Bigfoot Yeti and the Last Neanderthal Read online

  Standing in front of the display was a man. He was staring at the model with an almost tangible beam of intense attention. He stood completely still and I wondered at first what he had seen in the display that I had not. Something told me he did not want anyone to disturb his concentration. I withdrew to display cabinets a short distance away, from where I watched this strange visitor. He remained where he was for several minutes, without moving, utterly transfixed by the model in front of him. I could only see his back, but he was about 5′6″ tall, with wavy, dark hair just covering the collar of his raincoat. After some time he turned to his left, and for a moment I could see him in profile. Even though the light was dim, there was no mistaking the forehead sloping back at about forty-five degrees from the rest of his face. And below that, the strong, protruding brow ridges and a receding chin. I could not escape the chilling sensation that this man, whoever he was, was a Neanderthal who was communicating with the spirit of his ancestor. When I looked again, he was gone.

  There have been other occasions when I have been alerted to the continued existence of Neanderthals. Even as far back as 1996 when my colleagues and I published the first extensive mitochondrial DNA studies on Europe, one of the minor conclusions was that, on the evidence we had gathered, there was no place for Neanderthals in the ancestry of modern Europeans. The less cerebral British newspapers thought this was clearly wrong. The Daily Express, for example, announced in an article entitled ‘I'm a Neanderthal man’ that ‘despite what the scientists say, it explains why men have been behaving badly for the past 100,000 years.’ Beneath the headline, the article illustrated the evidence for the persistence of Neanderthals right down to the present day, with portraits of the cricketer Ian ‘Beefy’ Botham and the former Oasis singer Liam Gallagher looking particularly gormless. Beside them was one of ‘Evolution's Survivors’ as they put it, the bodybuilder, Hollywood star and former Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. These were given as examples of what the Neanderthals have become in the popular imagination. Brutish, primitive and rather stupid.

  The Daily Express article, and others like it that appeared around the world, sparked a deluge of letters from members of the public who refused to believe that the Neanderthals were no longer with us, usually because they knew one. I particularly remember one letter from Santa Barbara, California, which informed me that the checkout clerk at the Safeway store on State Street was definitely a Neanderthal. He, my correspondent assured me, was very nice and would not mind in the least if I asked him for a DNA sample. One revealing aspect of this flood of intelligence was that not once did anyone write to me saying that they were a surviving Neanderthal. It was always someone else.

  After exploring questions about European ancestry on a time-scale of tens of thousands of years, I turned my attention to more recent events, in particular the genetic history of Britain and Ireland, which had been my interest behind an earlier book Blood of the Isles. I only mentioned Neanderthals once in that book, and even then only as a narrative sideline rather than as part of my genetic conclusions. Yet when the book was published in 2006 this almost casual remark led to another flood of correspondence. To gather the genetic evidence for Blood of the Isles, my research team and I had travelled to every corner of Britain collecting DNA samples from over ten thousand volunteers. In Blood of the Isles, I had recounted a story told to me in Mid Wales by a local farmer in the market town of Tregaron. He had lived thereabouts all his life and when, during conversation in the bar of the local hotel, I explained what I was doing in the area, he told me about the Tregaron Neanderthals. Apparently, two elderly bachelors living on a remote farm in the wild hills behind the town were widely acknowledged to be Neanderthals, so much so that the local school organised annual trips to visit them. I wasn't sure I believed him, but nevertheless included the encounter in the book. When the widely read Wales on Sunday reviewed Blood of the Isles, the article was almost entirely devoted to the Tregaron Neanderthals. There were several consequences of this narrowly focused coverage including, to my bewilderment, that the story had mutated almost immediately into my actual discovery of genetic evidence of Neanderthal survivors in Wales, which of course I had not.

