Case file · Cryptid

Almas

A wild hominid of Central Asian and Mongolian folklore.

1900 CE · 47.00, 99.00 · status: legend

The researched reading

An old folklore of wild people whose best-known case turned out to be an enslaved African woman. No physical evidence supports a surviving hominin.

Explanation	Weight	Why
A cultural story	44%	Central Asian traditions of wild people go back centuries; they may encode memories of marginalised humans or of Neanderthals, but are folklore.
Something known, misidentified	22%	Bears, hermits and people with disabilities or illness have been labelled almas; Zana, the famous “captured” almasty, was genetically a modern human of African ancestry.
Perception, memory or mind	12%	Expectation and fear in remote mountains.
A hoax or fabrication	10%	Some evidence and accounts were exaggerated or faked.
An unknown or out-of-place animal	9%	A relict hominin was proposed by Boris Porshnev, but no bones or DNA support it.
Genuinely anomalous	3%	No evidence of anything beyond known causes.

Official position: No official investigation; Soviet expeditions in the 1950s found nothing.