Plug

Member of The Crypto Crew:
http://www.thecryptocrew.com/

Please Also Visit our Sister Blog, Frontiers of Anthropology:

http://frontiers-of-anthropology.blogspot.com/

And the new group for trying out fictional projects (Includes Cryptofiction Projects):

http://cedar-and-willow.blogspot.com/

And Kyle Germann's Blog

http://www.demonhunterscompendium.blogspot.com/

And Jay's Blog, Bizarre Zoology

http://bizarrezoology.blogspot.com/
Showing posts with label Solo Man. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Solo Man. Show all posts

Friday, 6 December 2013

Yowie and Eastern Bigfoot, the Solo connection

The article below refers to the Australian Yowies but the first illustration is a "Marked Hominid"-Which calls to mind the curious circumstance that the type specimen for Marked Hominind is a skull that has a braincase that resembles the so-called Solo Man of Java, a presumptive ancestor for Australia's Yowies. This skull is sometimes claimed as a late Homo erectus but is more usually considered the local counterpart to the Neanderthals. It also seems to be similar to the "Homo erectus" element detected in Latin America and spoken of by Austin Whittall.

Above, the normal-sized and larger (to giant-sized) Yowies, Wildmen and Bigfoot all seem to be basically similar to each other in Australia, in North America, and in fact all the way around the pacific. Below: this category also seems to have a smaller subtype that is generally comparable
 (But not necessarily identical to) the Flores Island "Hobbit" 
 
Ivan T. Sanderson in Abominable Snowmen, Legend Come to Life :
Even if we don't know where "sub-man" ends and "man" begins we do know that, quite apart from myth, legend, and folklore, there was once [and in some cases still seems to be] a group of not-quite-humans spread all over a vast area from Morocco to the Pacific, and from the southern border of Eurasia [which, incidentally seems to have remained the domain of the surviving Neanderthalers]..., southern Arabia, Ceylon, the East Indies, New Guinea, and the greater islands immediately beyond. Everywhere we go throughout this vast swath of the earth's surface we find traces of peoples so primitive that they are variously alleged to have been hairy, to have had tails [a mere profligacy, as we have explained], to dwell in trees, have had no proper language, be cannibals, lack fire and even tools, and generally to be "Those who lived in the land when our ancestors first came from …" Osman Hill has brought to light some exceedingly interesting facts about one of these races called the Nittaewo in Ceylon.
These little, mostly Pigmy, primitives that seem once to have inhabited the whole of the tropical belt of the old world, provide us with most suitable candidates for our Proto-Pigmy Class of ABSMs ... the Sedapa [and] Teh-lmas of the Orient. These little ones are alleged to be really very human in many respects and their footprints are as human as they can be. The facts that they are hairy and gibber do not, as we have seen, necessarily put them into any bestial class nor even out of the human. They could just be leftovers; the "Devil-Sakai" that can really use the trees as highways. If there really are such Proto-Pigmies in the New World, represented by the Dwendis and the Shirus, they must have traveled around the long way by the Bering Straits land-bridge at an early date, and become isolated. [There are also such Pygmies reported in Australia-DD]
And Earlier:
II. PROTO-PIGMIES (Orient,... and possibly Central and Northwest South America). Smaller than average humans, to tiny; clothed in thick black or red fur but with differentiated head-hair that usually forms a mane. Go about in pairs or family groups; wary but inquisitive; apparently a very primitive form of language; toes sub-equal and heels small or pointed; good tree-climbers and swimmers; tropical forests down to seashores and swamps; omnivorous, insect, fish, and small animal eaters plus fruits, leaves; very nervous. 
 [I am leaving the ones from Africa out of this for now since they seem to be something else-DD]
And then there are the more obviously bestial Sub Hominid (=Pongid)  types also present in Austraila:
IV. SUB-HOMINIDS (south central Eurasia—i.e....Himalayas, and [Central China]). In every way the least human. Somewhat larger than man-sized and much more sturdy, with short legs and long arms; clothed in long rather shaggy fur or hair, same length all over and not differentiated. Naked face and other parts[reddish brown to] jet black; bull-neck and small conical head with heavy brow-ridges; fanged canine teeth; can drop hands to ground and stand on knuckles like gorilla; ... color, dark brown; nocturnal and somewhat inquisitive; usually flees but may make simulated attacks if scared, and carry them through if the person gives ground and is alone; temperamental and bestial when aroused, being destructive like an ape; foot extremely un- or non-humanoid [Descroibed as "Handlike" with an opposed big toe] Omnivorous but with a preference for insects, snails, and small animals; will [occasionally also] kill larger game. Lone hunter and food collector; wide traveler like all carnivores.
And to all appearances the actually-Ape types in Austrailia are most likely to be displaced orangutans