  The following week I received two letters from people who had read the Wales on Sunday article. Each described two brothers with very unusual heads whom they remember visiting as children in the 1950s. These brothers lived not in the hills behind Tregaron, but a few miles further north under the shadow of Plynlimon, the mountain inland from Aberystwyth that is the source of both the Wye and Severn rivers. Their home had since been flooded to create the Nant-y-Moch reservoir. According to my correspondents, one of the brothers had left his body to Aberystwyth University. These were old memories, and while they may not be entirely accurate, they were nevertheless sufficiently vivid to be recalled fifty years later. In my research for Blood of the Isles I had been reading H.J. Fleure's book, The Natural History of Man in Britain, published in 1951.2 Fleure was a distinguished academic, a fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Anthropology at Aberystwyth. He had made a study of head shapes in Wales and had come to the conclusion that some of the people around Plynlimon might be an archaic form of human. He did not directly suggest that they were Neanderthals, but nonetheless I found it an interesting observation. He illustrated his ideas with a full-face and profile photographs of J. James whose features were typical of Fleure's ‘archaic form’. I came to the conclusion that James was one of the brothers who was forced to move when the dam was built and the valley flooded, as mentioned by my Welsh correspondents.

  My interest in Fleure's hypothesis and in the Tregaron Neanderthals was reawakened when I was thinking about where best to look for the DNA evidence of Neanderthal survival or interbreeding and I decided, on the spur of the moment, to go back to Mid Wales and see what else I could find out. As I crossed the border into Wales and got closer to my destination, the hilltops began oddly to assume the shape of a Neanderthal skull, an early indication of my own susceptibility to the psychological phenomenon of pareidolia, something we explore later in the context of sasquatch sightings. I booked into the same hotel, the Talbot in Tregaron, where I had first heard about the Neanderthals ten years earlier. This time my visit coincided with the Rugby World Cup and, as I settled into the bar, the France v. New Zealand quarter-final match was showing live from Cardiff on the large television suspended in the corner. This fixes the date as 6 October 2007. It was a tight game, which France won 20–18.

  Wales, and New Zealand for that matter, are passionate about their rugby and the bar was filled with appreciative banter. I was sharing a table with some local farmers, young men who were keenly following the match. During the half-time interval I got talking with them. I told them I was trying to locate the Neanderthal brothers. This didn't produce the looks of astonishment that I would have expected in most company. Two of the young farmers had been to school in Lampeter, ten miles south of Tregaron, and had actually been on one of the school trips to visit the brothers. More than that, they pointed to an elderly gentleman sitting in a booth on the other side of the bar. ‘There's one of them, over there,’ they said.

  After a stiffening gulp of beer, I went over to where he was sitting with his pint. He was an elderly gentleman with thinning white hair, quietly minding his own business, and gave me a gentle smile as I introduced myself. It was far too noisy in the bar for explanation, so I arranged to meet him and his brother the next day at their remote farm.

  The following day was clear and bright. As I drove out into the hills I wondered what sort of reception I could expect on my unorthodox visit. I arrived at the farm gate and walked up the track to the house, high up on a hillside with a wonderful view across the valley of the River Teifi. Dafydd Jones and his brother John were lifelong bachelors and had taken over the farm from their parents. The farmhouse was spartan but scrupulously clean and they could not have given me a warmer welcome. In no time there was a cup of tea and a slice of home-made ginger cake on the table. I never like to ask someone if they think they might be a Neanderthal, such is their negative reputation. With the Jones brothers I explained that my big survey of Wales had shown up what looked to be very ancient lines of human ancestry in central Wales, which was true, and that I was following this up, guided by Prof. Fleure's earlier observations. Despite their billing in the local school curriculum, the brothers had none of the features that I associated with Neanderthals. Nonetheless I wanted to check their mitochondrial DNA and they were happy to give a sample. They also knew about the James family who once lived in a now-flooded valley, and showed me a copy of a book that gave more details of the family. It was called Good Men and True: The Lives and Tales of the Shepherds in Mid-Wales by Erwyd Howells.3 When I returned to Oxford and read the Bodleian Library's copy I discovered that Fleure's J. James was John James Nant-y-Moch, who, with his brother Jim, had been forced to leave their remote farmhouse with its adjacent chapel when the valley was flooded in 1961 to feed the Cwm Rheidol power station. John James moved to Capel Dewi where he died in 1966, aged eighty-five. Howells' book mentions that John's unusual skull was bought by a local museum, though I could not find any confirmation of this. But I had at least identified the owner of Fleure's ‘archaic’ skull and confirmed the story I had heard ten years earlier about the school visits to the Tregaron Neanderthals. I was hardly surprised when the lab report came back that the brothers' mitochondrial DNA was definitely not Neanderthal. They were descendants of Ursula, the oldest of the seven maternal clans that I had identified in Europeans. An ancient clan to be sure, but still far too young to be Neanderthal.

