Iwas watching a program on History channel that offered different explanations for the Himalayan Yeti (abominable snowman) such as its a bear, its a relict Gigantopithecus ape, its the footprints of deformed human feet, its imagination (Brocken spectre, pareidolia, or a shadow person), and finally, it mentioned some sightings of extant Neanderthals reported in the Kemerovo region of Siberia around 2011-2012, and investigated by Russian scholars. Which is indeed a new alternative,in line with what I have written about on the ancient Patagonian myths of "wild men" (sightings of surviving ancestral hominins in America). For these reasons, I decided to post about it, and look into these sightings and the scientists and organizations that are studying them.
The Kemerovo Sightings
An article published online in 2011 mentions a spike in sightings of the abominable snowman in Siberia in the Kemerovo region noting that it is 3,000 miles (4,800 km) from Moscow, and neighboring Altai (a place where Denisovans and Neanderthals lived for several hundreds of thousands of years, and overlapped there, admixing).
The article mentions an "International Centre of Hominology in Tashtagol, and cites its head, Igor Burtsev (his name was also cited in the History Channel documentary). Burtsey stated that: "When Homo sapiens started populating the world, it viciously exterminated its closest relative in the hominid family, Homo neanderthalensis. Some of the Neanderthals, however, may have survived to this day in some mountainous wooded habitats that are more or less off limits to their arch foes."
Kemerovo is indeed close to Altai (see Google map), roughly 580 km (360 mi) north of the famous Denisova Cave.
Another article describes the sightings: one took place near a village called Misky (see map), where a fisherman called Vitaly Vershinin, who was sailing up the river, saw what he believed to be two people with a bear-like appearance drinking by a river, but when they saw him, they stood up, and walked away, so did he. The man, took a TV crew to the spot, and added that ""they just rushed away, all in fur, walking on two legs, making way through the bushes with two other limbs, straight up the hill, right there."
Some "yeti" hairs were found by an expedition in Kemerovo conducted by Burtsev the previous year (2011), who said that despite the violent interactions between modern humans and Neanderthals "Some of the Neanderthals, however, may have survived to this day in some mountainous wooded habitats that are more or less off limits to their arch foes. No clothing on them, no tools in hands and no fire in the household. Only round-the-clock watchfulness for a Homo sapiens around." I disagree. Neanderthals were sophisticated people, they knew how to make specializeds stone tools, dominated the art of firemaking, and fashioned clothes to protect themselves from the harsh Ice Age climate during the period they thrived in Eurasia, for several hundreds of thousands of years.
I posted about these sightings in 2011 and was looking forward to the outcome of the DNA tests of the tufts of hair recovered in Kemerovo. But these were never disclosed.
The article continues, and also mentions that "Sightings of the creatures in the region have increased three-fold over the past 20 years, prompting scientists at Moscow's Darwin Museum to speculate that there may be a small population of these creatures." (Neanderthals).
Another sighting took place in January 2013 (Source) when a state inspector spotted a yeti in the Shorsky National Park in the Tashtagolski district (see map). A local official, Sergei Adlyakov, said that it didn't look like a bear and vanished in the forest snapping branches off the bushes as it fled.
The final report of an encounter with yetis took plaxe in Kuzbass, when men on a boat navigating the Mras-Su River (see map) spotted, on a rock above the river, "some tall animals looking like people. Our binoculars were broken and did not let us see them sharply. We waved at the animals but they did not respond, then quickly ran back into the forest, walking on two legs."
A 2014 post quotes Igor Burtsev as affirming that "there is an active population of about 30 of the creatures living in the Kemerovo (the region of Mount Shoria) in Siberia to this day"
The "Yeti Expert"
Who is Igor Burtsev? and what is the International Centre of Hominology?
Burtsev is co-author of a research paper about a wild woman that was captured in a forest in the Caucasus (Margaryan A, Sinding MS, Carø C, Yamshchikov V, Burtsev I, Gilbert MTP. The genomic origin of Zana of Abkhazia. Adv Genet (Hoboken). 2021 Jun 14;2(2):e10051. doi: 10.1002/ggn2.10051. PMID: 36618122; PMCID: PMC9744565), in the paper he is credited as affiliated to the " International Center of Hominology, State Darwin Museum, Moscow, Russia." This museum is a serious institution (website).
The paper cites some refrences authored by Burtsev:
- Bourtsev I. A Skeleton Still Buried and a Skull Unearthed: the Story of Zana. In the Footsteps of the Russian Snowman, Crypto‐Logos Publishers 1996;46–52.
- Burtsev I. Relict Hominoid Research Seminar. 1987.
- Burtsev I. Moscow Naturalists' Society. 1987.
Burtsev has appeared in some episodes of documentaries about cryptozoology (Cascade Bigfoot Blood Mystery, 2022, and in The Proof is Out There, 2025: Bigfoot Car Chase, Airport UFO, and High School Football Ghost, S.5;Ep. 12 and Siberian Yeti, Amazonian Alien Researcher, and Japanese Wolves Resurrected, S.5; Ep. 14.
