Wait, wait, wait, don't bin this idea just yet. A professor of anthropology has concluded that there's more to this idea than initially meets the eye. Have a look at his research of the beliefs of the native inhabitants of Papua New Guinea: Forth, Gregory: Images of theWildman in Southeast Asia. An Anthropological Perspective. London: Routledge, 2008. 343 pp. ISBN 978-0-7103-1354-6. Price: £ 95.00 This book is the fruit of long-term fieldwork, library research, and regional comparison-making in a special ethnological arena. Prof. Forth’s remit is wide, and his scholarly scope is correspondingly deep. He has covered a huge terrain of materials across Southeast Asia and including parts of the Pacific region, all in pursuit of the elusive topic expressed in his title, “Images of the Wildman.” Forth is not averse to many different forms of speculation, interpretation, and deduction in relation to the array of materials he has marshaled, and the result is an impressive testimony both to his persistence in following leads into byways and corners of ethnography and to the acuity of his thoughts about the topic as a whole. There are two main aspects of his enquiry. One is to establish the distribution of a particular set of images of “wildmen” or “hominoids,” partly human creature, who appear to be neither simply fictional/symbolic nor entirely a product of empirical observation. The other is to Anthropos 105.2010 Rezensionen 637 relate these traditions both to the spread of Austronesian speakers throughout Southeast Asia and Oceania (including Taiwan, a putative origin place of the Austronesians), and to the recent discovery of homo floresiensis remains in Flores, where Prof. Forth has carried out his own longterm fieldwork. The distribution of stories about categories of wildmen is extremely wide. Forth’s erudite exposition takes us progressively from his field areas among the Nage of Flores with their ideas of the ebu gogo category, through other examples from Flores, and then progressively outwards to Sumba, Timor, the Moluccas, Sulawesi, Sumatra, Borneo, Java, and Bali, all within Southeast Asia (chapters 1–6). In chapters 7–10 he embarks on another comparative journey through Sri Lanka, China, and the Himalayan region with its traditions of the yeti. Throughout, he finds evidence that these wildman images may be partly derived from observations of primates, but he cautions that a simple empiricist explanation is not entirely adequate, because “the representations include a residue, apparently (though not always certainly) fantastic, which cannot simply be derived from experience of known animals” (202). He finds this same pattern in examples from further afield outside of Asia, in Europe, North America, Australia, and Africa, bringing the discussion form Southern Africa over to Madagascar, a link with Southeast Asia (chapter 8). In chapter nine Prof. Forth comes to the Pacific region, including the areas conventionally labeled Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia. Appropriately enough, Taiwan and the Philippines, as homes of Austronesian speakers, are included here. Forth discusses the Solomons category of the kakamora and the mumu, the vui of Vanuatu, and notions of aggressive creatures with long hair and teeth, said to steal pigs and eat humans (246). This last image of aggressive cannibalism leads to a discussion of materials from Mount Hagen in the interior highlands of Papua New Guinea. There are two prongs to the analysis here. One has to do with reports of “pygmies,” since short stature is a recurrent motif in wildman images. These, however, should not too readily be assimilated to wildman traditions. Forth quotes information from Hein Dosedla about “cannibals,” light-skinned people portrayed in Hagen folktales as cannibals who prey on ordinary humans. Forth reports that these cannibals, according to Dosedla, are seen as having also reddish hair, sometimes all over their bodies (247). From our own fieldwork knowledge dating from the 1960s, and from the earlier work by Vicedom and Tischner, and Strauss and Tischner, we would comment that there are actually two categories of light-skinned beings in folktales from Hagen: one is the light-skinned cannibals known as kewa wamb nui wamb (“the strangers who eat people”), the other is the Tei Wamb, the creative origin people who are seen as giving the underlying power to humans to procreate and prosper in their lives and whose abode is the sky and mountain tops. Neither category corresponds at all closely to the “short hairy hominoid” image of the Wildman. As for pygmies, Hageners traditionally viewed the people of the Jimi Valley area north of Hagen as being very short and also as possessors of kum koimb powers of sorcery/witchcraft (see P. J. Stewart and A. J. Strathern, Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors, and Gossip. Cambridge 2004). But they did not regard them as less than human or wildmen in that sense. A recurrent feature in wildman stories is the idea that humans exterminated these creatures at some time in the past. This feature appears in the Nage stories from which Forth begins his quest. It turns up also in Taiwan, for example among the Saisiat, who have a story of earlier symbiosis with cave-dwelling dwarfs, whom they then killed because these dwarfs “seduced their women” (253). A male and female dwarf pair, however, escaped and before leaving taught the Saisiat an agricultural ritual which they now perform every two years (253). This interesting point sets the Saisiat case apart from the more common stories of how humans simply killed the wildmen off. Forth carefully notes this and other differences from his Nage materials. In a final chapter (chap. 10), Forth meticulously reviews all of his materials. He muses on the symbolic