 
 

The Australian Hairy Man, Australian Gorilla, Australian Bigfoot, Yahoo or Yowie

http://garyopit.com/yowie-bigfoot/
Big Hairy Man, Bigfoot, Yowie, Australian Bigfoot
This cryptozoological animal is an unknown species of hominin using both quadrupedal and bipedal perambulation to access its habitat. It is known in English as the Australian hairy man, Australian gorilla and yowie. Occasional descriptions and illustrations of it had appeared in newspapers, books and memoires from the early day of European settlement. Because specimens were not obtained, to be examined and classified by zoologists, and because so few reports were received of it, this remarkable species has been almost forgotten.
Consequently, it was almost completely unknown until Graham Joyner, interested in the history of science and employed as an archivist in Canberra, unearthed several references to yowies and yahoos in old documents and 19th century newspapers. He published a book The Hairy Man of South Eastern Australia in 1977, which contained 29 early references to the animal, dating from 1842 to 1935, listed some of the names that Aboriginal people used for it and succeeded in bringing it to the awareness of some members of the scientific community.
However, it remained unknown to the general-public until naturalist Rex Gilroy of Katoomba in the Blue Mountains behind Sydney began writing articles for newspapers and magazines in the 1970s, describing his research and requesting reports of observations into the animal. The name yowie was recorded by P. J. Gresser in his 1964 article entitled Manuscripts Relating Principally to the Aborigines of the Bathurst District in which he wrote that the Aborigines of south-eastern Australia, particularly the mountain tribes, feared “the Yahoo or Yowie … an animal of large proportions whose body was covered with masses of long hair…” (Gresser, 1964).
Hair samples, excellent footprints with detailed dermal ridges, photographs and video footage have been obtained. However, no bodies or skeletal remains, essential for identification, have been found.
Homo erectus and Homo palaeojavanicus have been found in Indonesia as million year old fossils, though Homo floresiensis fossils from Flores, on the Australian side of the Wallace Line, are only 13,000 years old.  Homo neanderthalensis is known from fossil evidence to have existed throughout Eurasia until about 28,000 years ago. The Australian, New Guinean and Solomon Island bigfoot and the much smaller njimbin / junjadee are most likely related to these species and may have reached these shores as survivors washed out to sea by tsunamis.
In May 1975 at the base of the Cougals, to the east of Springbrook, on the Queensland / New South Wales border, I heard the roaring voice of an unknown animal, which greatly surprised me. I knew the calls of every species and was amazed that I was hearing something completely unknown. It was a short series of loud distinctive roars that emanated from the rocky, steeply sloping cliff a hundred metres away. I attempted but was unable to climb the cliff from where the call came and then the call was repeated. It was most likely the warning roar of a yowie telling me that I was approaching its core territory, though at the time I was quite unable to imagine what kind of animal could produce such a powerful call and remain completely unknown to science.
A close encounter at 2 pm on 5 March 1978 at Best of all Lookouts on Springbrook by national park head ranger, Percy Window, was very interesting because he was a government employee and in charge of a large and popular national park. The witness was a work colleague of a friend of mine, John Duncan, who was able to relate to me a detailed description. A bipedal, gorilla-like primate standing 2.5 metres (8.2 feet) high was clearly observed in Antarctic Beech rainforest in good light from a distance of 4 metres (13 feet). It had a distinctive odor, a grunting voice, a body covered in long black hair, a flat, shiny-black face, large yellow eyes, a sagittal crest, and huge hands. Several other previous sightings on the same mountain and in surrounding districts were reported in local newspapers.
