Living Ape-Men

Mainstream Science and Wildmen Reports

Previous

Despite all the evidence we have presented, most recognized authorities in anthropology and zoology decline to discuss the existence of wildmen. If they mention wildmen at all, they rarely present the really strong evidence for their existence, focusing instead on the reports least likely to challenge their disbelief.

Skeptical scientists say that no one has found any bones of wildmen; nor, they say, has anyone produced a single body, dead or alive. But as we have seen, hand and foot bones of wildmen, and even a head, have been collected. Competent persons report having examined bodies of wildmen. And there are also a number of accounts of capture. That none of this physical evidence has made its way into museums and other scientific institutions may be taken as a failure of the process for gathering and preserving evidence. The operation of what we could call a knowledge filter tends to keep evidence tinged with disrepute outside official channels.

However, some scientists with solid reputations, such as Krantz, Napier, Shackley, Porshnev, and others, have found in the available evidence enough reason to conclude that wildmen do in fact exist, or, at least, that the question of their existence is worthy of serious study.

Myra Shackley wrote to our researcher Steve Bernath on December 4, 1984: "As you know, this whole question is highly topical, and there has been an awful lot of correspondence and publication flying around on the scene. Opinions vary, but I guess that the commonest would be that there is indeed sufficient evidence to suggest at least the possibility of the existence of various unclassified manlike creatures, but that in the present state of our knowledge it is impossible to comment on their significance in any more detail. The position is further complicated by misquotes, hoaxing, and lunatic fringe activities, but a surprising number of hardcore anthropologists seem to be of the opinion that the matter is very worthwhile investigating."

So there is some scientific recognition of the wildman evidence, but it seems to be largely a matter of privately expressed views, with little or no official recognition.

Previous

From: Forbidden Archaeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race, Michael A. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson (Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing, 1996).