Sharing with Igor Burtsev and Friends

I had sought permission by Igor Burtsev to reprint the material on Zana and he granted me permission some while back. Here is the source material in English from the Russian Hominology site
http://www.hominology.narod.ru/zanai.htm

Wild woman, supposed relict hominoid, captured somewhere in a forest and having given birth from a local man in Abkhazia in the eve of 19^th sentury

By Igor Burtsev, translated by Dmitri Bayanov

In Abkhazia, Western Caucasus, relict hominoids (snowmen) are called abnauyu. While collecting reports in 1962, a colleague of Prof. Boris Porshnev, zoologist Prof. Alexander Mashkovtsev, heard and studied the story of Zana. Subsequently, Porshnev took over where his late companion left off. The following information is borrowed from Porshnev's work The Struggle for Troglodytes*.

* Boris Porshnev. The Struggle for Troglodytes . Prostor magazine, July 1968 pp. 113-116 (in Russian).
.

Zana was a female abnauyu who had been caught and tamed and who lived and died within the memory of a number of people still alive at the time of the research. She was buried near the village of Tkhina in the Ochamchiri District of Abkhazia in the 1880s or 1890s.

The manner of her capture is vague. Pro­bably she had already changed hands by sale when she became the property of the ruling prince D.M.Achba who was the titular head of the Zaadan region. She passed into the possession of one of his vassals, named Chelokua and still later she was presented to a nobleman, Edgi Genaba, who visited the region. He took her away, still shackled and chained, to his estate in the village of Tkhina on the Mokva River, 78 kilometres from Sukhumi, the capital of Abkhazia.
At first Genaba lodged her in a very strong enclosure and nobody ventured in to give her food, for she acted like a wild beast. It was thrown to her. She dug herself a hole in the ground and slept in it and for the first three years she lived in this wild state, gradually becoming tamer. After three years she was moved to a wattle-fence enclosure under an awning near the house, tethered at first, but later she was let loose to wander about. However she never went far from the place where she received her food. She could not endure warm rooms and the year round, in any weather, slept outdoors in a hole that she made herself under the awning.
Villagers teased her with sticks thrust through the wattle-fence, and she would snatch them with fury, bare her teeth and howl.

Her skin was black, or dark grey, and her whole body covered with reddish-black hair. The hair on her head was tousled and thick, hanging mane-like down her back.

She could not speak, over decades that she lived with people, Zana did not learn a single Abkhaz word; she only made inarticulate sounds and mutterings, and cries when irritated. But she reacted to her name, carried out commands given by her master and was scared when he shouted at her. And this despite the fact that she was very tall, massive and broad, with huge breasts and buttocks, muscular arms and legs, and fingers that were longer and thicker than human fingers. She could splay her toes widely and move apart the big toe.

From remembered descriptions given to Mashkovtsev and Porshnev, her face was terrifying; broad, with high cheekbones, flat nose, turned out nostrils, muzzle-like jaws, wide mouth with large teeth, low forehead, and eyes of a reddish tinge. But the most frightening feature was her expression which was purely animal, not human. Sometimes, she would give a spontaneous laugh, bar­ing those big white teeth of hers. The latter were so strong that she easily cracked the hardest walnuts.

She lived for many years without showing any change: no grey hair, no falling teeth, keeping strong and fit as ever. Her athletic power was enormous. She would outrun a horse, and swim across the wild Mokva River even when it rose in violent high tide. Seemingly without effort she lifted with one hand an eighty-kilo sack of flour and carried it uphill from the water-mill to the village. She climbed trees to get fruit, and to gorge herself with grapes she would pull down a whole vine growing around the tree. She ate whatever was offered to her, including hominy and meat, with bare hands and enormous gluttony. She loved wine, and was allowed her fill, after which she would sleep for hours in a swoon-like state.

She liked to lie in a cool pool side by side with buffalos. At night she used to roam the surrounding hills. She wielded big sticks against dogs and on other perilous occasions. She had a curious obsession for playing with stones, knocking one against another and splitting them.

She took swims the year round, and preferred to walk naked even in winter, tearing dresses that she was given into shreds. However, she showed more tolerance toward a loin-cloth. Sometimes she went into the house, but the women were afraid of her and came near only when she was in a gentle mood; when angry she presented a scary sight and could even bite. But she obeyed her master, Edgi Genaba, and he knew how to bring her to heel. Adults used her as a bogy figure with children, although Zana never actually attacked children.

She was trained to perform simple domestic tasks, such as grinding grain for flour, bringing home firewood and water, or sacks to and from the water-mill, or pull her master's high boots off.

