Part II: Fantasy (continued) / Part III: Fact

Be sure to check out the illustrations at the end of this section!

PART II: FANTASY (continued)

Chapter Ten
The Wildman in Myth

We have already come across a number of wildman myths in our dealings with other topics. We have examined the European wildman legend of the Middle Ages, and the lycanthropist is a sort of wildman as well. The Cyclopes of classical mythology and even the Coptic version of St. Christopher all touch on this theme. In these myths of ages past, the wildman is a being who is to be feared on the one hand and pitied on the other. He is estranged from the company of other men and is but a caricature, a mere shadowy image of what it is to be a man. Reprobus, the man-eating cynocephalic, is thought fortunate to have been saved by his contact with the holy men who have brought him into the fold of Christianity and, even more tellingly, into the companionship of other men.

In the preceding chapter, mythical beasts, many with flesh and blood counterparts, were examined. Obviously, the creation and spreading of animal myths did not cease with modern times, nor did the discovery of new flesh and blood creatures. In fact, the gorilla, pygmy hippo, orangutan, okapi, and Congo peacock were thought to be mythical animals until described by science. The living coelacanth, a fish thought to be extinct for 65 million years, was only rediscovered in the late 1930's off the African coast not far from the Comoro Islands near Madagascar,(1) and a large new species of deep-water shark called the megamouth, Megachasma pelagios, was only discovered in 1976. In the 1990's, two new species of deer were discovered in Asian jungles, and eleven new monkey species were identified in Brazil alone. Each in its turn, these animals stepped out of the realm of nonexistence and myth and into scientific reality. The twentieth century has prepared us for animal legend becoming biological fact. With this background, it is no wonder that some people hope that other myths will prove to be living creatures as well. Today we know for certain that large tracts of rain forest could well be destroyed before science has a chance to catalog all their species, and so there is a sense of urgency.

Possibly the most interesting of the modern myths is the contemporary version of the wildman legend. Although it has a uniquely modern twist, this myth is rooted far back in the legends of many cultures. Three persistent stories bear watching: the yeti or abominable snowman of the Himalayas, the sasquatch or bigfoot of the Pacific Northwest, and the alma or hairy man of Central Asia. The interesting thing is that in each of the modern versions of these myths the "tribes" are thought to be happy in the wilderness, even better off there, away from the bad influence of civilized man at large. Aside from a few "monster hunters," modern humanity is happy to let these myths, if they exist in the flesh and blood, continue to avoid the rat race of contemporary society. Here Reprobus remains unredeemed and is thought of as better off for having missed the experience. A number of years ago, a movie called Wolf was released. In the movie, the hero and heroine (portrayed by Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer) become lycanthropists. In the end, with the pressure of society crushing their humanity, they become fully animal and adopt the lifestyle of wild wolves in the woods. What does this Hollywood version of the wildman myth say about human life in modern society and society's attitudes about itself? The answer would certainly show a very different world view than one expressed by the tellers of the story of Reprobus.

Myths about wildmen of various types have been told around campfires and hearths for a very long time. Just as with a number of the animal myths outlined in the last chapter, some of the most unlikely stories prove to have foundations in reality. We have already hinted at this in the case of the legends of giants. Blumenbach inventoried much of the physical evidence supporting the myths of the giants of Europe and realized that the material was actually the fossil remains of the mammoth. Although the giant in human form was the mythical result of the discovery of the skeletons of a completely different creature, we have seen that this sort of thing has happened over and over again.

It was quite natural for the people of Europe to have been willing to believe in giants and to actively search for them; there were two important pieces of literature which backed up their quest. Both the Bible and the Odyssey speak of giants. Despite stories of physical evidence from such places as Krems in Austria, Lucerne in Switzerland, and the Dauphine in France, very large skeletons discovered in Europe were not human.(2) Georges Cuvier, like a latter-day Don Quixote, tilted at the giants of his day. On the plain of the Dauphine, known as le champs des geants,(3) the skeleton of the so-called King Teutobochus was discovered in the winter of 1613. A man named Mazurier claimed to have excavated the bones from a thirty-foot-long, stone-lined grave which bore the inscription "King Teutobochus." By Cuvier's day a controversy raged over the skeleton, some claiming it was a surprising natural rock formation and not a skeleton at all. When Cuvier examined the fossil, he was able to declare that it was, indeed, fossilized bone, the skeleton of an elephant relative called Dinotherium.(4) Not since Cuvier's book, Recherches sur les Ossements Fossiles,(5) was published in 1824, did any man of science seriously consider the possibility that giants in human form ever really existed. It should be noted as an interesting side issue that it was not only the old world where misidentification of fossils occurred. According to a collection of published accounts written by Reverend Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale College, a similar misreading of evidence occurred sometime around 1705 near Claveric, an area below Albany. Stiles was telling the tale in 1764. Using the diary of a Mr. Taylor of that area, Stiles said that "Grandfather" Taylor claimed to have heard reports of a giant Indian brave. Taylor said that his source for the story was the Dutch community of the area who told him in about 1666. The Dutch said that the local Indians claimed that the brave had died about two hundred and forty years before and was as tall as a pine tree, that he hunted bears until they were treed and then would take them in his hands, and that he would wade into water of twelve to fourteen feet deep and catch 5 sturgeons at a time and then broil and eat them all. According to Stiles, a skeleton was discovered in 1705 which was enormous. Teeth from the skull weighed in at from two to five pounds each according to Taylor who said he weighed them himself, in his own home. He described the teeth as having three ridges and as being the color of old olivant (ivory). Ley states that even this sketchy amount of detail shows the skeleton to have belonged to one of the American mastodons. So much for Heymo and his American relations.

Now let us turn our attention toward Polyphemus and his brother Cyclopes. For a start, the name Polyphemus may be a sort of humerous dig, on the part of Homer, at those who spread stories about such giants. The name can be translated as "the much talked about." Beyond that, Homer seems to have relied heavily on the art of personification when it comes to his descriptions of this Cyclops. In Book IX of the Odyssey, Homer describes Polyphemus as like a peak. But, is Polyphemus a giant who is as big as a mountain, or is he actually a mountain with a temper as bad as a fierce giant's? Homer writes:

"Yea and a monstrous marvel was he-- not fashioned seeming
Like to a mortal that liveth on bread but the peak of a mountain
Covered with forests and standing alone, o'ertopping the others.
(IX, 190-93)
Thereat, with a heart more maddened to fury,
Breaking a peak clean off from a huge high mountain he hurled it.
Down on the water it fell...
(IX, 480-82)

There is, indeed, a long standing tradition that Homer intended his description to be a personification of the peak of the Sicilian volcano, Mount Etna. In classical times, the Roman poet Virgil spoke of Aetnaeos Cyclopas, showing that he thought that Polyphemus was the volcano. In Book III of The Aeneid Virgil described the fury of Polyphemus:

"With that he roar'd aloud: the dreadful cry
Shakes earth, and air, and seas; the billows fly
Before the bellowing noise to distant Italy.
The neighb'ring Aetna trembling all around,
The winding caverns echo to the sound.
His brother Cyclops hear the yelling roar,
And, rushing down the mountains, crowd the shore."

Much of the lore of the Cyclopes backs up the interpretation that they are volcanoes. After all, the single, large, and round eyes of the giants could be an allusion to the craters of volcanoes. The Cyclopes were monsters who lived apart from men on the crests of mountains. They were sons of Poseidon in Homer, but this may be a literary device to link them to Odysseus' wanderings on the sea. In another set of traditions, they were the sons of Heaven and Earth. Here they served as the workmen of Hephaestus who helped him forge the thunderbolts of Zeus in the volcanic flames. Even the descriptions of wondrous vineyards and fields of grain in the land of the Cyclopes agree with the fertility of volcanic slopes. That observer of the natural world, Pliny the Elder, even referred to volcanic projectiles or "bombs" as cyclopum scopuli.

There may have been a second idea which Homer had in mind, however. For there is another tradition about Sicily. According to Ley, a man named Empedocles, writing in 440 B.C., claimed that Sicily had once been the home of a ferocious race of giants. Although it is true that both Sicily and peninsular Italy once housed races of people who were, on average, quite a bit taller than either classical or modern Italians, this is probably not what Empedocles meant. Very occasionally, the skeletons of much larger beasts were discovered in caves along the coast of Sicily. Sicily once served as the habitat of a "dwarfed" race of mammoths as did other Mediterranean islands. Although the skeletons would have been small in comparison to those of some other members of the elephant clan, they would have been enormous in comparison to human skeletons. One of these skeletons, discovered in the fourteenth century, caused such a stir that a famous Italian writer of the time, Giovanni Boccaccio, declared that the actual skeleton of Polyphemus had been discovered near the town of Trapani on the west coast of Sicily (just about as far away from Mount Etna as one can get and still be on the island). Athanasius Kircher of the Society of Jesus examined the remains in the middle of the 1600's and declared Bocciccio's excitement to be justified, even though he had exaggerated the size of the giant. According to Kircher, the giant would have stood thirty feet tall and not three hundred feet as Boccaccio had claimed.(6) We have already seen that the skeletons of mammoths and other members of the elephant family have been misidentified as the bones of giants, but what is there about them that provides such a strong link to the Cyclopes myths?

We are pretty sure that the Homeric Greeks were unfamiliar with the living species of elephants of their day. We know, too, that mammoth skeletons were present in Sicily and that, at least later, these were thought of as evidence for the existence of giant races of men. In addition, there is a very curious characteristic of elephant skulls; when they are examined from the front, they appear to be huge human skulls with one central hole instead of the usual eye and nose holes which appear on a normal human skull. For someone who is untrained in anatomy, the single hole could be misinterpreted as a huge single eye socket. While this single opening is, in actuality, the nasal passage of the creature, it is easy to see how such a mistake could be made. According to Ley, it is possible that Mediterranean sailors came into contact with such skulls in their travels. He writes (pp. 34-35):

"The big skulls to them were simply the skulls of big humans, distinguished from others not only by their size but also by the fact that they had 'only one single eye in the middle of the forehead.' And one can hardly expect these sailors to go home and report in a dry-as-dust manner that there was such a skull in such and such a cave. They would not tell of dried and dead skulls of giants, they would tell of giants that were very much alive and battled with them. And if they had not been victorious in those battles they would not be sitting in front of the harbor tavern to tell the tale. These tales must have been numerous... 'polyphemus'!"

At the opposite end of the wildman spectrum there are the small folk. These can be anything from the leprechauns, gnomes, elves, pixies, and fairies of western Europe to the pygmies and dwarves of far-away lands. In myth and legend, contact with these beings can range anywhere from a blessing to a curse; most of the time, however, such contact is depicted as showing these races to be mysterious and somewhat malevolent tricksters. If it were not for the fact that at least some of these tribes of small people (the African pygmies, for example) are real, it would be possible to see how the occasional small person born to tall parents could account for all the stories. Even in ancient times, people were familiar with the occasional small human. In Egypt, they served as model for the dwarf god, Bes, the guardian of family life and of pregnant women. In Rome they served as popular entertainers.

