Almas — Cryptid Encyclopedia

In the remote Altai Mountains of Mongolia, a creature has been reported for over 600 years that challenges our understanding of human evolution. The Almas — meaning "Wild Man" in Mongolian — is not described as an ape or a monster, but as something uncomfortably close to human. Standing five to six and a half feet tall, covered in reddish-brown body hair but with a distinctly human-like face, the Almas is said to walk fully upright, use simple tools, and exhibit a level of intelligence that separates it from any known great ape.

The earliest Western account comes from Hans Schiltberger, a Bavarian nobleman captured during the Crusades who spent years traveling through Central Asia in the 1420s. He described encountering "wild people" in the mountains who were "covered all over the body with hair, except the hands and face," and who lived in the wilderness apart from human settlement.

In 1925, Major General Mikhail Topilski of the Soviet Red Army reported that his unit encountered and shot what they initially believed to be an enemy combatant hiding in a cave in the Pamir Mountains. Upon examination, the body was covered in hair, with a heavy brow ridge and a jaw structure that was distinctly non-human. The body was left in the cave and never recovered.

The most detailed account comes from Soviet anthropologist Boris Porshnev, who in the 1960s collected testimony about a female Almas named Zana, allegedly captured in the Caucasus Mountains in the 19th century. According to witnesses, Zana was kept by a local nobleman, bore several children by human fathers, and exhibited both human-like intelligence and ape-like physical characteristics.

Some researchers have suggested the Almas may be a surviving population of Neanderthals or Homo erectus — a relic hominid that persisted in the remote mountain ranges of Central Asia long after the species was believed to have gone extinct. The Altai Mountains are, notably, where the Denisovan hominins were first discovered — proof that multiple human species inhabited these mountains far more recently than previously thought.