Khwit

Raya

But she became the mother of human children, and this is the wonderous side of her life story, very important for the science of genetics. Zana was pregnant several times by various men, and, giving birth without assistance, she always washed the newborn child in the cold water-spring. The half-breed infants, unable to survive these ablutions, died.

So, when subsequently Zana gave birth, the villagers began taking the newborn babies away from her in good time, and reared them themselves. Four times this happened, and the children, two sons and two daughters, grew up as humans, fully-fledged and normal men and women who could talk and possessed reason. It is true that they had some strange physical and mental features, but nonetheless they were fully capable of engaging in work and social life.

One of her sons Khwit died in 1954. There were rumours that his father was in fact Edgi Genaba himself, but in the census he was put down under a family-name of Sabekia. It is significant that Zana was buried in the family cemetery of the Genabas, and that the two youngest children of Zana were brought up by Genaba's wife.

Khwit was powerfully built, had dark skin, but he inherited scarcely anything from Zana's facial appearance. The complex of human features, inherited from hisd father, was dominant in them and overruled the mother's line of descent. Khwit, who died at the age of 65 or 70, was described by his fellow-villagers as little different from the human norm, except for certain small divergences. He was extremely strong, difficult to deal with and quick to pick a fight. In fact, he lost his right hand after one of the many fights he had with his fellow-villagers, but his left hand sufficed him to mow and do other work on a collective farm, and even climb trees. When old, he moved to the town of Tkvarcheli where he eventually died, but he was taken back for burial at Tkhina.

The next stage of the Zana case was taken up by attempts to find her grave and skeleton. Here is what Prof. Boris Porshnev says about his efforts in that direction:

In September 1964, the archaeologist V.S.Orelkin and I made our first attempt to find Zana's grave. After was the second and third expeditions, but the search party had still not found Zana's bones (the last one was in October 1965)*.

* Archaeologist Yury Voronov, who later became Vice Premier of Abkhazia and was killed in September 1995, participated in the search at the time {IB.)

Igor Bourtsev on the excavation

After the passing of Porshnev it fell to my lot to continue the search. I headed three expeditions to Abkhazia in search of Zana's skeleton, in 1971, 1975 and 1978, which merits a separate story. Our difficulty was that by that time the last scion of the Genaba clan had passed away and nobody knew exactly where Zana's grave was. We put in a tremendous amount of spade work on that hillside, digging sticky clayey earth under almost daily downpours. During the second expe­dition I was taken seriously ill with an illness which doctors failed to identify. We never found a skeleton that would fit Zana's features as described by witnesses.

It was then decided to exhume the skull of Khwit, Zana's younger son, whose grave was still well indicated. The famous paleontologist professor Nikolay Bourchak-Abramovich assisted me in that digging in 1971, and a young anthropologist-archeologist Leonid Yablonsky consulted the digging in 1975.

I brought the skull to Moscow where it was studied by two physical anthropologists, M.A.Kolodieva and M.M.Gerasimova. The re­sults of the study were reported by me at the Relict Hominoid Research Seminar and the Moscow Naturalists' Society and published in 1987.**

The skulls of Khwit and a woman

** I.D. Bourtsev, M.A. Kolodieva. Results of a Preliminary Investigation of a Skull from the Village of Tkhina, Abkhaz ASSR. In: Papers of the Moscow Naturalists' Society. Moscow, 1987 (in Russian).

Anthropologist M.A.Kolodieva compared the skull of Khwit with the male skulls from Abkhazia in the collection of the Moscow State University Institute of Anthropology and found that Khwit's skull was significantly different. Indicating it as the Tkhina skull, she writes:

The Tkhina skull exhibits an original combination of modern and ancient features ... The facial section of the skull is significantly larger in comparison with the mean Abkhaz type ... All the measurements and indices of the superciliary cranial contour are greater not only than those of the mean Abkhaz series, but also than those of the maximum size of some fossil skulls studied (or rather were compara­ble with the latter). The Tkhina skull approaches closest the Neolithic Vovnigi II skulls of the fossil series...

The skeleton in the neighborly grave

On her part, anthropologist M.M.Gerasimova came to the following conclusions:

The skull discloses a great deal of peculiarity, a certain disharmony, disequilibrium in its features, very large dimensions of the facial skeleton, increased development of the contour of the skull, the specificity of the non-metric features (the two foramina mentale in the lower jaw, the intrusive bones in the sagittal suture, and the Inca bone). The skull merits further extended study.

