Almas (cryptozoology)
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Almas (Mongolian for wild man), is a reported hair-covered (except for hands and face) hominid species said to live in the Pamir Mountains, and the Altai mountains of southern Mongolia, as recently as the 1970s, although it remains undescribed to science and its very existence is open to dispute.
British anthropologist Myra Shackley, in Still Living? (ISBN 0500012989), documents Ivan Ivlov's 1963 observation of a family of Almas. Ivlov's driver also saw them. Ivlov, a pediatrician, decided to interview the children who were also his patients, and discovered that many of them had also seen the Almas. Neither the Mongol children nor the young Almas were afraid of each other (Shackley p. 91).
Hans Schildtberger's 1430 journal of his involuntary travels to Mongolia, as a prisoner of the Mongols, documents his personal observation of these creatures, as well as Przewalski horses (Manuscript in the Munich municipal library, Sign. 1603, Bl. 210).
Nicolai Przewalski also observed the animals in Mongolia 1871 (Shackley p. 94). Almas are part of the Mongolian and Tibetan apothecary's materia medica, documented along with thousands of other animals and plants, which live today.
Shackley has speculated that the Almas are a remnant population of Neanderthals, however this is impossible, as this would have involved massive devolution.
Recently, Henry Gee, editor of the prestigious Nature, writes of an unexpected discovery, that "The discovery that Homo floresiensis survived until so very recently, in geological terms, makes it more likely that stories of other mythical, human-like creatures such as Yetis are founded on grains of truth....Now, cryptozoology, the study of such fabulous creatures, can come in from the cold." [1] (http://www.lorencoleman.com/top_cryptozoology_2004.html)
External links
- Alma, Strange Apelike Creatures (occultopedia.com) (http://www.occultopedia.com/a/almas.htm)
- The Almas of Mongolia (http://www.n2.net/prey/bigfoot/sbs/mongolia.htm)