Then in June 1978 at 3 a.m., on a very quiet night with a full moon, I was awakened by a very powerful, continuously repeated roaring-bellowing call. The voice came from lowland subtropical rainforest in Joalah National Park on Tamborine Mountain 300 metres (984 feet) from our house at an altitude of 500 metres (1,640 feet).
The call was a deep-throated, booming “Yee-yee-yee-yee-yee” that continued without a break for 5 minutes. I could clearly hear the sounds being pumped out of a massive chest and the vocalization sounded more like a big primate call. After approximately 2 minutes, three dingos (Australian wild dogs) broke into their characteristic howling. Two of the dingos were approximately 80 metres (260 feet) to one side of the mysterious animal and the third was howling at a similar distance on the opposite side. The sound of these 4 animals in full cry was the most remarkable natural sound that I have ever heard. I was able to accurately judge the call of the unknown animal with the calls of the dingos that I regularly heard.
The yowie’s call was at least twice as loud as and much more powerful than the dingos and after their howling finished the yowie continued its repetitive bellowing for perhaps another minute. Then only the sound of Curtis Falls, Cedar Creek and the chirping of the crickets remained.
The next time I heard the calls of the yowie was at 3-30 a.m. on 1 June 1996 on the slopes of the Koonyum Range at an elevation of 200 metres (656 feet) at Main Arm in north-eastern NSW. I had walked outside for a view of the full moon illuminating a crystal clear night and heard 100 metres (328 feet) away, near a dry creek bed in eucalypt forest, a series of some 90 loud bark-like calls. The calls were always in a series of three, the middle call was always the loudest and it was followed each time by softer call “arroo-ARROO-arroo.”
The beginning of each of the three barks “ARR” was sudden and intense while the final “oo” portion was cut short as it fell off in volume. Between the sets of three barks, a time of about 5 or 6 seconds, a disturbingly strange soft gurgling call, “gu-gu-gu-gu,” could be heard. It continued with very little variation for about 5 minutes with the last couple of series of calls appearing less loud as if it had begun to move off. It was quite unlike the calls of foxes or barking deer that I had heard in Southeast Asia and once again had more of a primate feel to it. The next day I found 3 toe prints in the earth of a creek bank where it had climbed up the slope and each toe was about the same size as a human big toe, slightly reducing in size as if it were a right foot.
At dusk on 3 November 2008 in the Billinudgel Nature Reserve, Wooyung, I had a yowie, approach me to within 10 metres, as I was walking along a track in coastal bushland with a dense tea tree & sedge grass understorey. I was with my dog Banjo near my home when I heard something moving towards me through thick vegetation.
We could hear the gentle sound of a large body quietly pushing through the dense lower stratum of vegetation, 1 to 2 metre high and once every 30 to 40 seconds we could hear a loud crack sound as if two sticks had been hit together. As it drew closer, after 4 or 5 minutes, my dog suddenly gave a double warning bark. I hissed at him to be quiet.
I was surprised that it continued to approach us with the same sound of sticks being hit together. Then after another 4 or 5 minutes my dog suddenly barked a second time, and again I hissed at him to be quiet. This second bark also failed to deter the approaching animal & it continued to get closer with the same cracking of sticks for another 3 or 4 minutes. I had been carefully viewing through binoculars & saw a brown upright animal 1.5 m tall moving carefully parallel to the track I was on and about 6 metres away and then it moved quietly off.