Fraud may also have served to enlarge the stories about small tribes, however. As early as Marco Polo's day, hoaxes about small tribes were being exposed. When it was claimed that there was an extremely small race of people living in Asia, Marco Polo's Travels (Book III, chapter 12) exposed the plot by unscrupulous specimen dealers:

"It should be known that what is reported respecting the dried bodies of diminutive human creatures, or pigmies, brought from India is an idle tale, such pretended men being manufactured in this island in the following manner. The country produces a species of monkey, of tolerable size, and having a countenance similar to that of man. Those persons who make it their business to catch them, shave off their hair, leaving it only about the chin, and those other parts where it naturally grows on the human body. They then dry and preserve them with camphor and other drugs; and having prepared them in such a mode that they have exactly the appearance of little men, they put them into wooden boxes, and sell them to trading people, who carry them to all parts of the world."

The Greek historian, Herodotus, reported a story about five young men told to him in Egypt. The five men claimed that, wanting to know more about Africa, they went on an expedition. After crossing the sand for many days, they came to a place where fruit trees grew. Here, they said, they were captured by a band of small men. They were led across extensive marsh land and brought to a village on the banks of a river which flowed from east to west.(7) Even before Herodotus, Homer's Illiad also mentions "small-bodied pygmies." Aristotle stated that pygmies lived beyond the source of the Nile and assured his readers that they were no myth. It was not until an expedition led by Paul Belloni du Chaillu for the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences in 1863-65, however, that the pygmies of Africa were encountered by western explorers. In 1870, another group of pygmies who lived closer to Egypt, and must have been the group talked about by Aristotle, was identified by Georg August Schweinfurth. Soon information on Asian pygmies was reported as well. Although Ctesias(8) mentioned them in the 400's BC, it was only now that concrete scientific evidence began to accumulate.

From the distribution of the known pygmies in the first decade of the 1900's, it was theorized that they had been pushed into the marginal jungle land that most of them inhabited by their taller competitors. Some believed that the pygmies, therefore, represented relict groups of men who at one time populated the entire earth and were later "muscled out" of much of their range. The fossil record has simply not supported this theory, however.(9)

Africa and Asia are also the sources for stories about other sorts of little people whose existence has certainly not been proven. One such group of "people" is known as the agogwe in Tanzania (Tanganyika) and Mozambique. These agogwe are said to be even shorter than the pygmies, to be covered with reddish-brown or sometimes black hair (somewhat longer on the head), and to walk in an upright manner like other men. These beings, which have a simian appearence, are said to be so primative that they fail to recognize spears as weapons and prefer to throw handfulls of gravel at their adversaries while waving their arms excitedly. Although they are not called by the same name, "hairy little men" are also said by natives to be found in the dense forests on the Ivory Coast. As far as the Ivory Coast creature is concerned, Professoer A. Ledoux, of the Zoology Division of the Adiopodoume Education and Research Institute, collected quite a number of stories. Among these were the following two accounts (Heuvelmans, pp. 511-512):

"During one of his expeditions in the course of 1947 the great elephant hunter Dunckel killed a peculiar primate unknown to him; it was small with reddish-brown hair and was shot in the great forest between Guiglo and Toulepleu, that is, between the Sassandra and Cavally rivers. Its remains disappeared while it was being carried home, no doubt having been disposed of by superstitious porters. Dunckel even offered to take my informant to the place and he in turn invited me to go with them.

Unfortunately this expedition never took place...

According to an African technician of mine from Toulepleu called Mehaud Taou, an intellegent boy keenly interested in these questions, there was recently a system of barter between the negroes and these forest creatures; various manufactured goods were left in the forest in exchange for various fruits. This was supposed to have gone on until 1935. The little men who practised the barter were hardly known even to the negroes themselves. The Gueres called them Sehite.

It is possible that these Sehites may be true pygmies like those in central Africa."

According to Heuvelmans, Ledoux concluded that the Ivory Coast stories could be evidence of both the previously unknown presence of pygmies there and the existence of some reddish primate as well. It is uncertain what actual primate, if any, the agogwe might turn out to be, but there are those who would opt for the view that they may be some sort of relict species.(10)

Very similar tales of "hairy little men" exist on the continent of Asia as well; here the creature in question is called nittaewo. Like the agogwe, it is said to be very primitive and ape-like, even though it walks upright. Stories of this creature and other similar creatures are told over much of southern and south-eastern Asia, from India and Sri Lanka to Cambodia, southern China, and Laos. Although some descriptions are similar to those used for the agogwe, some rather unbelievable embellishments are also included:

"...According to these local reports the "wild men" of Nam-Noung are small --less than 1.50 m high-- covered with a thick coat of reddish hair, and arms or legs which they cannot bend at all. The back of the forearm has a sharp membrane like the blade of a knife which they use for cutting away the bush to make a path through the forest. They cannot climb up trees, since they have neither knees nor elbows, so they sleep leaning against tree trunks. They live on roots and stalks of plants, and do not know how to build huts, living the same wandering life as other beasts of the forest..."(11)

It seems to me that there are a couple of possibilities when it comes to this account: it is a totally fictional myth without any basis in nature whatsoever, or it is based on brief glimpses of some very shy forest-dwelling creature. If the first option is true, there is very little further to say, except that this version of the myth may constitute an ethnographic etiology, to borrow a term often used in the form criticism of the Bible. An ethnographic etiology is a story which talks about the beginnings of a particular tribe or group of people; it is an origin myth, if you will. According to the teller of the tale, the people of a local village claimed to be descended from one of these creatures by the name of Kjhat, and they may have spread the tale to other local natives. It is more likely, however, that the people of this village tied into an older myth which is widespread in Asia and used it to explain their origins. On the other hand, if the story is based on some real, poorly-known animal, what could it possibly be? The man-like stance and stiff arms and legs seem to hint at some sort of gibbon. Gibbons often walk with their arms outstretched, stiffly angled toward the ground from the shoulders. The arms are thus used in the way a tight rope walker uses a pole for balance, and the gibbon moves stiffly along looking as though it has no joints. The problem with this analysis is that known species of gibbon are not reddish and that local natives in south-eastern Asia should be familiar with the gait of the gibbon. Another "monkey wrench in the works" in trying to identify this mystery creature as some species of gibbon is that the Moi tribesmen, who originally passed on the information, included a tail in their description. So, perhaps we should look elsewhere (at some unknown monkey?) for a match. On the other hand, Heuvelmans points out that it is a fairly common practice in southern Asia to describe even little-known peoples as having tails. He claims that the tail serves as a sort of symbolic appendage signifying the primitive or animal nature of mysterious tribes. He states that the Annamite neighbors of the Moi once used to claim that the Moi had tails themselves.

In the Malay jungle, similar beings are called hantu Sakai by the Sakai people of the area. The name may be translated as "Sakai demons." The following account appears in Heuvelmans (pp. 113-114):

"[The hantu Sakai] ...have a sharp blade-like bone in their right forearm which they use in the felling of trees. To gather the fruit from the topmost sprays of a tree they climb the stem, and seat themselves upon a branch, whilst they cut the spray through with this sharp blade. Although they fall to the ground together with the branch they never hurt themselves."

In nearby Sumatra, the term orang can mean anything from man to ape to monkey. As such, it is applied to men of Malay (orang malayu), a large, reddish ape (orang utan or the man-of-the-woods), and the proboscis monkey (orang blanda or the Dutchman). It is, therefore, somewhat difficult to know what exactly is meant by the term orang pendek which translates as "little man."(12) The orang pendek is traditionally described as a small biped which speaks an unknown language, is one meter and a half tall at most, has pinkish-brown skin under sparse brown to black hair. On its head there is thicker black hair which forms a bushy mane that falls down its back. Its arms are said to be shorter than those of an ape, and it is supposed to climb only rarely. The one very odd characteristic which is mentioned in the traditional myths is that the creature walks with its feet reversed, with the heels forward and the toes pointing back.

Although the creature had been talked about by the local tribesmen from time immemorial, the Dutch settlers didn't begin to take the stories seriously until the 1900's. In contrast to the native descriptions, the Dutch stories often seem to be describing a strange ape (Heuvelmans, p. 127):

"I saw that he had short hair, cut short, I thought; and suddenly realised that his neck was oddly leathery and extremely filthy. 'That chap's got a very dirty and wrinkled neck!' I said to myself.

His body was as large as a medium-sized native's and he had thick square shoulders, not sloping at all. The colour was not brown, but looked like black earth, a sort of dusty black, more grey than black.

He clearly noticed my presence. He did not so much as turn his head, but stood up on his feet: He seemed to be quite as tall as I (about 1.75 m).

Then I saw that it was not a man, and I started back, for I was not armed. The creature calmly took several paces, without the least haste, and then, with his ludicrously long arm, grasped a sapling, which threatened to break under its weight, and quietly sprang into a tree, swinging in great leaps alternately to right and left..."

This account, told by Mr. Oostingh, the manager of a coffee plantation at Dataran in 1917, was reported by L.C. Westenenk, the Dutch Governor of Sumatra. Westenenk gave the following analysis with a resounding second by Heuvelmans (p. 127):

"Might not the orang pendek be the same among the gibbons as the old solitary bulls are among elephants? Lone, ill-tempered great-grandfathers, hated by all the females in their tribe, who have lost most of their hair as a result of mange or age?"

The following story, also reported by a European, is surprisingly similar to the traditional description of the orang pendek. Mr. van Herwaarden, the European to whom the events allegedly occurred, had been collecting tales of the orang pendek (he uses the label sedapa) for many years before October, 1923, when this story takes place. According to some skeptics, this accounts for the similarity between his description and those of the traditional peoples (Heuvelmans, pp. 132-133):

"...For several days from early morning to late afternoon I had been tracking a sounder of wild pig in the cleared part of the island [Poeloe Rimau(13) ]. But, alas, it was to no purpose, although there were countless tracks.

Finally I decided to have one last try and lay in wait, crouching down and well-hidden. For an hour nothing happened. Then I happened by chance to look round to the left and spotted a slight movement in a small tree that stood alone. By now it was time for me to be going home, for it was not advisable to journey through such country after sundown. But all the same I was tempted out of curiosity to go and see what had caused the movement I had noticed. What sort of animal could be in that tree?

My first quick look revealed nothing. But after walking round the tree again, I discovered a dark and hairy creature on a branch, the front of its body pressed tightly against the tree. It looked as if it were trying to make itself inconspicuous and felt that it was about to be discovered.

It must be a sedapa. Hunters will understand the excitement that possessed me. At first I merely watched and examined the beast which still clung motionless to the tree. While I kept my gun ready to fire, I tried to attract the sedapa's attention, by calling to it, but it would not budge. What was I to do? I could not get help to capture the beast. And as time was running short I was obliged to tackle it myself. I tried kicking the trunk of the tree, without the least result. I laid my gun on the ground and tried to get nearer the animal. I had hardly climbed 1 or 1.50 m into the tree when the body above me began to move. The creature lifted itself a little from the branch and leant over the side so that I could see its hair, its forehead and a pair of eyes which stared at me. Its movements had at first been slow and cautious, but as soon as the sedapa saw me the whole situation changed. It became nervous and trembled all over its body. In order to see it better I slid down to the ground again.

