Almas
Aliases: Almasty · Abnauayu / Territory: Mongolie, Russie, Géorgie, Azerbaïdjan
The wildman of the Caucasus and Mongolia: five centuries of accounts, no evidence — and the Zana case solved by DNA in 2015.
The almas — almasty in the Caucasus — is the 'wild man' of Central Asia's steppes and ranges: a hair-covered being of human size with a receding brow, described not as an ape but as a primitive human, lacking speech, fire and tools. The word belongs to Mongol cultural heritage, where the almas inhabits herders' tales and Altai place names; closely parallel figures exist among Caucasus peoples — Kabardians, Balkars, Abkhazians — as the almasty or abnauayu. These living traditions, in which the wild man also works as a moral figure and a warning, long predate his cryptozoological career.
The oldest written mention usually cited is fifteenth-century: the Bavarian traveller Hans Schiltberger, carried across Central Asia as a captive, reported wild people in the mountains, covered in hair except for face and hands. In the early twentieth century, Mongolian and Russian scholars — Tsyben Zhamtsarano among them — are said to have collected and mapped testimony; their archives, partly lost in the Soviet purges, survive only patchily and at second hand.
It was the USSR that gave the file its peculiar shape. In 1958 the Soviet Academy of Sciences created a short-lived 'Snowman Commission' and sent an expedition to the Pamirs, which found nothing. The historian Boris Porshnev then championed the hypothesis that made the almas famous: relict Neanderthals. In the Caucasus, the French-Russian surgeon Marie-Jeanne Koffmann spent decades gathering hundreds of almasty accounts. The corpus impresses by sheer volume — and remains testimony from end to end: no bone, no photograph, no conclusive hair.
The case's most famous exhibit ended up testifying against it. Zana, a 'wild woman' captured in the nineteenth century and kept in the Abkhazian village of Tkhina, where she bore several children, was long floated as a possible almasty. In 2015, genetic analyses led by Bryan Sykes on her descendants concluded she was a fully modern human of Sub-Saharan African maternal ancestry — plausibly descended from people enslaved in the Ottoman era — with nothing archaic about her. The Neanderthal hypothesis founders on genomics anyway: Neanderthals died out roughly 40,000 years ago, and nothing in ancient or modern regional DNA hints at late survival. What remains are bears, hermits, marginalized or afflicted people — and a powerful folklore that never needed a specimen.
+ Notable reports
// Mountains of Central Asia
The Bavarian captive Hans Schiltberger records in his travel narrative wild, hair-covered people living in the mountains — the earliest written layer usually cited.
// Tkhina, Abkhazia
A powerfully built, hair-covered woman captured in the hills, named Zana, lives and dies in the village after bearing several children. Long cited as a possible almasty, she is identified by DNA in 2015 as a modern human.
// Pamir Mountains, USSR
The Soviet Academy of Sciences creates a 'Snowman Commission' and fields a Pamir expedition. No probative trace is recovered and the commission is dissolved.
// North Caucasus
Marie-Jeanne Koffmann collects hundreds of almasty accounts among Kabardian and Balkar communities — a voluminous corpus containing no physical evidence.
+ Leading rational explanations
- Brown bears, upright or glimpsed at night, across the whole Caucasus-Altai arc
- Real people: hermits, marginalized individuals, or people with hypertrichosis or disabilities living apart
- The Zana case resolved: a modern human woman of African ancestry, not an archaic survivor
- The relict-Neanderthal hypothesis, unsupported by any fossil or genome younger than about 40,000 years
- The wild man's folkloric function as moral figure and warning, independent of zoology
Status note
Class 2: a massive, centuries-deep body of testimony but no physical trace — and the file's one near-physical exhibit, Zana's lineage, was resolved by genetics in 2015 as fully modern human.
+ Frequently asked questions
- Is the almas real?
- Nothing material supports it: five centuries of accounts and hundreds of collected Caucasus testimonies, but no bone, photograph or DNA. Bears, hermits and the wild man's own folkloric momentum account for the corpus without remainder.
- Who was Zana?
- A woman captured in the nineteenth century in the hills of Abkhazia and kept in the village of Tkhina, where she had several children. Long presented as a possible almasty, she was identified in 2015, through genetic analysis of her descendants, as a modern human of Sub-Saharan ancestry — plausibly descended from Ottoman-era slaves.
- Could the almas be a surviving Neanderthal?
- That was Boris Porshnev's famous 1950s-60s hypothesis, but it has no support: Neanderthals disappeared around 40,000 years ago, and neither recent fossils nor regional genomes suggest late survival. Almas accounts belong to folklore and misidentification, not palaeoanthropology.