DALE DRINNON: Pugnoses Part 2: On the Ice

There have been many commentators on the 'Iceman' body examined and described by Ivan Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans. Most of the expressed opinions on the matter made by others are completely worthless.

There have been claims by certain persons that they have manufactured the model body that was used in the Iceman exhibit. These are false claims. Ordinarily the claimants will identify features that the body examined by Sanderson and Heuvelmans did NOT have, and in fact the claims usually cite features of the second iceman exhibit and that one definitely did not match the first one, most especially in the face. I have seen Heuvelmans's original photographs in Sanderson's files and I could see that the two icemen as exhibited did not match and could not both be the same model (as Napier alleges in his book Bigfoot) Furthermore, the head has a distinctly Neanderthaloid facial skeleton. An allegation made by the Balls states that the body they manufactured was based on a Cro-Magnon man: there is no way that they could have been looking at a Cro-Magnon body and put distinctively Neanderthal characteristics on it. If they knew enough to make such an accurate depiction, they would most certainly have known the difference.

Similarly, the facial skeleton is definitely NOT characteristic of Homo erectus: Neanderthal browridges were arched and erectus' browridges ran across the face in a straight horizontal line. The shape of the eye sockets alone tells the tale, and several prominent Cryptozoologists that have pronounced the body to belong to the species Homo erectus have merely demonstrated that they do not have enough technical knowledge to make the distinction.

One of these Cryptozoologists is Mark Hall. Mark Hall did in fact send me material on the so-called "Homo gardarensis" skull found in Greenland and dating from the Viking age.

It is also clearly a primitive hominid of very large size, and not a modern human with acromegaly as has been alleged.

This one skull pretty much clinches the matter entirely.




As far as the Iceman goes, I have read Heuvelmans's book on it, which has been written in French but never published in English. It is a very impressive and convincing book and I reproduce several tables and illustrations from it. Before I saw the copy Heuvelmans and I had exchanged letters on the subject, and he graciously sent me copies of articles about it: he also put me in touch with Loofs-Wissowa, and I communicated with the latter over the phone a few times. I had told Heuvelmans that even going by Sanderson's drawings, I could tell that he (Heuvelmans) had been correct in his identification but Sanderson himself had missed several telling signs. I also told him that what he called Homo pongiodes could not be considered either an unknown species nor an unknown animal, to which he quite readily agreed.

I had made up some transparencies for lectures back in the late 1980s and on them I had cut-out portions of Sanderson's Iceman drawing and Neanderthal fossil material. I include scans of those transparencies here. In the original, I could take the Iceman face or hand and lay the transparency over the corresponding Neanderthal part and the set would match up practically perfectly.

The Neanderthal hand skeleton, which matches the Iceman's hand, is also close to the Pangboche hand. In Ivan Sanderson's book Abominable Snowmen: Legend come to life, he states that the bony structure of the Pangboche hand was identified as possibly Neanderthaloid by Ostman Hill and definitely o by Russian experts. That constitutes an exact scientific classification of identity by separate assessments. There are also other such hands reported in Central Asia, some of them retaining the hairy covering (red being stated in one such case). That too goes on to confirm the identity.
It is also pretty certain that the Central Asian Almas is anatomically close to Neanderthals. I include my comparisons for a Neanderthal (hairless body) reconstruction with a magazine illustration representing Caucasian sightings (that from Sanderson's files) and another comparing an old Neanderthal head restoration, with something of a pug nose also, to a reconstruction of the Almas (marked "A". the latter was compiled from several "Blobsquatxch" photos. The region of the back of the neck looks different but that would be because the live Almas had thick hair back there.

Any one of these things would be enough. Frankly, once you have the Gardar skull you do not need to say the Iceman was genuine. Once you have established that the Pangboch hand has a Neanderthaloid anatomy, you do not even need the Gardar skull.. And in fact once you have DNA samples from hairs that consistently fall into the Neanderthal genetic range, you do not need anything else.

I do not claim to have solved the mystery. All I am doing is pointing out that the mystery was already solved years ago.

And kindly allow me to repeat my earlier statement: it is a recognised school of thought that Neanderthals are only a subspecies of Homo sapiens. That does not have to be currently popular among theorists in order for the term Homo sapiens neanderhalensis to still be on the books and still be in use. Therefore if these creatures really are Neanderthals, it automatically follows that they are H. sapiens. And you cannot call your own species unknown. The default assumption in the case of all of these hairy Wildmen running around must be that they are all actually HUMAN.

[Note: There has been some insinuation that the Iceman could not have been a real body because human bodies would not be on display in a sideshow exhibit. That was an incorrect assumption: for example, the body of poor Julia Pastrana wound up as a sideshow exhibit, alongside her stuffed and mounted baby. It does sound like the reason the original body of the Iceman was swapped for a fabricated model is that the FBI was about to look into the matter, and evidently the real owner - whoever that might have been - had a strong disliking for being investigated by the FBI]

There are also such things as large human teeth ascribed to the Eastern Bigfoot that match the Neanderthaloid taurodont pattern, and other alleged remains ranging from hair samples that match each other and fall in the Neanderthal range up to whole alleged skeletons, as well as several purported examples.