ALMAS

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Across the mountains and deserts of Central Asia, in Mongolia, the Caucasus and the Pamirs, people have for centuries described a hairy, man-like wild creature. In Mongolia it is the almas, and the name and its variants, alma and almasty, appear in Mongolian, Turkic and Iranian languages. It is usually described as shorter and more human than the Himalayan yeti, with a flat face, dark hair, a stooped walk and long arms.

In the twentieth century the almas became the subject of a Soviet scientific hunt. The hair samples tested in a 2014 genetic study turned out to be from bear, horse and cattle. A related Caucasian story, that of a woman called Zana, was tested far more directly. The result, published in 2021, was a genome, a family tree and an answer nobody in the search had expected.

Timeline

1876The explorer Nikolay Przhevalsky records a creature called kung-guressu, man-beast, with a flat human-like face, thick black fur and large claws.

The 19th centuryIn Abkhazia, then part of the Russian Empire, hunters are said to capture a woman living wild in the forest. She is sold several times and ends up with the Abkhaz nobleman Edgi Genaba, who takes her to his estate at Tkhina. She is kept in an enclosure for about three years, then given more freedom. She cannot speak but knows her name and does domestic work. She dies around the 1880s or 1890s, the sources differ, and is buried in the Genaba family cemetery. Locals call her an abnauayu, the Abkhaz wild-man figure.

1958The USSR sets up a snowman commission and sends an expedition to the Pamir Mountains, led by the hydrologist Alexander Pronin. Boris Porshnev and the surgeon Marie-Jeanne Koffman take part.

1962The Moscow biologist Alexander Mashkovtsev and Porshnev go to Tkhina and collect local accounts.

1963 and 1964Porshnev describes the almas as a stooped figure with long arms that did not use fire or weapons, and proposes that it could be a relict Neanderthal. In 1964 he tries to find the graves of Zana and her son Khwit, and fails. His work is later published in English as The Soviet Sasquatch.

1971Porshnev locates and exhumes the remains of Khwit, Zana's youngest son, who died in 1954.

1974Porshnev and the cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans argue in a book that Zana was a surviving Neanderthal.

1975Soviet archaeologists excavate the Genaba cemetery. They find an unusual burial of a woman, with a mirror in the grave. Khwit's skull, labelled Tkhina-71, and the woman's, Tkhina-75, go to Moscow. The other remains go to a museum in Sukhumi and are destroyed in 1992 during the Abkhazia War.

1981The Mongolian writer Damdinzhavyn Maidar describes a half-human, half-animal figure with reddish-black hair and a pointed back to its skull.

2006 and 2012Todd Disotell finds in 2006 that the skulls might be maternal relatives, but contamination makes it inconclusive. In 2012 Vladimir Yamshchikov reconstructs mitochondrial DNA from both and concludes they were maternally related.

2014A genetic study led by Bryan Sykes reports on eight almasty hair samples from Russia.

2016Sykes reports on mitochondrial DNA from Khwit's skull and saliva from six of his descendants, and concludes Khwit's mother was of West African descent.

June 2021Margaryan and colleagues publish full genomes of both skulls in the journal Advanced Genetics.

Key figures

Boris Porshnev, a Soviet historian, argued for a surviving Neanderthal population. His view won little acceptance among Soviet scientists. Marie-Jeanne Koffman was a surgeon who took part in the 1958 expedition. Alexander Pronin led it. Igor Burtsev, with Myra Shackley and Dmitri Bayanov, kept the Neanderthal idea alive in Russian cryptozoology and is credited in the 2021 paper with starting the search for Zana's grave. Byambyn Rinchen, a Mongolian scholar, wrote in 1964 that the origin of the name almas is quite unknown. Michael Heaney has suggested that the almas might be the Arimaspi, legendary humanoids said to live in the Riphean Mountains.