The sedapa was also hairy on the front of its body; the colour there was a little lighter than on the back. The very dark hair on its head fell to just below the shoulder blades or even almost to the waist. It was fairly thick and very shaggy. The lower part of its face seemed to end in more of a point than a man's; this brown face was almost hairless, whilst its forehead seemed to be high rather than low. Its eyebrows were the same colour as its hair and were very bushy. The eyes were frankly moving; they were of the darkest colour, very lively, and like human eyes. The nose was broad with fairly large nostrils, but in no way clumsy; it reminded me a little of a Kaffir's. Its lips were quite ordinary, but the width of its mouth was strikingly wide when open. Its canines showed clearly from time to time as its mouth twitched nervously. They seemed fairly large to me, at all events they were more developed than a man's. The incisors were regular. The color of the teeth was yellowish white. Its chin was somewhat receding. For a moment, during a quick movement, I was able to see its right ear which was exactly like a little human ear. Its hands were slightly hairy on the back. Had it been standing, its arms would have reached a little above its knees; they were therefore long, but its legs seemed to me rather short. I did not see its feet, but I did see some toes which were shaped in a very normal manner. This specimen was of the female sex and about 1.50 m high.

There was nothing repulsive or ugly about its face, nor was it at all ape-like, although the quick nervous movements of the eyes and mouth were very much like those of a monkey in distress. I began to talk in a calm and friendly way to the sedapa, as if I were soothing a frightened dog or horse; but it did not make much difference. When I raised my gun to the little female I heard a plaintive 'hu-hu,' which was at once answered by similar echoes in the forest nearby.

I laid down my gun and climbed into the tree again. I had almost reached the foot of the bough when the sedapa ran very fast out along the branch, which bent heavily, hung on the end and then dropped a good 3m to the ground. I slid hastily back to the ground, but before I could reach my gun again, the beast was almost 30 yards away. It went on running and gave a sort of whistle. Many people may think me childish if I say that when I saw its flying hair in the sights I did not pull the trigger. I suddenly felt that I was going to commit murder. I lifted my gun to my shoulder again, but once more my courage failed me. As far as I could see its feet were broad and short, but that the sedapa runs with its heels foremost is quite untrue."

Van Herwaarden is supposed to have kept quiet about this encounter for an entire year, hoping to back his story up with physical evidence when the time came to tell it. It was only when he was about to return to Europe that he finally shared his experience, allegedly for the benefit of other settlers. Dr. K.W. Dammerman, curator of the Museum at Buitenzorg at the time, summarized his opinion of the story in this way (Heuvelmans, p. 134):

"But this writer is almost too exact in his description of the animal, so that it does not seem impossible that the incident was either based on his imagination, or, that he has written it strongly impressed by the stories about the orang pendek."

I find myself leaning toward Dammerman's conclusion. After all, according to the story itself, the events took place in the very late afternoon or evening when shadows are long. Yet van Herwaarden claimed to have seen quite small details about the creature from some distance away while looking up into a tree from below for only a brief period of time. The shear quantity of specific details also seems to me to be a bit suspect. It is likely that if the events happened as he claimed, at least some of the details might have grown in his mind over the course of his year of silence. But, if his story was based on an actual encounter, with what creature would this encounter have been? If the creature was a gibbon or other ape, it was certainly of an unknown species, one with many unique characteristics. Not the least of these characteristics are the long, flowing hair and the ability to run upright for quite some distance and at a fairly high rate of speed. A reasonable explanation is not easy to come by.

Between about 1915 and 1924 several foot prints were observed which were meticulously drawn by their discoverers. One set of tracts was even photographed in situ and later collected in the form of wax casts. Each of these sets of tracks appeared to be made by small bipedal creatures with very short and wide feet, either triangular or square in shape. Except for the size, all of the tracks had a general similarity to human foot prints; they were both plantigrade(14) and lacked the separation of the big toe print from the others that appears in the tracks of apes. For a long time these tracks were thought to be those of the orang pendek. Finally, the wax casts made their way into the hands of Dr. Dammerman, who immediately identified the creature that made them as the Malayan sun-bear which is called the bruan in Sumatra.(15) Bernard Heuvelmans, who has closely examined copies of the casts himself, agrees with this identification.

It seems to me, that this episode should not be too quickly dismissed as a simple dead end, however. Heuvelmans reports that at least twice a bruan was identified as an orang pendek to a European hunter by a native guide. In both cases the hunter was bolder than van Herwaarden, and killed the beast. Both were then positively identified as sun-bears; one of the two was quite old and was bald on its back and neck. It seems more and more likely that much of the traditional orang pendek myth may be explained by a mere blending of the characteristics of known animals, for example, the sun-bear and the gibbon. Even the traditional idea that the orang pendek walks with its heels back to front may find an explanation in bear tracks. As Dr. Dammerman explains (Heuvelmans, p.137):

"The peculiar belief that this mysterious ape-man walks with his heels turned to the front may find its origin in the bear tracks. The Malay bear often turned his feet in, that is to say with his toes turned in and the heel turned out."

In general, humans walk with their heels in and their toes pointed out; if that is what a savvy native tracker expects to see in a human trail, a trail that has the toes in and heels out must look to him like the man's feet are on backwards. In addition, a bear's feet are constructed differently than a man's. On a bear's foot the largest, most prominent toe is on the outside of the foot, while a man's big toe is on the inside of his foot. This could certainly add to the illusion that the bears tracks were, instead, made by a small man with "turned around" feet. Finally, the bruan matches the general size and color used to describe the orang pendek as well. The little sun-bear, when standing upright, is about a meter and a half in height. In color, the bear is very dark brown or black over much of his body while his face is a light brown. Although there are many loose ends to be explored in the origins of the myth of the little ape-men of Sumatra, at least some of the components of the myth can be attributed to other beasts.

The next mysterious wildman is also a native of Asia, and in many ways he is the most famous of all. This is the yeti or the abominable snowman.(16) The setting for the snowman myths is the high mountains of the Himalayas, an area where beliefs in extremely ancient gods and demons have been wedded to the mahayana form of Buddhism. Here venerable myths, which pre-date the spread of the Buddha's teachings, form a mystical backdrop for the cultures of Tibet and Nepal. The resulting Lamaistic Buddhism is a richly woven tapestry of beliefs, some originating in India and others in the more northern mountain traditions. Instead of being Buddhists, some of the mountain people follow the bhakti yoga form of Hinduism, a form which is willing to include many images of God-- including some based on animal shapes. In cities like Katmandu, Buddhist stupas and Hindu temples sit side by side. The snowman is but one component of an enormous collection of folk stories and religious fables that characterize the myth system of the mountain peoples. The snowman myth thus reaches far back into time and is firmly rooted in the local cultures. As such, the snowman is an object of religious veneration among the peoples, mainly Buddhists and Hindus who have a fundamental respect for all forms of life anyway. For this reason, it may be nearly impossible to separate any scientific truth about the snowman from the mountain legends. Although the snowman has been an intricate part of the local myths, it was not until 1889 that anything even remotely connected to the myths was recorded by Westerners.(17)

It was in 1889 that a European expedition left Darjeeling on its way to northeastern Sikkim.(18) Major L.A. Waddell, of the India Army Medical Corps, published an account of the expedition called Among the Himalayas in London in 1899. He wrote (Ley, pp. 76-77):

"Some large footprints in the snow led across our track and away up to the higher peaks. These were alleged to be the trail of the hairy wild men who are believed to live amongst the eternal snows, along with the mythical white lions whose roar is reputed to be heard during storms. The belief in these creatures is universal among Tibetans. None, however, of the many Tibetans I have interrogated on this subject could ever give me an authentic case..."

According to Ley, Major Waddell eventually suggested that the tracks he encountered were made by a bear, Ursus arctos isabellinus.(19)

The next mention of the yeti appears in a book by a French author, Jean Marques-Riviere, called L'Inde Secrete et su Magie. Here, Marques-Riviere claims to have interviewed a pilgrim who assured him that the snowmen were a race of large humans who spoke an unknown language. The pilgrim told him that he had been the member of a group of natives who followed a yeti trail and came upon a group of at least ten of the giants, seated in a circle. They were:

"10-12 feet high, beating tom-toms, oscillating and engaged in some magic rite. Their bodies were covered with hair; their faces between man and gorilla; quite naked at that great altitude, and a sadness expressed on their frightful visages."(21)

Considering the title of Marques-Riviere's book, and the complete lack of scientific bent that it implies, it is little wonder that the description of the snowmen seems to be one designed to show their mystical importance and worth as objects of religious veneration.

In 1915, H.J. Elwes, Fellow of the Royal Society, published an account in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London. The account was an eye-witness report by J.R.P. Gent, a forestry officer stationed near Darjeeling. Gent claimed to have seen ape-like creatures, which the locals called sogpa, above the treeline. These he described as having long, yellow-brown hair. He measured the creatures' stride at about two feet on flat ground; but when they walked up steep slopes they seemed to walk on their knees, leaving a track with toe marks pointing backward.

The most famous of the early encounters with evidence of the snowman occurred in 1921; in that year, Colonel C.K. Howard-Bury led the first Mount Everest expedition. In September, the team made an assault on the north col by way of the 22,000-foot-high Lhakpa La Pass. In soft snow, they discovered tracks which seemed to have been made by a barefoot man. At once, the porters identified the tracks as those of the metohkangmi. When the story made its way to the Western press, much was made of the possibility of encountering large, hairy men in the Himalayas, even though Colonel Howard-Bury made light of the local myths and put forward the theory that the tracks had been made by large mountain wolves. After all, speculated the newspapermen, who should be able to know the area and its inhabitants better-- a foreign military man or the experienced native porters?

In 1925, Signor N.A. Tombazi published the following report in Bombay at the conclusion of a photographic expedition at the 15,000-foot-high Kanchenjunga glacier(Ley, p. 78):

"Intense glare prevented me seeing anything for a few seconds, but I soon spotted the object referred to two or three hundred yards away down the valley-- unquestionably the figure in outline was exactly like a human being, walking upright and stopping occasionally to uproot some dwarf rhododendron. It showed dark against the snow and wore no clothing. Within the next minute or so it had moved into some thick scrub and was lost to view. I examined the footprints which were similar in shape to those of a man but only 6-7 inches long by 9 inches wide at the broadest part. Marks of five toes and instep were clear but trace of heel indistinct. I counted five at regular intervals from 1 to 1 1/2 feet. The prints were undoubtedly of a biped."

Although Tombazi had once skeptically referred to the snowman as a "delicious fancy," this alleged sighting in 1925 seems to have caused him to change his attitude about the yeti. Still, the unusual dimensions of the tracks which he described call for some pretty fancy explaining. Ley suggests that the creature in question was a yeti which may have been walking without its heel hitting the ground; that is, it walked on tip-toe. Other sets of alleged snowman tracks don't share this characteristic, so this explanation isn't very satisfactory. It seems more likely to me that the tracks were the composite footprints of a bear, made up of the bear's front and rear tracks being imperfectly superimposed over one another and causing a somewhat indistinct track which appeared broader than it was long. As far as what Tombazi saw is concerned, it boils down to a darkish man-sized figure which was sometimes upright and sometimes hunched over among the bushes. He described the glare as hampering his vision of this figure which was seen only briefly and at a distance.

