In yesterday's post about a strangre sculpture which, according to Richard Thornton, depicts an homo erectus I mentioned his comments about extant Homo erectus in Vietnam, which were encountered by U.S. troops during the war in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and early 1970s. Today's post will look into this claim.
I found an article about hominins (wild men) in that area Research on Wildmen in Vietnam, published in The Relict Hominoid Inquiry 10:6-28 (2021), written by Tran Hong Viêet, Tran Hong Hai, and Jeff Meldrum. Which reports the presence of surviving hominins in the jungles of Central Vietnam. The evidence they present includes the descriptions in local folklore, and tracks and footprints. They identify two varieties, a big one and a small one. The larger creature has feet larger than those of humans but smaller than those attributed to the American bigfoot. It is hairy and roughly 1.8 - 2 m tall (5 ft 11 in – 6 ft 7 in). The paper wonders if they are surviving Gigantopithecus blackii or Homo erectus or even Homo heidelbergensis.
The smaller creature is also hairy, 1.2 - 1.5 m (3 ft 11 in – 4 ft 11 in).
Ciochon R, Long VT, Larick R, González L, Grün R, de Vos J, Yonge C, Taylor L, Yoshida H, Reagan M. in an article titled Dated co-occurrence of Homo erectus and Gigantopithecus from Tham Khuyen Cave, Vietnam. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1996 Apr 2;93(7):3016-20. doi: 10.1073/pnas.93.7.3016. PMID: 8610161; PMCID: PMC39753, report that Gigantopithecus and erectus overlapped in the same ecosystem and time in a cave in Vietnam during the Early and Middle Pleistocene.
Some references to Vietnamese hominins
I found some mentions of "rock apes" and bigfoots in Vietnam, but they are all relatively recent, from the 2020s. For those interested in reading other sources, see the following: Some US troops reportedly saw Bigfoot in Vietnam — No one knows how he felt about communism by Stilwell, 2025; The Mysterious 'Bigfoot' That Horrified Troops In The Vietnam War by Russell, 2024; and Moore, 2024, My uncle and the rock apes of Vietnam, and Rock Apes: How Vietnam’s ‘Rock Apes’ Confounded American GIs by Hemmings, 2019.
Surprisingly all of these articles are relatively recent. Didn't anyone write about them in the '60s or '70s?
Apparently they did, but not in the way you would expect. The rock apes were Vietcong (enemy soldiers) named so because instead of calling them "guerrillas" they were refered to as "gorillas" (a pun!) see this source. However, an American Sergeant named James Austin while describing the wild jungle animals, mentioned "Rock apes that throw rocks at you...."
These bipedal "apes" got their name because they threw stones at the American GIs. They were named Batutut or Người Rừng (forest men) by the Vietcong troops or North Vietnamese Army (NVAs).
An article published in 2025 mentions an incident that took place in 1968, when US Marines were attacked by rock-throwing apes in Da Nang at a place called Monkey Mountain. In 1969, close to the city of Hue, a group of male apes confronted soldiers, who had to fire shots to scare them away. It also has some other anecdotical evidence.
I found an even older reference (Coleman, 1999, see p. 180) that states that in 1974, shortly before the end of the war, a NVA General named Hoang Minh Tha sent a group of ment ot hunt one of these creatures, apparently it included three scientists named Vo Quy and Le Vu Khoi (Hanoi University) and Hoang Xuan Chinh (Hanoi Institute of Archaeology). The general was a real person (born in 1921, died 2008) (source) and the scholars were also mentioned in the Research on Wildmen in Vietnam paper.
As a closing remark, I leave this link to an article written in Vietnamese (thankfully Google translated it for me): In a Place in the Truong Son Mountains by Tran Hoai Thu, 2015, which describes the war, and an expedition by the author to the area where Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia meet, the home of these creatures.
We could imagine that any of the local native monkeys that live in Vietnam could explain the "rock apes" without having to invoke an extant prehistoric hominin. For instance, there are Tonkin snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus avunculus) and several types of gibbons (Nomascus) in Vietnam.
I also want to point out that the jungles of this region have sheltered large mammals that only recently were discovered by science: the Saola (Pseudoryx nghetinhensis) in 1992 a cow-antelope-like being, the Giant Muntjac (Muntiacus vuquangensis) in 1994, a deer; and the Laotian Rock Rat, a rodent, in 2005 (Laonastes aenigmamus). Therefore, they could also be the hideout of intelligent hominins.
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