In The Footsteps Of The Chinese Bigfoot - Alternative View

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In The Footsteps Of The Chinese Bigfoot - Alternative View
In The Footsteps Of The Chinese Bigfoot - Alternative View

Video: In The Footsteps Of The Chinese Bigfoot - Alternative View

Video: In The Footsteps Of The Chinese Bigfoot - Alternative View
Video: China's "Bigfoot", the Yeren 2024, March
Anonim

All over the world there are reports of a huge creature that looks like a monkey, but walks on two legs, like a man, and has other human characteristics.

In North America, it is called Bigfoot or Yeti. In China, he is called the ehen or the Chinese wild man. Dozens of Chinese scholars from serious institutions were studying the Yezhen. In the 1980s, hundreds of scientists even went on an expedition to the region reportedly inhabited by the Yezhen.

The Shennongjia forest region has an area of 3000 sq. kilometers, it is located in a remote area of Hubei province. This is a place with pristine nature, high mountains (up to 3000 m) and deep valleys. According to reports, this is where the Yehen appears most often.

Virgin forests at an altitude of 2500 in Shennongjia, Hubei province.

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According to the state news agency Xinhua, the Yezhen has been seen 400 times in the past decades. According to a New York Times article, from the 1920s to the 1980s, he was seen 300 times.

Here is an overview of reports of encounters with the Yezhen, some of the research and legends that exist in the region.

Promotional video:

Yezhen can cry and laugh

On April 4, 1994, the supervisor of the Yuhao Yuan Nature Reserve visited the outlying areas of Shennongjia. On the hillside opposite, he noticed a strange creature, which, apparently, was sleeping. At that time, Yuan had been working in the reserve for 15 years. He was well acquainted with the local animals, and the creature seemed very strange to him.

Yuan watched the creature through binoculars and then yelled at it to wake it up. It woke up, got up, looked at Yuan and left. Yuan, who spoke about it on History Channel's Monster Quest, said he had a reddish brown coat and was taller than 1.80 m. “I'm not sure if it was a ezhen, but it seemed to me strange that he got up and walked on two legs. It wasn't a bear,”Yuan said.

In 1984, the New York Times published an article "In the Footsteps of the Chinese Bigfoot", which recounted the most famous encounters with the Yezhen.

In the 1980s, hunter Bu Xiaoqiu in Ronghui County, Guizhou Province allegedly caught a little Yeheng. But the hunter let him go when he saw tears in his eyes. Tears are unique to humans and do not appear in other primates.

Yezhen can also laugh, but unlike crying, not only humans, but also other primates do it. In September 1979, a shepherd in Fangxiang County bumped into a Yezhen, who grabbed his hand, laughed and did not let go of his hand for half an hour. In 1978, hunters in Rongjiang County were sitting at a halt around a campfire, and the ehen sat down with them and even threw wood into the fire! The hunters were frightened and decided to pretend not to notice this creature.

Not only hunters and villagers reported about the Yezhen. In 1976, the Party Secretary of Fangxiang County, not far from Shennongjia, said that he saw a Yeheng running away with a pig in his hands.

The most resonant appearance of the Yezhen occurred on May 14, 1976, when a car with six Party officials drove past the Dezhen in a village located between Fangxiang County and Shennunjia. This event aroused great interest, and as a result, in 1980, Chinese scientists organized an expedition to find the Yezhen.

Type: laboratory tests

Meng Qingbao, the leader of the expedition, found 1,000 tracks in Shennunjia at 1,600 meters. The longest track was 45 cm, according to the New York Times.

Zhou Guoxing, an anthropologist at the Beijing Natural History Museum, also participated in the expedition. In a 2012 article entitled “50 Years of the Search for the Chinese Bigfoot,” he wrote that many of the supposed footprints of the Yezhen actually belonged to bears or monkeys. But one footprint, discovered during the 1980 expedition, did not resemble a footprint of a person, or a footprint of a bear or other famous creature, he said in the program "Monster Hunters."

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But Zhou doubts the wild man exists. He described 50 years of his work in studying the Yezhen as follows: "In my search for the Yezhen, I went through an interesting evolution - from cautious belief in it to doubts and almost complete denial of the possibility of its existence."