In addition, it is interesting to note that at least one set of alleged yeti tracks has been proven to be the tracks of one of the species of Himalayan bear. Unlike Tombazi's discoveries, these tracks were thirteen inches in length and six inches wide. They had the clear impressions of five symmetrically placed toes and of a heel with two curious toe-like marks on either side. The tracks were found in 1937 at over 18,000 feet up in the Bhyundhar Valley. Frank S. Smythe, who described the spoor in his 1949 book, The Valley of Flowers, stated (see Ley, p. 80):

"My photographs were developed by Kodak Ltd. of Bombay under conditions that precluded any subsequent accusation of faking and, together with my measurements and observations...were examined by Professor Julian Huxley, Secretary of the Zoological Society, Mr. Martin A.C. Hinton, Keeper of Zoology at the Natural History Museum [London] and Mr. R.I. Pocock. The Conclusion reached by these experts was that the tracks were made by a bear. At first, due to a misunderstanding as to the exact locality in which the tracks had been seen, the bear was said to be Ursus arctos pruinosus, but subsequently it was decided that it was Ursus arctos isabellinus which is distributed throughout the western and central Himalayas. The tracks agreed in size and character with that animal and there is no reason to suppose that they could have been made by anything else."

In his own account of this particular set of tracks, Bernard Heuvelmans states that tales based on this type of footprint must have led to traditional Sherpa stories about the yeti having extra toes and walking with its feet back-to-front (see p. 153). He points out that the traditional opinion that some little-known and mysterious men of Asia had such extraordinary feet is quite ancient and widespread in Asia, that it even appeared in Megasthene's Indica of the fourth century B.C. There it was written: "In the mountains called 'Nulo' there are men whose feet point backwards and have eight toes on the ends." This piece of evidence, which continues to point toward a bear as the flesh-and-blood creature behind the snowman myth, seems rather telling in trying to determine whether there is any scientific truth to be found in accounts of the yeti.

Because of the positive identification of the Smythe footprints, many explorers and scientists were ready to allow the yeti to lapse back into the realm of myth by the middle of the twentieth century, but circumstances in the form of more sightings and tracks never allowed the controversy over the existence of the yeti to die completely away. Then, in 1951, a surprisingly clear footprint was photographed which did not lend itself to easy identification as belonging to an already known species. This is the famous footprint which was photographed next to the head of an ice-axe for size comparison by Eric Shipton.

Shipton had failed his sixth attempt on Everest and was in the process of exploring the Gauri Sankar range with Michael Ward and a Sherpa guide named Sen Tensing when the men came upon a trail which seemed to be made by very large man-like feet. They followed the trail along the south-western slope of Menlung-tse for about a mile until it was lost on an ice moraine. At this point they investigated the tracks more thoroughly and took the famous picture of the individual track as well as one of a segment of the trail.(22) Shipton later described the tracks as basically oval in shape and some twelve inches long. The photograph shows a distinct big toe and possibly only three other smaller ones.

Although the prints which Shipton captured on film seem to be quite clear and distinct, showing no great resemblance to any known animal of the region, at least one plausible theory has been put forward to explain the appearance of the prints which does not necessitate the existence of a large unknown species. This theory has to do with the temperature fluctuations to be found in mountainous regions. According to this idea, the tracks could have been made in fresh snow by a well-known animal such as a bear; when the sun warmed the tracks, they began to melt, increasing in size and changing somewhat in shape while retaining what seem to be deceptively sharp edges. Finally, these altered tracks would freeze in the night, looking as though they had just been vacated by a large foot. Although this theory sounds quite credible, I have not heard of it being tested. It seems that experimentation in both field and laboratory conditions could be easily conducted, but such experiments may be of limited use. After all, if the Shipton track could be fairly closely reproduced, it would conclusively show that the freeze/thaw cycle probably changed the Shipton track but not prove what animal originally made it. On the other hand, failure to reproduce the track under experimental conditions may only show a failure to exactly duplicate the natural conditions under which the original Menlung-tse trail was formed.

Other pieces of so-called physical evidence for the existence of a flesh and blood snowman have simply not withstood the tests of science. Although lamas, the holy men of the region, have claimed to posses the mummified remains of yetis as part of the collections of sacred relics in their Buddhist monasteries, none of these remains have been examined by science. On the other hand, various yeti scalps had been photographed by Western expedition members over the years; Sir Edmund Hillary, of Everest fame, managed to borrow one from Khumjung in November of 1960. Close scientific inspection of the scalp revealed that it was actually an old piece of hide from a Nepalese serow, Capricornis sumatrensis thar, a species of wild mountain goat, which had been stretched over a cone-shaped mold.

Aside from the Himalayan bear theory, speculation about what sort of creature the yeti may be ranges from the ordinary to the unlikely. The first candidates are monkeys; it has been pointed out more than once that there are three species of reasonable size which are native to the general area of yeti activity. These are the Himalayan langur, a close relative of the Indian sacred langur, the Roxellana's snub-nosed langur, with its very human expression, and the presbytis langur, the largest of the three.(23) It should be noted that, instead of these known species of monkey, there are those that claim that the yeti is a large unknown species of primate, either a monkey or great ape, which has given up moving on all fours in favor of plantigrade bipedalism in order to minimize body contact with the snowy or frozen ground. Although this theory sounds reasonable, there is certainly no compelling evidence that it is the right one, especially since there are three concrete examples of known local monkeys which live in the snows of the region without having made such a radical evolutionary change in lifestyle and anatomy.

One rather unlikely theory about the identity of the yeti has been put forward by both Ley and Heuvelmans. Their ideas are based on fossil evidence collected in southern China of a giant primate which was sometimes called Gigantopithecus (giant ape) and sometimes Gigantanthropus (giant man). The label one chose depended on which side of the ape/man controversy one fell on. According to Heuvelams (p. 173):

"...discovery of a jaw-bone belonging to the Gigantopithecus in a mountain cave in Kwangsi Province, South China, settles the controversy. Dr. Pei Wen-Chung of the Laboratory of Vertebrate Palaeontology, Academia Sinica, who studied the jaw-bone, reports in the American Anthropologist (October 1957) that it is definitely of an ape, not a man. It is between 400,000 and 600,000 years old (Middle Pleistocene period). Wear on the teeth shows 'the animal had a mixed diet of meat and vegetables, quite different from that of modern apes which live on fruit.' Dr. Pei adds: '...this anthropoid was closer to man than any other ape yet discovered. It is estimated to have had a height of some 3.65 m.'"

Like Ley and Heuvelmans, one could extrapolate a similarity between the yeti and Gigantopithecus despite the fact that the case for the very existence of the first is based on tracks, sightings from a distance, and local tales, and the second is known only from fossil teeth and jaws. Giving the two cryptozoologists their due, the one-time existence of a huge and possibly bipedal ape in central Asia, one which ate a diet that would correspond to the omnivorous requirements of a large mountain dweller, virtually requires one to ask whether it is possible that such a giant ape could have survived in some relict population on the slopes of the Himalayas, especially if one is of the opinion that the sketchy evidence for the yeti can best be explained by an unknown man-like primate.

Leaving the question of the flesh-and-blood identity of the mysterious snowman aside, let us examine one of the many native stories about him. According to the natives, recently and nearby (though the time and location varies with the teller) a selfish and greedy yeti came each night to a mountain village to take whatever it wanted. It drank from the village water supply, ate the villagers' crops and stores, even smashed outbuildings and fouled drying linens. Soon the villagers, who were normally willing to tolerate the presence of all living things, lost patience with the greedy destructiveness shown by the yeti. They devised a plan to punish the yeti for its selfishness and total lack of regard for its fellow beings. The villagers put out large bowls of chang, a fermented drink like beer, for the yeti to find that night. Being the selfish glutton that it was, the yeti had soon finished all of the chang and fallen into a deep, snoring sleep. When the villagers awoke, they discovered the creature still under the influence of its excess and slew it.(24)

We must keep in mind that for the native peoples the snowman is a magical being, one from whom religious and cultural truths are to be drawn. Here, the snowman, although it is depicted as base and self-centered, teaches the valuable lesson that greed is death in the mountains. The story holds a moral for those who must share in order to survive the rigors of life in the Himalayas.

In the Pacific Northwest and the forested mountain regions of California there are tales of a similar being. Here, too, the myths stretch back into antiquity. In this case, the Native Americans of these areas have looked to their legendary giant, bigfoot or sasquatch, as a sort of elder brother, capable of the strongest forest magic. The creature figures in myths as a being that is in right relationship with his natural surroundings, a mystic holy man who knows his proper place among the other dwellers of the mountain forests in which he lives. He is respected by man and beast alike, a wise one of the woods who is at peace with all creation. Like the other sacred creatures of the Northwest (killer whales, salmon, ravens, eagles, and bears, etc.), he is carved onto totem poles and other artifacts by the native artists. Here, he serves as a shining example of the well-lived life in contrast to the greedy yeti of the Sherpas' dark tale of selfishness and just retribution.

Throughout the Americas rumors about the existence of a creature which is similar to the sasquatch may be found, especially in remote forests, swamps, and jungles. In general, the creature is said to be very large by those who claim to have seen it. It is described as leaving enormous plantigrade footprints, sometimes far exceeding even those of the yeti in size. As for its appearance, the sasquatch is said to be hairy and ape-like.

Aside from an enormous number of casts of alleged footprints, which often look like large caricatures of human tracks, evidence for the existence of the sasquatch consists of sighting reports, film images, and even recordings. There are virtually thousands of sites on the Internet which are dedicated to displaying the evidence in the form of narrative eyewitness accounts, still photos and images taken from movie film, and even reproductions of recordings of spooky, booming and yowling screams which are said to be sasquatch calls.

The most widely cited evidence for bigfoot, both on the Internet and elsewhere, is the Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin film. This 20 feet of 16mm film has become so recognizable that the image in it has been adopted in an ad for California cheese.(25) In the film, a large and hairy figure, said to be an adult female sasquatch by some, walks away from the camera quickly while swinging its long arms; at one point the figure turns and seems to look directly into the camera.

On October 20, 1967, Roger Patterson, a long-time monster hunter, and Robert Gimlin, an experienced outdoorsman, were exploring the Bluff Creek area of Six Rivers National Forest on horseback. This area of northern California, 18 miles from the Pacific Ocean and 38 miles from the Oregon border, had been chosen for exploration by the two men because many alleged sasquatch footprints had been seen there since 1957 and 1958 when a road was cut into the area. The tracks ranged from 12 1/4 inches to 17 inches in length. As the two men approached a certain spot in Bluff Creek, we are told, the horses reacted to a strange scent and the cameraman was thrown from his horse, only to recover himself and shoot the now-famous footage. The film is clear, and this is certainly not a case of mistaken identity. Either the film is authentic or it is the result of an elaborate hoax by one or both men. As proof of the authenticity of the sighting, some have cited the fact that Patterson and Gimlin had a falling out over financial rights to the film and yet both have stuck to their original version of events. The theory behind this offer of proof is that one man thinking he had been cheated would blow the whistle on the other.(26)

According to one Internet site entitled Bigfoot: Fact or Fantasy?, the evidence for sasquatch goes back a long way. The oldest recorded sighting of a bigfoot-like creature occurred in 986 AD when Leif Erikson and his men wrote of ugly, hairy monsters with great black eyes. The first modern record is based on large, human-like tracks described by David Thompson in 1811; he claimed to see them near Jasper, British Columbia. There is even an account of the capture of a small specimen, about 4 1/2 feet tall, near the railroad lines at Yale, British Columbia; according to the story, it was sent to London for scientific examination but never arrived.

