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The Almas

So how do two saplings woven together amount to a nest ? Why no pics of an actual nest?
Bindernagel claims such structures are found in the US, but they usually comprise more than just two saplings, or are made of broken branches or dry sticks and are not actually associated with nests, they are more likely markers indicating something.
 
I've seen film of these guys handling alledged almasty (not yeti) hair with their bare hands!!!! That's any DNA evidence shafted.
 
"A group of international scientists made headlines last month after suggesting they were "95 percent" certain they'd found evidence that the elusive Yeti -- or fabled Siberian Snowman -- really exists.

But one scientist who was part of the big snowman hunt tells The Huffington Post that local Siberian officials staged the entire snowman scenario -- all for publicity.

"It was a very awkward feeling because here I was a guest and this was clearly orchestrated," said Idaho State University anthropologist and anatomist Jeffrey Meldrum."

http://www.aol.com/2011/11/22/yeti-siberian-snowman-evidence_n_1107370.html#s388533
 
Article from Pravda, which I think underlines the divide between what passes as muster on the local crypto scene and how it's reported to us.


“I knew the story from my early childhood, but it could never occur to me that the story was true. It happened before the revolution. One of our ancestors encountered a wild woman in the woods. They developed affection to each other, and he even brought her to the village as if she was his wife. It was obviously a shock for the villagers. Many women were openly laughing at the wild female, and so she cursed them. There were several women of our clan among the cursed. Many of our female descendants have never been able to have their own families since then. They become either unhappily married or spend the whole life alone,” the woman said.


http://english.pravda.ru/society/anomal ... females-0/

This stuff makes bigfoot seem reasonable.
 
I dunno about that, i remember reading about a man that said he was captured by a family of bigfoots and felt he was wanted as a mate for a young female Bigfoot.
 
Fair enough, I should say it makes modern bigfoot stuff sound reasonable, actually saying that...
 
titch said:
I dunno about that, i remember reading about a man that said he was captured by a family of bigfoots and felt he was wanted as a mate for a young female Bigfoot.

Sounds like something out of an R. Crumb cartoon.
 
gncxx said:
titch said:
I dunno about that, i remember reading about a man that said he was captured by a family of bigfoots and felt he was wanted as a mate for a young female Bigfoot.

Sounds like something out of an R. Crumb cartoon.
That would be Albert Ostman. A firm part of the Sasquatch canon, and just as hotly disputed as any of the other staples (and, as is often the case, divides the experts down the middle too - Napier says no, Green says yes.)

There's a good, recent-ish discussion about the case on Cryptomundo, here.
 
I'm probably wrong but I'm getting the impression that bigfoot is becoming increasingly more of a fringe subject.
 
oldrover said:
I'm probably wrong but I'm getting the impression that bigfoot is becoming increasingly more of a fringe subject.

Maybe that's because of fewer sightings? Maybe they died out?
 
Oh I don't know, I think it's because people are more environmentally aware these days. They're told on the one hand that Nature is a finite resource and we're infringing on it, but then the BF camp want to try and sell them a giant unknown species of ape living in their back garden.
 
Mythopoeika said:
oldrover said:
I'm probably wrong but I'm getting the impression that bigfoot is becoming increasingly more of a fringe subject.

Maybe that's because of fewer sightings? Maybe they died out?

Eaten by hillbillies.
 
oldrover said:
Oh I don't know, I think it's because people are more environmentally aware these days. They're told on the one hand that Nature is a finite resource and we're infringing on it, but then the BF camp want to try and sell them a giant unknown species of ape living in their back garden.

Yeah, sightings close to settled areas do not ring true.

But theres still a lot of wilderness out there in Asia, even in the US and Canada.
 
But theres still a lot of wilderness out there in Asia, even in the US and Canada.

But to suggest that it could support such an animal comes back to the fact that it would mean that the world's most widely distributed large animal is one we've never quite managed to even photograph.
 
The weird paradox set out just above, is what has me reckoning (in between spells of thinking that all encounter reports are indeed from people who are "mischievous or mistaken"), as follows. The sheer volume of told-of encounters -- many from people who have nothing obviously to gain, and things potentially to lose, from telling of them -- suggests to me that there is here, truly something going on; and that with it, the paranormal is in play in some way: stuff beyond the ken of science, at least at science's current level.
 
oldrover said:
I'm probably wrong but I'm getting the impression that bigfoot is becoming increasingly more of a fringe subject.


Such things have always been on the fringe of things, because they are improbable. But then again, the discovery of the Bili Ape was improbable, and also the Denisovan discovery was improbable. Sometimes improbable things happen.

(Some guy named Michael Heaney wrote an article about Denisovans in relation to the folklore of "wild men", but I can't find the specific article at the moment.)

The Old World almas and the New World bigfoot seem to be descriptions of distinctly different things, the almas being more like literal "wild men" (feral humans) with some atavisms like extremely hairy skin, heavy-browed foreheads, and faces that are elongated and sort of snout-like, prognothous-looking. But still "human", if somewhat vaguely. Maybe leftover Neanderthal-ish creatures, or maybe basically modern humans that somehow got isolated from civilization, and went "wild" from generations of genetic drift. The bigfoot is usually described as basically something like a bipedal-adapted super-gorilla, definitely ape-ish, a giant upright simian. An almas could almost pass for an ordinary human (albeit a hideous, hairy, incoherent and deranged human) in most descriptions, but nobody would ever mistake the thing in the Patterson-Gimlin film for a Red Army deserter, or whatever.
 
The Bili Ape is really interesting, but what they are isn't clear enough yet to draw any conclusions about the likelihood of their discovery, if you see what I mean. I do agree with you though it might well be a valid example. I don't see where the improbability is with the Denisovans though.

I'm not sure what an article about them and folklore could have to offer either, personally I don't believe that tradition could stretch back that far. That said I haven't read the article so I might be missing something, I probably am so if you do come up with a link I'd be really grateful if you could post a link.


The Old World almas and the New World bigfoot seem to be descriptions of distinctly different things

They are now that's certainly true, but in my opinion that's because bigfoot, as opposed to any earlier report such as Boone's or native American tradition, is a modern invention. It's certainly true that there was some sort of wildman tradition there, but it doesn't correspond to the accepted version of bigfoot today. That only really comes into being after the Yeti hype of the latter half of the last century. Which in itself isn't particularly close to the local tradition, rather an idea based on the mid 20th C western take on the universal man of the wild myth.

I'm not trying to insult the Caucasus or anything to do with their culture, but it certainly seems to me when comparing, as we've done several times here, the difference in the way the Almasty is reported there and here in the West that their cultural take on the question is more traditional, and closer to the earlier indigenous traditions of America.

The myths have diverged slightly only because the cultures which maintain them have too.
 
Bigfoot73 said:
The almasty's willingness to cooperate with humans is exceptional among crypto-hominids.You don't hear of bigfoots or orang pendeks or barmanous helping out in the fields, or having rooms in people's homes, or wearing clothes.

I am going to have to search up a link, but there are Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest who claim that Bigfeet are a race of people with language, and they said that they trade with them.

It isn't Bigfoot doing house chores, but it is interaction :p
 
Rather startling news in the comments below: "There is a herd of them living in Formby Pine woods. Huge shaggy creatures.. - Ian , southport, 25/9/2012 11:40"

It would have enlivened our school field-trips no end! :shock:
 
JamesWhitehead said:
Rather startling news in the comments below: "There is a herd of them living in Formby Pine woods. Huge shaggy creatures.. - Ian , southport, 25/9/2012 11:40"

It would have enlivened our school field-trips no end! :shock:

Thats just a bunch of crusties who are out to save the trees.
 
