One of the unsolved mysteries of the African wilderness, writes British naturalist Frank Lane, are the little forest "men" - agogwe.
The strange creatures do not exceed four feet in height (about 1 meter 20 centimeters), their whole body is covered with red hair, they have a monkey face, but agogwe walk on two legs, like people.
Agogwe live in the depths of impenetrable forests. Even an experienced hunter has little chance of seeing them. It only happens once in a lifetime, locals say. Rumors about agogwe are spread over an area of more than 1000 kilometers - from southwestern Kenya to Tanganyika and further to Mozambique.
European travelers also report about small forest "men". Captain Hitchens, an official of the British administration in Kenya, during his long service in Africa, has collected a lot of information about the mysterious, unknown to science animals, in the existence of which the locals believe. In an article entitled "African Mysterious Animals" published in 1937 in the English scientific journal "Discovery" ("Discovery"), he writes about the agogwe:
“Several years ago I received a hunting mission to shoot a man-eating lion in the forests of Issur and Simbiti on the western [21] edge of the Vembar plains. Once, when I was waiting in ambush for a cannibal in a forest clearing, two small brown creatures suddenly emerged from the forest and hid in a thicket on the other side of the clearing. They looked like tiny men about four feet high, walked on two legs, and were covered in red hair. The local hunter accompanying me froze with his mouth open in surprise.
"This is agogwe," he said when he came to a little."
Hitchens spent a lot of wasted efforts to see the little people again. But it is easier to find a needle in a haystack than an agile animal in this impassable thicket!
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Hichens insists that the creatures he saw were unlike any monkey he knew. But who are they?
A few years earlier, the Journal of the Natural Science Society of East Africa and Uganda published the following message: “The natives of the Kwa Ngombe region claim that their mountains are inhabited by buffaloes, wild pigs and a tribe of little red-haired 'men' who jealously guard their mountain domains. Old Salim, a guide from Embu, said that one day he climbed high in the mountains with several companions. We reached almost the very top, a cold wind was blowing here. Suddenly a hail of stones fell from above on the hunters. They ran away. Looking back, old Salim saw about two dozen little red-haired "men" who were throwing stones at them from the top of a steep cliff."
Here are other stories about the little red-haired "men" of Africa.
One traveler saw them from a ship sailing off the coast of Mozambique, in the company of baboons. Another met in the interior of the same country a whole family of agogwe: a mother, a father and a cub. The local hunters accompanying him strongly protested when he wanted to shoot one of the Lilliputians.
“Have you heard,” asked the hunter Cotney his squire, “about the little people who live on May? [22] About the little people who are more apes than people?
And he told how his father was once taken prisoner by the "dwarfs" of May, while tending sheep on the slopes of Mount Longonot [23]. Having missed one sheep, he followed her bloody trail. Suddenly, out of nowhere, he was surrounded by strange little creatures, shorter than the "forest people" (that is, pygmies), they did not have tails, but they looked more like monkeys jumping on trees than people. Their skin is white, like the belly of a lizard, but their face and body are overgrown with long black hair.
With the help of his spear, the shepherd got rid of the dangerous society of warlike "dwarfs".
The most striking thing is that the little forest "men", as the rumor draws them, very much resemble the extinct monkeys, well known to paleontologists …
500-800 thousand years ago on the plains of South Africa, small hairy "men" really lived. In small groups, they roamed the river valleys, hunted hares, baboons and even antelopes, which they organized round-ups for the whole "society". Hairy "little men" killed baboons and antelopes by breaking their skulls with sharp stones.
In 1924, workers at a limestone quarry in the eastern Kalahari found the fossilized skull of one of these prehistoric monkeys. Since then, anthropologists have studied several dozen of their skulls, teeth and bones.
South African biologist Raymond Dart, examining the first find from the Kalahari, called the fossil "men" Australopithecus ("southern apes"). They were amazing monkeys! They lived on earth, walked only on two legs and had almost human body proportions.
Their teeth were more human than ape's. Even in brain volume, they stood closer to humans than to monkeys. In a five-year-old Australopithecus cub, the cranial capacity was 420, and in adult Australopithecines, 500-600 cubic centimeters - almost twice as much as in chimpanzees, and no less than in a gorilla! But the Australopithecines were much smaller than these monkeys. Their height did not exceed an average of 120 centimeters, and their weight was 40-50 kilograms.
Some scientists even suggest that Australopithecines were fluent in speech and knew how to use fire. Therefore, they consider them to be the oldest human ancestors.
“But,” writes MF Nesturkh, “there are no facts in favor of such an assumption. There is no reason, he says, to regard these monkeys as our ancestors.
“Are all Australopithecines really extinct,” some romantic zoologists ask? Maybe the rumors about the "May dwarfs", about the forest "little men" of the agogwe owe their origin to the Australopithecus who survived in the wilderness of the virgin forests? Persecuted by their stronger and more developed "cousins" - the people of the Stone Age, they could take refuge from their pursuit in the impenetrable forest thicket [24] and on the tops of the mountains, which in Africa are completely unpopulated and rarely visited by people: for an African it is too cold there. After all, something similar happened, apparently, with the "Bigfoot" in Asia.
Igor Akimushkin. Traces of unseen beasts