen bone fragments with human bones, rewrapping the hand to disguise his theft.

Byrne smuggled the bones from Nepal into India, after which actor James Stewart allegedly smuggled the hand out of the country in his luggage.

Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman rediscovered this story while writing Tom Slick’s biography in the 1980s. Coleman confirmed details of the incidents with written materials in the Slick archives, interviews with Byrne, and correspondence with Stewart. Byrne later confirmed the Pangboche hand story via a letter from Stewart that Byrne published in a general book on Nepalese wildlife.

During the highly-publicized 1960 World Book expedition, which had many goals including gathering intelligence on Chinese rocket launchings, Sir Edmund Hillary and Marlin Perkins took a sidetrip in Nepal to investigate the hand. Hillary was unaware of the possibility that he was looking at a combination of the original material and the human bones placed there by Byrne. Hillary determined the artifact was a hoax.

Tests and analyses

London University primatologist William Charles Osman Hill conducted a physical examination of the pieces that Byrne supplied. His first findings were that it was hominid, and later in 1960 he decided that the Pangboche fragments were a closer match with a Neanderthal.

In 1991, in conjunction with Coleman’s research, it was discovered that the Slick expedition consultant, an American anthropologist by the name of George Agogino, had retained samples of the alleged Yeti hand. The NBC program Unsolved Mysteries obtained samples and determined they were similar to human tissue, but were not human, and could only verify they were “near human.” After the broadcast of the program, the entire hand was stolen from the Pangboche monastery, and reportedly disappeared into a private collection via the illegal underground in the sale of antiquities. George Agogino, before his death on September 11, 2000, transferred his important files on the Pangboche Yeti hand to Loren Coleman.

Replica hand

In 2010 Weta Workshops produced a replica skull and hand based on photos of the missing hand and skull. Adventurer Mike Allsop will take the replica to Pangboche in 2011.

DNA Results

On 27 December 2011 it was announced that a finger belonging to the hand contained human DNA, following tests carried out in Edinburgh.

Source: Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangboche_Hand

Note: Photo 4, A finger from the Pangboche Hand was smuggled out of Nepal in 1958/9 and ended up at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, labelled “a Yeti finger from Pangboche Hand”.

Source www.occultopedia.com/y/yeti.htm

Yeti

The Tibetan name for the Abominable Snowman, a humanlike monster whose tracks have been discovered in the frigid lands of perpetual snow in the Himalayan regions of India, Nepal, and Tibet.

According to locals, the Yeti is but one of several unidentified creatures that inhabit the highlands of southern Asia. Sherpas, Nepalis and Tibetans alike have described different types of Yeti; a larger variety is described as being a hybrid of man and ape and standing well over two meters tall and having a fur of a dark brown to black color.

Yet another type is described as smaller than an average man with a reddish-brown pelt. These different types of Yeti have two things in common; they walk upright and are equally elusive.

Several sightings, mainly of footprints, have been reported by westerner explorers throughout the years, but contrary to popular belief, these creatures are highly unlikely to dwell in the snowfields where food is scarce, but rather inhabit the jungle and forested areas where there are abundant plants and small animals on which they may feed.

In every mountain range in the world live people who tell stories of a strange, lumbering, manlike creature; of footprints too large to belong to any human; of isolated communities living in fear of a monster that goes by many names.

In the Himalayas he is known as the Yeti. Elsewhere in Asia, from the Gobi Desert in the north to Assam in the south, he goes by the names of Meti, Shookpa, Migo, Kang-Mi, and many others. To people living in remote, wooded parts of the northwestern United States, he is Bigfoot. In the foothills of the Canadian Rockies he is known as the Sasquatch.

Whatever the name, the description is roughly the same; height, up to 10 feet; weight, about 300 pounds; appearance, hairy and apelike, but walks upright on two legs; species, unknown.

Yeti’s Timeline:

1832 — B.H. Hodson,the U.K. representative in Nepal, described a hirsute creature who reportedly had attacked his servants. The natives called the beast “rakshas,” which means “demon.” This was the first report of the Yeti made by a Westerner.

1889 — British army major L. A. Waddell found what he took to be large footprints in the snow on a high peak northeast of Sikkin. His bearers told him that these were the tracks of a man-like creature called Yeti, and that it was quite likely to attack humans and carry then away as food.

1913 — A group of Chinese hunters reportedly wounded and captured a hairy man-like creature, that the locals soon named the “snowman”. This creature was supposedly kept captive in Patang at Sinkiang province for a period of five months until it died. It was described as having a black monkey-like face and large body covered with silvery yellow hair several inches long; it’s hands and feet were man-like and the creature was incredibly strong.

1914 — J. R. P. Gent, a British forestry officer stationed in Sikkim, wrote of discovering footprints of what must have been a huge and amazing creature.

1921 — Members of a British expedition (led by Col. Howard-Bury) climbing the north face of Mount Everest sighted some dark figures moving around on a snowfield above them. When the explorers reached the spot, at some 17,500 feet, the creatures were not there but had left behind some huge, humanlike footprints in the snow.

1923 — Major Alan Cameron, with the Everest Expedition of that year, observed a line of huge and dark creatures moving along a cliff face high above the snowline. Pictures of the creatures’ tracks were taken two days later, when the expedition reached the area where they were seen.

