Bigfoot Yeti and the Last Neanderthal Read online

  Published by Disinformation Books,

  an imprint of

  Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

  with offices at

  65 Parker Street, Suite 7

  Newburyport, MA 01950

  www.redwheelweiser.com

  Copyright © 2016 by Bryan Sykes.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages. Previously published in 2014 as The Nature of the Beast by Coronet, an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton, ISBN: 9781444791259.

  ISBN: 978-1-938875-15-1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data available upon request

  Cover design by Jim Warner

  Cover photograph: The Yeti, illustration from “Monsters and Mythic Beasts,” 1975 (colour litho), D'Achille, Gino (20th century) / Private Collection / Bridgeman Images

  Printed in the United States of America

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  To Rhettman Mullis

  A good man and a good friend

  Contents

  PART I

  1. The Big Guy

  2. The Yeti Enigma

  3. The Last Neanderthal

  4. The Footprint that Shook the World

  5. The Professor

  6. Desperately Seeking Sasquatch

  7. The Russian Almasty

  8. The Godfather

  9. Clutching at Straws

  10. Our Human Ancestors

  11. Keeping it in the Family

  12. The Crimson Casket

  PART II

  13. The DNA Toolbox

  14. Good Science, Bad Science

  15. The Hunt Begins

  16. The Guru

  17. The Mountaineer

  18. The Explorer

  19. The Pangboche Finger

  20. The Man who Shot a Bigfoot

  21. The Veteran

  22. The Landscape Gardener

  23. The Indian

  24. The Government Laboratory

  25. Knock Three Times

  26. The Russians

  27. The Laboratory Reports

  Postscript

  28. The Snow Bear

  29. Zana

  30. Finale

  Notes

  Zana Genealogy

  Acknowledgements

  PART 1

  1

  The Big Guy

  The following account is taken from my field notes of Sunday 18 March 2013

  The events I am about to describe defy any rational explanation; something that as a scientist who believes in the triumph of reason over superstition, I find profoundly disturbing. The events occurred in the western margins of the northern Cascade Mountains about a hundred miles north of Seattle. I was taken there by Lori Simmons, a young woman in her thirties, who has dedicated a large part of her life to carrying on her late father Donald Wallace's work on a family of sasquatch. For the fifteen years before he died in 2010 he had lived deep in the forest a few miles from the small town of Marblemount, on the banks of the Skagit River. Lori had donated a clump of sasquatch hair found by her father to my research project, and I was keen to interview her and to see the area where the hair had been found.

  We left the small town of Marblemount, Washington State, crossed the bridge over the Skagit River and drove along a narrow road through steep, forested slopes, only now and then glimpsing snow-covered peaks through gaps in the trees. After twenty miles or so we reached a point where a track led off to the right towards a campsite. We parked the car. It was completely silent. No breath of wind, no birdsong. A locked metal gate closed off access to the campground for the winter. We had to continue by foot.

  On the way up to Marblemount, Lori and I had talked about precautions in case of a bear encounter. Black bears were common in the area and, in recent years, grizzlies had begun to drift down from British Columbia across the Canadian border, only sixty miles north. This year, with a mild winter, bears were coming out of hibernation earlier than usual. Opinions vary about what to do when meeting a bear, but Rhett, our other companion, was clearly taking the ultimate precaution as he strapped on his sidearm. All I carried was a puny Swiss Army knife.

  We had stopped the car near a patch of old snow (which I checked for prints), eased ourselves around the gate and begun walking down the sloping track towards the campground. The underbrush was a mossy carpet punctuated by clumps of narrow-leaved ferns that had been flattened by recent snow. Tall fir trees stretched a hundred feet or more towards the sky. Beneath, spindly saplings struggled upward towards the light, their branches sleeved in the same green velvet moss that covered the ground. The forest was not dense, and the scene was bathed in an entrancing golden glow. To our right, about fifty yards distant, a small river tumbled down the mountainside and filled the wood with the gentle sounds of rushing water. A fallen trunk lay across our path, axe cuts showing that the park rangers had begun to clear the casualties of winter storms. Both Rhett and Lori examined the trees for signs of sasquatch, pointing out how the lower branches of the mossy trees bent downward, which they both attributed to long-term climbing by our mysterious friends. Similar explanations were given for the angle of other fallen trees and branches. Throughout, I said nothing, and saw nothing about the trees that could not be explained by completely ordinary events. I was just an observer, scanning the forest for signs of life, particularly bears, and keeping an open mind. I felt pleased to discover that although I was certainly alert, I was not unduly frightened. I made sure my voice recorder was working and my camera ready for instant action.