status of wildmen as inverted opposites of the proper forms of human sociality (262), but notes that specific features of these images still need to be explained. Wildmen are not simply spirit figures (263). They do seem to be universally figures that mediate between humans and animals (271), and thus can be derived both from observations of human-like animals and “other” humans, seen as not fully cultural beings (marked by their habits of stealing from humans, although humans steal from one another also). Finally Forth considers the intriguing possibilities of overlap between the Nage ebu gogo and the Homo floresiensis findings, concluding that “at best” there is only “an approximate concordance” (282). More broadly, however, he thinks that prosaic descriptions of wildmen categories, among the Nage and elsewhere, reveal a development of naturalistic observation that is also akin to “the emergence of scientific thought” (286). Ethno-taxonomies in general, of course, reveal the same capacity for empirical observations of “nature.” Taken all in all, this book is a scholarly and intellectual tour de force in the grand traditions of comparative enquiry in mainstream anthropology. It is also an eloquent testimony to the stimulus of field materials, indicating how an interest in ebu gogo tales among the Nage led Forth into such a sweeping, original, and thoughtful comparative odyssey. Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart Now, compare with this recent eyewitness event from a log cabin in Canada: Now compare this with the eyewitness sightings of the Dover Demon: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! All I'm saying is that if a strange 'alien' body was recovered along with the balloon wreckage, then it's much more likely to be an earthly crypto creature, rather than the popular myth of a "space alien". Anyone see what I mean?
Yes, thank you for a positive opening comment Pinwheel. The Arabs first identified this cryptid creature with the name of ghoul, which lured people away to get lost and die of exhaution and starvation..
common_sense_seeker, I'm just going to point this out in case you miss this, I know the psychology establishment complain at my attempt to convey to you that you perhaps have a small conspiracy/delusion problem. (I guess in their institutes when someone is greeted with a contradiction to their reasoning, they can become violent and disturbed, I really hope that's not the case with you, otherwise you would be a stereotype.) Now lets first ascertain from the number of conspiracies you are putting forwards, actual merit. Roswell Crash having "Aliens", Currently not particularly credible. Wildmen, Stories of wildmen have existed for a number of years, especially back when there were in fact wilds for people to survive in. The number of "wild men, women or children" has however dropped since the world has become more populated and travelling through it quicker. (It's not like it takes months to arrange a rescue party etc) Therefore credibility is "Past Tense". Candian Scary Creature. If actually really seen (remember Witness statements are often confused and involve their own psyche attempting to rationalise a situation and therefore invent more back story to a glimpse of a shadow etc.) then it was possibly a sick polar bear suffering from starvation and mange. (Especially where he states "The bright light startled the creature and it hunched over as if about to run.") Again I wouldn't suggest credible. As for the "Dover Demon", again it's easy to be Skeptical since the people that saw it during that period were Teenagers. What they might of actually seen however was someone's escaped pet or it in turn was a complete fabrication. Again not Credible. You see currently in your mind you see each of these being a "Scientifically Proven Fact" and that's the problem, you aren't looking at these "Facts" sceptically which means you are open to generating delusional reasoning. You need to try and get more of a grip with understanding what a "Fact" entails, it isn't "Just a statement", it's "a statement that can be tested to be proven true", in all of the "facts" you've automatically assumed to be true, they have neither been tested nor is it possible to test to be true, so you should in essence be sceptical.
Interestingly this report from the Chinese mountain of Taibai supports the 'gibbon wildman hypothesis', Wildman sighted on Taibai Mountain
Dont worry, apparently he has a business idea to develop a camera to capture the Giant European Hyrax and Black British Panther mating, using recognition software. I expect it to be uploaded to Red Tube.
...and the "Understatement of the Year Award" goes to.....(opens envelope)......Stryder! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! It's ok CSS....you're posts are at least entertaining....in a "Holy shit...that dudes bat-shit crazy"...kinda way Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Funnily enough, I've now changed my opinion of which cryptid was found from a white ghoulish gibbon to the female dogman. This is because the female dogman is now recognised as a short coated grey with large eyes on the side of her head with a non-prominent snout unlike the male warewolf. The hyrax ingeneral is also known to not have visible genitalia A reported feature of the recovered 'alien bodies'..
Never mind the ghoulish Gibbon, what about the shadow of a giant squirrel top world scientists found in Nepal using google earth? Open Google Earth If you are not on the Fly to menu click on Search. (top left) Enter placename Chukhung. Pick the Samarang option. Zoom out a bit. Then go due east. A good way east. You will see a big pale blue lake, the same shape as Canada. Just below it is a small round dark blue lake. Here you will see the giant squirrel.