At last we come to the Asian hairy man called the alma or almasty. This mysterious race of men has been described as similar to the very ancient and primitive Homo erectus and also at times to the more modern Neanderthal man.(27) Unlike the stories surrounding the yeti, those about the alma universally acclaim him to be nothing other than a man. Central Asian stories about this race of primitives include accounts of locals trading with them by leaving goods for them to find and later collecting other items left in place of these. Typical modern accounts of encounter with the primitives includes a story which was said to have happened in 1924. A Russian Red Army unit was investigating rumors of suspicious activity in the Vaj Mountains of Central Asia. Instead of finding a dissident stronghold, their exploration revealed a cave in which a primitive "ape-man" was hiding. The soldiers were said to have surrounded the entrance to the cave, and the end result was that an alma male was eventually forced to run headlong into a hail of bullets. It is interesting to note that no corroborating physical evidence, or even eyewitness testimony, has been put forward by anyone, and, without such, the account must be seen as a mere rumor.

According to an Internet site entitled Asian Hairy Man, which attributes the information to an article of the same name in Fortean Times, issue 67, the alma is said to inhabit the most remote regions of the Caucasus and Pamir mountain ranges, east of the Black Sea. He is shy, nomadic, and usually nocturnal in his habits, especially when modern people are nearby. Alma infants are said to closely resemble modern human babies, a smaller size being the only discernible difference at a distance. A Franco-Russian cryptozoologist named Marie-Jeanne Kofman, who was in her seventies when the article was published, spent 20 years interviewing witnesses and examining both footprints and droppings of the primitives. Her analysis of the alleged alma droppings revealed that whatever produced the droppings had a typical omnivorous diet which consisted of berries, roots, eggs, frogs, lizards, rodents, and other small animals.

The stressed relations between the super powers may well have kept valuable evidence about all of the alleged wildmen of Asia from reaching the rest of the world in former days. Perhaps, now that relations are somewhat improved and international cooperation seems to be more of a reality, more information about such rumored beings as the alma will reach the outside world. We must wait and see.

As has been seen, myths about wildmen (whether giants, dwarves, or ape-men) are widespread among many cultures around the world. These have had an influence on the imagination of not only traditional societies but on contemporary societies as well. The myths range from tribal etiologies to insults directed at neighboring tribes to religious and cultural moral lessons to popular entertainment. The wildman myths strike a chord in the human psyche, in man's understanding of his world and of himself. Whether or not any particular one of the myths represents an account of a flesh and blood wildman is really of less significance than what that myth says about the teller. On the other hand, wouldn't it be wonderful to discover another race of men who could teach us how better to fit in with the created world around us. Are there such men out there? Our search has shown that the evidence is not yet strong enough to make a case for believing so, yet hope springs eternal.

Notes For Chapter 10:


(1) A second coelacanth population was discovered in Indonesian waters during 1997. This population may be a dis tinct race; the Indonesian fish are covered in golden specks which the others lack.

(2) The major source for the material on giants and Cyclopes is Ley, pp. 28-35.

(3) This translates as, "the field of giants." Huge bones had been found on the plain repeatedly, but this is not all that unusual. In Central California, not far from my parents' home, a large number of mammoth skeletons were found in a fairly small area which was intended to be an expansion of the Madera County garbage dump.

(4) This is also sometimes spelled Deinotherium; it means "terrible beast."

(5) Research on Fossil Bones

(6) Considering the fact that the skeleton was probably an example of the dwarf Sicilian mammoth, Kircher's estimate of thirty feet was probably an exaggeration as well. Full sized mammoths are thought to have been as large as the largest African elephant of today. African bulls can reach a size of about 13 feet from ground to highest point; this would mean an animal of no more than 25 feet if it could stand perfectly straight up on its hind legs. A typical Sicilian dwarf specimen probably wouldn't reach anywhere near that height in that position. In fact, one full-grown specimen was discovered which would have been no more than about 3 feet tall at the shoulder.

(7) For more on small races of people, see Ley. pp. 90-108, and Heuvelmans, pp. 503-519.

(8) See also his contribution to the unicorn legend.

(9) After asserting that the evidence was against the "pygmy as relict" theory in the early 1900's, Ley makes an inventory of more recently discovered fossil evidence which implies that the theory may yet prove to be tenable. In order to find wide-spread populations of individuals who where small enough in stature to fit the theory, Ley goes back as far as the australopithecines, the members of a genus which probably was ancestral to the genus Homo. There were a number of species within the genus Australopithecus, and, so far, the fossils of seven have been identified: A. amanensis, A. afarensis, A. bahrelghazali, A. africanus, A. aethiopicus, A. robustus, and A. boisei. Although the first four species listed are described as the gracile australopithecines and the last three as the robust australopithecines, all members of the genus ranged between about one meter and one meter and a half in height with females at the lower end of the range and males at the higher end. It is, therefore, extremely unlikely that the gracile members of the genus Australopithecus gave rise to small modern humans while the robust members gave rise to larger modern humans; it simply does not stand up to scientific scrutiny. In addition, the so-called robusts are really only more robust in the structure of their teeth and chewing muscles and not in their stature at all, as can be seen by the size range of the various species. The fossil evidence (as well as the genetic evidence) is decidedly against the theory of so completely divergent an evolutionary path for the pygmies.

(10) Both Ley and Heuvelmans see some sort of surviving australopithecine as a possible explanation for the agogwe. I must say that this theory is only a little more plausible than that expressed about pygmy evolution above.

(11) This account was written by an explorer named Henri Maitre and appears in Heuvelmans on p. 110. For more on the wildmen of Asia see Heuvelmans, pp. 91-216.

(12) The same creature is often called orang letjo or "gibbering man." Other names which are applied to it in various areas are: sedapa, orang gugu, atoe pandak, atoe rimbo, ijaoe, sedabo, and goegoeh.

(13) This is not a coastal island. Rather, it is a part of the Palembang District which is surrounded by rivers.

(14) That is, the entire foot touched the ground; the beast didn't walk on its toes, as do many animals, but walked on the flat of its foot like a man.

(15) Helarctos malayanus (it sometimes is also called Ursus malayanus).

(16) The name abominable (or foul) snowman is a direct translation of the word metohkangmi which is often used by native Tibetans for the wildman. The names mirka and sogpa, in addition to the commonly used yeti, also apply to the creature. Other names like banjhankris (forest wizard), ui-go, mi-go, and tok (mouth man) are also sometimes used, correctly or otherwise.

(17) See Ley, pp. 75-89 and Heuvelmans, pp. 143-216 for more on the snowman.

(18) Sikkim borders on Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan. Northeastern Sikkim is about 75 miles due east of the peak of Mount Everest, while Darjeeling is about 100 miles to the southeast of the peak. Both areas, Sikkim and Darjeeling, are in modern India.

(19) Tellingly, there are stories which insist that the snowmen have backwards-facing feet, just like the orang pendek. See the material on the bruan above.

(20) Secret India and Its Magic.

(21) Ley, p. 77.

(22) Heuvelmans, p. 143.

(23) In the same order, the scientic names for the three are: Semnopithecus schistaceus, Rhinopithecus roxellanae, and Semnopithecus entellus achilles. It should be noted that even the largest stands no more than 4 1/2 feet tall, far short of the alleged size of the yeti.

(24) This telling of the myth is a composite of stories related in Heuvelmans, pp. 156-157.

(25) In the ad, the familiar image of bigfoot was zoomed in on to reveal that its hand held a wheel of real California cheese. The message of the ad: "Why does bigfoot return to California? It's the cheese."

(26) I'm not sure how logical the theory is; it would require someone, hoping for financial gain, to render worthless what he hopes to profit from as a tactic to get control over it. Recent wisdom, and rumor, holds that the Patterson film bigfoot was a costume created by the same Hollywood special effects genius that produced the original Planet of the Apes make up.

(27) The fossil evidence for Neanderthal shows that they stopped leaving recognizable remains about 28,000 years ago while Homo erectus may have died out 200,000 years before that. It should be noted that some experts believe that modern science has attempted to draw too sharp a line between Homo erectus, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis (or Homo neanderthalensis), and Homo sapiens sapiens; instead, they hold that the genus Homo has been moving from erectus through neanderthalensis to sapiens in a very gradual way, so gradual that the myriad of transitional forms blurs all but the most basic distinctions. In effect, these experts accept the names above as convenient labels but really see the genus Homo, at least from erectus onward, as a single species in flux.


PART III: FACT

Chapter Eleven
In the Beginning

Within the pages of this chapter, some of the various scientific ideas about the origin and development of the physical universe and of life on earth will be explored. As we have seen, Homo sapiens is a species that values its religious beliefs and myths, and these have a profound impact on the way in which our species looks at itself and the world around it. Perhaps, it would be appropriate here to briefly recap the Judeo-Christian beginning stories before exploring those scientific ideas which came to flower in the 19th and 20th centuries. Before that time, after all, creationism was widely accepted, even in scientific circles.

According to Genesis:

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters. Then God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.

Scripture scholars tell us that these words serve as an introduction to the whole Pentateuch. They are intended to demonstrate how God imposed order on a universe of primordial chaos by speaking His creative word.


According to the Gospel of John:

"In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things came to be through him,
and without him nothing came to be .
What came to be through him was life..."

This prologue states the main theme of the Gospel of John, that Jesus Christ, the eternal Word of God (the Logos) is pre-existent and that He is the vehicle through which the Father creates life. The first three words of the prologue are, of course, parallel to the Genesis creation account.

According to modern science, in the beginning there was a super dense ball of matter which exploded, causing the stuff of the universe to be flung outward in all directions. The universe expanded into the surrounding nothingness, and the matter began to form the stars and planets. Eventually, perhaps 4.5 billion years ago, our own planet was formed out of the primordial matter which had once been part of the dense ball. In this same "big bang" theory, science tells us that there is no new "stuff" in the universe, it all being present in the dense ball of matter; therefore, we ourselves are made up of the same star dust as the rest of the universe.


Scientists are finding traces of microscopic life in ancient rock formations which they estimate to have formed 3.5 billion years ago. This means that life on Earth has an age of somewhere between 4.5 billion, the age of the Earth itself, and 3.5 billion years. So, 4 billion years would be a reasonable guess as to the age of life on Earth.


