T. Peter Park
Fri, 10 Sep 2004 09:20:20 -0700
Friends, Forteans, Listmates!
The late Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) was noted for three
series of imaginative stories and novels: the "Tarzan of the Apes" tales
set in an imaginary "Darkest Africa"; the "Barsoom" books set on an
imaginary Mars inspired by Percival Lowell's speculations about the
Martian canals; and the "Pellucidar" stories set inside a hollow Earth.
Few people realize it, but his Tarzan books are a treasure-trove of
admittedly fictional cryptozoological speculation about relict
populations of dinosaurs, sabre-tooth tigers, and ape/human "missing
links" surviving in 20th century Africa. However, the real-life
cryptozoology of recent decades suggests that some of Burroughs'
fictional cryptids may not have been so completely off the mark after all.
Tarzan, we may recall, was an English nobleman, Lord Greystoke,
orphaned as a baby in West Africa (_Tarzan of the Apes_, 1912). Like
ancient Rome's Romulus and Remus and Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli with their
wolf foster-mothers, he was adopted and brought up by a tribe of "Gray
Apes" unknown to mainstream primatologists. The "Gray Apes" speak a
rudimentary language also understood by most other denizens of the
jungle throughout Africa. As a boy reading the Tarzan books I myself
used to visualize the "Gray Apes" as a race of gorillas with gray
instead of black hair. However, they might also be seen as an
interesting early 20th century amateur anticipation of what later 20th
and (21st) century palaeontologists have written about the
Australopithecines or _Homo habilis_! As Loren Coleman and Patrick
Huyghe pointed out in their _Field Guide to Bigfoot, Yeti, and Other
Mystery Primates Worldwide_ (New York: Avon Books, 1999), 20th century
Africa has abounded with rumors of small hairy bipeds, manlike but
covered with thick black or red fur, known by a variety of local names
like _séhité_, _agogwe_, and _kakundakári_. Cryptozoologist Bernard
Heuvelmans thought some of these African "little people" reports might
be relict populations of Australopithecines (Coleman and Huyghe, _Field
Guide to Bigfoot, Yeti..._, pp. 31, 100). So, Tarzan was in effect a
_Homo sapiens_ child taken in by a _séhité_ (to use their local West
African name) band!
In _The Return of Tarzan_ (1913) and _Tarzan and the Jewels of
Opar_ (1916), Tarzan discovered and explored Opar, a ruined ancient
Atlantean gold-mining colony in what is now Uganda, Rwanda, or Burundi
near the Ruwenzori ("Mountains of the Moon") range. The Oparians
guarding the ancient Atlantean treasure-trove are "bestial" and
"frightful" in appearance, as a result of millennia of interbreeding
with the "apes" or "First Men"-i.e., with the _agogwe_ or _kakundakári_,
as the _séhité_ are called respectively in East and Central Africa! The
Atlanteans' hybridization with the "First Men" is phenotypically
sex-linked. Oparian. women (like their beautiful queen La) look
perfectly human, while Oparian men are short, squat, hairy, bow-legged,
and beetling-browed, what we might call "Neanderthaloid," in appearance.
In _Tarzan the Terrible_ (1921), Burroughs transposed Arthur
Conan Doyle's dinosaur-infested South American _Lost World_ to a Central
African setting. Searching for Jane, abducted by German troops from
German East Africa (now Tanzania) during World War I, Tarzan discovered
the Lost Land of Pal-ul-Don, isolated by deserts and swamps from the
outside world in what is now southern Zaire or northwestern Angola.
There, he encountered the Triceratops-like dinosaurian "gryf,"
saber-tooth tigers, and no less than three races of "Pithecanthropi"with
prehensile monkey-like tails and thumb-like opposable big toes.
Evidently, Burroughs was unaware-or deliberately ignored-that
prehistoric hominids did not have tails, any more than modern anthropoid
apes do. The Pal-ul-Don "Pithecanthropi" include the city-dwelling,
white-skinned, hairless (except for the tops of their heads) Ho-Don
("White Men") on a roughly Mayan or Inca cultural level, the somewhat
more primitive cliff-dwelling Waz-Don ("Black Men") all covered with
ape-like black hair, and the gigantic, red- or brown-furred, rather
Bigfoot- or Yeti-like Tor-o-Don ("Beast-Like Men"), whose favorite
pastime is raping Ho-Don and Waz-Don women during their rutting season.