Figure 14. Yowie researcher Pixie Byrnes is sitting in the position where she first obtained clear views of the yowie that she named ‘Humpty’, at 11.30 am on 10 March 2008. The male yowie squatted on the grass in the small clearing towards the top of the photograph before moving off. With Pixie sitting in the same position the next day at 12.30 pm ‘Humpty’ walked out of the trees towards her, and then turned away.
Pixie’s first encounter with a yowie was even more exciting. She states “I was in a paperbark tree lined creek bed, cooking potatoes and steak on a fire that I had made in the river sand, along a lovely shady bank. I never realized that I was not alone until a mob of dogs came rushing in on the other side of the creek only 15m or so away. Up popped a massive yowie from the long grass above the creek, I had no idea it was there at all. I climbed up into a paperbark tree with a pot lid in my hand. By the time I got up the tree I saw three dogs racing around and around this yowie and another dog was already in the yowie’s hand. It was holding it by the muzzle and head and it looked very dead in a very short time.
The yowie, holding on to the dead dog, flung it around at the other dogs and struck them over and over again until they were yelping. The next thing I saw was that those big ugly, horrible dogs ran away from the struggle with their hair all mattered and with the bristles on their backs standing upright. One of them seemed to have part of his face missing. Then the big dark-haired yowie turned and holding the dog in its hand, walked across the flat ground to a big tree. Then it flung the body up into a fork of a tree. The torso of the large golden dog or dingo seemed to be empty or crushed flat.”



Figure 15. A drawing of ‘Humpty,’ watching wild bush turkeys while holding three sticks in his right hand, by Yowie researcher Pixie Byrnes. This was drawn immediately after the encounter at 11.30 am on 10 March 2008.


Figure 16. A drawing of ‘Humpty’ sitting beside a water hole after having washed himself in the early morning during rainy weather, by yowie researcher Pixie Byrnes. This was drawn immediately after an encounter in March 2008.


Figure 17. Cryptozoological researcher and artist John Opit, 14 May 2012 at Limpinwood, examining a small rainforest tree which a yowie had torn open with its fingers to obtain the wood boring grubs. Two yowies had been heard giving their distinctive howling calls from this exact position within heavily vegetated undisturbed rainforest the night before. Yowies use their fingernails to rip the wood away and the result is more efficient and less destructive than the beak ripping employed by black cockatoos in more open forest.
John encountered a yowie nearby on his property at night in the forest and it ran off. His son Simeon saw a 6 foot tall black-furred yowie early one morning near the house.

Thursday, 9 May 2013

More on Yowies

Above are some Australian rock art representations supposedly showing the Yowie.
Below is an exceptionally good Yowie track. it is 14 inches long and nearly
five inches wide, and compares well in size with many of the "Bigfoot"
 type tracks found in the colder parts of the Northern hemisphere. Attributons are to yowiehunters.com.au buty my server will not connect to the site for verification.

 
There is a famous article published in CRYPTOZOOLOGY stating that Yowie reports referred "Only" to stray individuals of wandering "Wild" Robust Aboriginals as misundersood by the witnesses. There is some merit to stating the problem in such terms because some of those Robust
fellows were unusually big and unusually hairy, and very well used to living off of the land. Furthermore a still-popuolar theory holds that they were at least partly descended from types
 of earlier fossil men known from the island of Java in Indonesia.

Mungo Man burial. This man stood at least 6'6" in life.
The genetics of Mungo Man were unusual, as shown in the chart below.
 Both of these illustrations are from Mathilda's Anthropology Blog.

Mungo Man turns out to have come from an older branch of humanity than most of the rest of us, at least on his mother's side. That branch is more closely related to the Neanderthals than us but not related to tyhe specifically European Neanderthals (A distinction wich we also see in the Denisovians) In this case this brings to mind the "Tropical Neanderthals", the Solo Men of Java
 
Compartison of some "Robust" fossil skulls  to Solo Man from Indonesia. KS marks one of the Kow Swamp skulls. certain other skulls from Kow Swamp seem to have been artificially deformed instead.
 

Photograph of one of the mostly extinct "Robust" Murrayan Aboriginals.
These were large, powerful and stocky aborigines with a lot of body hair.
 They were mostly wiped out by smallpox in the early days. Their populations were concentrated more in the area now more heavily inhabited by White Australians, in the South.
 