So the bottom line of the Zana case today is this: we have only descriptions of Zana's peculiar nature, but the hard and specific evidence of her son's skull goes a long way in making the testimony of witnesses more solid and trustworthy.

It is need to add, that neighborly to the Khwit’s grave there was an interesting finding of the remnants: the skeleton of a woman buried in unusual position: on the side and with legs bent. Her skull is more robust comparing the local women and very prognathic. I don’t exclude that this burial belongs to Zana herself. To define this conclusion it is necessary to fulfill the comparative DNA analysis of both the sculls.

^©Cryptosphere Fund

From Igor Bourtsev: "Me in Tajikistan, 1979. One of the footprints found, casted" This is incidentally a classic footprint of the Almas type and can be matched by photos of similar casts from the Caucasus, Pamirs, Tien Shans, Mongolia and Tibet

-I consider that the woman's remains found with Kvit are possibly a relative but probably not Zana's.
I did find that Kvit's skull shows features which in a fossil example would definitely classify it as a Neanderthal crossbreed. The Skull is very much like the well-preserved Classic Neanderthal from La Ferassie:

Zana's Daughter or Granddaughter Natalia and Khvit's son Shaliqua, killed in the 1950s. Khvit lived to be an old man in his seventies before he died and was buried: Igor has many photos of their relatives and descendants, who continue to flourish in the area up to the present day.

Igor's daughter drew a portrait of him interviewing one of the specific North American Bigfoots that had been reportedly "Acclimatized" to regular feedings. I had already said that her artwork depicting this individyual showed a Neanderthal-type cranium and so I superimposed one of the Spanish early-Neanderthal ("?H. heidelbergensis") skulls for comparison and showed it to him:

Incident on the Carter Farm illustrated by Lilia Bourtsev

This was the illustration I saw first and I remarked that the Bigfoot in question had a Neanderthal shaped skull. The woman in the picture is secretly snatching some hairs from the creature's arm: I had some of the hairs as samples myself through an intermediary, and Igor through another route: both of us sent our samples in to be analysed. The samples I sent in were unfortunately discarded at the other end but the ones Igor had analysed matched against Kvit's remains genetically. Which was a remarkable and highly significant finding.

I later sent in some reconstructions based on ones at the "Them and Us" site to show how the theory would account for hairy Neanderthals resembling the Bigfoots or what Igor preferred to call "Forest People" (Some of the critics complained about the reconstructions all having the same fixed snarling expression)

And in this last one I had the "Them or Us" models (With legs repositioned more naturally under the body) scaled to show a more typical Neanderthal (on the Left) or a really big Heidelberger (With the eyes emphasized as in many reports) as compared to an average adult man.


Best Wishes, Dale D.

Neanderthal Reconstruction Via Tyler Stone

Tyler Stone found this reconstruction of a Neanderthal Man on Flickr, a product of the series of Hominid artwork by tmkeesey. This is marked as Unfinished but it looks fine to go as it is by me. I told Tyler that it looked like the artist had visted the "Them or Us" website.

I can see that part to be finished yet does include the hands wrapping around the pole. I consider this to be a very good representation of what Loren Coleman calls the Marked Hominid, the larger Subarctic Neanderthaler-or-Heidelburger for which we do have physical remains on record. The Marked Hominid-first identified by Mark Hall-is often said to have lighter-coloured hair or patches of lighter and darker hair giving it a piebald appearance. It would be the origin of what the press in Russia is currently calling a "Yeti" (in fact it probably does stretch its range all over the flat parts of the Tibetan plateau, especially in the center and to the South of Tibet where the altitudes are lower, but it would be called "MIGU" or "Wildman" most commonly)

This shall be interesting to see once it gets done. I'll have to remember to keep an eye out for it later.

Best Wishes, Dale D.

PS, in my earlier long article I mentioned such creatures might be wearing the whole skin of a deer with the antlered head attached as camoflage. I subsequently did come across a report of a hairy hominid "Jersey Devil" that had a deers antlers on its head and that probably confirms the theory. It probably might also account for the periodic reports of "Goatmen" or Wildmen with curled Ram horns.

