The widespread biped

The ABC says that some Chinese “scientists” (I wonder what their normal day job is, though) are going to look for their version of the “wild man” again:

Over the years, more than 400 people have claimed sightings of the half-man, half-ape Yeren in a remote, mountainous area of the central province of Hubei, state news agency Xinhua said.

Expeditions in the 1970s and 1980s yielded hair, a footprint, excrement and a sleeping nest suspected of belonging to the Yeren, but there has been no conclusive proof, the report added.

Witnesses describe a creature that walks upright, is more than 2 metres tall and with grey, red or black hair all over its body, Xinhua said.

It’s somewhat interesting, this widespread popularity of bigfoot type mystery creatures in different parts of the world. Although, now that I think about it, I suppose you only hear about them from Tibet/China, North America and Australia. Or do you?

Of course, the internet can answer me, turning up this information in a flash:

Folklore from Europe tells of a creature called the wildman. Like Bigfoot, the European wildman looked something like a human covered all over with a thick coat of hair, and it lived in the wilderness. Beyond these facts, there is not much resemblance between wildmen and Bigfoot. Wildmen could sometimes talk and generally seemed more human-like than Bigfoot.

In fact, European folklore assigned a different origin to the wildman that we do to Bigfoot. The wildman was not a different species. It was thought that any man or woman who wandered in the wilderness, acted like a wildman and ate acorns would gradually grow a thick coat of hair all over the body. Day by day, this person would become less human. The end result was another wildman or wildwoman. This transformation was permanent and could not be reversed, even if the wildman were captured and forced to live according to the rules of civilization.

Well, be careful with the acorn recipe I linked to in the previous post.

Anyway, other sites, like this page from Monstropedia (a handy reference, by the sounds) note that bigfoot-like creatures have been claimed to be seen in many other parts of the world, such as South American and Hawaii. It also notes what I have mentioned here before as one of the most fascinating things I find about sightings of mystery night creatures: how they have often been claimed to be associated with foul smells.

Of course, one explanation could be that they are the citizens of an alternative earth that keep stumbling through the portals between worlds. In which case, on their version of the planet, they keep having mysterious sightings of strange, short, relatively hairless bipedal creatures that come in all sorts of weird colours.