Almas: The Wildman of the Central Asian Mountains

The herder will describe it for you in detail — the reddish hair, the heavy brow, the way it ran up the scree like a man but not — yet he will not walk you up the valley where he saw it, not for any money. That reluctance is the most consistent field mark of the almas, a creature reported across Mongolia, the Altai, the Tien Shan and the Caucasus for something like six centuries.

Almas is usually glossed from Mongolian as "wild man," and the reports are strikingly un-monstrous. Witnesses describe not a giant but a human-shaped figure of ordinary or stocky size, covered in hair, without fire, tools or language — less King Kong, more missing neighbor. The earliest widely cited account comes from Hans Schiltberger, a Bavarian squire captured at the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396, who spent decades in captivity in the East and wrote afterward that mountain people in the Tien Shan region included wild folk, hair-covered and living like animals, two of whom he claimed were presented as curiosities. His memoir is a real fifteenth-century document; what exactly he saw is anyone's guess.

The Soviets take it seriously

The almas enjoyed a phase of official respectability that Bigfoot never got. In 1958, riding the worldwide yeti excitement, the Soviet Academy of Sciences convened a Snowman Commission and sent an expedition to the Pamirs. It found nothing, but the historian Boris Porshnev spent the rest of his career arguing that almas reports described relict Neanderthals surviving in the emptiest folds of Asia. Mongolian scholars, notably the academic Yondon Rinchen, collected sighting reports from herders through the mid-twentieth century. The relict-hominin theory has an obvious charm and an obvious problem: not one bone, camp, hearth or burial in a region that has been crossed by geologists, soldiers and shepherds for generations.

Zana, the wildwoman of Tkhina

The legend's best case had a face. In the 1870s a woman known as Zana was reportedly captured in the forests of Abkhazia and kept in the village of Tkhina — described as massive, hair-covered, immensely strong and unable to learn speech. She bore several children to local men, died around 1890, and her son Khwit lived until 1954. Cryptozoologists treated her lineage as a possible Neanderthal bloodline for decades. Then genetics arrived. In 2013 the Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes tested saliva from Zana's living descendants and a tooth from Khwit's skull, and found an entirely human, sub-Saharan African maternal lineage. Zana was a human being — most plausibly a descendant of Africans brought to the Caucasus in the Ottoman era, though Sykes floated more exotic migration speculations that remain exactly that. The wildwoman was a woman, almost certainly enslaved or abandoned, remembered by her captors as a creature. That reads less like cryptozoology and more like an indictment.

What the sightings are made of

The sober inventory: brown bears rear up and walk short distances on two legs; hermits, fugitives and people with congenital hypertrichosis have all haunted remote districts; and a folklore category, once established, recruits every ambiguous silhouette at dusk. Gigantopithecus, the giant ape sometimes drafted as an ancestor, is known only from teeth and jawbones found far to the southeast and went extinct long before any herder's grandfather. And still the reports keep a strange discipline — the same heavy brow, the same silence, from witnesses who never met.

Below, readers have posted their own encounters from mountains and treelines, and the jury sorts them into True, Fake and Not sure. See whether the pattern survives your scrutiny.