Bryan Sykes, a geneticist, led the 2014 hair study and the 2016 descendants study. Gutierrez and Pine, and separately Edwards and Barnett, challenged his claim about a polar bear match in Himalayan samples. Ashot Margaryan, M. Thomas P. Gilbert and colleagues produced the 2021 Zana genomes.

Physical and documentary trail

The record: nineteenth-century travellers' notes, Soviet expedition reports, local tradition, two skulls and the genetic work of 2014, 2016 and 2021. No body, bone or skeleton of an unknown creature has been found. The eight almasty hair samples tested in 2014 matched brown bear, horse and cattle. In the same study, Himalayan samples linked to the yeti were said to match a Pleistocene polar bear, which Gutierrez and Pine argued was ordinary brown bear and which Edwards and Barnett rejected on grounds of DNA degradation and a sequence mismatch.

The Zana skulls gave the clearest result. The 2021 team sequenced both genomes to about three times average depth, 3.1 times for Zana and 3.3 times for Khwit, with contamination under one per cent. Their mitochondrial DNA was identical, haplogroup L2b1b, and the kinship figures fell in the parent and child range, which let the authors identify the unnamed woman as Zana. Khwit's Y chromosome lineage, R1b1a1b1b, is non-African. Zana grouped with modern humans, not archaic humans or chimpanzees, and showed no excess Neanderthal ancestry. About two thirds of her ancestry was eastern African, close to Luo and Luhya populations, and about a third western African. The authors guessed that her family reached Abkhazia through the Ottoman slave trade between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, and say plainly that this is a hypothesis, not a tested finding.

The limits are stated in the paper: low sequencing depth, damaged ancient DNA, and earlier skull measurements and mitochondrial results that were never published. The authors also suggest Zana may have had congenital generalised hypertrichosis, a condition that can cause excessive hair growth, intellectual disability and distinctive facial features. That rests entirely on eyewitness descriptions, and no test for it was done.

Things you might not know

• The name is hard to pin down. A scholar said in 1964 its origin was quite unknown.
• There is a taboo. In two Mongolian provinces people call the creatures akhai, meaning uncle-brother, to avoid the name.
• Place names remember it. Almasyn Dobo means the Hills of Almases.
• Zana had children. At least four, with local men: Dzhonda, Gamasa, Kodzhanar and Khwit. Six of Khwit's descendants gave saliva for the 2016 study.
• Some skulls were lost to a war. The remains kept in Sukhumi were destroyed in 1992.
• A newspaper story went too far. Some papers reported that Sykes had said Zana could have been a yeti. He had not.
• Hair samples went to a lab. They were bear, horse and cattle.

Competing explanations

Folklore and misidentification. The strongest reading. Bears, which can stand upright, and a strong local tradition would explain the reports, and the physical material that has been tested was from known animals.

A relict hominin. Porshnev's Neanderthal idea. It has limited acceptance and no fossil or DNA behind it. The Zana genomes, which would have been the best test of it, showed no excess Neanderthal ancestry.

A human woman who was misread. For Zana, the evidence points to a woman of African ancestry, perhaps with a medical condition, who lived and died in captivity. The two earlier skull analyses disagreed: the Soviet anthropologists thought the woman might be of sub-Saharan descent but rejected that she was Khwit's mother, because they did not think he had African ancestry. The genomes showed he did.

Later life of the case

The almas now shares the field with the yeren in China and with Himalayan stories such as Shipton's yeti tracks. It remains a tradition with no specimen. Zana is the one case in the story where the question was put to the genes and answered.

Finding

The almas is a long-standing tradition across Central Asia, backed by a Soviet search that never produced a specimen. The material that has been tested came from bear, horse and cattle, and the one human case examined in depth, Zana, turned out to be a woman of African ancestry with a documented family, not a wild creature.

What still will not resolve: what the older accounts, such as Przhevalsky's kung-guressu in 1876, were describing, since they predate any testing and the witnesses cannot be questioned, and how Zana came to be in the Caucasus, since the genome gives her ancestry and the slave trade is only the authors' hypothesis.