Almas

A Bavarian soldier’s diary from 1427, written during his captivity among the Mongols, describes being shown a pair of wild people covered in hair, captured in the mountains. The creatures could not speak. Whether the account is reliable, embellished, or fabricated is impossible to verify. It is the earliest European mention of what Central Asian peoples have reported for much longer.

The Reports

Mongolian herders describe the almas as shorter than a man, stocky, covered in reddish-brown hair, with a flat nose and pronounced brow ridges. It walks upright. It avoids humans. Sightings come from the Altai Mountains, the Tien Shan, the Pamir, and the Caucasus. The reports are consistent across thousands of kilometers of mountain territory, from populations that have limited contact with each other.

The Soviet Investigations

Boris Porshnev, a Soviet historian and scientist, spent decades collecting almas reports and lobbying the Soviet Academy of Sciences to fund an expedition. He proposed that the almas was a surviving population of Neanderthals or another archaic hominid. The Academy was skeptical but allowed limited investigations. No specimen was captured. Myra Shackley, a British archaeologist, published Still Living? in 1983, arguing the case for relict hominids in Central Asia. The scientific mainstream remains unconvinced.

The Pattern

Every major mountain range on earth has a reported wild man: the yeti in the Himalayas, the yowie in Australia, the sasquatch in North America, the orang pendek in Sumatra. The almas fits the pattern. Whether the pattern reflects a biological reality, a psychological need, or the way mountain-dwelling humans explain the uncanny sounds and movements in the terrain around them is the question that none of the expeditions has settled.