  The following year, I heard a piece on the BBC Radio's Today programme which suddenly revived my interest in the possibility of finding surviving Nea
nderthals. The interviewee was Jonathan Downes. He was due to give a lecture in London later the same day about an expedition that was shortly setting off for the Caucasus Mountains in search of the elusive almasty, the local yeti which had in the past been linked to Neanderthal survivors. I couldn't get to the lecture, but my wife Ulla was in London and she did go to hear Jonathan and arranged for us to visit him in Devon, which we did very soon afterwards.

  Jonathan runs the ‘Centre for Fortean Zoology’ or CFZ for short, an organisation named after the early American cryptozoologist Charles Fort, from his home in north Devon. This was, in fact, the first time I had heard the word ‘cryptozoologist’, let alone met one. Jonathan is one of those people for whom the phrase ‘larger than life’ was invented. At once tall and heavily built, with a tangled mane of dark hair and a beard to match, Jonathan is the son of an officer in the British Colonial Service. After spending his early childhood in Nigeria and Hong Kong he was sent to, then expelled from, an exclusive public school in Devon. In an eventful and varied adult life he has had spells as a psychiatric nurse, as a member of the cult art-rock band Amphibians from Outer Space and as the editor of a magazine about tropical fish. Now that he is concentrating on cryptozoology, his output is prodigious. Every month he edits a newsletter and he is also the author of several monographs on the subject.

  We arrived at Jonathan's home, an ancient cottage complete with gnarled oak beams, one summer's day in 2008. He and his wife Corinna invited us to lunch and we were joined by other guests, including the zoologist Richard Freeman, who was to lead the forthcoming expedition to the Caucasus. I gave Richard some DNA brushes to take with him to swab the local population, whose mitochondrial DNA just might be Neanderthal, as well as encouraging him to be on the lookout for any almasty hairs.

  It is a strange phenomenon, but when I have found myself in the company of cryptozoologists, their sincerity and absolute belief in the existence of their quarry begins to rub off. Soon I was also thinking it was only a matter of luck whether or not they ran into an almasty on the expedition, not a question of whether or not the almasty existed. That was taken for granted. (I have to say that I was less convinced that bad luck alone had frustrated earlier CFZ expeditions in their quests for, among others, the Mongolian Death Worm or the Giant Anaconda of Surinam. ‘We went in the dry season,’ was Richard's rationalisation of their failure on this last occasion.) As it turned out, Richard's expedition to the Caucasus did not return with any DNA swabs – apparently the locals were Muslims and he didn't think they would approve of giving DNA. And the only hair samples that I was sent looked awfully like pine needles! Once again there was really nothing to build on, so I returned to my research project on the genetic history of America.

  After that had been finished off, and the book DNA USA finally written, I began to think again of Neanderthals and wondered whether it would be at all feasible to combine my rather whimsical interest in these and other ‘extinct’ humans with a hard look at the evidence for almastys, yetis and the like. The rationale for combining the two approaches was that cryptozoologists live in hope that some of these creatures, as yet ‘unknown to science’, are actually surviving Neanderthals, or some other archaic hominid, that have yet to succumb to the unstoppable advance of Homo sapiens. Perhaps we, the scientists, had all been wrong about the extinction of the Neanderthals and somewhere in the wilderness they lived on.