Illustration of a Yowie from a Bigfoot Discussion board:
unfortunately the original board cannot be located currently.
This is another certainly "Robust" individual but human looking enough.
Impression of a Yowie living around bog holes, from recent reports 

Cryptid Catalog: 'The Yowie'

http://www.fearnet.com/news/news-article/cryptid-catalog-yowie

Yowie3
Artwork: Bill Asmussen
 
It seems like just about every culture on the globe comes with its own legend of a hulking, apelike semi-human or proto-human creature – from the Yeti (or Abominable Snowman) of the Himalayan mountain range to the Sasquatch (aka Bigfoot) of the U.S. Pacific Northwest, and literally dozens of others. Australia is no exception to the rule, as there are many legends about a simian beast believed to dwell in the wilderness in all parts of the continent. Known by many names depending on the region and culture, it's most commonly referred to as the “Yowie,” or “Yahoo.”
Yowie1

LINK  LINK 2

Alleged Yowie Sighting (c/o Yowiehunters.com.au)
Tales of this creature can be traced back to ancient Aboriginal folklore, where they are described as a hairy, ape-type species, with some legends adding eerie details like clawed feet and unnatural speed. European colonists documented their accounts of similar ape-men in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and Yowie sightings are still being reported today all around the continent, as recently as last year. According to the Australian Yowie Research site, some Yowie studiers theorize the creature could be a form of the hominid species Australopithecus.
Yowie2
Alleged Yowie Claw (c/o Yowiehunters.com.au)
[This is obviously nothing to do with the Yowie]
Much like Bigfoot and the Yeti, accounts of the Yowie have been documented in heavily-researched books, covered in various fiction and nonfiction media (there are hundreds of Yowie-themed YouTube videos out there) and fully entrenched in Australia's popular culture. The creature was recently the subject of an award-winning comic short, which you can watch right here:


The Yowie - short film from Jens Hertzum on Vimeo.
"A very hot four day shoot in the magnificent Blue Mountains with limited time and zero budget. The crew were superb and two pick up days were added to the initial four days shooting.
Despite a number of production issues, it was worth it in the end, so far we have bagged two international awards (one for our brilliant Cinematographer Callan Green and another Merit Award for the film itself) at the 2010 LA Cinema Film Festival for our troubles!"
 
 
For ealier information about the yowie on this blog please go to this link:
http://frontiersofzoology.blogspot.com/2012/02/yowies-robust-aboriginals-and-solo-man.html

Sunday, 11 September 2011

CFZ REPRINT: Yetis and Orangs at All Sizes

Monday, May 17, 2010
DALE DRINNON: Orangs and Yetis at All Sizes

Yeti and Orangutan with male head peak



















The Yetis would be related to the orangutans, but the severe differences in foot structure and habitat make it likely they are not the same species. They may well represent the more generalised ancestors of the more specialised known orangutans (Pongo). In his checklist Heuvelmans concludes the listing of the yeti by saying 'it is equally possible that the so-called Snowman is merely a particular form of orang-utan, more terrestrial than the tree-dwelling kind', and this entry immediately follows another entry for mainland-Asiatic orangutans (Olo-banda and Bir sindic in Assam, in English translation 'Big Monkey', equivalent to Mahalangur used around Mount Everest) The Mainland orangutans are considered survivals of the "Fossil Pongo" found alongside Gigantopithecus and also considered to equate to the legendary Chinese Xing-Xings.




















"Heuvelmans Yeti Compared to Orangutan Proportions"



Yeti Territory (Mt Everest region double-circled)


The search for the orang pendek has been the focus of much interest at the CFZ. The orang pendek is frequently singled out as the cryptid most likely to be discovered next and added to the known species category. The press releases very frequently simplify the situation for the layman to more easily get the thrust of the argument. There is more than one kind of orang pendek and the name does not specifically refer to any one thing in particular. Bernard Heuvelmans says in his checklist that the type consists of small hairy hominoids with long straight hair on their heads, exterminated on Ceylon where they were formerly known as Nittaewo, but still alive on Sumatra where they are known as Sedapa and Orang Pendek, and on Borneo where they are known as Batut. He also mentions that W. C. Osman Hill thought they could be dwarfed forms of Homo erectus in 1945.


B. Heuvelmans Orang Pendek As Dwarfed Solo Man  

The names orang pendek and orang utan are used in what Sanderson calls Kitchen-Malay, a sort of creole trade language, in which the word 'orang' means 'person' (i.e, a human being). 'Orang pendek' means 'short or stocky person' and 'orang utan' means 'person who lives in the forest.' Both names can and are in common usage to mean regular human beings with just such determining characteristics. The native terms 'sedapa' for orang pendek and 'mias' for orang utans are preferable, and this is the situation as stated by Ivan T. Sanderson in 1961 in his classic book Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life.