  About a mile into the forest we came to our destination, a huge fir tree nearly thirty feet round at its base and well over a hundred feet tall. This, I was told, was the Big Guy's tree and he lived in a cave beneath it. The thought that I was in the company of the insane or deluded did flash across my mind. Lori had seemed perfectly normal when I met her in Burlington, and the three of us had chatted easily enough on the drive up the Skagit Valley to Marblemount. And yet here we were, in the middle of the forest, miles from anywhere, about to disturb what, if Lori and Rhett were right, was a very large and potentially very dangerous animal. Lori told me how she had been building a relationship with the Big Guy over several years, visiting this spot regularly, leaving green apples as gifts and engaging him in two-way conversations. She walked over the mossy ground to the base of the tree, all the time talking to the subterranean sasquatch as if it were a small child, pleading with it to respond. Not getting an answer from her voice alone, she stamped hard on the ground, but nothing happened. I watched this performance, not with silent mocking or wry amusement, but as an open-minded observer, a state of mind I tried to retain throughout the project.

  Lori continued her monologue for perhaps five minutes, explaining to the Big Guy that she had brought two friends with her and that I had travelled all the way from England to meet him. In a mildly scolding tone she said how disappointed she was that he didn't want to play the knocking game today. We withdrew perhaps twenty yards up the road, Lori reasoning that a break might put him in a better mood and give him more time to wake up. She began to tell me how she had been introduced to the Big Guy by her father and how they had grown close over the years of her visits. Although she and the Big Guy had never seen each other, she had become increasingly
aware of his amorous intentions towards her. She became convinced of this when she brought her new fiancé to the gifting spot, whereupon the Big Guy had responded with more agitated knocking and fiercer growling than ever before.

  Two or three minutes later we returned and Lori began her routine once again, stamping her foot on the ground. Again there was no response. Lori had with her a tape recorder with a parabolic microphone to record the Big Guy's various sounds but which could also transmit. She switched the recorder to ‘PLAY’ mode and the voice of her father, long dead, drifted through the forest. He was reminiscing about his years in the woods, how he had first encountered the family of sasquatch who shared this remote place, how he had won their trust. Her father's familiar and reassuring voice had worked before, encouraging the Big Guy to respond with a knock or a growl. But not this time.

  Then, a few seconds later, I heard, we all heard, two distinct knocks coming from under the tree. And a third.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ Lori turned and asked me.

  ‘Yes, I did,’ I replied. The sound was quite different from Lori's stamping, which was muffled by the mossy ground. The knocks were much sharper, as if a piece of wood was being struck by something hard. I could also feel a very slight vibration in the air at the same time, which ruled out the tape recorder as the source of the sound. I was completely stunned. My first thought: ‘Perhaps there is something after all. Perhaps they were right all along.’ My second thought: ‘What on earth is making the noise?’ My third: ‘What would Sherlock Holmes have made of it?’ In even the most unlikely and mysterious of events, the master detective was always able to provide a rational explanation. If there was one here, I certainly could not think of it.

  Gingerly I circled the trunk looking for an entrance to an underground cavern. There was none. The tree stood on a small bluff, with a drop of about ten feet on the downhill side, but I could not see any signs of trampling in the undergrowth. Around the tree, the ground had been flattened and there was a fallen log stripped of bark, as if by rubbing. A bear could have done this. I began to examine the trunk and the undergrowth for hairs, even the apple store, but could find nothing.

  I stood up next to Lori and it happened again. This time I was certain she had not done anything. There must be something under the tree. I went around the trunk again searching for hair, or hidden openings. It did occur to me that I might tumble through a concealed trapdoor into the creature's den. Even so, I was not unduly frightened, as curiosity and the prospect of a definitive sasquatch identification reinforced my adrenalin-fuelled bravado. I found nothing. Yet the knocking sound had been absolutely definite. None of us were keen to hang around and, a few minutes later, with no further sounds, we walked back to the vehicle and drove away. Other than two black-tailed deer by the roadside, we saw no signs of animal life.

  What was I to make of it? First, there was no doubt at all that I heard a total of six knocks coming from under the tree. Since there were two other witnesses, this was no hallucination. Significantly, I thought, Lori was pleased, though not ecstatic, that I had heard the knocks because she, of course, expected to hear them. Rhett too, though he was coughing badly and too sick to register much of a reaction, was not especially excited.

  On the drive back to Marblemount, I began to imagine that I would soon have solid evidence of the sasquatch's existence within my grasp. Writing now, a few hours later, I am not so sure. I had certainly heard something extremely strange. But that did not mean what I had heard was a sasquatch. There might be other explanations. Of these a hibernating bear was the most obvious, though this would be hard to reconcile with Lori's claims that the animal responded to her stamping, nor with the far louder and more boisterous knocking accompanied by agitated, blood-curdling screams which she told me she had heard on other occasions. For now I had to be content that this was a true mystery – something that had no rational explanation – which was, for me, intolerably frustrating. I knew already I would be back.