JamesWhitehead said:
Rather startling news in the comments below: "There is a herd of them living in Formby Pine woods. Huge shaggy creatures.. - Ian , southport, 25/9/2012 11:40"

Surely it's a flange of Yeti's. Or a whoop even. :D
 
This is getting a bit silly:

A new Yeti resort in Siberia is to be opened to encourage tourists to find the elusive Abominable Snowman

The development is in an area of the world that claims to have one of the highest number of sightings of a legendary creature also known as Bigfoot.

News and Features

A new Yeti resort in Siberia is to be opened to encourage tourists to find the elusive Abominable Snowman
By The Siberian Times reporter
15 January 2013

The development is in an area of the world that claims to have one of the highest number of sightings of a legendary creature also known as Bigfoot.

Igor Idimeshev, 48: 'We are building the Yeti Park now, and of course there will be a chance for people who come here to see creature. For me having Yetis here means something much more than the tourist attraction'.

The new Yeti Park will be constructed at Sheregesh ski resort, in the stunning Shoria Mountain area of Kemerovo region in southern Siberia. The development comes with a pledge by the region's governor Aman Tuleyev to offer a one million rouble ($33,000) reward to anyone who can catch a Yeti and prove its existence.

'I'll pay a million to anyone who will find the Yeti and bring it to see the me. I'll sit down with him, chat and have a cup of tea', he promised.

Critics see the Yeti Park - with a hotel and a themed children's playground - as a crude attempt to bring in both Russian and foreign tourists.

'We can see how Scotland exploits the Loch Ness Monster, who why can't we do the same with the Yeti?' admitted one official. 'We hope people will come from all over the world.'

Recent tours to remote caves in the region have found samples of Yeti hair, though various promises of definitive DNA research on them have somehow failed to materialise.

Despite this, local officials insist the Yeti is real, even if Igor Idimeshev, 48, deputy head of the local administration in Sheregesh, and the man behind the new park, has a novel explanation for its existence.

'I've seen this creature several times', he said. 'I think it is most likely of the extraterrestrial origin, not from this world. The Yeti might suddenly disappear and re-materialise. Another extraordinary thing is that Yeti's hair is luminous at night, and also that the Yeti can walk on water.'


http://siberiantimes.com/weird-and-wond ... e-snowman/
 
I think this is the key paragraph:

Zilch5 said:
'We can see how Scotland exploits the Loch Ness Monster, who why can't we do the same with the Yeti?' admitted one official. 'We hope people will come from all over the world.'

Money makes the world go around.
 
We're a bit off topic geographically here aren't we, this story is from Siberia not the Caucasus.
 
oldrover said:
We're a bit off topic geographically here aren't we, this story is from Siberia not the Caucasus.

I just realized that after posting - maybe one of the mods can put it into the Siberian thread.
 
The Siberian and Caucasus creature seem to be the same thing, the almasty, probobly an off shoot of the first wave of Homo erectus and a totaly different creature to the larger more ape like yeti.
 
By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY
Wild, hairy, folks who fought griffons and nomads — have paleontologists unearthed mythic figures of folklore?

Siberia's Denisova cave held the pinky bone of an unknown early human species, a genetics team reported in March. The Naturejournal study, led by Johannes Krause of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, offered no answer for what happened to this "archaic" human species, more than one million years old and living near their human and Neanderthal cousins as recently as 30,000 years ago.

But at least one scholar has an intriguing answer: "The discovery of material evidence of a distinct hominin (human) lineage in Central Asia as recently as 30,000 years ago does not come as a surprise to those who have looked at the historical and anecdotal evidence of 'wild people' inhabiting the region," wrote folklorist Michael Heaney of the United Kingdom's Bodleian Library Oxford, in a letter to The Times of London.

Wild people?

Herodotus, the father of historians, wrote about these human cousins, the "Arimaspians," around 450 B.C. They were "strong warriors, good horsemen rich in flocks of cattle and sheep and goats; they are one-eyed, 'shaggy with hairs, the toughest of men'," according to John of Tzetses, a writer of the Byzantine era. They also fought griffons, mythical winged lions with eagle's faces, for gold, according to Herodotus and his contemporary Aristeas, who clearly knew their stuff when it came to spicing up historical writing.

