The Bigfoot DNA question: Zana, Khwit and what the data can and cannot show (Ford, Sol 6.0, Claude Opus 5/5.5)

I know the sort of account you mean, but I can’t pin that particular Iran story down reliably yet.

There is a well-established older “wild man” tradition running through Iran, the Caucasus, Central Asia and Afghanistan. Early-20th-century accounts collected by Russian zoologist Vitaly Khakhlov describe hairy, humanlike beings in the Iran–Central Asia mountain belt; one account from the Iran-Kabirg region describes herders actually capturing a short, hairy “wild man” with unusually long arms and very humanlike hands and feet. citeturn958889search0turn996588search5

There’s also a genuinely weird historical coincidence: anthropologist Carleton Coon excavated caves in Iran and Afghanistan and later became an outspoken believer that relic populations of humanlike “wild men” could still exist. citeturn958889search45

But I’m not finding a solid source for the specific episode you remember — an isolated primitive group encountering modern Iranians and one of them driving or throwing a spear through an Iranian’s chest. That may be buried in an older cryptozoology book rather than indexed online, or one detail may have migrated from another story.

One possibility I’d keep in mind: Irian Jaya — the former name commonly used for western New Guinea — sounds very much like “Iran” in a decades-old memory, and that region has numerous contact stories involving previously isolated peoples armed with spears. I’m not saying that’s definitely it, just that the phonetic resemblance plus the “isolated primitive tribe” detail makes it worth checking.

And importantly, I wouldn’t merge it with the Kandahar Giant yet. Kandahar already contains the spear-through-the-soldier element, so later retellings could easily have cross-pollinated the stories.

If we do the giants/wild-men Skeptic Desk properly, I think we should build a chronological source table. That will tell us very quickly which creepy similarities existed independently and which ones appeared only after these stories started circulating together.

no it was most definitely Iran, I don't remember them having red hair or being giants though

In my anthropology class in college, the teacher said there was a cave in Isreal with 9 different humanoids living in it roughly 90k years back, at different times of course

Ah — I think I can identify almost exactly what your anthropology professor was talking about, and your “nine” and “~90,000 years ago” memories are both remarkably close.

It was probably Skhul Cave on Mount Carmel, Israel. When it was excavated in the 1930s, archaeologists initially described nine human individuals/burials from the cave. A tenth individual was recognized later. Modern dating places the Skhul population roughly 120,000–80,000 years ago, with ~90,000 years often given as the shorthand date. citeturn170853search0turn170853search48

The part I think has drifted in memory is “nine different humanoids.” They weren't nine different species. They were nine (later ten) individual hominins, and they were anatomically strange enough that their classification caused decades of argument. Early researchers actually called them “Neanderthaloid”; today they're generally classified as early Homo sapiens, but with a mixture of robust/archaic and modern-looking traits. citeturn170853search1turn170853search4

And here's probably why your professor's story was so memorable: right next door was Tabun Cave, containing Neanderthal remains from approximately the same broad period. Once better dating was done, researchers realized early modern humans at Skhul and Neanderthals at Tabun were present in the Mount Carmel region at roughly overlapping times. That wrecked the older, simple picture where Neanderthals lived there first and modern humans merely replaced them later. citeturn356453search3turn356453search5

There were several important caves in that little Mount Carmel complex—Skhul, Tabun, el-Wad, Jamal—and elsewhere in Israel you also have Qafzeh, with another large population of early Homo sapiens around 100–90 thousand years ago. So that tiny Levantine corridor was an extraordinary crossroads between Africa and Eurasia. citeturn170853search6

And the story has actually gotten more complicated since your college anthropology class. We now know Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred, so some of those ambiguous combinations of traits don't necessarily have to represent neatly separated populations.

So I suspect what you originally heard was something approximately like:

“They found nine hominid burials at Skhul around 90,000 years old, with people showing a remarkable mix of archaic/Neanderthal-like and modern-human traits, while actual Neanderthals occupied nearby caves.”

Over the years that became “nine different kinds of humanoids lived in one Israeli cave.”

But the corrected version is still damn fascinating. Around 100,000 years ago, Israel really was a meeting zone for substantially different human populations.

And on your Iran story: I believe you that Iran is the location you remember. I just haven't yet found that particular spear incident in a source I'd trust enough to tell you I've identified it. That one deserves another pass rather than forcing it into the Kandahar story.

no we are going around bigfoot here actually

Right — you’re using the ancient-hominin stuff to frame Bigfoot as a possible relic hominin, not changing topics.

And that is actually one of the more coherent biological Bigfoot hypotheses.