  2

  The Yeti Enigma

  For two hours we watched them. They were enormous and they walked on their hind legs. Their faces I could not see in detail, but the heads were squarish and their ears must lie close to the skull because there was no projection from the silhouette against the snow. The shoulders sloped sharply down to a powerful chest and long arms, the wrists of which reached the knees. The nearest I can get to deciding their colour is a rusty camel. They were covered with a long loose straight hair. They were doing nothing but moving around slowly together and occasionally just standing and looking about them, like people admiring the view.

  This graphic description of a close encounter with a pair of yetis in western Nepal comes from the journal of Slavomir Rawicz, a Polish army officer who escaped from a Siberian prisoner-of-war camp in 1941. He and six companions trekked over four thousand miles across tundra and desert before crossing the Himalayas, where they encountered the yetis, before finally reaching safety in India.1

  Like many of us, I am thrilled by tales like this from faraway lands. Tales of creatures, half-man, half-beast, that roam the high peaks or survive in the densest jungles. I wasn't sure I believed them, but neither was I ready completely to dismiss them. There could be something ‘out there’.

  I have spent my professional life as a scientist, most of it in Oxford, where I specialised in using DNA to explore various aspects of the human past. In particular I have used DNA to work out how our ancestors spread across the planet, when and where they came from and what routes they took. As well as publishing my research in conventional scientific journals, I have written four books which cover the main areas for general readers. The Seven Daughters of Eve, published in 2001, concentrates on tracing our ancestry using the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA, which also features heavily in The Yeti Enigma. Other books focus on the paternally inherited Y-chromosome and the evolution of sex (Adam's Curse, 2003), on genealogy and the genetic history of Britain and Ireland (Blood of the Isles, 2006) and America (DNA USA, 2012). I mention these titles in case readers want fuller details of some of the technical aspects that we are going to cover here, though let me reassure you that it is certainly not necessary to have read any of them to follow The Yeti Enigma.

  I have always been curious about other human species, like the Neanderthals, that we know lived alongside our Homo sapiens ancestors. I wondered what happened to them. Did they become extinct, as most authorities believe, or do they live on as creatures such as Rawicz describes? Until very recently this was an absurd notion, but scientific developments over the last few years, which I shall describe, have come some way to making this less of a whimsical fantasy and more of a realistic possibility.

  As I began to think seriously about making a scientific investigation in this area, I was frustrated by how little of any value had been published. I read the regular reports in the newspapers about mysterious remains being sent away to un-named laboratories for DNA testing but these were hardly ever followed up, and certainly never published in scientific journals in such a way that I could scrutinise the results.

  As I read more, I also discovered a worrying undertone. In almost every book written by cryptozoologists, as those who study creatures ‘unknown to science’ are called, I encountered the complaint that they had been ‘rejected by science’. As a scientist, I knew very well that science does not reject anything out of hand. Science is a way of trying to make sense of the world that relies on evidence. As such science is, at heart, a branch of philosophy, which is the reason practitioners qualify as PhDs – Doctors of Philosophy. Science is a philosophy based not on opinion or subjective judgement or orders from a higher authority or from God, but on evidence. I felt as though my profession was being unfairly accused by the community of cryptozoologists.

  For a mixture of these reasons, I set out to explore what I call the yeti enigma using the standard approach of my profession. I would gather genetic evidence for the existence of ‘anomalous primates’, as yetis, B
igfoot and others are collectively known, have a close look at it and, importantly, try to publish what I found in a mainstream scientific journal. I was strongly of the opinion that, bizarre though such a project might appear to be, it did not lie outside the scope of scientific enquiry.

  There are many good reasons for doubting the claims of the yeti-hunters. No body has ever been found and fully examined. There are no completely convincing films or photographs of these creatures, even nowadays when superb footage of extremely rare animals is on our television screens at regular intervals and everyone has a mobile with a built-in camera. And yet eyewitness reports of these creatures still come streaming in. Are these all the invention of vivid imaginations, phantasms of the mind of the harmlessly deluded or just plain fraud? In August 2012, forty-four-year-old Randy Lee Tanley, dressed in a monkey suit, was run over and killed on Highway 93 near Kalispell, Montana when he jumped out in front of a car. How many times had his dangerous antics triggered a new report of a sasquatch sighting from a bewildered and frightened motorist?

  What would it take to convince us all of the almost miraculous existence of these creatures? In Scotland, Edinburgh's Royal Mile runs up a gentle slope in the Old Town between the Palace of Holyroodhouse and Edinburgh Castle. About halfway up is the seated bronze statue of the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume. His big toe protrudes beyond the stone plinth and is polished by the touch of tourists flowing constantly up and down the hill. I doubt many of them know much about David Hume, apart from his irresistibly tangible hallux. Hume agonised over the existence of God and wrote an influential essay ‘On Miracles’ which sets out what it would take for him to believe in one. After insisting on multiple eyewitness accounts and other criteria, he summarises the level of proof required to convince him and, by implication, all those with a rational mind: