Ian Officer of Benger, Western Australia, reports that there have been numerous sightings in recent times, including twenty-two reported in one year. One witness, Mr Buckingham, said that he had a very clear view of a dog-like animal, grey-brown, with very marked either dark brown or black transverse stripes running across the rump, and a thin tail.
But it is the 1985 photographs, taken in February by Kevin Cameron of Girrawheen in Western Australia, that provide the most challenging evidence – something far more concrete than anything that has turned up in fifty years of searching in Tasmania itself. Sceptics have asked why Cameron did not get a picture of the animal bounding away; why he did not shoot it, as he clearly had a rifle; why the animal seems to be in exactly the same position in the two photographs; and there have been critical analyses from a technical photographic point of view.
Cameron offers no comment. He is of aboriginal descent and an experienced bushman who works with a pair of highly trained dogs. Until recently he was illiterate. He seems hardly equipped to perpetrate a major deceit. And the photographs themselves are beguiling. They have a lack of artifice, and the position of the animal seems full of naturalness and energy.
Athol Douglas, until recently Senior Experimental Officer at the Western Australian Museum in Perth, is convinced that the animal is a thylacine. Dr Ronald Strahan of the Australian Museum, and formerly Director of Sydney’s Taronga Park Zoo, regards the pictures as authentic and says that the animal could not be anything but a thylacine. Kevin Cameron also possesses casts which show the distinctive pattern of the Tasmanian tiger: five toes on the forefeet and only four on the hind.
Meanwhile, in the rough terrain of the centre and north of Tasmania itself, expeditions continue to try to prove that the animal survives. It is hard to credit that a wolf-like creature the size of an alsatian, so distinctively coloured, which carries its young about in a pouch and is not notably afraid of humans, could have evaded its pursuers for fifty years. Most of the tigers were wiped out in the last years of the nineteenth century by bounty hunters protecting sheep. The last known killing of a wild thylacine was in 1930. London Zoo’s last specimen died in 1931, and the last of all at Hobart in 1936. Since then, and particularly in recent years, there have been numerous recorded sightings – at least 100 of them of sufficient clarity and detail to be accounted as reliable.
The distinguished zoologist Eric Guiler has been involved in many forays to try to locate the thylacine. He has placed electronic surveillance equipment and night cameras at likely spots, but without success. His interest has been sustained by the apparent authenticity of so many reported sightings. In the early 1950s he managed to interview a number of old men who had been tiger bounty hunters. One of them, H. Pearce, described seeing a female and three pups in the late 1940s – with the clear implication that he had wiped them out, as he had so many in the past. The old shepherds were unrepentant.
Another incident near the area known as the Walls of Jerusalem was described by a cattle drover. His three dogs were involved in a scuffle in the bush near his cabin. Only two came back. Next day he found the third dog dead, with its heart eaten out. He took his horse and two dogs to a nearby gully. The dogs ran under the horse and then a tiger appeared on a nearby rock.
Guiler lists dozens of modern sightings, often backed up by more than one witness or by other evidence. In 1960, by the Manuka River (near the spot where a sighting had been reported), he himself heard the strange yapping hunting noise that the thylacines made. In June 1976 there was a sighting on the Pieman River, and nearby a fresh wallaby kill. In 1981 at Mount Eliza there were quite clear tracks of the distinctive five toes followed by four toes. Since the 1960s there have been a whole clutch of sightings at Woolnorth, which was one of the most profitable areas for the bounty hunters of the last century.
Almost annually now, well-equipped expeditions set off to try to obtain final proof that the Tasmanian tiger managed to survive the depredations of less ecologically minded generations of Tasmanians. Yet so far the nearest thing to evidence comes from Kevin Cameron’s photographs, by all accounts taken far away on the Australian mainland, 2,000 or 3,000 years out of time.
The Communist Wildmen
If there are unknown ‘wildmen’ still to be found on this earth, the odds are that they lurk protected not only by some of the remotest landscapes on our planet, but also by the severe and daunting frontiers of the two great Communist superpowers. Details are slowly emerging of the extraordinary proliferation of sightings and evidence now being collated by researchers in both the Soviet Union and China.
In 1985 newspapers in the West carried a colourful Reuters report from Peking, quoting the China Daily. It said that a 3ft 7in (1.1 m) tall male wildman had been caught in the mountains of Hunan and was living in a flat in the city of Wuhan. The story was soon to be retracted.
But, in its resolution, it was to provide a fascinating insight into the state of ‘wildman’ research in China. For the creature turned out to be a previously unknown type of monkey – the very animal that had been predicted by Chinese researcher Zhou Guoxing in his analysis of wildman evidence.
Zhou, a staff member at the Peking Natural History Museum, and his colleague, Professor Wu Dingliang, Director of Anthropological Research at Shanghai’s Fudan University, had both taken part in the vast Chinese Academy of Sciences expedition in 1977 to the Shennongjia Mountains. More than 100 people had been involved for nearly a year. They collected casts of footprints, pieces of hair, faeces and, most importantly, they collated the many accounts of ‘wildmen’ from the local people. From this evidence Zhou and Professor Wu concluded that there were two creatures involved. The first – apparently about 4 ft (1.2 m) high -was an unknown type of ape or monkey. The second – 7 ft (2.1 m) tall or more – was a large unknown species of primate, they thought.
Within five years the first part of their theory was to be proved right; evidence for the second part accumulates rapidly.
The vast arc of virtually uninhabited territory which runs from Afghanistan along the Soviet-Chinese border, through Tien Shan and then down southern Mongolia for more than 2,000 miles, is remote to an almost unimaginable degree. Even the nomadic herdsmen make only occasional excursions into the high mountains. It can be 400 miles from one road to the next. Tibet, to the south, is, by comparison, heavily populated. Much of the area is still thick primeval forest rising up the Shaal Tau and the Altai Mountains.
It was in 1981 that Zhou first heard that there were relics of a wildman preserved in Zheijiang Province. The next year he was able to make a trip to investigate. In the village of Zhuanxian he met a woman, Wang Congmei, a cowherd, who as a girl (back in May 1957) had encountered the creature. She said it had a head like a man and almost hairless skin. When it stood erect it was at least 1 m (3 ft 3 in) tall. Walking, it went on all fours, rather like a panda. The creature had been killed by Wang’s mother, Xu Fudi, and a party of villagers. The local schoolmaster, Zhou Shousong, had preserved the hands and feet.
Even in their shrivelled state, the hands and feet (see illustrations), presented a haunting sight. Zhou had heard similar stories before. Road builders in Xishuang Eanna had killed what they called a ‘wildwoman’ in 1961. It had walked upright, being 4 ft (1.2 m) tall or more. They said its hands, ears, breasts and genitalia were similar to those of a female human.
Many witnesses in Yunnan said that such wildmen still walked about. Zhou took careful measurements of the severed hands and feet of the Zhuanxian wildman – it had been very certainly male, Wang Congmei said. He also took plaster casts and samples of hair back to Peking. After careful analysis and consultation he concluded that the creature was neither a man nor an ape, but an unknown type of large monkey. Within a year his theory was to be justified.
In 1983 a large monkey was captured in the Huang Mountains and taken to the Hefei Zoo. It is nearly 1 m (3 ft 3 in) high, has hands and feet like Wang Congmei’s creature, and certainly has the strange flat finger and toe-nails which give such an uncanny man-like appearance to the severed hands and feet from Zhuanxian.