The otherwise quite subhuman Tor-o-Don have learned to domesticate the
"gryf," ferocious three-horned gigantic carnivorous descendants of the
herbivorous Triceratops of the Cretaceous. Besides pithecanthropi and
dinosaurs, Pal-ul-Don (the "Land of Men") is also the home of the
"jato," saber-toothed tigers.
In populating Pal-ul-Don with the Triceratops-like "gryf,"
Burroughs probably had little or no inkling in 1921 that real-life
modern Africa is the home of persistent surviving dinosaur rumors.
However, the swamp-dwelling _mokele-mbembe_, _chimiset_, or _nyamala_ of
West African cryptid reports is a long-necked creature with a long tail
and small head generally described as looking like a small Brontosaurus.
The _mokele-mbembe_ does not seem at all Ceratopsian, not in the least
like a dinosaurian rhinoceros, and thus is a ftr cry from Burroughs'
"gryf." Yet, it's still interesting that Burroughs made Africa the home
of living dinosaurs in our time.
In _Tarzan and the Ant Men_ (1924), Burroughs described another
Central African "Lost World," hidden behind an impenetrable thorn forest
and inhabited by two human or near-human lost races. The open plains of
central "Minuni" are the home of the "Ant Men," 18-inch-tall
white-skinned ultra-pygmies inhabiting enormous stone dome-cities. In
the forested outskirts of Minuni lurk the speechless Neanderthal-like
"Alali" with ferociously dominant women and abjectly timid men, both
sexes communicating exclusively through manual sign language. In 1924,
of course, it was not yet considered "politically incorrect" to consider
the Alali "monstrous regimen of women" as damnably unnatural, as
Burroughs portrayed it! Burroughs had Tarzan teach the downtrodden Alali
menfolk to make and use spears, bows, and arrows far more effective than
the women's clubs and sling-thrown pebbles, and to dominate their
womenfolk in "natural" fashion! In the next-to-the-last chapter, Tarzan
approvingly observed a "post-revolution" Alali band with healthily
dominant men and joyfully submissive women!
With his 18-inch-tall "Ant Men," Burroughs anticipated more
recent rumors of supposed ultra-pygmies only 2 or 3 feet tall, like the
_alux_ of Yucatán, the Yushe along Peru's Curanja River, and Hawaii's
_menehune_, as well as reports of encounters with "Mini-Men" only 6 to
18 inches tall. Except for his portrayal of bizarrely reversed sex
rôles, likewise, Burroughs unwittingly anticipated real-life modern
reports of alleged Neanderthal-like hominids with his Alali (see Coleman
and Huyghe,_Field Guide to Bigfoot, Yeti..._ , pp. 23-26, 52-53, 90-911,
118-119 on modern "Neanderthaloids" from North America, Europe, Central
Asia, and China). By making the Alali speechless, likewise, Burroughs
unwittingly anticipated recent palaeontological arguments over whether
or not the Neanderthals could speak or use language!
. Otherwise, Burroughs filled "Darkest Africa" (as Westerners
still pictured it in the 1920's and 1930"s) with lost cities of white
men on a Bronze Age Near Eastern, pre-Columbian Mexican, or Graeco-Roman
cultural level. In _Tarzan and the City of Gold_ (1933), he portrayed
"Athne" and "Cathne," the perpetually warring "City of Ivory" and "City
of Gold" in southwestern Ethiopia or northernmost Kenya, with a vaguely
Graeco-Roman culture and somewhat Greek-sounding names (Gemnon, Tomos,
Pindes, Thudos, Phordos, Althides, Xerstle, Alextar, Nemone, Doria,
etc.) In _Tarzan the Untamed_ (1920), Tarzan visited "Xuja," a city of
madmen and mental defectives of apparently ancient Near Eastern
ancestry. _Tarzan and the Lost Empire_ (1929) brought Tarzan to two
perpetually warring cities of descendants of lost Roman legionnaires,
"Castrum Mare" and "Castra Sanguinarius" (Burroughs had an atrocious
sense of Latin case, gender, number, and grammatical agreement!)
_Tarzan and the Forbidden City_ (1938) brought him to a colony of
ancient Egyptians with a sophisticated hydraulic technology in an
underwater city in a central African lake. _Tarzan, the Lord of the
Jungle_ (1928) depicted his visit to two perpetually warring (as usual)
cities of mediaeval English crusaders in Ethiopia, speaking
bastard-Shakespearian English ("Zounds! Forsooth, methinks!") and
preserving the jousts-and-tournaments knightly culture of Richard the
Lion-Hearted's day.
Best regards,
T. Peter
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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