It was all the way back at the end of the 18th century that observers of the landscape first began to realize that the Earth must have been older than had been thought. As they noted and recorded the evidence for geological changes they saw around them, they realized that at what they perceived to be the current rates vast amounts of time would be necessary in order to lay down the thick layers of sedimentary rock that they encountered. The deep gorges cut into the layers signaled even more time-consuming processes. As geologists spent more and more time examining rock layers, they realized that the strata must correspond to periods of time. These periods were grouped into eras by John Phillips in 1841; he named these the Paleozoic (ancient animal), Mesozoic (middle animal), and Cenozoic (recent animal) based on the life forms which were shown by fossil evidence to have lived in each era.
As the fossil evidence piled up, it became apparent that the history of life on Earth is one of change; the life evolved over time into the forms we now know. Fossils of creatures which no longer survived occurred at certain rock layers formed in the past which also revealed a lack of fossils of animals which exist in more modern times. In other words, the fossils found at each level differed from those found at other levels, implying that the forms of life on earth must be modified over time. This modification became known as evolution, and was theorized long before Charles Darwin published his book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.


For example, Jean Baptiste Lamarck saw life forms as constituting a chain, each link finding its origin in the link before. He also proposed a process by which specific forms changed. According to his theory, a creature might modify itself by means of its own lifestyle or effort, and any modification achieved could be passed on to the next generation. Here, one could say that an individual animal works to improve itself during its lifetime and passes that improvement on to its heirs. The eventual result, over many generations, could be quite dramatic. The classic example used to explain this notion of "Lamarckian evolution" is a seemingly logical but incorrect assumption about the giraffe's neck. The example runs as follows: a hypothetical short-necked giraffe ancestor, a proto-giraffe, stretches its neck in order to reach its favorite shoots on a tree branch. After a lifetime of stretching, this proto-giraffe has a slightly longer neck than when it started and is able to pass this progress on to the next generation which in turn repeats the process and passes on the result. Eventually, the necks which are passed on from one generation to the next are quite long indeed, and the resulting offspring have become full-fledged giraffes. In an historical period devoid of any notions of genetic mutation, Lamarck's ideas must have seemed like a plausible explanation for evolution.


When Darwin published his work in 1859, therefore, his contribution to biological thought wasn't the idea of evolution itself. Rather, his innovation was a statement of the first really convincing mechanism for evolutionary change, one which fit the evidence far better than its Lamarckian predecessor. This mechanism is known as natural selection and is based on a simple set of assumptions (Gould, The Book of Life, p. 29):

"1 Organisms produce more offspring than can survive and reproduce.

2 The organisms that survive tend to be better adapted to the local environments.

3 The characters of the parent appear in the offspring.

4 So generation by generation, hundreds of thousands of times over, the better-adapted lines will survive to pass on the features that give them advantage in local environments."

It should be noted here that Darwin himself did not describe his mechanism of natural selection as the survival of the fittest. Rather than the Lamarckian notion of progress by degrees, brought on by effort on the part of individual members of the species or the implications associated with the subjective evaluation of "fitness" which go along with the phrase "the survival of the fittest,"(1) Darwin seems to have preferred the supposedly more neutral idea of adaptation by means of natural selection. But, was Darwin's preferred terminology really designed to be less judgmental toward individuals or species not selected? It seems not.
Darwin referred to nature as "red in tooth and claw," and to "the struggle for existence" in such a way that he made it clear he believed there was an ongoing war for survival and that some competing creatures would be failures in this titanic struggle for existence. Although Darwin made an enormous contribution to the biological sciences with his mechanism for evolution, he was not able to escape his British Empire prejudice in favor of "might makes right." For Darwin, as for his contemporaries, the winners in the many battles for survival (biological, commercial, industrial, or military) are like the proverbial rising cream. In this view the species which survived were the best adapted to their surroundings, the best "fighters," and the struggle for survival was a war which was constantly being escalated. Over vast expanses of time, slowly but surely, the struggle became more and more intense and survival harder and harder to assure. The surviving species must be, therefore, "lean, mean, fighting machines," the best adapted species ever to have lived. Here, as with Lamarckian evolution, we come to the idea of effort in evolutionary change. For Lamarck the effort was self motivated; for Darwin it is motivated by external pressures like competition for limited resources. Both systems of thought seem to contemplate evolutionary change as progress toward an ideal or, at least, toward being "better" (more able to survive, more adapted to the ecological niche, more self realized, etc.). The question is, are existing species the best that have ever lived? Has natural selection brought us a progression of better and better species until we live among the pinnacle species, the super-species?


According to Richard Leakey (in The Sixth Extinction, p. 17):

"One of the legacies of the Darwinian revolution...imposed a very particular view of the world on Western intellectual thought. According to the perspective, species thrive because they are superior in some way to their competitors... This is a rather simplistic reading of Darwin's greatest insight, the theory of evolution by natural selection, but it was comfortingly consistent with the Western ethos of success through effort. The expression of this ethos can be seen, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, in biological texts and even more so in anthropology texts, particularly those of a few decades ago."

As was stated above, Darwin needed vast stretches of time for his natural selection theory to work, and there was time aplenty in the geological record. Darwin believed that very small changes had accumulated over all this expanse of time, eventually resulting in new species after new species. The apparent lack of evidence for slow, continual change in the fossil record (that is, the lack of the presence of all the measurable intermediary forms between species), he said, was attributable to a flaw in that record. He predicted that, at least, some intermediate forms would be discovered as the fossil record was explored further, and his prediction came true.(2) Evolution was an unhurried process for Darwin; it was like slowly climbing a ramp which rose only slightly from the horizontal, but, because the ramp was so tremendously long, real progress would eventually be made.


The best example of an intermediate form is the Archaeopteryx (its name means ancient wing). It appears to be intermediary between reptiles and birds. The case of the Archaeopteryx also makes an interesting case study of the shift of scientific opinion in favor of Darwin's ideas (see Feduccia, pp. 10-24). After an imprint of a feather was found in the lithographic limestone of a quarry in Solnhofen in Bavaria in 1861, the search for a complete fossil bird was on among quarry workers, who supplemented their incomes by selling or trading fossils. Within a month Hermann Meyer, who gave the creature its name, reported the discovery of a nearly complete fossil skeleton in another nearby quarry. Due to the fine grain of the limestone, very small details of the feather impressions could be seen surrounding of apparent wings and long, bony tail. Eventually, the specimen entered into the hands of Dr. Karl Haberlein, a medical officer who accepted fossils in exchange for his treatment of quarrymen or their families. The fossil was offered for sale by the doctor after only three months, and negotiations were begun with the German government which wanted the object for the State Collection in Munich. However, when an influential professor of zoology at the Munich University became party to a controversy about the specimen's identity, negotiations slowed. The professor, J. Andreas Wagner, as an opponent of Darwin's ideas, denied even the possibility of a transitional link between the reptiles and the birds.


Because Haberlein did not publicly display his trophy, instead allowing only a small circle of experts to examine it and confirm its authenticity, rumors of fakery circulated; this gave Wagner the opportunity to publish a paper entitled "A New Reptile Supposedly Furnished with Bird Feathers."(3) One can almost hear the sarcasm of such a title. Wagner insisted that the limestone was simply too old to contain fossil feathers because, he said, birds did not exist as far back as the late Jurassic. He ignored the name bestowed on the creature by Meyer, a name which pointed to its birdlike form, and invented a new one: Griphosaurus (griffin-lizard). This moniker, which alluded to the winged creature of human fantasy, left no doubt of Wagner's opinion that this fossil had to be placed firmly in the reptile class. At this point, Wagner was working from second-hand descriptions of the specimen, not even having seen the thing himself. Although the controversy may have slowed things down in the bargaining with Germany, this was not the case everywhere.


Sir Richard Owen, Superintendent of the British Museum of Natural History, knew that Archaeopteryx would be a "feather in the cap" (some puns are irresistible) of any museum collection. Despite his own antievolutionist position, he and the Curator of the Geology Department recommended to their museum trustees that a deal for the object be struck at once. After several months, a bargain was made. The fossil arrived in London in 1862, along with 1,703 other specimens which were part of the agreement with Haberlein. Once the thing was acquired by the British Museum, it became an object of even more controversy. Neither the general public nor the scientific establishment of Britain was ready to embrace the idea of transitional forms, seeming to prefer the entrenched view which saw birds and reptiles as relatively static groups. Finally, a debate began to take shape.


Owen, the leader of mainstream scientific thought in Britain, began a careful examination of the Archaeopteryx specimen. Even while this went on, a number of scientific papers supporting his disagreement with Darwin's ideas where being published in England. One of these was a translation of Wagner's paper; in it he had maintained that the fossil represented a creature which would best be classified as a pterodactyl or flying reptile. In part, the paper read (Feduccia, p. 14):

"In conclusion, I must add a few words to ward off Darwinian misinterpretation of our new saurian. At the first glance of the Griphosaurus we might certainly form a notion that we have before us an intermediate creature, engaged in the transition from the saurian to the bird. Darwin and his adherents will probably employ the new discovery as an exceedingly welcome occurrence for the justification of their strange views upon the transformation of animals but in this they will be wrong."

On the other side of the debate, Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin's able public champion, was also studying the evidence. Huxley compared the specimen with another, also described by Wagner in 1861; this other fossil was that of the then smallest known dinosaur, the Compsognathus (elegant jaw). Huxley made an immediate connection between what he considered to be the birdlike reptile Compsognathus and the reptilelike bird Archaeopteryx. Here, he said, was not one intermediary form to show the link between reptile and bird, but two! Although many found Huxley's argument convincing, the controversy was still raging in 1877 when news of the discovery of another specimen was announced. That same year, Othniel Charles March of Yale, known for his American "dinosaur wars" with Edward Drinker Cope, wrote (Feduccia, p. 15):

"The classes of Birds and Reptiles, as now living, are separated by a gulf so profound that a few years since it was cited by the opponents of evolution as the most important break in the animal series, and one which that doctrine could not bridge over. Since then, as Huxley has clearly shown, this gap has been virtually filled by the discovery of bird like Reptiles and reptilian Birds. Compsognathus and Archaeopteryx of the Old World...are the stepping stones by which the evolutionist of to-day leads the doubting brother across the shallow remnant of the gulf, once thought impassable."

Finally, with the aid of such advocates as Huxley and Marsh, Darwin's view of the slow, gradual progression of species through adaptation as the direct result of natural selection became the prevailing view. For generations of biologists, this was the accepted scientific wisdom. Eventually, however, a few anomalies in this well-ordered progression began to surface, and then more, until it seemed that natural selection alone could not explain all that was being discovered in the fossil record.(4)


In order to better examine the evidence, let's go back to the beginnings of the evolutionary journey. The earliest periods of life on Earth definitely seem to bolster Darwin's idea with evidence of minutely gradual progress over very long periods indeed. Primordial life had dawned in the form of single-celled organisms without nuclei, called prokaryotes.(5) Although these organisms diversified somewhat, they more or less sat in evolutionary doldrums for some two billion years. Even by Darwin's standards, this was slow progress. When cells with nuclei, called eukaryotes, finally developed, they did not signal a mad dash for progress either. For some billion years more, these single-celled beings ruled the world. Finally, the first simple form of multi-cellular life occurred some 800 million years ago, but it was not until about 530 million years ago that any real accomplishments in this direction can be boasted about. Once these accomplishments began, however, there was no holding back more and more of them. According to paleontologists, who refer to this time period as the Cambrian explosion, life suddenly began to diversify in spectacular ways over a span as short as a few million years. All at once, evolutionary innovation was frenzied.


