Still Living? [antikvár]

Prologue For the last 2,500 years we have been accumulating reports of creatures which do not conform to any of our convenient zoological classifications, but which may loosely be called 'wildmen'. Initially, such reports describe only sightings, and are difficult to distinguish from myths, folklore and travellers' tales. More recently, however, the matter has been taken up by established scientists concerned with the possibihty that some of the reports may refer to genuine creatures - perhaps even one or two varieties of primate (the group including both the great apes and man) and even primitive types of man. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of such a discovery. The purpose of this book is to present not only the evidence for the existence of wildmen, but also to try to disentangle fact from fiction, the genuine article from later accretions of myth. The character of the wildman, in one of his numerous guises, appears in the art and literature of almost every culture that has ever existed - even our own, where we use the term to imply freedom, rebellion or permissiveness. The Roman world included a wildman in the shape of the satyr, and in the Middle Ages the 'wodewose' was a convenient incarnation of ideas about a primitive way of Hfe, a comment on society, and a central figure for allegory and romantic poetry. The very ubiquity of wildmen is suspicious, and there is considerable similarity between themes and characters in the mythology of peoples widely separated in space and time. Many theories have been evolved to account for this. Allowing for the presence in every society of occasional genuine 'monsters' - giants, genetic freaks^ and so on - it is possible to argue that all wildman stories are merely myths (and therefore untrue), and that societies borrow the myths from each other, as was certainly the case with Greece and Rome. But it is difficult to account for the fact that similar stories appear in different continents, unless you postulate