You Wouldn't, Would You?

This week, I have mainly been thinking about human/ape hybridisation, mainly off the back of this week's episode of The Paracast, where David Hatcher Childress discusses Bigfoot, the Yeti and so on, and at one point discusses various alleged attempts by various cryptohominids to mate with humans.
The best known of these is Zana, an alleged abnauayu (the local word for a relict hominid, similar to alma, kaptar etc) captured in the Caucasus mountains in the 1840s- more info on her capture is here. She became tame, and gave birth to several children, many of whom died after she washed them in a cold stream immediately after birth. The villagers eventually saved some of her offspring by confiscating them. The aforementioned article shows a couple of pictures of her descendants, including her son and grand daughter.
Various people have claimed this as evidence of a population of relict hominids in the area, though if she produced viable offspring with mating with humans, this suggests she was fully human. An analysis of what is thought to be her skull has been done, along with that of her son, and although they are unusual, they are not outwith the morphological range for modern humans, and DNA analysis has confirmed they are both genetically modern humans. This has lead some people to suggest that Zana may have been a black slave who had escaped from Turkey and her wildness exaggerated over time, alternatively it's been postulated that she may have been a local suffering from a condition such as hypertrichosis. Another interpretation is that the area does harbour an extremely primitive but otherwise modern tribe of homo sapiens.
Going by the photographs, her descendants don't look unusual at all- maybe a bit darker than you'd expect people from that part of the world to look- her son in particular looks a bit like an aborigine, but you wouldn't look twice if you saw them on the streets of a multi-racial city.
There are quite a few other tales of Bigfoot/yeti/other wild people abducting humans with the intention of mating with them, possibly the best known being that of Albert Ostman, who claimed he was kidnapped to be the mate of a young female Bigfoot.
Hatcher Childress mentioned a photograph of an apparent human/hominid hybrid woman from Brazil, which I'm not familiar with, I may need to invest in a copy of his book to find out more.
I'd barely finished digesting that when Micah Hanks posted this article at The Gralien Report about chimp/human hybrids. There's no confirmed humanzees of chumans, some biologists do believe it could be possible, in the laboratory at least- although there are documented instances of human/ape sexual contact, such as this story about a female orangutan rescued from prostitution (I realise Vice is hardly the best source of info, but I'm reluctant to dig further on this subject)- not sure if it's the same orangutan, but a couple of my friends visited a primate sanctuary in the UK who had a orangutan rescued from prostitution, not sure how widespread this practice is, and I suspect it's maybe better not to know in this case.
As a footnote, it's worth mentioning the chapter on sex and the sasquatch in Loren Coleman's excellent Bigfoot: The True Story Of Apes In America which includes a sighting of what can only be described as a sasquatch bumming a cow. Friends have accused me of making this story up, but it's in this book, make of that what you will!

Stone Age Genocide

Outside of Forteana, one of my main interests is bad films and occasionally the two crossover. While watching the 80s cave man/Conan knock off Ironmaster, one particular scene caught my attention. The film revolves around a tribe of cavemen who discover iron and use this to wage war & conquer their less advanced neighbours. In one scene, they chase down some apemen into a cave, pile up firewood and suffocate them with the smoke.
Interestingly, this parallels tales told about what have been interpreted by some as relict hominid populations. Possibly the best known is the Ebu Gogo, a diminitive race said to have dwelt on the island of Flores in Indonesia (and linked by some to Homo floresiensis). They would occasionally raid villages for food, and eventually, so the legend goes, islanders trapped them in a cave and set fire to palm fibres piled inside, exterminating the remaining population.
Similar legends are attached to the Nittevo of Sri Lanka.
So how did this end up in an early 80s Italian exploitation film? Is this a wider spread archetypal tale than we realised? Was the writer familiar with these legends? Co-incidence?
If you're interested in tracking down a copy, it's not had a dvd release, so you may need to track down a vhs copy (or it's easily available on file sharing websites). I would warn you that it shares many of it's contemporaries cavalier attitude to animal cruelty, which is a shame as otherwise, the film's a hoot, Gerorge Eastman is great as the despotic tribal chief. There's a trailer on youtube, with a clip from the scene in question around one minute in.
I may need to do a post on Sasquaplotation films, so keep your eyes peeled for that.

Another Perthshire big cat sight

Following on from my last post, this sighting from the Big Cats In Britain blog caught my eye:

"On Monday 6th September I was having my usual coffee while standing admiring the view out my back door in Strathearn when I noticed Roe deer running, then what I thought looked like a jet back bear/cat, it was chasing the roe deer into the woods. I nearly choked on my coffee.
I told my husband and some colleagues. I didn't think they believed me until my husband came home on Thursday with an article that was in the Sun newspaper about Ray Mears saying he had saw 3 cats in Scotland. The article had two pictures and the cat/bear I saw was like the second picture.
I have since spoken to the Strathearn Herald (local newspaper) and they are going to do an article this week about my sighting, they also told me to get in touch with you guys, well I think it was you! So I just thought I'd let you know about my sighting."