Now because we have a situation where a creature is named by a non-specific name, we have a situation where more than one kind of creature is being reported under that name. The situation is exactly the same as in the case of the South American Didi: one of the types is a hominid with long head-hair and human-style feet with non-opposed toes. The other is a kind of an ape with non-differentiated head-hair and an opposable toe on its foot. The situation also refers to the very popular terms Bigfoot and Yeti, and it occurs in both the Old World and the New World.



"Orang pendek track compared to other feet"
This is the human type Orang Pendek, track in lower left



 Eyewitness drawings of orang pendek

Upright Ape Type Above, Small-Human Below





This has caused some disconcerting situations as the orang pendek being related to the Flores 'Hobbits' by many researchers, while at the same time the same researchers incongruously show casts of ape tracks with opposed big toes as evidence for the theory. The earliest known tracks attributed to the orang pendek are human tracks and they are comparable to small neanderthal tracks. That is why I made my paste-up showing how the orang pendek could be a dwarfed form of Solo Man (The paste-up above was done before the discovery of the Flores 'Hobbits' and the two "O pendek" figures would be at approximate female and male average heights.) Now the ape-like pendek is clearly like an orangutan in the shape of its skull and facial profile (I am ignoring the occasional reports of an outsized Siamang also confusing the issue) And as a matter of fact, on the islands of both Sumatra and Borneo, known orangutan habitats, there are not only reports of 'little ones'; there are also reports of giants. The giants in Sumatra are known as orang gadang (great big people) and there is a very famous case of one giant orangutan being killed and sent to a museum mentioned in all the old natural history books. That one was over seven feet tall when the dead body (NOT the stretched skin) was measured.






















 "Hypothetical Orangutans matched against Human height extremes"

 Chad Arment in Cryptozoology: Science and Speculation (2004) discusses this case. Going by human records, it might well be possible for orangutans to range from under three feet tall to over eight feet tall as adults (male heights). It is even conceivable that the end populations might form inbreeding populations of unusually large or unusually small average sizes through the process of genetic drift. Now it just so happens that a comparable situation is reported in the Yetis of the Himalayan region (Ivan Sanderson does at one point specify 'The Meh-Teh [classic yeti] is NOT a Himalayan inhabitant' but there is clearer evidence for them in the Everest region and around Assam) where the basic type of creature is very like an orangutan and in this area there are not only reports of the big yetis over seven feet tall, there are reports of the dwarf kind or Teh-lma. This last kind is very like the ape-like version of the orang pendek, although the tracks attributed to it are probably mistakes (on the occasion reported by Gerald Russell, the tracks were in association with a sighting, and the reported creature was much too large to have made the tracks)

Above:Orang utan skull, Compare to shape of the head in the more Apelike Orang Pendek.
Below: Orang pendek track of the more Apelike type.

 So I think there is a good chance that both the large and small orangs (sedapas, or orang gugus) and the large and small 'yetis' are genetically-isolated offshoots of the known orangutans, and the parallel situation among the yetis developed by a parallel process.

P.S, I am NOT advocating the existence of the orang pendek in the form of two or more Cryptids, i.e, unknown species. To Sanderson's classification and my own, the more human type is simply a Homo sapiens sub-type while the ape-like form is an orangutan variant, and I would defer to any good genetic evidence that establishes it as a new species as opposed to an unusual population of the common Sumatran orangutan species.

Sources:
Heuvelmans, Bernard, Annotated Checklist of Apparently Unknown Animals with which Cryptozoology is concerned" CRYPTOZOOLOGY vol. 5, p.1-26
Heuvelmans, Bernard, On The Track of Unknown Animals, Hill and Wang 1965
Sanderson, Ivan T., Abominable Snowmen, Legend Come to Life, Chilton 1961

Bobbi Short's Orang Pendek page which defines something that sounds very much like a pedomorphic pygmy orangutan is at: