While legends of wildmen flourish all around the world, active searches for anomalous primates have been confined to the yeti in the Himalayas, the Bigfoot/sasquatch in the US and Canada and in one other region – Russia. Yeti-hunts in the Himalayas have been, on the whole, substantial expeditions and sometimes, as in the case of Sir Edmund Hillary's in 1962, coupled to a mountaineering objective. Bigfoot searches in America and Canada are organised quite differently and largely carried out by individuals acting entirely alone or in loosely co-ordinated groups. In Russia, things are different again, and their search for anomalous primates is the only effort to have enjoyed any official government backing.
The instigator and the central figure in Russian hominology, as the science is called, was the late Boris Porchnev. It was Porchnev who was the first to suggest the intellectually attractive hypothesis that the local anomalous primates were, in fact, surviving Neanderthals. There is plenty more to say about my efforts to test Porchnev's theory later in the book, but for now let me concentrate on the abundant sightings of Russia's own yeti, usually called the almasty. The almasty, which has been seen in many parts of Russia but especially in the Caucasus and in Siberia (where it is also known as the alma), shares many of the attributes of both the yeti and Bigfoot: generally tall, though short varieties are also reported, muscular and hairy in appearance, wary and retiring in behaviour.
Porchnev, though an academic historian by training and an authority on the French Revolution, is best remembered for his pioneering work on the almasty. It was through his influence that the USSR Academy of Sciences established the ‘Snowman Commission’ in 1958 to co-ordinate all reports of these creatures and to organise expeditions to find them. This was an impressive achievement. I cannot imagine the US and UK equivalents, the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society respectively willing to take such a risk. How differently things might have turned out had they done so.
During its short life, the Snowman Commission sent an expedition to the Pamir Mountains in what is now Tajikistan. It was stimulated to explore this region by a rare almasty sighting by one of the Academy's own members, the geologist Alexandr Georgievitch Pronin, who saw one at the edge of the Fedchenko Glacier in August 1957. Standing on a boulder, at first he thought it was a human, although he knew the area to be uninhabited. The creature was stocky and stooped with long, trailing forearms visible as it walked across the snow before disappearing among the rocks. Unusually for any sighting, yeti, Bigfoot or almasty, he saw the creature again three days later in the same vicinity. Pronin later reported what he saw to the Snowman Commission with mild surprise, saying, ‘I had heard reports of these creatures, but never expected to see one myself.’1 Nonetheless, the official expedition found nothing when it searched the same area. There being no definite proof of the kind the Academy required to declare that the almasty existed, the Snowman Commission was dissolved soon after the expedition returned empty-handed. Almasty enthusiasts are not easy to kill off and Porchnev found the survivors a home in the Darwin Museum in Moscow by inaugurating a monthly seminar in 1960. Fifty-four years later, this monthly seminar series is still going. In August 2013 I had the privilege of giving one myself.
Porchnev was also in contact with a remarkable Mongolian academic, Yöngsiyebü Rinchen. A linguist by training, Rinchen had made a particular study of Mongolian almas, including retrieving and studying several promising skulls. Images of these were published by the Dutch lawyer and anthropologist Tjalling Halbertsma, who has lived in Mongolia for many years, but the skulls themselves have long since disappeared.2 In Halbertsma's account, Rinchen was a prolific correspondent, something I can certainly verify having seen his many letters to Heuvelmans in Lausanne. Halbertsma also writes that Rinchen sent two hairs to Heuvelmans, but search though I did throughout the Rinchen folders in the archive, I could not find them. Rinchen collected stories of alma encounters from the people of remote regions of the country. There was even a body, covered in hair, found in a gorge. The skull and some bones were brought back to the capital, Ulan Bator, where Rinchen worked, but again they too have vanished.
Despite the disbanding of the Snowman Commission after the unsuccessful expedition to the Pamirs, the search for the almasty continued thanks to the efforts of individuals, both academic and lay. Porchnev was a close friend and colleague of Bernard Heuvelmans, whose archive in Lausanne contains especially plump folders of their correspondence. Together they wrote Les Neanderthals Sont Toujours Vivant, a book that amplifies Porchnev's surviving Neanderthal theory with Heuvelmans' account of the Minnesota Iceman, of which more later. Though Porchnev died in 1972, his legacy has been continued by his protégé Igor Burtsev and his colleagues Dmitiri Bayanov and Michael Trachtengerts. I was delighted to find that this triumvirate of scholars was still active, and eager to talk, when I visited Moscow in the summer of 2013.