The Sun article referenced is here. The second picture that the witness compared her sighting to looks a still taken from this video, filmed in Helensburgh last year. I find her description of the animal as a bear cat interesting as the squat, muscular build combined wth the short face is something that crops up in big cat sightings from time to time, and has lead researchers such as Di Francis to speculate that Britain may be home to an as yet unrecognised species of big cat, sometimes referred to as the mastiff cat hypothesis. The idea of a large predator surving unrecorded in the UK into the 21st century, is of course, unlikely. However, the occasional snippet of intriguing evidence does crop up, such as a photo taken by a camera trap in Argyle, which shows a squat, muscular black feline in quite clear detail. (This photograph has not appeared online, though it has been used by the Centre For Fortean Zoology on the cover of a previous issue of Animals & Men, though if my memory serves me correctly, it does appear in this video, which is  talk given by Shaun Stevens of Big Cats In Britain).

As a footnote, I went to the Strathearn Herald website, and found this article from last year which had a completely different interpretation to the above, suggesting that a binturong (also known as a bear cat) was loose in the area, so maybe this coloured the witnesses choice of words? Certainly seems to have been a fair few sightings in the area.
NB- Strathearn is an area of Perthshire, covering Comrie/Crieff/Auchterarder, plenty of country for a cat/bearcat/whatever it is.

Big cat in Perthshire

I've been meaning to post this for a while, so it's slightly old news now, but I found this report of a big cat just outside Perth to be really interesting. Rather the usual panther or puma type sightings, it sounds a bit more like a Kellas cat, a hybrid between a domestic and Scottish wildcat, or possibly even a rabbit headed cat, the status of which is a bit more controversial.
My mum had an encounter with a large black cat outside of Luncarty (the other side of Perth to where this encountered occurred) around 20 years ago. Flicking through a book, she tenatively identified the Kellas cat as being closest to what she saw. One of her workmates spotted what was presumably the same animal a few days later, which crouched in a field and hissed at her. Could they range much further South than is generally assumed?
For more info on the Kellas Cats, I recommend My Highland Kellas Cats by Di Francis, who first brought them to national attention, and even attempted breeding them.

A quick plug...

For anyone in central Scotland with an interest in the strange, you should get yourself along to the Edinburgh Fortean Society, which presents a talk on the second Tuesday of the month, upstairs at the Bongo Club in Holyrood Road.

This month, Alison Rutter will be talking on The Scottish Mermaid Flap.In the early nineteenth century there were a number of mermaid sightings around the Scottish coast. This talk will look at these and perhaps provide

an explanation.
Kicks off at 7.30pm, admission is the princely sum of £1. More info on the Edinburgh Fortean Society website, including past and future events.

A further appeal for information...

While reading Nick Redfern's massively entertaining Three Men Seeking Monsters, my interest was piqued by a report of sightings of a family of Bigfoot type creatures in the Falkland area of Fife. It also mentioned the area was rich in werewolf legends. It cited the source as cryptozoologist Mark Fraser of Big Cats In Britain, so I dropped him an email to see if he could give me any more information on the source of these tales. Unfortunately, all he really knew was what was in the book (and mentioned on various websites), and that the stories were vague rumours, the source of which is unknown.
Funnily enough, I've always thought the area looked like it should have a werewolf- it's a picturesque village, nestling under some steep wooded hills like something out of a Hammer film, it's practically crying out for a strange creature to be lurking in the woods!
I've had a hunt around on the internet and in various books, but I also can't locate any werewolf legends (they're not common in the UK, especially Scotland). The general area is rich in big cat sightings, but I can't draw up much more than that, which obviously makes the tales suspect. However, again, if anyone reading this can furnish some firmer details, I'd be very interested.

On the general subject of Bigfoot like creatures in the UK, Nick Redfern runs a blog devoted to the subject: Man-beast UK. I'm very much looking forward to his book on this fascinating but problematic phenomena.

The Edinburgh Mothman

Another interesting tale from Ron Halliday's UFO Scotland that turns up in other books & websites from time to time is that of the Edinburgh Mothman. While investigating a UFO sighting over the Portobello area of the city in October 1992, he uncovered an unusual story. The unnamed witness, who lived in the Niddrie Burn area of town, woke up during the night and noticed a brilliant white light coming in the window, she tried to wake her husband, but he remained fast asleep. Peering out the window, she saw what she described as a giant bird the size of a man or possibly a human like figure with wings. Again, she tried to wake her husband, but to no avail. She returned to bed, and remained in an agitated state until she drifted off to sleep at dawn.
While this report has occasionally been claimed as a Mothman appearance, the fact the witness had woken from sleep and remained unable to wake her partner is suggestive of some kind of sleep paralysis or night terror, though this kind of experience is more commonly associated with bedroom invaders, such as the Old Hag, shadowy figures or even the Greys of UFO abduction lore.
While there certainly is a body of reports of large birds and winged humanoids (as well as the Mothman, let us not forget the Owlman of Mawnan), whatever they represent- misperceptions of known species, hoaxes, interdimesional interlopers, tulpas, some kind of cultural phenomena, or something we can't even conceive of- many of these reports have multiple witnesses in the same area over a time period, then it seems to melt away (in common with many Fortean phenomena, such as UFOs or alien big cats). As far as I know, this seems to be a one off- though if anyone knows different, I'd love to hear about it!