I came across some short texts posted by Richard Thornton (his mini bio), in which he discusses a statue protraying an ape-like creature found in Mexico. Thornton suggests that it is the depiction of a captive Homo erectus.
In Homo Erectus in the coastal marshes of Tabasco State, Mexico? (October 25, 2024) he includes some pictures he took in the 1970s, including one that he describes as "...quite controversial after public exposure, since it does not portray a Homo Sapiens with typical Indigenous American features. However, mainstream archaeologists still refuse to admit the possibility that the millions of animals that crossed back and forth across the Bering Land Bridge over the past two million years were followed by primitive hominids."
A second post Homo Erectus in the Americas? (April 15, 2022) includes the following image:
Thornton wrote: "It looked like a primitive hominid, such as Homo Erectus, not a New World Monkey. He is portrayed standing erect with his hands tied behind his neck. This is the typical way that Mesoamerican art portrays prisoners of war or people captured to be made into slaves. Monkeys were always portrayed with their arms and legs tied together, hanging from poles."
The final post is titled: Did Homo Erectus live in the Americas until fairly recently? (December 6, 2023) and includes this text "There are stories, both in the Lower Southeastern United States and in Southeast Asia of primitive humans with tails, who were capable of hurling rocks and sharpened sticks at Homo Sapiens humans. Those in what is now the United States disappeared soon after the arrival of Europeans. Apparently, they were extremely vulnerable to European diseases. During the Vietnam War, such creatures supposedly attacked both U.S. and Vietnamese soldiers, who ventured into an uninhabited mountain range in what was then South Vietnam."
Some comments
The spider and howler monkeys are common in the southern areas of Mexico. They represented good fortune, happiness, lust, pleasure in the Central American lore. They were sacred animals and were not used for sacrifices nor eaten (source). Below are some Mesoamerican depictions of monkeys (same source), they have a monkey appearance:
Thornton is right in his posts when he says the statue has been moved. It ended up in the Villahermosa museum and is known as "Monument 56", its name is "Monkey Looking at the Sky."
The sculpture although it is shaped as a column is believed to be a peg-like structure which was to be displayed horizontally. It shows a head and a torso of a simian (anthropomorphic) figure with its arms bent backwards, behind the neck. It has a round-shaped eye and a narrow bridged nose. The creature wears a hat or helmet, and the back of the hands have been lost. It has triangular ears. It is 1.36 m long (roughly 4.5 ft.) and 53 cm wide (21") and 48 cm thick (19"). It is made of a tough hornblende andesite.
"It is highly likely that this sculpture was originally embedded horizontally; that is, the section resembling the body is the tenon that secured it as part of a building's architectural structure." (Source, and also source of the following images):
Finally, the comments about Vietnam and sightings there during the war are new to me. I will look into it. The remark about them being vulnerable to European diseases makes sense. Illnesses like measles, human flu, and small pox would affect hominins but not monkeys.
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