Soon, forms which represent all the modern phyla came to be. In addition, creatures which don't fit into any of these phyla have been found among the Cambrian era fossils as well. The explosion of the Cambrian constitutes the first of the many surprising radiations of living forms, and these extraordinary burgeonings of species appear in the fossil record over and over again. As Leakey points out (The Sixth Extinction, p. 17):

"The arrival of complex multicellular life, late in the day though it was, again might have been expected to presage steady progression through the prehistoric worlds we know from the fossil record, leading eventually and predictably to the world of nature as we know it today. But again, such expectations were not met. Life since the Cambrian explosion has been characterized by boom and bust, as species diversified wonderfully, only to be extirpated in huge numbers by occasional mass extinctions, five in all. The epigram that is said to describe war is fitting for life on Earth, too, in its tempo if not in its manifestation: long periods of boredom interrupted by brief moments of terror."

Darwin himself had been well aware of the lack of fossils of Precambrian organisms to corroborate his version of events, but he never envisioned that it would so eloquently state the flaws in his theory to an alert group of twentieth-century scientists. Rather than indicating a hole in the fossil record, the lack of Precambrian evolutionary evidence of slow and steady progress toward full-flowering Cambrian forms seems to show not only a lack of evidence but a lack of progress as well.(6) It seems that Darwin's version of evolution won't explain all that scientific exploration has discovered about the origin and development of life on Earth.


Contemporary scientists call the sort of big, "fast and furious" evolutionary changes, like those that occurred in the Cambrian explosion and after the subsequent mass extinctions, macroevolution as opposed to the smaller, slower changes which Darwin's theory explains perfectly well. These smaller changes are generally referred to as microevolution. According to Richard Leakey, when writing about the macroevolutionary changes of the Cambrian explosion (The Sixth Extinction, p. 26), "Clearly, the gradual pace of canonical Darwinian evolution will not suffice as an explanation of an event of this magnitude and rapidity, and other mechanisms must be sought." Leakey continues by exploring a few theories to explain the apparent differences between microevolutionary processes and macroevolutionary ones.


It seems that macroevolution might be explained in a couple of possible ways. The first possibility is more compatible with traditional Darwinian ideas because it, too, has to do with external forces at work in shaping the species. According to this theory, the reason that evolution was able to happen so quickly during certain times was not that there were periods of more changes (that is, more genetic mutation), but that the changes that occurred were more likely to succeed in a wider range of niches which had been opened up due to catastrophes which led to mass extinctions. Leakey calls this the "empty ecological niche idea." Once all the niches were filled, further innovation of this magnitude would no longer succeed, slowing evolution down to the more typical snail's pace.


On the other hand, Leakey also explores what he calls the "genetic hypothesis." When researchers compared the changes that came as a result of the Cambrian explosion with subsequent radiations, they realized that although the quantities of new species were comparable, the types of changes were qualitatively different. In other words, although many new species resulted from other, later radiations, no new phyla resulted. The changes which occurred were simply not as great in magnitude. This theory claims that the greater evolutionary innovation, relatively early after the invention of multi-cellular life, was due to what Leakey labels a "more loosely organized genetic package." This volatile genome eventually became more and more integrated and refined as generations passed. Since, as the speculation runs, bigger morphological changes are more feasible with a loosely integrated genome than in one that is tightly integrated, evolutionary leaps made earlier in the history of multi-celled life could be larger than those made later. This explains why Cambrian changes were large enough to constitute new phyla while subsequent changes have been at the level of class or lower.(7) Whether the wider range of variability which happened early on was due to the "empty niche" or the "genetic" factor, no one can tell for sure. In subsequent evolutionary changes, however, it seems that mass extinctions due to natural calamities (whether these came in the form of climate changes, geological upheavals, extraterrestrial missiles, exotic diseases, or some combination of these or other factors) had a sort of "venturi effect" on evolution. Just as the air moving through a constriction in a tube, a venturi, increases in velocity, so evolution seems to hasten as it passes through the constriction of a mass die off. So, although the history of evolution is slow moving for the most part, it speeds greatly during times of environmental stress and catastrophe.(8)


Darwin himself had been exposed to catastrophe theories. The uniform change idea adopted for geology by Lyell, who had rejected the notion of geological catastrophes as an appeal to external agents, influenced Darwin's rejection of crises in evolutionary development as an appeal to supernatural intervention. The notion that a Noah's flood event as well as other catastrophes had shaped life on Earth had been advocated by earlier generations of biologists, including Cuvier. This idea, which was known as catastrophism, was completely rejected by Darwin and his supporters in favor of the uniform change due to natural selection. As we have seen, however, Darwin's version of events cannot explain all of evolution.


Beyond natural selection, many contemporary biologists advocate random chance as a major contributing factor when it comes to evolution. The environmental stress caused by chance catastrophes leads to extinction now here and now there. There is little or no connection in such cases between survival and how well any particular species is adapted to its environment. Sudden, drastic changes can wipe out vast numbers of species no matter how intricately, strongly, or beautifully bound to their niches. Survival under such circumstances can be a real crap shoot. The "best man" doesn't always win, and life on Earth is seen as due as much to luck as to anything. Living species are no better adapted than those that are now extinct (i.e., than 99.9% of all species that ever lived). Although natural selection is responsible for extinctions, bad luck (and not bad genes) is responsible for the extinction of many species, according to current thought. This, however, seems to leave biologists with more questions than answers, and to say that the greatest single factor in evolutionary change, at least in the big picture, is good or bad luck doesn't seem quite as satisfactory an explanation as Darwin's solution of adaptation by means of natural selection.

Notes For Chapter 11:


(1) Namely, that the fittest must have within it an inborn superiority which leads to the advance of the species in such a way that the idea of being more fit was equated by some Victorian thinkers as being better or closer to some cosmic biological ideal.

(2) From that time the search for intermediate forms or "missing links," as they are sometimes called, was on. The favorite goal in the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries was the ape-man. This was so much the case that it was relatively easy to fool a group of very well respected evolutionists with the manufactured Piltdown man fossil. Because the scientists expected to find a form somewhere between apes and men, it proved possible to deceive them into thinking they had done just that. Piltdown man turned out to be a jumble of teeth and bone from different sources.

(3) The title of the German version of the paper reads "Uber Ein neues, augeblich mit Vogelfedern versehenes Reptil."


(4) This material is drawn from Leakey's The Sixth Extinction, pp. 15 ff.


(5) These micro-organisms are those responsible for the formation of the colonial stramatolites, the fossil evidence of which can be seen in various places in the world.


(6) Darwin postulated that holes in the fossil record would be found, that the record would be incomplete, and that these flaws would account for a lack of evidence for transitional species, etc. In fact, many holes or flaws in the record do seem to exist as Darwin attested; in this instance, however, the problem does not seem to be a mere flaw in the record.

(7) The classification of living things places them into different categories. The largest of these is called a superkingdom; from there they proceed to kingdom, phylum, subphylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. There are also such things as subfamilies and subspecies to draw even further distinctions. If we take our pet dogs as an example, we see that they are classified as follows: Eukariota (superkingdom), Animalia (kingdom), Chordata (phylum), Vertebrata (subphylum), Mammalia (class), Carnivora (order), Canidae (family), Canis (genus), familiaris (species). The scientific name of an animal is generally given as a combination of its genus and specific name; the dog would thus be Canis familiaris. It is interesting to note that Darwin, although he agreed that classification was scientifically convenient, held that there was no such thing as a species, but only a collection of individuals which had characteristics enough in common that they were able to interbreed and produce fertile offspring.

(8) Beyond the so-called "big five," it should be noted that geologists David Raup and Jack Sepkoski have identified another fifteen or so extinction events of a somewhat lesser magnitude. According to their research, these events happen about once every twenty-six million years in what appears to be a repetitive cycle. So far, the only explanation seems to be that the Earth may come into contact with a group of comets or asteroids when our respective paths cross every twenty-six million years (see The Sixth Extinction, p. 56).

PART III: FACT

Chapter Twelve
Beyond Natural Selection

As has been explored, Darwin's vision of evolution was one of head to head competition between species with clear winners and losers. Although this competition went on over very long periods of time, and at a very slow pace, it was no less bloody. This competition at a snail's pace served to hone species into beings which where better and better suited to their respective ecological niches, until they could be said to be thoroughly ensconced in them. For Darwin, this meant that living species were somehow better adapted than those that have gone before. He wrote (Darwin, p. 343):

"The inhabitants of each successive period in the world's history have beaten their predecessors in the race for life, and are, in so far, higher in the scale of nature; and this may account for that vague yet ill-defined sentiment, felt by many palaeontologists, that organisation on the whole has progressed."

However, Darwin, it seems, was not correct in his assumption that survival necessarily denoted advancement; what many current thinkers label "chance" or "luck" also seems to have had a significant part to play in evolutionary development. This luck manifested itself in the form of mass extinctions; in each of the five largest of these episodes of biotic crisis, called by Leakey "the big five," some 65 to 95 percent of all marine animal species were extinguished. Each of these mass extinctions has led to flowerings of new species that quickly filled the ecological niches that were left open.


Although what has been called chance does seem to have a major influence over evolutionary outcomes, there do seem to be some biological "strategies" that may increase a species' rate of survival in times of crisis. Among marine animals,(1) those which disbursed their larvae over a very wide area with the drifting currents were more likely to survive; if the adults were also spread over a very wide part of the world, this helped. It should be noted, however, that there is no apparent evolutionary mechanism which allows any species to anticipate a biological crisis or mass extinction; therefore, the adaptation of wide larval disbursement and wide adult distribution must have been developed because they work in non-crisis periods, and the fact that they helped in a crisis is seen by biologists as a happy coincidence. This way of thinking is very clearly stated by Leakey when he writes (The Sixth Extinction, p. 65):

"Moreover, there is a strong argument for suggesting that adaptive superiority-- in the day-to-day Darwinian sense-- simply cannot have been a factor in major biotic crises. Natural selection operates cogently at the level of the individual in relation to local conditions-- the impact of competitors and prevailing physical conditions. It is a powerful response to immediate biological experience. But it cannot anticipate future events. And it certainly cannot anticipate rare events."

The fact that the average life span of a species is much shorter than any proposed cycle of mass extinction means that a majority of the species that have ever lived have done so without ever experiencing a biotic crisis. This idea has two important implications: 1) biotic crises are so rare that it is unlikely in the extreme that any given species could develop an adaptation to specifically counteract them, and 2) a majority of species originate, develop, flourish, decline, and die out completely independent of biotic crises. However, to say that mass extinctions have little influence over the evolutionary development of a majority of species would be a grave error. The mass die offs are instrumental in setting the stage for evolutionary trends by greatly narrowing the field of potential starting points for subsequent evolution, even if they do not direct that subsequent evolution in any tangible way. As the naturalist William Beebe wrote, "When the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again." Beyond that expression, which implies regret and unfulfilled promise, one can add that not only the species itself but any potential future species which could have arisen from it are cut off.


Every mass extinction is, indeed, instrumental in influencing future evolutionary paths by limiting the potential new species; any extinct species, once it's gone, can leave no progeny. The five major extinction events which, along with the Cambrian explosion, resulted in drastic changes in evolution were: the end-Ordovician event, the Late Devonian event, the end-Permian event, the end-Triassic event, and the end-Cretaceous event.(2) As we have seen, however, lesser extinction events can be identified in the geological record. A rather noteworthy one is the die off of the so-called megafauna(3) which occurred between about twelve thousand and ten thousand years ago in the Americas.