Heaney notes that legends of hairy wild people, or almases, have been standard fare in the Russian steppes for centuries. "The reports of wild men, although having typical mythic overtones, do often reflect what we know of primitive hominins," Heaney says, by e-mail. "The presumed almases of Central Asia could be any one of a number of pre-(homo) sapien ancestors."

What about their gold-mine-guarding griffon foes? In a 1993 companion piece to a look at the Arismaspians by Heaney, Stanford historianAdrienne Mayor, author of The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times, suggested their legend sprang from dinosaur bones unearthed by nomads in their travels across the steppes of Western Mongolia.

"That region could well be Bayan-Ulgii aimag (province) in western Mongolia and environs, where I have wandered many long days and have seen ancient and contemporary small gold mines," says archaeologist Jeannine Davis-Kimball of the Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads, who calls a dinosaur-bone origin for griffon stories reasonable. But as for Arimaspians being the same as the newly-discovered archaic humans, Davis-Kimball has pretty strong doubts.

"We have excavated Bronze Age hunters and gatherers and small villagers along the Eurasian rivers — these were the people that precede the nomads by a 1,000 or maybe even many more years. I've seen lots of skeletons from many locales in my travels from Hungary to Mongolia, but none that correlates with this new hominid line or with the one-eyed Arimaspians," Davis-Kimball says, by e-mail. "It's too difficult for me to believe that hominids living 1,000,000 years ago could be perpetuated in a myth to the time of Herodotus or about 450 BC."

Another explanation came in a 2008 Archaeology Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia journal study by Dima Cheremisin of the Russian Academy of Sciences who looked at the ancient Pazyryk people of Siberia, an Iron Age tribe whose burial mounds dot the Altai Mountains. "The mythical griffon is the most popular figure in Pazyryk art, suggesting that the Pazyryk people maybe identified with the 'griffons guarding gold,' mentioned by Aristeas and Herodotus," Cheremisin noted.

And cryptozoologists, who make a study of legendary creatures, have offered similar archaic human explanations in the past for sightings of the Yeti or Bigfoot. Bernard Heuvelmans, the father of modern cryptozoology, theorized in the 1980's that such sightings of the wild people could be based on ancestral memories of Neanderthals.

Of course, it does turn out that people seem to have interbred with Neanderthals, according to a May Science magazine report led by Svante Pääbo, a long-time ancient genome researcher who also was a co-author on the Denisova Cave discovery report. More than 50,000 years ago, most likely in the Near East, intermingling of early modern humans and Neanderthals led to modern-day Europeans and Asians typically having a genome that is 1- 4% Neanderthal, according to the study.

Such interbreeding is another staple of old stories. Hercules, the hero of Greek myths, walked around in a lion skin with a club over his shoulders and was wondrously strong, a bit like a Neanderthal, due to half-divine parentage.

Even the Old Testament contains references to Nephilim, "giants," who married people and had children.

"These stories go back millennia, but they don't go back that far," says biblical archaeologist Robert Cargill of UCLA. "There's no way that the author of the Book of Genesis had in mind Neanderthals." Most likely, ancient people were trying to explain the origin of tall people, Cargil says, and pointing back to a time when things were so bad that even semi-divine creatures were misbehaving.

Of course, it's fun to speculate. After all, researchers in 2003 discovered another human species, Homo floresiensis, nicknamed "hobbits" for their puny stature about three feet tall, who died out perhaps 12,000 years ago in Indonesia.

So we have hobbits, giants, and possibly cyclopean wild men, running around in prehistory. It's not quite The Lord of the Rings, but we can certainly forgive Herodotus for some of his taller tales.
 
Zilch5 said:
oldrover said:
We're a bit off topic geographically here aren't we, this story is from Siberia not the Caucasus.

I just realized that after posting - maybe one of the mods can put it into the Siberian thread.
I think the geography thing is maybe a red herring - it's all Almasty related, as opposed to Yeti or Yeren, further south or east so I'll retitle to reflect that.
 
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