Rock Apes

 

When you think Rock Ape your mind instantly goes to the RAF Regiment, but not so fast. Rock Apes, Batatuts or Nguoi Rung, people of the forest, are evidently a form of apelike, bipedal cryptid living in the jungles of far east Asia. Travelling in packs, the apemen would attack US patrols along the Cambodia/Laos border. A veteran states:

Rock apes are the real thing. I saw a band of them up on "Carlie Ridge" in Quang Nam Province in the spring of 1970. It was nightfall and I saw them through a Starlite scope. 10-15 of them headed away from us up a steep incline. They weren't VC because they walked as a pack side by side in the jungle and not in a military type line. They all looked to be very broad bodied and up to 5 ft tall.

 

He was lucky, Nguoi Rung were allegedly known to hurl rocks at people invading their territory and attack potential aggressors with utter, apelike ferocity. There were apparently so many sightings towards the end of the war that the Communist Vietnamese Party sent scientists to investigate.

One, Dr. Vo Quy from Hanoi, discovered footprints and made a cast of the imprint, which was wider than a human foot and too big for an ape. Another expert, Tran Hong Viet, discovered similar prints in 1982, in remote jungle.

Witnesses report that Rock Apes grow up to 5' in height, are covered with brown fur, broad shouldered and show no fear, or very little, of humans. It's suggested their remote location accounts for this; having never met the ferocity of Homo Sapiens, the apemen attacked in ignorance. Or, possibly, they regarded seemingly weaker humans as easy prey.

Regardless, some of the few people who read this mind blog have been to those jungles. Have you seen or heard of these creatures? There's plenty of evidence that they're there, and I feel that they're possibly living fossils, like Coelacanths but hominins, remnants of our evolutionary tree, alive today. Or not.

Your Call,

LSP

The Age Of Man

 

It's commonly accepted that modern man, Homo Sapiens, evolved in Africa in a Kenyan garden of Eden around 350,000 BC (Pleistocene) and spread out from there, eventually reaching Europe around 40,000 BC, and the America's some 30,000 years later across the Bering Strait land bridge.

Typical

All well and good, and the schema runs something like this: Ancient apes evolve into smarter apes, who evolve into still smarter apes, until over millions of years you get apelike semi-humans, hominins. Then, at last, in the middle Pleistocene, Homo Sapiens arrives, following on from Homo Erectus. The latter being the "missing link" between us and the ape people of prehistory.

Eoliths, which you can see are clearly not shaped in any way at all

It sounds good, but what if stone tools were found dating to a far earlier period in the earth's history, say the Miocene (23-5 million years BC), in the earth's Tertiary? What's more, tools which were indistinguishable from their counterparts in East Africa (Olduvai) in the Pleistocene some million years later. Or, for that matter, from stone tools made by modern humans, in Africa and elsewhere.

Yet More Ancient Stone

Without getting down in the weeds in an admittedly complex and fractious subject, what if Homo Sapiens is far older than currently thought, and existed with hominins for many hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps interbreeding, as we apparently did with Neanderthals? What then.

Out of Africa?

All the history books would have to be rewritten, for a start, and dates pushed back much further. More seriously, the process and theory of evolution itself would come under question. As opposed to something gradual, taking place in tiny increments over thousands of years, we'd be faced by the sudden emergence of rational man at a very early date. 

Ahem

Gradualism to catastrophism? Perhaps. Maybe the same impetus that drove the explosion of megafauna after the cataclysmic demise of the dinosaurs drove the remarkable rise of our early human cousins and humanity itself. Then again, can intelligence evolve into reason? C.S. Lewis, famously, says no, the two are qualitatively different.

Hmmmmm

In the meanwhile, here at the Compound, sweet and sour pork's on the menu.

Bifacial Chipped Flint Forever,

LSP