For about two million years, the Earth has been on a temperature roller coaster.(4) The world climate has fluctuated between cold glacial periods and warm interglacial periods. With each dip and rise of the mercury, the Earth's plant life has gone through drastic change. When temperatures went down, the tropical rain forests shrank into isolated pockets, and other forests and woodlands receded toward the equator. Any animal species which were dependent on the trees were forced to migrate with the forests or perish. When temperatures rose, the forests once again spread--as did their constituent animal species. This entire process took place time and again throughout the Pleistocene epoch in a sort of slow-motion oscillation of the Earth's greenbelt. At least partly due to the biotic turmoil caused by such fluctuation, the Pleistocene was an epoch of extinction as well as active growth in new species.


Against this backdrop of flux, there seems to have occurred a mixing and re-mixing of animal and plant populations as species which may have been far flung before were thrown together within the remnants of once great jungles and woodlands. In these new settings, species found themselves competing with strangers for space and resources, and they may have been exposed to conditions and diseases previously unknown to them. This probably had a profound effect on the evolutionary trajectory of life on Earth. What we do know for certain is that more than 100 species of large American mammals died out in this two-million year time span. However, the majority of these deaths do not seem to be demonstrably associated with any particular temperature fluctuation or shrinking/expanding forest events. Instead, the fluctuations seem to have culled a number (around 50) of large American mammal species at a moderate rate throughout the period running from about two million years ago to about twelve to ten thousand years ago, then things jumped into high gear. Starting at about twelve thousand years ago some 57 more species of large American mammals met their end. What caused this increase in tempo has been the object of some debate among biologists.


Although there is now very convincing evidence that man has been in the Americas longer than the twelve-thousand-year-ago mark at which the megafaunal die offs increased so dramatically, man remains the primary suspect in the deaths according to many biologists.(5) This was not always the case, however. Periodically during the course of recorded history, certain men have looked with such admiration at the men of preceding, simpler generations or at the primitive lifestyles of the noble native peoples so as to idealize them, to see them as in right relationship with the gods, their fellows, and the natural world around them. Here, Ovid's "men of the Golden Age" and Rousseau's "noble savages" are to be praised and admired as totally connected to a universal right and justice and, more important to our purposes, as being in complete harmony with the world around them. Thinkers of the late-nineteenth century were not immune from this attitude toward more primitive men; it was, after all, a romantic and attractive idea.


One thinker, Alfred Russel Wallace, believed that the megafaunal extinctions had come as a direct result of the temperature fluctuations, and he said so in 1876. He wrote that the cause of the extinctions was to be found "in the great and recent physical change known as the Glacial Epoch" (see The Sixth Extinction, pp.172-173). The more he thought about this, the more he found it to be unsatisfactory, however. His final sloughing off of the prejudice in favor of primitive man as some sort of (what we might call) ecological saint came sometime before 1910, at which time he publicly admitted his previous error and placed the blame for the extinctions at the feet of prehistoric man.(6) It was widely known in Wallace's time that European colonization of many parts of the world had led to the extinction of native species, but it was not accepted that earlier colonization into these areas (by proto-Americans, Polynesians, Australian Aborigines, etc.) may have led to similar results. Most biologists continued to doubt Wallace's idea for more than fifty years.


Then, a re-examination of the evidence made the idea more plausible. Throughout the glacial/interglacial period America was inhabited by elephants of various types, giant ground sloths, armored glyptodonts, horses, and camels. These animals were harassed by such large carnivores as lions, giant bears, and saber-toothed cats. At the time that all of these and other large animals died out, tellingly, only a handful of small species were lost. The period of the extinctions precisely coincides with the end of the glacial/interglacial cycle, but does this really mean that the ending of the cycle actually caused the extinctions? The curious fact remained that not all of the American megafauna died out at the time, and biologists began searching for what the surviving species had in common. It was found that many of the large species which did not die out at the time (bison, moose, musk ox, elk) probably evolved in Eurasia and came across on the same land bridge as did man. Having evolved side by side with human hunters, these animals may have been adapted to them (that is, they may have become less vulnerable, more wary, etc.) while the members of the native-grown megafauna were not. With this sort of evidence, albeit circumstantial, the American megafaunal die off is now also referred to by some biologists as the "Pleistocene overkill," man being thought of as the author the slaughter.


Some of the problems with the overkill theory as a complete solution to the question of the American extinctions should be examined, however. As has already been seen, not all of the megafauna of America died out, and at least some of the surviving creatures had evolved along side man in Eurasia and migrated to the New World with him. Whether these migrant species succeeded because they were more wary of human hunters, because they out competed native species for American ecological niches in head to head competition, or because they were simply what some biologists would call "luckier" is still a mystery. The patterns of species survival are also not as clear as it may at first seem. For example, all species of horses died out in the Americas but continued to thrive in Eurasia and Africa despite human hunting in those areas; camelids died out in North America but survived in South America and the Old World; all species of mammoth died out in both Old and New Worlds, and the fact that the Eurasian mammoth species had grown up with human predation seems to have made little difference. Yet another problem with the overkill hypothesis is that although the period of mass extinction coincides perfectly with the end of the glacial period at about 12,000 years ago, the date for the first human colonization of the Americas is being repeatedly pushed back to well before that due to the discovery of older and older evidence of human activity. However, if humans were present in the Americas 10,000 years earlier, for example, one would expect them to have an earlier impact on game species populations. Clearly, the overkill idea alone cannot explain all of the complicated issues involved.


To rule out the effect that a new predator, especially one as skilled in hunting as man, would have had on an unprepared American megafauna population would be foolish; however, to lay all of the blame for the extinction of the 57 or so species that died out 12,000 years ago on man may be just as unwise. If man was, indeed, present in the Americas earlier than the 12,000 year threshold, what does that do to the overkill theory? Evidence for human occupation of the Americas earlier than that is fairly slim when compared to the richer evidence which exists after the threshold period. This has led some paleoanthropologists to theorize that human beings migrated over the land bridge in mere "dribs and drabs" over the course of about 20,000 years with a larger migration, perhaps, coming only at the end of the period. So, rather than one large sweeping wave of humanity rushing headlong from Asia into the Americas, this theory proposes many small ripples of migration. Although there is no real concrete proof that this theory is the correct one, it has been designed to fit what evidence there is. This "ripple" theory would allow one to hold out for an early date for the first human colonization of the Americas while, at the same time, allowing one to endorse the idea of overkill. Of course, any future evidence showing an earlier mass migration of humanity could weaken the overkill theory. If the overkill theory is wrong, or if over hunting is only partly responsible for the die offs, where does that leave us? It seems to me that if the American megafaunal extinctions were not entirely due to human activity, we are left with five choices (If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on the last one):

1. 57 native American megafaunal species were out competed, "head to head," by immigrant Eurasian species in a telescoped version of Darwinian natural selection.
2. 57 native American megafaunal species had such a severe intolerance for the climatic changes at the end of the glacial period that neither migration nor adaptation were enough to save them.
3. 57 native American megafaunal species had no natural immunity to diseases which were spread to their populations due to migration.
4. 57 native American megafaunal species perished because of some yet unknown factor(s).
5. 57 native American megafaunal species perished because of a combination of factors which may include over hunting, direct competition with immigrant Eurasian species, climatic change, introduced disease, and other factors.

It should be noted that most of these factors are not directly linked to natural selection in the Darwinian sense. It does indeed seem certain, as we have seen before, that natural selection is probably not enough to explain extinction and speciation in every circumstance. We can rightly say that, at least in some situations, many factors are implicated in mass extinction. Other theories which contradict natural selection as the only reason for evolutionary change can be found among biologists. In addition to over hunting, climate change, exotic disease, and mass migration, one could add continental drift, volcanic activity, and extraterrestrial object impact as causes of mass extinction and subsequent evolutionary radiation.


On a recent trip to the area around San Carlos, Mexico, I took along a copy of The Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts. It is interesting to note that more than 60 years after the book's descriptions of the Gulf of California were written, the Gulf still has the same feel to it. While reading and contemplating the natural surroundings which inspired the writing, I was struck by a couple of the ideas of John Steinbeck and his marine biologist friend, Ed Ricketts. The two companions were on a marine specimen collecting expedition. Between rushed collecting excursions to various tide pools and during animated discussions sparked by cases of Carta Blanca beer, the two worked on an interesting theory about living things. First they insisted on freeing themselves from any thinking which could be described as teleological. That is, they attempted to get away from "cause and effect" thinking in favor of what they termed "is" thinking (see pp. 109-125). Next, they attempted to see life as it "is." They arrived at a sort of "unified life theory" which points to the basic interconnectedness of living things. Although the interdependence between life forms is familiar to most people today, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, originally published in 1941, may well contain its first expression in popular American literature. They wrote (pp.198-199):


"All night the hissing rush and splash of hunters and hunted went on. We had never been in water so heavily populated. The light, piercing the surface, showed the water almost solid with fish--swarming, hungry, frantic fish, incredible in their voraciousness. The schools swam, marshaled and patrolled. They turned as a unit and dived as a unit. In their millions they followed a pattern minute as to direction and depth and speed. There must be some fallacy in our thinking of these fish as individuals. Their functions in the school are in some yet unknown way as controlled as though the school were one unit. We cannot conceive of this intricacy until we are able to think of the school as an animal itself, reacting with all its cells to stimuli which perhaps might not influence one fish at all. And this larger animal, the school, seems to have a nature and drive and ends of its own. It is more than and different from the sum of its units. If we can think in this way, it will not seem so unbelievable that every fish heads in the same direction, that the water interval between fish and fish is identical with all the units, and that it seems to be directed by a school intelligence. If it is a unit animal itself, why should it not so react? Perhaps this is the wildest of speculations, but we suspect that when the school is studied as an animal rather than as a sum unit of fish, it will be found that certain units are assigned special functions to perform; that weaker or slower units may even take their place as placating food for the predators for the sake of the security of the school as an animal. In the little Bay of San Carlos, where there were many schools of a number of species, there was even a feeling (and "feeling" is used advisedly) of a larger unit which was the inter-relation of species with their interdependence for food, even though that food be each other. A smoothly working larger animal working within itself--larval shrimp to little fish to larger fish to giant fish--one operating mechanism. And perhaps this unit of survival may key into the larger animal which is the life of all the sea, and this into the larger of the world. There would seem to be only one commandment for living things: Survive! And the forms and species and units and groups are armed for survival, fanged for survival, timid for it, fierce for it, clever for it, poisonous for it, intelligent for it. This commandment decrees the death and destruction of myriads of individuals for the survival of the whole. Life has one final end, to be alive; and all the tricks and mechanisms, all the successes and all the failures, are aimed at that end."


Notes For Chapter 12

(1) These marine fossil species are the ones that have been most studied because they are more widely found. Some 95 percent of the 250,000 known fossil species are of marine origin. Ironically, terrestrial species likely outnumbered marine ones by from ten to one hundred times in man