DALE DRINNON: Celebes Macaques in New Guinea?

A photo found on a routine Yahoo (Flicker) photosearch turned up this carved wood face labelled 'Possibly a Primate?' and originating in Papua New Guinea. Dr Karl Shuker's blog recently reported on a 'New Guinea Bigfoot' and he alluded to further reports he had heard of 'Hairy Dwarfs' in the area.

On an earlier blog posting I had made the suggestion that most if not all of these 'Hairy Dwarfs' in Oceana were Celebes apes (which are large tail-less macaque monkeys) that were known to have been artificially moved about in pre-colonial times for cultic purposes (Ivan T. Sanderson, The Monkey Kingdom)

One of the places where they were suspected to have been artificially introduced was Irian Jaya, Western (Indonesian) New Guinea. They are quite large monkeys and they can attain the size and general appearance of small chimpanzees.