Ancient Survivor (Part 1)

Professor Bryan Sykes details how he might have discovered a descendant from a species of human with sasquatch-like qualities (part 1).

From the Newsweek Special Edition: "BIGFOOT: The Science, Sightings and Search for Americas Elusive Legend":

The story of Zana fascinates everyone with even the most fleeting interest in the legends of the wildwood and the strange creatures, half-human, half-beast, that lurk in its shadows. It is by far the most absorbing account of the capture of an anomalous primate, an apeman, that there has ever been. Unlike so many other stories that depend on unsubstantiated eyewitness accounts, hundreds of people saw Zana the wildwoman in the 40 or more years she was held in captivity. Even more unusually, there were physical remains to examine and, especially for me, genetic analyses that I could perform that might discover what sort of creature Zana really was.

We know the details of Zana's capture thanks to the work in the early 1950s of the Russian zoologist Alexander Mashdovtsev and his young associate Boris Porshnev, who went on to become the leading figure in Russian hominology. Although Zana had died 60 years previously, Mashdovtsev and Porshnev were able to find and interview several witnesses who as young children had seen Zana and remembered her well.

The location for Zana's story is Abkhazia, now a country devastated by war and uneasily positioned between Russia and Georgia on the southern slopes of the Caucasus Mountains. In the early 1850s, a traveling merchant visiting the Ochamchir region of Abkhazia on the southern slopes of the mountain range came across a young almasty by a remote stretch of the Adzyubzha River. As soon as it caught sight of him, the creature vanished into the forest. Some days later he returned with a group of hunters and their dogs. When they saw it again, the dogs were unleashed, chased it into the forest and brought it down. After a fierce struggle it was eventually subdued, tied, gagged and shackled to a log. It was clearly a female. She was held for a while in a ditch surrounded by sharpened wooden stakes, then sold onto a succession of "owners" until she was eventually purchased by the Abkhaz nobleman Edgi Genaba and taken to his farming estate at Tkhina on the Moskva River. Here she spent the rest of her life until she died around 1890.

Mashdovtsev and Porshnev obtained detailed and consistent eyewitness descriptions of the creature, named Zana, in the 1950s. Part-human, part-ape with dark skin (Zana means "black" in Abkhaz), she was covered with long reddish-brown hair which formed a mane down her back. She was large, about 6'6" tall, and extremely muscular with exaggerated, hairless buttocks and large breasts. Her face was wide with high cheekbones and a broad nose. Brilliant white teeth flashed from her wide mouth, teeth which could crush nuts and even bones. Her strength was such that she could lift a 50-kilogram sack of flour with one hand and hold it steady for several minutes. At first Zana was kept in a stone-walled enclosure near Genaba's house, and her food was simply thrown over the wall. She dug a hole in the ground within the enclosure where she slept. Zana was a source of cruel amusement for local children, including some of the eyewitnesses later interviewed by Mashdovtsev and Porshnev. The children used to torment Zana by prodding her with sticks through a gap in the wall or pelting her with small stones.

Despite these provocations, Zana became gradually less aggressive as the years passed. She was moved from her stone prison to an enclosure close to Geneba's house before finally being set free to roam the estate. Zana hated being indoors, preferring to sleep in the open air, often lying down with the estate's water buffalo in a stagnant pool. She never wore any clothes, and even in the depth of winter spent all day and night completely naked, never attempting to cover herself against the cold. Zana enjoyed swimming in the Moskva River, even when it was in full flood, and showed her athleticism by racing Geneba's horses. She never tried to escape and began to do menial tasks for Genaba, including grinding corn in his watermill. Though apparently not fully human, she became his slave. One aspect of the eyewitness descriptions that I find most remarkable is that Zana never tried to speak. Though she had a repertoire of inarticulate grunts, whistles and cries, she never managed to learn a single word in Abkhaz or attempt to speak in her own language, whatever that might have been. In many ways Zana's is a classic tale of a wild creature, part-human, part-animal, captured and tamed. And so it would have remained a story, and we would have known nothing more about Zana. What has kept the story alive is that she had at least four children with local men. The circumstances are unclear, but there are tales of drunken orgies and curious men being granted access to her in exchange for money.

Two developments turned Zana's story from an intriguing folk tale, albeit substantiated by several eyewitnesses, into a case with potential for real scientific investigation. The first of these was that in 1971 Igor Burtsev located the grave of Khwit, the younger of Zana's two sons, in an overgrown graveyard in Tkhina and exhumed his body...

Part 2 will be posted tomorrow.

You can purchase this Newsweek Special Edition: "BIGFOOT: The Science, Sightings and Search for Americas Elusive Legend" here.