THE YEREN - THE CYNOCEPHALI

[Dept of PMM Artists & things]

THE YEREN

The yeren, otherwise known as the Chinese wildman, is a hairy humanoid that is said to inhabit the dense forests of China. About man-sized, it has quite distinctive red hair.

The yeren usually sounds like a bipedal, more human-like version of an orangutan. It could be an orangutan that has evolved to fill a more ground-dwelling niche, with associated bipedalism and thus it ends up looking like a Bigfoot or missing link through sheer coincidence. Bipedalism has evolved independently in the ape family at least two times, so it is at least slightly possible that this has happened yet again with an isolated population of orangutans.

In some reports, yeren sound less like bipedal orangutans and more like standard an ape-like hominid such as Bigfoot. These reports typically describe a creature varying between six and seven feet tall, with a heavy, muscular build and anatomical features that lean more towards the human side than towards the ape side. Fur colors are also more variable, with less instances of red. Some reports in this category sound so human-like than the yeren is thought by some researchers to be a primitive species of human, such as a Neanderthal man.

**********

THE CYNOCEPHALI

The Cynocephali exist in the mythology of Europe, India and China. The legends of all three of these cultures originally said that the Cynocephali resided somewhere in the wild lands west of Tibet and north of Persia (modern-day Iran). The European legends later began placing Cynocephali in all unexplored regions. In Europe, they were described as dog-headed people, sometimes as dog-headed hairy giants that have something in common with hairy humanoids. In the legends from India and China, the Cynocephali were described as shapeshifters who could change from human to dog, but who always retained some animal features when they became human again.

If real Cynocephali exist, it is hard to decide what sort of animal they might be. Some of these legends might be garbled accounts of baboons, monkeys with dog-like snouts. Today, this explanation has been mostly dropped. Further studies have suggested that the Cynocephali tales are actually based on dog ancestor origin myths from tribes who were considered filthy barbarians by more "civilized" writers in India and China. According to these writers, whole races of people were deliberately killed because they weren't human, they were "really" monsters. When these myths were imported to Europe, they became even further changed from the originals. The European Cynocephali is often quite different than the creature of the original legends.

Since there do not seem to be sightings of these creatures today, most cryptozoologists ignore them. To the few who do pay attention to them, the Cynocephali are viewed as either just one more kind of hairy humanoid or as a cryptid canine of some sort.