  I rang Jonathan to arrange another visit. The timing was fortunate because the following week was the annual meeting of the CFZ, the intriguingly entitled ‘Weird Weekend’, where enthusiasts get together for two days of fun and games, and some talks. A speaker had cancelled at short notice, and Jonathan immediately invited me to give a replacement presentation, an invitation I accepted at once. What I was really trying to find out by going to ‘Weird Weekend’ was whether cryptozoologists were serious about finding proper evidence for the existence of their quarry, or were merely colluding in the continuation of shared delusions long after the rest of the world had made up its mind that it was all nonsense. I have to say that ‘Weird Weekend’ was a bit of a mixture. When a retired police officer showed huge numbers of slides of UFOs taken on Salisbury Plain and concluded his presentation with one of a mirror that had jumped clean off his kitchen wall and lay smashed on the floor, I began to wonder if I was wasting my time.

  I gave my talk straight after the UFO marathon. I had prepared something which covered the DNA tests I had done ten years previously with the Bhutanese migoi, then went on to challenge the audience to try their best to gather hairs and other materials that could be genetically tested. Materials, in other words, that could – in theory anyway – provide the extraordinary proofs that were needed to convince a sceptical world. I berated them, gently I hope, for complaining that they were constantly being ‘rejected by science’. I don't think I have ever given a talk where the audience has paid more attention. No one spoke or even moved for the forty minutes I was speaking.

  At the closing ceremony, Jonathan, in his best ringmaster manner, announced that I had won the coveted ‘Golden Baboon Award’ – for what I am still not sure. The whole weekend had been lots of fun, but on the long drive back to Oxford my thoughts began to crystallise. There was, I was sure, a willingness, even an eagerness among cryptozoologists to look for proper scientific evidence, but no one had much of a clue how to go about it. Here I could help, because I knew what standard of research results would amount to acceptable proof of their hypothesis that these creatures existed; that is my job as an academic scientist. I also realised that nobody had any idea how to interpret the few DNA tests that had been done on their material so far.

  I was very struck by a talk about the orang-pendek. This elusive ape-like creature is thought to live in the dense mountain forests of Sumatra. The English translation of its Indonesian name is ‘short person’; it is relatively small compared to other anomalous primates, maybe three to four feet tall. According to eyewitness descriptions the orang-pendek has a round, ape-like face and is covered in greyish hair. In contrast to the well-known orang-utan or ‘forest person’ which is predominantly arboreal, the orang-pendek walks easily on two legs.

  As his talk progressed the speaker, Adam Davies, whom I later got to know well, informed the audience that some mitochondrial DNA tests had been run on hair samples found close to a footprint track. These tests, according to Adam, showed the DNA to be halfway between human and chimpanzee. When I pressed him in question time, there was no detail, no effort to explain what was meant by ‘halfway between human and chimpanzee’. In a regular scientific presentation of the sort I am used to hearing, and giving, that response would be unforgivable. The audience would have torn the speaker to shreds. But, very understandably, neither he nor the members of the audience knew enough about genetics to interpret or even question the laboratory results. I later discovered that the details of the analysis had never been fed back from the labs anyway. All he got was an off-the-cuff remark that he had accepted at face value. I could see that I was going to have some serious discussions with the scientist who had done this work to see if I could at least look at the data on which these conclusions were based.

  After ‘Weird Weekend’ I realised that cryptozoologists had no chance of convincing the world of the validity of their claims on their own. Neither did I think that they had been well served by those scientists who had, from time to time, accepted samples, often collected under very difficult circumstances, and who had not even bothered to return proper reports. By the time Ulla and I got back to our Oxford flat that evening, I had decided to do my best to build a valid scientific project out of all this. You must judge from The Yeti Enigma whether or not I succeeded.