Almas (cryptozoology)
Almas (Mongolian for wild man), is a cryptid hair-covered (except for hands and face) hominid species said to live in the Pamir Mountains, and the Altai mountains of southern Mongolia, as recently as the 1970s.British anthropologist Myra Shackley, in Still Living? (ISBN 0500012989), documents Ivan Ivlov's 1963 observation of a family of Almas. Ivlov's driver also saw them. Ivlov, a pediatrician, decided to interview the children who were also his patients, and discovered that many of them had also seen the Almas. Neither the Mongol children nor the Almas children were afraid of each other (Shackley p. 91).
Hans Schildtberger's 1430 journal of his involuntary travels to Mongolia, as a prisoner of the Mongols, documents his personal observation of these creatures, as well as Przewalski horses (Manuscript in the Munich municipal library, Sign. 1603, Bl. 210).
Nicolai Przewalski also observed wildmen in Mongolia 1871 (Shackley p. 94). Almas are part of the Mongolian and Tibetan apothecary's materia medica, documented along with thousands of other animals and plants, which live today.
Shackley has speculated that the Almas are a remnant population of Neanderthalss.