Russian legends tell of a breed of homonids who were excellent herders, tough as (the yet to be invented) nails and most importantly made a sport of fighting Griffins for caches of gold. It now appears that we have biological proof of these legendary wild men.
Siberia’s Denisova cave held the pinky bone of an unknown early human species, a genetics team reported in March. The Naturejournal study, led by Johannes Krause of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, offered no answer for what happened to this “archaic” human species, more than one million years old and living near their human and Neanderthal cousins as recently as 30,000 years ago.
But at least one scholar has an intriguing answer: “The discovery of material evidence of a distinct hominin (human) lineage in Central Asia as recently as 30,000 years ago does not come as a surprise to those who have looked at the historical and anecdotal evidence of ‘wild people’ inhabiting the region,” wrote folklorist Michael Heaney of the United Kingdom’s Bodleian Library Oxford, in a letter to The Times of London.
So it’s just a matter of finding some Griffin bones. But now that we have a pinky bone of a wild man, we just have to look for the foot he buried in the winged lion’s butt.
