Alma (cryptozoology)
From Freepedia
The Alma (Mongolian for wild man) is a human-like species said to live in the Pamir Mountains and the Altai mountains of southern Mongolia. It is described as hairy (except for hands and face). Sightings have been recorded as recently as the 1970s. Without specimens to compare with possibly related species, science is unable to express an opinion about Almas.
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Famous sightings
In 1430, Hans Schildtberger recorded in the journal of his involuntary travels to Mongolia as a prisoner of the Mongols, his personal observation of these creatures, as well as Przewalski horses (Manuscript in the Munich municipal library, Sign. 1603, Bl. 210).
Nicolai Przhevalsky also observed the animals in Mongolia 1871 (Shackley, Still Living?, p. 94). He noted that Almas are part of the Mongolian and Tibetan apothecary's materia medica, documented along with thousands of other animals and plants that still live today.
British anthropologist Myra Shackley in Still Living? describes Ivan Ivlov's 1963 observation of a family of Almas. Ivlov, a pediatrician, decided to interview children who were also his patients, and discovered that many of them had also seen Almas. Neither the Mongol children nor the young Almas were afraid of each other (Shackley p. 91). Ivlov's driver also saw them.
Zana
A female "wildman" named Zana was said to have lived in the isolated mountain village of T'khina fifty miles from Sukhum; some have speculated she was a non-human Alma.
Captured in 1850, she was at first violent to her captors but soon became domesticated and would be employed to do simple tasks. Zana had sexual relations with a man of the village named Edgi Genaba and gave birth to a number of children of normal human appearance. Several of these children, raised by their mother, died in infancy; some have attributed this to Zana's supposed incompatibility as an Alma with hybrid children.
The father gave four of the children to be adopted by local families. The two boys, Dzhanda and Khwit Sabekia (born 1878 and 1884), and the two girls, Kodzhanar and Gamasa Sabekia (born 1880 and 1882), were assimilated into normal society, married, and had families. Zana died in 1890.
Explanations
Shackley has speculated that the Almas are a remnant population of Neanderthals, though this idea has seen little support from other scientists.
