The Neanderthal resurrection and the Abominable Snowman legend

Since the 1870s, the image of the ‘prehistoric man’ has spread widely in European and American public imagination. His appearance is reconstructed by paleoanthropologists and anatomists (Schaaffhausen, Solger, Martin); under the guidance of “primitive cultures” specialists (Lubbock, Boule) it is recreated by artists (Griset, Philippart, Kupka). From the pages of illustrated magazines (Harper’s Weekly, The Illustrated London News, etc.), the ‘reconstructed’ Neanderthal gazes very much alive — hairy, long-armed, round-shouldered, with a low forehead and sunken eyes. The possibility of a direct encounter with him has been put forward by science-fiction writers (from Jules Verne to Conan Doyle and Obruchev). Such ideas could not have arisen without the influence of Darwinism; they stemmed from the understanding that various biological species that appeared at different stages of evolution coexist in living nature, including relict forms. European explorers of the Himalayas and Tibet — military men, mountaineers, naturalists of the late 19th to early 20th centuries — were readers of these magazines and books, and their worldview included a reconstructed appearance of a Neanderthal. They could easily recognize him when they met, and in that sense they were ready for such encounter. And the meeting took place: the relict hominid was discovered in the legends about the ‘Abominable Snowman’ of the Central Asian highlands. This is how hominology was born, which began to research this creature (essentially, since the 1950s) and gather information about him. Audacious, but never confirmed, paleoanthropological hypotheses have been used as a tool for interpreting local folklore texts: neither the object of research, nor the products of his vital activity, nor his remains have been found, which means that behind these texts there are only local images of ‘lower mythology’, although very specific ones.

1. Amos, L. M. (2011). ‘Them’ or ‘us’? A question of cognition: The case for Neanderthal modernity (Master’s Thesis, Univ. of Bergen, AHKR/ARK350).

2. Antonov, D. I. (2011). Kontsovki volshebnykh skazok: put’ geroia i put’ rasskazchika [Fairy tale endings: The hero’s journey and the storyteller’s journey]. Zhivaia starina, 2011(2), 2–4. (In Russian).

3. Bennigsen, A. P. (1912). Legendy i skazki Tsentral’noi Azii, sobrannye grafom A. P. Bennigsen [Legends and tales of Central Asia, collected by Count A. P. Bennigsen]. Tipοgrafiia A. S. Suvorina. (In Russian).

4. Bernheimer, R. (1952). Wild men in the Middle Ages: A study in art, sentiment, and demonology. Harvard Univ. Press.

5. Blade and bone: The discovery of human antiquity (n. d). Linda Hall Library. https://bladeandbone.lindahall.org/25.shtml.

6. Boule, M. (1911–1913). L’homme fossile de la Chapelle-aux-Saints. Annales de paléontologie, 6, 111–172, 7, 21–56, 85–192, 8, 1–70. (In French).

7. Bulliard, M. (2001). L’enjeu des origines: les romans préhistoriques de J.-H. Rosny aîné. Archipel. (In French).

8. Darwin, Ch. (1859). On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or The preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. John Murray.

9. Forth, G. (2007). Images of the Wildman inside and outside Europe. Folklore, 118(3), 261–281.

10. Gerasimov, M. M. (1955). Vosstanovlenie litsa po cherepu (sovremennyi i iskopaemyi chelovek) [Reconstruction of the face from the skull (modern and fossil man)]. Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR. (In Russian).

11. Ginzburg, C. (1986). Miti, emblemi, spie: Morfologia e storia. Einaudi. (In Italian).

12. Gurevich, G. (1958). O romanakh V. A. Obrucheva “Plutoniia” i “Zemlia Sannikova” [On V. A. Obruchev’s novels Plutonia and Sannikov Land]. In V. A. Obruchev. Plutoniia. Zemlia Sannikova (pp. 630–639). Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvovo detskoi literatury. (In Russian).

13. Hoppal, M. (1980). Genre and context in narrative event: Approaches to verbal semiotics. In L. Honko, & V. Voigt (Eds.). Genre, structure and reproduction in oral literature (pp. 107–128). Akadémiai Kiadó.