A Russian language article states that Burtsev holds a History pHD, but then quotes him as supporting the weird theory put forward by Dr. Melba Ketchum (see my 2012 post about this quack story), who analyzed the DNA of North American samples of Bigfoots. Burtsev says that " It's been absolutely certain that the creature wasn't related to Neanderthals or Denisovans... Besides, 15,000 years ago, representatives of these human species had already disappeared from the face of the Earth—they went extinct... I don't rule out a hypothesis that might seem completely fantastic. Aliens who visited Earth could have been involved in the hybridization. Very unusual DNA was found in the samples analyzed in the United States." When UFOs and aliens are combined in a story involving Bigfoot, it becomes pseudoscience, and therefore placed in the same category as astrology, flat earth, creation science, Bermuda Triangle and similar nonsense.
I found his bio on the ICH website (more on ICH further down):
"Igor Burtsev, born in 1940, candidate of historical sciences, publisher, president of the Cryptosphere Fund for furthering scientific searches and explorations, director of the International Center of Hominology. Engaged in this investigation since 1965, participant and leader of many searching expeditions – in the North Caucasus (Kabardino-Balkaria, 1965), Azerbajan (Talysh, 1970-75), Abkhazia (1971, 1975, 1978, 2004, 2008), Mongolia (1976), Pamiro-Alai (1979-82), the Murmansk Region (Lovozero Lake, 1990); participant of investigations near St. Petersburg (1989, 2009) and in the Kirov Region (2002-2007), in the Novgorod, Tver’, Tula, Krasnodar regions (2009), in the Mountaneus Shoria, Siberia (2009-10). Since 1971 devoted several years to the study of the Patterson film. Author and co-author of many publications in the popular scientific magazines and in newspapers. In the fall of 2004 spent five weeks in Tennessee, USA, investigating reports of bigfoots visiting the Carter Farm. In 2006 visited the New York University concerning the analysis of the skulls excavated in Abkhasia."
International Centre of Hominology or ICH
Burtsev in collaboration with Bayanov (more on him below) created the International Center of Hominology in Moscow in 2003 (Source). Both are pictured below.
The ICH is listed in the Union of International Associations (link here) as a civil entity.
The UIA gives a website address for the ICH: https://hominology.narod.ru/eng.htm which is offline, however, the website can be seen in archive.org (a great tool, it has captured and saved one trillion web pages!), below is a screenshot of ICH's website as it looked back in 2013, when it was active.
ICH has a facebook page https://www.facebook.com/hominology which is currently active.
More on the Eurasian Hominoids
An interesting thesis exploring Soviet science and Darwinism touches the subject of hominoids and the Yeti. It mentions that these scholars believed that the Yeti was a missing link, a relict hominoid, but which one, was an open discussion. somt thought it was related to apes, like the gigantopithcus, while others like Boris Porshnev supported a hominin like the Homo erectus or a Neanderthal, and Petr Smolin thought it was an australopitecine. After deep studies of physical evidence, Porshnev "concluded that Yeti and Neanderthal shared too many traits to be incidental" yet the Yeti was an animal, it degenerated from the intelligent Neanderthal in a backward evolution. This seems to explain why Burtsev suggests that the Neanderthals in Siberia don't make stone tools, don't wear clothes or don't light fires, they are a reversion to an animal form, yet shaped like humans.
In my search about these Siberian sightings, I also came across the work of Dimitri Bayanov, who is the Science Director in the International Centre of Hominology. He is credited with coining the term "hominology" as the study of "hairy bipeds" like bigfoot, almasty, and yeti. For over 30 years he has headed the Smolin seminar focused on hominology at the Darwin Museum in Moscow.
In his essay, Bayanov Historical Evidence for the Existence of Relict Hominoids (The Relict Hominoid Inquiry 1:23-50, 2012) where he addresses the issue of which hominin has survived and embodies the current hominoids sighted in Eurasia:
"One final relevant question: How to correlate relict hominoids with the fossil record of paleoanthropology? According to Krantz (1980), Neanderthals had more traits in common with Homo erectus than with Homo sapiens, so that they “could all be classed with erectus.” He also wrote: “Homo erectus existed for over a million years with relatively little change – a kind of evolutionary plateau – and then was transformed rather quickly into Homo sapiens” (Krantz, 1980). Could it be that today’s wild bipedal homins are relicts of that evolutionary “standstill,” which lasted long enough for them to penetrate and settle the Old World before the advent of Homo sapiens? Adapting to local environments, these pre-sapiens must have more or less departed in their physique from the fossil erectus-grade forms presently known to science. I therefore propose that homins reported in central Eurasia are relicts of the Homo erectus-Neanderthal stage of evolution."
Closing Comments
The idea that surviving Neanderthals, Denisovans, or even Homo erectus have inspired the stories of wild men, or similar hominoids is exciting. It is extremely unlikely yet possible that in the vast wilderness of the Siberian hinterland there are a handful of our ancestors still living in the stone age. The same could apply to South America, or North America. But we need serious science to sift facts from pseudoscientific rubbish (like alien hybrids and similar nonsense).
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall ©
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