Yeti, bigfoot, snowmen of jungle, by Paul Spencer Sochaczewski

Published in The Quest
Summer 1998

ARE "SNOWMEN IN THE JUNGLE" OUR DISTANT RELATIVES?

KERINCI, Sumatra

In an Indonesian rainforest, British researcher Deborah Martyr claims to have sighted a tropical version of the Himalayan yeti. To date her primary evidence of the existence of the "snowman of the jungle" rests in sightings (alas, not photographed), recordings of calls, and plaster casts of its footprints.

I wonder. Old wives tale? Or the biological find of the century?

Reports of these unlikely creatures, tropical relatives of the more famous "yeti" or "Bigfoot", have occurred frequently enough in China, Indochina, Peninsular Malaysia, Borneo and Sumatra to merit a skeptical inquiry. Although mostly anecdotal, there is sufficient evidence that the Sumatran orang pendek, or "short person of the forest", is not an orangutan, and not a gibbon. But what might it be?
Numerous sightings of the Sumatran orang pendek were reported during the 1920s. A Dutch settler named van Herwaarden, who found an orang pendek in the deep Sumatran forest, was quoted by the Belgian naturalist Bernard Heuvelmans:

"The very dark hair on its head fell almost to the waist...(its) brown face was almost hairless. The eyes were very lively, and like human eyes. The nose was broad with fairly large nostrils, but in no way clumsy. Its lips were quite ordinary. Its canines showed clearly from time to time, they were more developed than a man's. I was able to see its right ear which was exactly like a little human ear."

Some respected scientists give cautious credence to orang pendek speculation. Dr. John MacKinnon, the only scientist to have studied the three great apes in the wild, told me he found footprints in Sabah, Malaysia, of an unidentified primate that were "so like a man's yet definitely not a man's that my skin crept and I felt a strange desire to return home." Philosopher-scientists have long speculated on man's relationship with apes and "wild men". Pliny elevated apes to "wild men", and Leonardo da Vinci noted similarities between people and animals. Goethe discovered the intermaxillary bone in man and "trembled with delight" about the links this indicated between man and ape. Darwin at first avoided the subject of whether man evolved from apes. When Benjamin Disraeli was asked to comment on whether man is an ape or an angel, he replied: "My lord, I am on the side of the angels."

While the best guess is that the orang pendek is a new species of giant gibbon, a minority group of dreamers speculates that the orang pendek might be a relict Australopithecus that has somehow survived in the dense forests of Kerinci. Could it be one of our ancient ancestors?

Human-like apes roam the territory of primal myth. I examine my life, where the closest most of my friends ever get to a primal myth is a Wagner opera or a Grimm fairy tale. What survival benefits do myths and legends have for mankind as a whole?

Among Asia's forest people, who are in daily contact with "wild nature," the various forms of ape-men are an ever?present reminder of what it means to be man?like, yet not quite human. The creatures of the twilight world live in the forest, away from people, but people fear and respect both them and their forest home.

Even far from the rainforest, most societies tell tales of giants and ape-men, perhaps because we need to be reminded of what our life might be like if we did not have culture, that uniquely human attribute.

As the British philosopher Angus Hall suggests: "We need creatures like these to inhabit that strange borderland between fact and fantasy, and our interest lies not so much in whether they really exist but in the possibility that they may exist."

Sometimes ape-men are closer than we might like to think. Why do we shudder when we read newspaper stories like the tale of Xu Yunbao, a Chinese man whose vestigial-tailed body, bent permanently at the waist, was completely covered with hair. The UPI report following the exhumation of his body read: "He grew to a height of only 3 feet and used all four limbs when walking. Xu refused clothing even during winter and lived on a diet of raw corn, vehemently rejecting cooked food. His brain capacity never grew over 350 ml [an average man has a brain capacity of 1,200 to 1,500 ml] and his spinal column and limbs were even more backward in construction than those of the Peking Man who lived more than 400,000 years ago."

The flip side is that many animals demonstrate what we term "human-like" characteristics. Recently a female gorilla saved a three-year-old boy. The child, who fell 18 feet into the primate exhibit at Chicago's Brookfield Zoo, was carried to safety by Binti Jua, an eight-year-old western lowland gorilla. Frans B.M. de Waal, author of Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Human and Other Animals, noted that "although Binti was reared by humans who rewarded her for parental behaviour, no one had ever taught her how to react to an unconscious boy invading her space." Is there such a thing as morality, or altruism among higher animals?

There is precious little altruism in the destruction of the great forest areas of Sumatra, Thailand, Sabah, Vietnam and Nepal which shelter orang pendek and their ilk. These forests are fast being sold to timber concessionaires, chopped into smaller fragments, or cleared by shifting cultivators. Rural people, who define their humanity both by what they are and what they are not, are moving to the cities and the concept of humanity is being re?defined. Instead of being the home of the human spirit, the rainforest is often considered by educated urban people as unproductive wilderness that can best serve man by being sold for timber and the land used to grow oil palm. City people are too sophisticated to worry that the destruction of the orang pendek's rainforest habitat takes away the home of a relative we will probably never meet in person but which is always a part of us.