14. Hubbard, H. (1945). A forgotten illustrator: Ernest Griset, 1844–1907. The Connoisseur, 115, 30–36.

15. Kanevskii, B. (1967). Po vsemu zemnomu sharu [All over the globe]. Rasprostranenie pechati, 1967(4), 9–10. (In Russian).

16. Karel, D. (1992). Dictionnaire des artistes de langue française en Amérique du Nord: peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs, graveurs, photographes, et orfèvres. Musée du Québec; Presses de l’Université Laval. (In French).

17. Klix, F. (1980). Erwachendes Denken: eine Entwicklungsgeschichte der menschlichen Intelligenz. Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften. (In German).

18. Krämer, B. (2003). Abenteuer Steinzeit und Mythos Evolution: die Romans préhistoriques von J.-H. Rosny Aîné. P. Lang. (In German).

19. Kuteeva, N. E. (2010). Otrazhenie pozitivistskoi kontseptsii v animalisticheskikh povestiakh Dzheka Londona [Reflection of the positivist concept in the animal stories by Jack London]. Vestnik Viatskogo gosudarstvennogo gumanitarnogo universiteta. Filologiia i iskusstvovedenie, 2(3), 128–132. (In Russian).

20. Lambourne, L. (1977). Ernest Griset: Fantasies of a Victorian illustrator. Thames & Hudson.

21. Lubbock, J. (1865). Prehistoric times, as illustrated by ancient remains, and the manners and customs of modern savages. Williams & Norgate.

22. Lubbock, J. (1870). The origin of civilisation and the primitive condition of man: Mental and social condition of savages. D. Appleton.

23. Madison, P. (2016). The most brutal of human skulls: Measuring and knowing the first Neanderthal. The British Journal for the History of Science, 49(3), 411–432.

24. Murray, T. (2009). Illustrating ‘savagery’: Sir John Lubbock and Ernest Griset. Antiquity, 83, 488–499.

25. Nekliudov, S. Yu. (1995). Otnoshenie “tekst — denotat” i problema istinnosti v povestvovatel’nykh traditsiiakh [The “text-denotation” relation and the problem of truth in narrative traditions]. In E. V. Permiakov (Ed.). Lotmanovskii sbornik (Vol. 1, pp. 667–675). ITs-Garant. (In Russian).

26. Nekliudov, S. Yu., & Riftin, B. L. (1976). Novye materialy po mongol’skomu fol’kloru [New materials on Mongolian folklore]. Narody Azii i Afriki, 1976(2), 135–147. (In Russian).

27. Pitts, M. (2013, February 11). Ernest Griset in London. Mike Pitts — Digging Deeper. https://mikepitts.wordpress.com/2013/02/11/ernest-griset-in-london.

28. Porshnev, B. F., & Shmakov, A. A. (1959). Informatsionnye materialy komissii po izucheniiu voprosa o “snezhnom cheloveke” [Informational materials of the commission for the study of the issue of the Abominable Snowman] (Vol. 3, n. e.). (In Russian).

29. Sawerthal, A., & Torri, D. (2017). Imagining the wild man: Yeti sightings in folktales and newspapers of the Darjeeling and Kalimpong Hills. In M. Viehbeck (Ed.). Transcultural encounters in the Himalayan borderlands: Kalimpong as a “contact zone” (pp. 121–143). Heidelberg Univ. Publishing.

30. Schlager, S., & Wittwer-Backofen, U. (2015). Images in paleoanthropology: Facing our ancestors. In W. Henke, & I. Tattersall (Eds.). Handbook of paleoanthropology (pp. 1019–1027). Springer.

31. Sommer, M. (2006). Mirror, mirror on the wall: Neanderthal as image and ‘distortion’ in early 20th-century French science and press. Social Studies of Science, 36(2), 207–240.

32. Vishniatskii, L. B. (2010). Neandertal’tsy: istoriia nesostoiavshegosia chelovechestva [Neanderthals: The story of a failed humanity]. Nestor-Istoriia. (In Russian).

33. Winslow, J. H., & Meyer, A. (1983). The perpetrator at Piltdown. Science, 83, 32–43.