Alexandr Fedenyow and The Face of Almasty is The Face Of the Eastern Bigfoot

Ordinarily I do not like to reprint items from the Cryptomundo site. In this case it was necessary to draw attention to something I had known about personally for a long time and I needed to share.Recently, Loren Coleman posted this notice at the usual sources:

Russian Hominologist Dies
Alexandr Fedenyow, 46, has died suddenly.
http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/fedenyow-obit/


Via Loren Coleman, International Cryptozoology Museum, Portland, Maine

And the article includes these two artworks with the introduction:

Tommy Shirley shares these two images created by Alexandr Fedenyow, who was also a graphic artist, of the Russian Almasty variety called Leshiy:

And at one of the places where the notice was posted, I added this reply:

Re: Russian Hominologist Dies

Posted by: "DaleDrinnon" daledrinnon@rocketmail.com   

Tue Dec 20, 2011 10:42 am (PST)

It is unfortunate that the man died so young (in his mid 40s)
To the other group members: Fedenyow was also an artist and the Cryptomundo notice has a couple of his productions on display. I was interested in this because what he depicts seems unusually close to what is being reported in our neck of the woods as "Eastern Bigfoot" and I have depicions from American artists that are almost identical to his. He would have been a valuable person for me to have talked to because I would have wanted to convey this information to him.

Best Wishes, Dale D.

PS, "Leshiy" is used indiscriminately to denote anything strange or unusual in the woods and it has also been used to refer to possible surviving wooly mammoth reports.

Above is the first posting of a Russian Almasty that I noticed to be showing the "Bigeye" feature I had been discussing with member Wolfen (See "Portrait" below) at the Yahoo group Frontiers of Zoology. At right is another similar Bigfoot portrait from Texas, and below that one another "Bigeye" Wildman or Almasty. When Wolfen posted his portrait painting below and noted that the witness insisted that the eyes were that big, I countered with the "Bigeye" artwork by a Bifgoot witness found on the internet and labelled "Figure 4"

Bigfoot "Figure 4" Artwork by witness Sue Lindley emphasizing the very large eyes of the female Bigfoot she saw.

"Wolfen's" painting "Portrait" submitted to the group Frontiers of Zoology in 2007 and beginning the discussion by noting the very arge size of the eyes as insisted upon by the witness describing the Bigfoot for him to represent. Actually all of these representations are also remarkable for the fairly high dome of the cranium above eye level in most of them, not the same as in "Patty" or the far-Western "Conehead" Sasquatches proper.

Once again, the "Them or Us" reconstruction of a bestial Neanderthal man that has among its features outsized eyes with a large dialation for night vision like a cat has. This is the same thing as is insisted upon by the Russian "Leshiy" witnesses. And actually there is some reason for this when you look at the Neanderthal's skull: the eye sockets are distinctively large and unusually rounded. Also the nasal passages are hugely enlarged and there are peculiarities about the ear opening as well. It would seem Neanderthals had immensely developed senses far beyond the senses used by civilized Homo sapiens and one could well categorize their senses of sight, smell and hearing as Superhuman (or animal-like if you prefer) Which would only go towards confitming what the witnesses say about the extreme caution about showing themselves and the heightened senses characteristic of the Almases and the Eastern Bigfoot in most of the sightings.

"Southern Sasquatch" [or "Bigfoot" rather] illustrating the reported effect of the very large eyes glowing from reflected light. This could well be something of an exaggeration and possibly partly because the irises of the eyes are coloured reddish, but many witnesses insist on the effect that the eyes are huge, both relatively and actually.
It is not certain whether the actual Sasquatch of the far West shares this trait or exhibits an eyeglow anything like this large.

Sketch of an Ohio Bigfoot

Alex Evans art of an Indiana Bigfoot emphasizing how large the dialated pupils are reported to be in such creatures. The drawing below is also by Alex (Owner of the Thunderbird Feather)


"Land Otter Man" of the West Coast (Alaska to Northern California) has been cited as a Native legendary creature comparable to Sasquatch: but actually the oversized eyes and double-arched browridge are more like the Eastern type. In Tennessee, some of them are said to drop to the ground to avoid being observed and  to "Go from vertical to horizontal in notime flat"
Land Otter Man is completely hairy and somewhat smaller than the typical Sasquatch (still six to eight feet tall) and they are said to kidnap humans but not to eat them, instead intending "To make them into other creatures such as themselves"



Scan of Dale's transparencies used in lectures demonstrating how the anatomy of the Iceman as depicted
by Ivan Sanderson is an exact match for what is known about Neanderthals. From the first, whenever I comment on this, I draw attention to the very large very round eye sockets on both the Iceman and on the Neanderthal skulls.
Bernard Heuvelmans independantly made much the same comparison by use of line drawings. In my lectures,
 I would overlay the transparencies of the Iceman hand and face over the Neanderthal skeleton and skull,
demonstrating a nearly perfect match in either case.

