Zana The Wild Woman

[lordmongrove]

So we don’t have to go through the whole paper and the abstract of genomic research, could you simply for the rest of us, say why?

I bought something at Curry’s and the girl on the checkout has given me enough homework to do already.

It's not a long read. The upshot is that she was most closely related to the Dinka people and had no archaic hominin in her genetic make up. Descriptions of her give a very odd suite of characteristics, covered in hair, huge size, massive strength, no language. She must have had a combination of weird conditions. This, of course does not explain the almasty as a whole.

 

[Kondoru]

If we are going to say she was very odd....(I think most descriptions of her, however vague, make her out to be singular).

Why did she end up in a place where they said "Oh, Wildwoman, harmless creature, needs looking after..."

Rather than a place where it would be "Scary monster! Best get rid of?"

As most of the world would would be?

 

[Nosmo King]

If we are going to say she was very odd....(I think most descriptions of her, however vague, make her out to be singular).

Why did she end up in a place where they said "Oh, Wildwoman, harmless creature, needs looking after..."

Rather than a place where it would be "Scary monster! Best get rid of?"

As most of the world would would be?

In the programme i saw about her, it said she was kept in a cage and local folk would come to see (and abuse and rape) her.

 

[blessmycottonsocks]

Just read these comments on Reddit. I have emboldened an interesting claim.

"Joerg Hensiek left a comment that according to the research of Sykes she would be a remnant of an African tribe or population not matching any modern African population: The well-researched contemporary descriptions suggest to me that Zana had nothing to do with the modern world.” “The details (of her mitochondrial DNA) place Zana in the L 2C lineage, one of the oldest 12 matrilineal African clans (and therefore NOT the ancestors of modern humans, my comment)….Zana would be a survivor from an African diaspora that fizzled out in the face of competition – the later spread of Homo sapiens that left her ancestors hanging on in the remote valleys of the Caucasus.” “I also had the scraps of her nuclear genome scattered among her descendants. Again, the African segments DID NOT match any records.” “I am hard at work making sense of it and I hope to know soon whether Zanan was indeed a survivor of an antique race of humans.”
"The pictures of her offspring looked quite obviously African descent to me. But there was one odd thing that Sykes said. He tells the gathered ‘experts’ she was 100% subsarahan African, with the normal 2-3% Neanderthal DNA. But this can’t be possible, as only European and asiatic peoples have the neanderthanal contribution, from after Homo sapiens moved out of Africa. I may have misunderstood his point, or it was a programming error, but basically she can’t have been both totally African and also have the Neanderthal contribution. Either she was mixed race, or there is a genuinely interesting finding in her DNA and this is why he postulated the (to my mind ridiculous) idea of an ancient hominid population in the area ( which the vet guy dismissed pretty quickly)."

Unfortunately there are no photos of Zana herself, just this widely-circulated sketch, with probably exaggerated features.

Zana's granddaughter, photographed below, had fairly robust features, but otherwise appeared quite normal:

 

[lordmongrove]

Professor Sykes, before he passed away was working on this with Tom Gilbert a geneticist from Copenhagen University. Tom confirmed her DNA was modern, African, human. She was a red herring in almasty research.