1925 — A Greek photographer and member of the Royal Geographical Society named N. A. Tombazi glimpsed a creature he later described as “exactly like a human being, walking upright and stopping occasionally to uproot or pull some dwarf rhododendron bushes.” Tombazi, who was at about 15,000 feet up in the mountains, later reached the spot where he sighted the creature, only to also find some intriguing tracks in the snow.

1936 — An expedition led by H. W. Tilman found strange footprints in the snow by the outer reaches of the snowline on the slopes approaching Mount Everest.

1937 — Returning from a campaign in Tibet, British explorer Frank Smythe relayed several reports of strange hairy wildmen made by the native Sherpas and Tibetans. He also claimed to have personally seen tracks of the creature at the 14,000-foot level.

1938 — The Yeti emerges as creatures of kindness and sympathy according to the story of Captain d’Auvergne, the curator of the Victoria Memorial near Chowringhee in Calcuta. The Captain claims that, injured while traveling on his own in the Himalayas and threatened with snow-blindness and exposure, he was saved from death by a 9 foot tall creature resembling a pre-historic human which, after carrying him several miles to a cave, fed and nursed him until he was able to make his way back home.

1942 — Slavomir Rawicz best selling book, The Long Walk, — published in 1952, telling how he and six friends escaped from a Siberian war camp and made their way to freedom in India by crossing the Himalayas — describes an encounter with two 8 foot tall creatures somewhere between Bhutan and Sikkim. According to Slavomir, he and his companions watched the outsized beasts for over 2 hours, from a distance of 100 yards.

1948 — Norwegian uranium prospector Jan Frostis claimed he was attacked by one of two Yetis he stumble upon near Zemu Gap, in Sikkim. His shoulder was badly mangled and he required extensive medical treatment to recover from his lesions.

1949 — A Sherpa named Tenzing claimed to have seen playing in the snow near a monastery. This was the same Sherpa that shared the fame of Sir Edmund Hillary in the first successful ascent of Mount Everest.

1950 — A patch of skin and a mummified finger and thumb were found in the Himalayan mountains. Zoologists and anthropologists considered the fragments to be “almost human” and “similar in some respects to that of Neanderthal man” even though they could not be associated to any known living species.

1951 — The Everest Reconnaissance Expedition (organized to evaluate routes for an attempt to ascend Everest) encountered fresh tracks at 18,000 feet. During the following months, several additional sightings of Yeti tracks were reported.

1953 — New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay spot giant footprints during their conquest of Mount Everest.

1954 — The London Daily Mail’s financed expedition (originally to hunt and catch a live Yeti) examined some supposedly ‘authentic’ Yeti scalps, but determined that these were mostly fakes made out of from animal skin; a small handful of them proved to be intriguing though, and zoologists were unable to link them to any known animals. The expedition also found footprints and droppings that, when analyzed, proved to contain both animal and vegetable matter.

1955 — Frenchman Abbè Bordet followed three separate trails of footprints that belonged to an unknown creature.

1957 — Texas oilman Tom Slick sponsors a Yeti hunt. His expedition came back solely with reports made by Nepalese villagers that five people had been killed by severe battering from Yeti over the preceding four years.

1958 — An American scientist working in Katmandu (Nepal), Dr. Norman Dyrenfurth, reports to have explored caves that were at some time inhabited by a type of “very low grade of human or near human creatures”, presenting documentation and physical evidence in the form of hair samples, plaster casts of footprints, and discarded food scraps. Also in 1958 a Dr. Alexander Pronin reports seeing the creature while he was in the Pamirs (a unique high mountain complex located primarily in Tajikistan).

1960-61 — The Himalayan Scientific and Mountaineering Expedition also found some unusual tracks in the snow.

1970 — After hearing a strange noise near Mount Annapurna in Nepal, mountaineer Don Whillans tracks and watches a strange humanoid creature for about twenty minutes through his binoculars before it lumbers away.

1978 — Lord Hunt photographed Yeti tracks.

1986 — Climber Reinhold Messner reported a close-up sighting of an Yeti as it came into sight from behind a tree.

1992 — Julian Freeman-Attwood and two other men camping at a secluded spot on a remote glacier in Mongolia reported finding an unusual trail of heavy footprints one morning on the snow outside their tent, definitely made by a creature larger and heavier than a human.

1998 — American climber Craig Calonica, on Mount Everest, reported seeing a pair of yetis while coming down the mountain on its Chinese side. Both had thick, shiny black fur, he said, and walked upright.

2007 — In early December 2007, American television presenter Joshua Gates and his team (Destination Truth) reported finding a series of footprints in the Everest region of Nepal resembling descriptions of Yeti’s tracks.

2008 — On October 20, 2008, a team of Japanese adventurers photographed footprints which could supposedly have been made by an Abominable Snowman. Their leader, Yoshiteru Takahashi, claims to have witness a Yeti on a earlier expedition (2003) and is determined to capture the beast on film.

This Yeti footprint souvenir sheet is part of a set of thirteen entitled “Mysteries of the Universe” Issued 1992. The footprint is modeled after those found in Nepal in 1951 of a supposed yeti abominable snowman by American mountain climber Eric Shipton.