Iceman

Heuvelmans' photo mosaic for the Iceman and the line-art reconstructions made at his direction by Alika Lindbergh both above and below, from his book on the Iceman and Surviving Neanderthals

 (Le Homme d'Neanderthal est Toujours Vivant).

From the onset I was aware that the statements being made by the witnesses were not only internally consistent, they were also uniformly in agreement and flatly contradictory to Conventional Anthropological wisdom. For not only were they all in agreement that the Neanderthals were surviving up to the present day and the same throughout Europe and Asia, North and South America, they were all insistant about some things which do not fossilize: that the Neanderthals had a nocturnal adaptation of enlarged eyes with very large pupil dialation and unusually strong eyeglow (ordinarily red or orange, but not necessarily so). The question is now not so much to confirm that observation but whether or not that means they belong to the same species as the rest of us if they have such a unique adaptation.

Best Wishes, Dale D.

Tenneessee Bigfoot, Eastern Bigfoot or Southern Bigfoot, similar sightings in Georgia and West Virginia. Compare body conformation with Heuvelmans Iceman directly above and the "Leshiy" drawing from Cryptomundo that went with the obituary. The shape of the head, hands and feet are again just like the Neanderthals: teeth of this type have been found and also match Neanderthals but are of very large size.

A Different Face For Neanderthals

I happened across a site, which belongs to Danny Vendramini, a TV producer and scriptwriter, with an interest in evolutionary biology. It is:



http://themandus.org/index.html



He has written a book called “Them and Us”, in which he advances the hypothesis that Neanderthals were:


•Very different looking from most modern representations – much uglier, hairier, and far less human-like.
•That they were brutal, intelligent, tool-using predators, who preyed upon modern man in the areas where they came in contact, specifically, the Levant.
•That being the prey of Neanderthals was the most important factor in human evolution, and that it was responsible for the flowering of art and sculpture, the technological innovations in the tool making industry, perhaps even the flowering of language – all of which happened around 40,000 to 50,000 years ago.
•And not only that, it was responsible for the evolution of the human body type, including features that distinguish us from other apes, such as decreased hairiness, the development of a prominent and protruding nose, different body posture and gait, etc.
•Finally, he lists a whole range of human behavioral traits, such as preference for symmetrical faces, fear of the dark, abominable snowman myths across various cultures, etc. as some sort of racial memory of Neanderthals, whom we fear and despise, because they preyed upon us.



























The author seems to have no formal qualifications in biology or paleo-anthropology, and is self-taught. That is in itself not necessarily to be counted against the possible validity of the theory.

Themandus' Press Release 1 reads:
Neanderthals hunted, raped and ate humans


Neanderthals were not the gentle, almost-human creatures portrayed in the media over the last 150 years. New Australian research reveals they were aggressive, powerful and terrifying carnivores—ruthless and efficient apex predators, who hunted, raped and ate early humans for over 50,000 years. The Neanderthal’s daily diet of nearly 2 kg of meat—the equivalent of 16 Quarter Pounders—included human flesh.

Based on the research, Australian independent scholar Danny Vendramini has developed “Neanderthal predation theory”, which argues that the evolution of modern humans— including our unique physiology, sexuality and human nature—is the result of a reaction to this systematic long-term sexual predation and cannibalism by Eurasian Neanderthals...

http://themandus.org/news_release_1.PDF

Now whether or not ALL of the theory is true, I am quite willing to concede several of Danny Vandramini's points, in particular when he says that there must have been some obvious visual differences between Neanderthals and the ancestors of Modern Man which kept them from regular, usual sexual interaction. I have reasons of my own tio believe that they were normally hairy all over and thus resembled his reconstructions. And I will go so far as to say that there is something spectacularly different with the structure of Neanderthaler's eye sockets and that the shape could indicate an adaptation to stronger night vision. That much might be speculative, but the other points about Neanderthal's heightened sense of smell and superhuman strength are not mere speculation: their fossils show the indications of those points quite definitely.

So as far as the first major point goes, that of the physical appearance of Neanderthals, I see no major objections as to why that should not be acceptable from a scientific point of view. As far as reconstructions go, we are talking what I refer to as "Upholstery", and that part does not preserve on fossils. I have some interesting comparisons to show on this subject for a future blog. Fot the time being I am going to put up Danny's theory and let that stand on its own. I do not need to discuss ALL of the points beyond that because ALL that I am interested in at this point is the matter of the reconstructions themselves.

Neanderthal reconstruction courtesy of themandus.org
Photographs from the site themandus used for review purposes only and should not be construed as indicating that site endorses this one, or even necessarily the reverse.