The Almas (also almasty and many related names) is a “wild man” of Central Asian and Caucasian folklore: a hairy, human-like being said to live in the mountains of Mongolia, the Altai, the Pamirs and the Caucasus. It is usually described as more human than ape, smaller than the Yeti, and living like an animal, without fire or tools.[1][2] In the twentieth century it became the focus of a serious Soviet scientific debate, and of some of the few DNA studies ever done on a wild-man legend.
| Other names | Almas, almasty, albasty, and related forms in Mongolian, Turkic, Iranian and Caucasian languages |
|---|---|
| Type | Reported relict hominid; figure of regional folklore |
| Region | Mongolia, Altai, Pamirs, Caucasus |
| Reported appearance | Stooped, long-armed, covered in sparse reddish-dark hair; does not use fire or tools |
| Earliest frequently cited account | Johann Schiltberger, early 15th century |
| DNA evidence | Hair samples tested in 2014 came from bears, horses and cattle |
An early account: Schiltberger’s “savages”
The earliest written account usually linked to the Almas comes from Johann Schiltberger, a Bavarian who was captured in 1396 and spent some thirty years as a captive and soldier in the service of Ottoman, Timurid and Golden Horde rulers. In his memoir he describes a journey to a country he calls Ibissibur, in Siberia, where a great mountain was home to “savages” unlike other people. They were covered all over with hair except for their hands and faces, ran about like wild beasts and lived on leaves and grass. The local lord sent a man and a woman captured on the mountain as a gift to the Golden Horde commander Edigu.[3]
Schiltberger’s nineteenth-century editor suggested a simpler explanation: the captives may have been ordinary Siberian people who, because of the harsh climate, wore animal-skin clothing night and day.[3]
The Mongolian wild man
In Mongolia the almas was described by local people and recorded by Mongolian scholars. The linguist Byambyn Rinchen, a student of the folklorist Tsyben Zhamtsarano, wrote in 1964 that the almas still existed in Mongolia and called it a “wild man.” He described a stooped creature with bent knees, longer arms than a human, and a sparse covering of dark hair, which did not know the use of fire or weapons. Rinchen also noted that the origin of the old name was unknown.[1][4]
In some Mongolian provinces people avoid saying the name at all and instead use a respectful substitute meaning roughly “uncle-brother,” a sign that the almas belongs to the world of taboo and folklore as well as to reported sightings.[1]
Soviet science and the Neanderthal theory
In the late 1950s the Soviet historian Boris Porshnev became the leading scientific advocate of “relict hominoids.” He took part in an unsuccessful 1958 expedition and in 1964 proposed that the almas might be a surviving population of Neanderthals.[1] His ideas attracted attention but never gained mainstream acceptance, and no fossil, bone or body of a recent Neanderthal has ever been found.
Real archaic humans in the Altai
Porshnev’s idea sounds less strange today than it did in 1964, for one reason: the Altai mountains really were home to other kinds of humans. In 2010 geneticists sequencing DNA from a tiny finger bone found in Denisova Cave, in the Russian Altai, discovered an entirely new group of archaic humans, now called Denisovans. Neanderthals lived in the same region, in Denisova Cave and the nearby Chagyrskaya and Okladnikov caves. In 2018 researchers identified a bone fragment from a girl, nicknamed “Denny,” whose mother was a Neanderthal and whose father was a Denisovan. She was a first-generation hybrid of the two groups.[7][8]
Dating work at Denisova Cave suggests that Denisovans used the site from about 200,000 years ago until roughly 50,000 years ago, and that Neanderthals came and went within that period. Both groups also interbred with modern humans, and traces of their DNA survive in people living today, especially in Asia and Oceania.[9]
So the region at the heart of the almas legend did once hold human-like beings who were not quite like us. What the evidence does not show is any sign of them surviving into recent times. The youngest Neanderthal and Denisovan remains are tens of thousands of years old, and no bone, tooth, tool or stretch of ancient DNA from a later period has been found. It is tempting to see the almas as a folk memory of these people, but there is no way to connect a story told in the twentieth century to populations that vanished before the last Ice Age ended.
Zana of Abkhazia
The most famous case linked to the almasty is Zana, a woman said to have been captured by hunters in Abkhazia, in the Caucasus, in the nineteenth century. Local stories and some cryptozoologists considered her a wild woman. She lived out her life in a village and had children with local men.[1]
Science has since answered the question. A 2021 study of DNA from Zana’s presumed remains and six of her descendants found that she was fully human, with Central African ancestry. How she came to be living wild in the Caucasus is unknown. The researchers suggested that the descriptions of her heavy body hair could reflect a condition called congenital hypertrichosis.[5] Her story is now understood as a human tragedy shaped by local folklore, not evidence of a wild hominid.
DNA tests on almasty hair
In 2014 geneticist Bryan Sykes and colleagues published DNA results on hair samples attributed to anomalous primates from around the world, including eight samples from Russia. All of the Russian samples came from known animals: brown bear, horse and cattle.[6]
Possible explanations
- Folklore of the wild man. Wild men appear in the folklore of Europe and Asia, often representing the untamed world beyond the village.
- Misidentified animals. Bears, which can stand upright, are the most common source of hair samples and probably of sightings.
- People living on the margins. Isolated hermits, people with mental illness or medical conditions, or travelers in heavy fur clothing could be described as wild men, as Schiltberger’s editor suggested and Zana’s case shows.
- A relict hominid. Porshnev’s Neanderthal theory remains popular with cryptozoologists, but it has no physical support.
For other wild-man legends, see the Yeti of the Himalayas and the Agogwe of East Africa.
References
- “Almas (cryptozoology),” Wikipedia, citing Rinčen (1964), Porshnev (1963), the New York Times (18 February 1964), Maidar (1981) and others.
- George M. Eberhart, Mysterious Creatures: A Guide to Cryptozoology (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2002).
- The Bondage and Travels of Johann Schiltberger, a Native of Bavaria, in Europe, Asia, and Africa, 1396–1427, trans. J. Buchan Telfer, with notes by P. Bruun (London: Hakluyt Society, 1879), chapter on Ibissibur, p. 35 and note 5. Project Gutenberg.
- B. Rinčen, “Almas still exists in Mongolia,” Genus 20, no. 1/4 (1964): 186 ff.
- A. Margaryan et al., genetic study of Zana and six of her descendants, Advanced Genetics (2021); see also A. Kleshchenko (2021) on the examination of her presumed skull, both as cited in Wikipedia, “Almas (cryptozoology).”
- B. C. Sykes et al., “Genetic analysis of hair samples attributed to yeti, bigfoot and other anomalous primates,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 281 (2014).
- J. Krause et al., “The complete mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia,” Nature 464 (2010): 894–897; D. Reich et al., “Genetic history of an archaic hominin group from Denisova Cave in Siberia,” Nature 468 (2010): 1053–1060.
- V. Slon et al., “The genome of the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father,” Nature 561 (2018): 113–116.
- K. Douka et al., “Age estimates for hominin fossils and the onset of the Upper Palaeolithic at Denisova Cave,” Nature 565 (2019): 640–644.
Correction note (October 2026): This entry was rewritten from historical, folklore and scientific sources. An earlier version gave a generic physical description and claims about behavior without sources; these have been replaced with what the sources actually report. The illustration above is an artistic impression.