Mono Grande
Hairy "wild men of the woods" are a near-archetypical feature of folklore--and modern sightings--the world over, be they the woodwoses of medieval Europe, the yeti of the Himalayas, or the Bigfoot of the Pacific Northwest. South America has its share of these hairy man-beasts as well, although they are almost invariably less well-known than their relatives in other parts of the globe. Probably the most famous of South America's hominids is a creature called mono grande (big monkey) or didi.
The first mention made of the creature appears to be in a book written by Pedro de Cieza de Leon in 1553. De Leon recounts native superstitions about these creatures, and goes on to tell of a Spaniard who found a carcass of one in the forests. Edward Bancroft's 1769 An Essay on the Natural History of Guiana also makes mention of what might be the mono grande when he recounts tribal superstitions that creatures "near five feet in height, maintaining an erect position, and having a human form, thinly covered with short, black hair" dwelt in the forest.
In 1860, Philip Gosse in his book The Romance of Natural History said that a "large anthropoid ape, not yet recognized by zoologists," probably existed in the forests of South America. More accounts of the animal came to light in 1876, when explorer Charles Barrington Brown wrote of a creature called the Didi. This creature, according to Brown, was a wild man which dwelt in the forests of British Guiana (today's Guyana). He said that on several occasions he had heard its cries, and on others he had seen footprints identified as coming from the creature.
The British magistrate of Guiana himself encountered two Didi while prospecting for gold in 1910. But the best--and most controversial--evidence for the existence of an anthropoid ape in South America's jungles came about a decade later, when Swiss geologist Francois de Loys led an expedition to the borders of Colombia and Venezuela. Many members of de Loys' expedition had died, and in 1920 the remnants of the party set up camp near the Tarra River.
Two creatures emerged from the forest and moved towards the campsite. De Loys noted that they were a male and a female and about five feet in height. He recounts how the creatures broke off branches of trees and waved them at the party. During this assault, de Loys said, the creatures began to howl and screech, and eventually they threw their own dung at the expedition. The party opened fire, and the female was killed. The male retreated into the forest.
The men, realizing that their kill was something out of the ordinary, sat its body on a crate, propping its head up with a stick. De Loys recorded that the creature was skinned, and its skull and jawbone preserved. Perhaps conveniently, these remains of the creature were lost.
De Loys' friend George Montandon took great interest in the photograph and published it in 1929, dubbing the creature Ameranthropoides loysi. On June 15, in the Illustrated London News, de Loys told the story of what had happened. Almost immediately, de Loys and Montandon came under attack from the scientific community. Many debunkers of the de Loys photo, foremost among them Sir Arthur Keith, proclaimed that the alleged "anthropoid" was actually a normal spider monkey, its tail concealed behind the crate on which its body sat. Furthermore, said Keith, there was nothing in the photo that was a clear measure of the animal's size.
Yet others have established the height of the creature at about five feet tall, saying that most crates of the kind on which it sits are 20 inches in height. The largest spider monkey ever recorded was only three feet, seven inches tall. Keith also dismissed the detail that the ape threw its own feces at de Loys and his men, although it is well-known that some types of ape do this when threatened. Still, most skeptics accept Keith's debunking of the photo.
This position was backed up in 1996 by cryptozoologists Loren Coleman and Michel Raynal, who agreed that the christening of the animal as an anthropoid by Montandon, a known racist, was an attempt to further racism. They cited a belief popular at the time that each of the world's major races were descended from a different type of ape. No ape was known from which the Native American could descend, hence one was created by Montandon.
Furthermore, they said, Montandon may have been acting against de Loys' wishes by having the photograph published -- they note that de Loys himself, upon returning to Switzerland, did not publish the photograph, but instead let it linger among his other research notes for nearly a decade.
Sightings of the creature have continued to the present day. In 1968, at Marirupa Falls in Venezuela, Pino Turolla heard from a native guide that three mono grande had attacked and killed his son with branches. Turolla later found the de Loys photograph, and showed it to his guide. The guide confirmed that Ameranthropoides loysi was the same as the Mono Grande. In the valley where the guide's son was killed, Turolla heard screeches and saw two large, apelike bipeds. In 1971, he claimed to have had another sighting in Ecuador.
As late as 1987, mycologist Gary Samuels was collecting fungi samples in a Guyana forest when he heard footsteps and looked up to see a a large ape-like animal which howled occasionally--a "hoo" sound, according to Samuels.
These encounters serve as adequate evidence that, although Ameranthropoides loysi may be "an outright hoax," as Ivan T. Sanderson has written, the body of folklore and sightings which suggest some sort of unknown primate does, indeed, exist in South America.
COLEMAN, Loren
1996
De Loys' Photograph: A Short Tale of Apes in Green Hell, Spider Monkeys, and Ameranthropoides
loysi as Tools of Racism (w/ Michel Raynal). The Anomalist
4 (Autumn).
HEUVELMANS, Bernard
1995 On
the Track of Unknown Animals (reprint). London: Kegan Paul.
TUROLLA, Pino
1980 Beyond
the Andes. New York: Harper and Row.