We now know that the recent human family tree was much bushier than people used to think. Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo sapiens, Homo floresiensis, and Homo luzonensis all existed surprisingly recently, and some overlapped in time. Denisovans and Neanderthals even interbred directly; one sequenced individual had a Neanderthal mother and Denisovan father. citeturn987670search4turn987670search8

And some lineages survived until very late. Homo floresiensis appears to have survived on Flores until roughly 50,000 years ago, while Homo luzonensis is known from around 67,000 years ago. citeturn987670search0turn987670search3

So the proposition:

“A non-sapiens human lineage survived much later than we currently know”

is not inherently ridiculous. We have discovered entirely unknown human lineages from tiny scraps of bone and DNA within just the last couple decades. Denisovans themselves were identified genomically from a finger bone before we had any idea what the population really looked like. citeturn987670search7

And a relic-hominin Bigfoot hypothesis would explain some reported behaviors better than “unknown ape”:

tool-like rock throwing, apparent warning behavior, curiosity, avoidance of humans, family groups, possible language-like vocalizations, intelligence, and perhaps why some alleged DNA samples come back human.

It still runs headfirst into the same brutal problem: where are the bones, teeth, camps, tools, scat and clean genome?

But conceptually, “some surviving archaic Homo population” is considerably more biologically grounded than imagining a giant North American gorilla appearing from nowhere.

And that is why the old wild-man traditions around Central Asia, Iran, Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Himalayas, etc. are interesting in this context. Those regions really were inhabited by multiple different hominin lineages surprisingly recently.

So yes — we are absolutely still circling Bigfoot. The paleoanthropology makes the question:

Could some fraction of worldwide “wild man” traditions preserve encounters with late-surviving archaic humans?

That’s speculative, but it’s a much better question than “could an eight-foot monkey hide behind trees for 100,000 years?”

what is homo luzonensis?

Homo luzonensis is one of the newer additions to the human family tree — formally announced in 2019 — and it’s pretty wild.

It lived on Luzon in the Philippines at least about 50,000–67,000 years ago. The fossils come from Callao Cave and include teeth plus finger, toe, and foot bones from at least three individuals. citeturn0search0

What makes it interesting is its bizarre mixture of features. Its teeth are relatively small and in some ways look Homo sapiens-like, while parts of its hands and feet have much more primitive-looking anatomy, including curved finger/toe bones reminiscent of much earlier hominins such as Australopithecus. Researchers concluded that the combination was distinctive enough to name a separate species, Homo luzonensis. citeturn0search0

We don't have a skull, so we don't actually know what its face looked like or its brain size. We also can't confidently say how tall it was. You’ll sometimes see it described as another tiny “hobbit,” like Homo floresiensis, but the available bones aren't sufficient to establish that firmly.

The really fascinating question is how the hell its ancestors got to Luzon. Luzon was never connected to mainland Asia by a dry land bridge during the Pleistocene. Somehow an archaic human population crossed substantial open water. And butchered rhinoceros remains and stone tools show that hominins were actually on Luzon about 709,000 years ago—although we don't know whether those earlier toolmakers were H. luzonensis or its ancestors. citeturn0search1

That is a big deal because it means some non-sapiens hominins were getting across significant sea barriers hundreds of thousands of years ago.

And for our Bigfoot conversation, luzonensis matters mostly because it illustrates how incomplete our picture remains. Until very recently, nobody knew this human lineage existed at all. Now we know an unusual species of Homo survived on a Philippine island until roughly the same period when Homo sapiens was expanding through the region.

So around 60,000 years ago you had at least:

Homo sapiens
Neanderthals
Denisovans
Homo floresiensis
Homo luzonensis

all alive somewhere on Earth at approximately the same broad time.

The idea we grew up with — ape → caveman → modern human — has turned into a damned shrubbery. 😄

wow so ocean fairing 710K years back, that is pretty wild

Yeah — some kind of open-water crossing almost certainly happened, and that is wild.

At Kalinga on Luzon, archaeologists found 57 stone tools with a butchered rhinoceros, securely dated to about 709,000 years ago. Luzon is not believed to have been connected to mainland Asia by a dry land bridge, so the researchers explicitly say the evidence points to early overseas dispersal by premodern hominins. citeturn511308search0turn511308search1

The big caution is that “seafaring” may overstate what we know. We don’t have a 700,000-year-old boat. They might have used crude rafts, vegetation mats, or been swept across accidentally in storms. But repeated colonization of islands in Southeast Asia makes pure accident harder to lean on as the only explanation.

And it wasn’t just one individual arriving. To leave a lasting archaeological presence, enough individuals had to make the crossing to establish a population.

So somewhere around three-quarters of a million years ago, a hominin we haven't even identified yet was:

making stone tools, butchering rhinos, and somehow crossing substantial stretches of ocean.

That pushes sophisticated behavior way deeper into prehistory than the old textbook picture of lumbering Homo erectus wandering around on foot.

it does show they were extremely intelligent, so maybe an archaic population of humans could possibly still exist

they would need to bury their poop, bury their dead, do it in hidden locations, I mean there is still a lot of reasons to say no way