The clumps of wool that supposedly belonged to the Yezhen ended up being the hair of monkeys, bears, or human hair.

But individual hair samples are of unknown origin. "We believe that the wool of the so-called 'wild people' may belong to an unknown species of great apes," said a forensic research team from a Wuhan hospital.

This study is cited in Hair: Its Power and Significance in Asian Culture, edited by Alf Hiltebeitel, Professor of Theology at George Washington University, and Dr. Miller, Professor of Anthropology. The Epoch Times was unable to verify the validity of this study.

In 1980, Zhou examined the alleged Yezhen's leg. It was believed to belong to a Yezhen who was killed in 1957 by villagers in the village of Zhuantang. The leg was kept in the home of a local teacher. But Zhou assumed it belonged to a large macaque.

Is it possible that this skirmish in 1957 and other similar incidents is simply an encounter with a monkey, which for some reason people mistook for an "unknown creature." Could the villagers not recognize the monkey? It is possible if it was an unfamiliar monkey species, says Frank Poirier, an anthropologist at Ohio University. On Monster Hunters, he suggested that on some occasions when people reported Ezhen, they actually saw Roxellan Rhinopithecus, a very rare species of monkey.

Illustration of the Ainu, a people in Japan believed to be covered with wool, Anthropology, Cheng Yinghuang, 1928

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Since this species is threatened with extinction, they rarely catch the eye of people. The growth of Roxollan rhinopithecus is about 1.5 meters, it often stands on its hind legs and straightens itself. But he doesn't walk on two legs like a man.

For Poirier, this is a defining moment. Frank Poirier was one of the few Western scientists who were admitted to China for research in the 1980s. In 2012, the Chinese authorities imposed severe restrictions on the creators of the program "Monster Hunters".

Poirier came to China in the 1980s to study Roxellanic Rhinopithecus. When he heard the stories about the Yezhen, at first he considered them to be fiction. But the footprints and bones that the locals showed him made him hesitate in his convictions.

“I'm still not sure what conclusions can be drawn from what I saw during that trip,” said Poirier.

An extinct species of monkeys?

Some believe that the echen is Gigantopithecus, a species of monkeys thought to be long extinct. Gigantopithecus became extinct for 8 million years, with fossils found in China and Southeast Asia. Since only their teeth and jaws survived, it's hard to tell what they looked like, but they were about 2.7 meters high and weighed almost half a ton. Yezhen is usually described as a creature with a height of 1.5 to 2 meters.

Anthropologist and director of the committee on strange and rare animals, Yuan Zhenxing, told the Beijing Review in 2007 that these monkeys may have gone unnoticed in the vast and inaccessible Shennunjia Sanctuary. He cites pandas as an example: “If scientists had not visited the forests of Sichuan and Shanxi provinces, then we would not have had the offspring of ancient pandas. It took almost a decade to discover the pandas."

People with birth defects?

Zhou noted that the Shennongjia region had been cut off from the outside world for a long time. Closely related marriages led to the birth of children with genetic disabilities. He cited the example of spinocerebellar ataxia. People with this genetic disorder have a small cerebral skull, light brain weight, a low forehead, a well-developed superciliary ridge of the frontal bone that forms huge eyebrows, and a narrow and deep jaw. As a result, patients have a skull that looks like the skull of primitive hominids."

Li Baoshu, who was born with hypertrichosis, a condition known as werewolf syndrome. Such people have increased hair growth. This photo was exhibited at the Beijing Zoo in the 1920s.

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In the book Hair: Their Power and Significance in Asian Culture, it is noted that in ancient China, foreigners could be described as animals: "In Singapore, foreigners were called angmo or angmogao, which in Hok-kien, a dialect of Chinese, means" red monkey " …

In China, the mention of Yezhen exists for thousands of years. The 17th century Fangxiang County historical record states:

“In the remote Fangxiang Mountains, there are caves where hairy people are three meters high. They often descend from the mountains to steal dogs and chickens from the villages. If the locals resist, they fight them."

After decades of searching, Zhou concluded: "Yezheni may have existed in the past, but today they seem to exist only in people's minds in the form of folklore and ancient myths."