The Almasty of the Caucasus

In the high valleys that rise from the Kuban and Terek basins toward the central peaks of the Caucasus, the herders and hunters of the Kabardin, Balkar, Karachay, and Chechen peoples have a tradition that long predates the arrival of Russian rule in the region. They speak of a hair-covered humanoid, a being who is not quite human and not quite animal, who lives in the forested gorges and rocky meadows of the high country and who sometimes ventures into the lower farms in the hours before dawn. He is called Almasty in the Turkic languages of the region, Almastı in the Caucasian, and his cousins to the south, in the steppes of Mongolia, are called almas. The Almasty is one of the most thoroughly investigated relict-hominid candidates in the world, owing in large part to the sustained attention of Soviet researchers in the middle decades of the twentieth century, and his file has implications that extend beyond the question of his physical existence.

A Region Of Many Peoples

The Caucasus is a place where mountain geography has produced an unusual density of distinct languages and traditions in a small area. The high valleys of Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia, and the western reaches of Chechnya and Ingushetia have, over centuries, sheltered communities whose oral traditions remain robust well into the modern period. Among these traditions is that of the Almasty, who is described with sufficient consistency across linguistic and ethnic lines to suggest a common underlying referent rather than independent invention.

Witnesses describe the Almasty as approximately the height of a tall man, sometimes slightly taller, with a stocky build, broad shoulders, and arms that extend somewhat below the knees. The body is covered in dark hair, ranging from rust-brown to black, with the face less covered than the trunk and limbs. The forehead is described as low, with prominent brow ridges and a flat or slightly upturned nose. The Almasty walks bipedally, with a long stride and a slightly bent posture, and is said to be unusually fast across rough ground. He is generally described as solitary, although females with young have been reported on rare occasions.

The Soviet Investigations

The Almasty became an object of serious Russian scientific interest in the years after the Second World War, when reports collected from soldiers returning from the Caucasus theater drew the attention of the historian Boris Porshnev. Porshnev, who held a chair at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, came to believe that the Almasty represented a surviving population of Homo neanderthalensis or of a closely related archaic hominid. Working with the zoologist A. A. Mashkovtsev and others, Porshnev in 1958 secured the establishment of a formal Commission on the Snowman within the Academy, which conducted field expeditions in the Caucasus, the Pamir, and Mongolia over the following years.

The Commission’s work was not lavishly funded, and after a few years it lost institutional support and was effectively wound down. Porshnev continued his research independently, however, and in 1963 published The Current State of the Question of Relict Hominoids, a substantial monograph that drew together Almasty reports with material from the Mongolian almas and the Siberian Chuchunya into a unified zoogeographic argument. Porshnev’s analytical framework, while now considered unpersuasive by mainstream paleoanthropology, was unusually rigorous by the standards of cryptozoology of any period and continues to shape Russian-language work on the question.

After Porshnev’s death in 1972, the field was carried forward principally by his student Dmitri Bayanov and by the geographer Marie-Jeanne Koffmann. Koffmann, a French-born physician who served in the Caucasus during her medical career, conducted decades of fieldwork in Kabardino-Balkaria and built up a remarkably detailed dossier of Almasty reports collected directly from local informants in their own languages. Her body of work, published principally in French and Russian, remains the single most thorough modern documentation of the tradition.

The Reported Behaviors

What distinguishes the Almasty file from many other cryptid traditions is the specificity of the reported behaviors. The Almasty is said to enter barns and stables at night, sometimes to take fodder; reports of Almasty riding horses around enclosed pastures, while strange enough to invite ridicule, are common enough in local oral tradition to constitute a recurring motif. The Almasty is also reported to take vegetables and fruit from gardens, to wash in streams, and to sleep in haystacks. In several accounts collected by Koffmann, an Almasty was found dead and buried by local witnesses; in one early-twentieth-century case the burial site was later excavated, with results inconclusive owing to poor soil preservation. The Almasty is generally described as timid and capable of limited communication through gesture and occasional human-sounding cries, though a few accounts describe aggressive encounters when one was cornered or wounded.

Physical Evidence And The Status Of The Tradition

The physical evidence in the Almasty file is suggestive without being conclusive. Tracks have been recorded and photographed by Koffmann and others. Hair samples collected from sites of reported encounters and analyzed at Soviet and later Russian institutes have been variously reported as consistent with brown bear, with humans, or with an unknown primate. The most important analyses, conducted in the 1990s and 2000s with modern molecular techniques, have generally identified samples as bear or human, with no evidence of an intermediate or archaic genome. A handful of skeletal materials have been reported over the decades, generally collected in ambiguous circumstances and lost or reburied before any modern analysis could be conducted.

The Almasty tradition remains active in the Caucasus today, although the pace of reports has diminished as the region has become more thoroughly settled and as local economies have shifted away from the pastoral lifeways that produced most historical sightings. Russian researchers continue to conduct occasional fieldwork in the region, and the Almasty remains a recurrent figure in regional newspapers and Russian cryptozoological journals. Wars and political instability in the North Caucasus over the past three decades have made sustained foreign fieldwork difficult.

A cautious assessment must place the probability of the Almasty’s existence as a real biological species at a low level. The DNA evidence does not support it, the fossil and archaeological record provides no relict population to which the figure could be assigned, and the patchwork nature of the physical evidence is more consistent with a tradition built up around misidentified bears, escaped or wandering individuals from marginal communities, and powerful folkloric expectations than with a genuine surviving hominid. What the file does demonstrate, with high confidence, is that something has been seen, repeatedly and across many generations, in a particular geography and described in remarkably consistent terms. Whether that something is biological, cultural, or both is a question that the existing record does not allow us to settle.

Sources

• Porshnev, B. F., The Current State of the Question of Relict Hominoids, Moscow, 1963.
• Koffmann, Marie-Jeanne, Le dossier Almasty, multiple papers in Archeologia and Bipedia, 1981–2010.
• Bayanov, Dmitri, In the Footsteps of the Russian Snowman, Crypto-Logos, 1996.
• Shackley, Myra, Still Living? Yeti, Sasquatch and the Neanderthal Enigma, Thames & Hudson, 1983.
• Sykes, Bryan C., The Nature of the Beast, Coronet, 2015.