Yeren

The best sceptic on the yeren is the scientist the Academy of Sciences sent to find it. Zhou Guoxing 周国兴 spent half a century on the case and, in 2012, published the inventory of what the physical evidence turned out to be. It is a demolition carried out almost entirely by its own author. The hair that Yin Hongfa of Qiaoshang commune, Fang County, said he tore from a wild man he fought off with a sickle on 1 May 1974 was identified by the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences as the nape hair of a Chinese serow (Capricornis milneedwardsii); when the zoologist Feng Zuojian 冯祚建 went back to see Yin years later, Yin admitted he had invented the whole fight to frighten children into coming home before dark. The famous bright red Shennongjia hair — the colour of the flag, as people kept saying — was sent twice to laboratories in the United States and came back both times as dyed human hair; under a lens the shafts still hold melanin where the dye did not take. Seven long hairs collected in 2003 and passed to the cameraman Jiang Yong went to the School of Wildlife Resources of Northeast Forestry University in Harbin, which identified a goral (Naemorhedus). Hair from Leigong Mountain in Guizhou turned out to be wild boar mane. A 1.4-metre bundle of black, silky "hair" from Xiaodangyang village was a fungus, the local "tree hair" (Pterula umbrinella). A preserved "wild man's foot" brought from Henan in 1982 and passed down for generations was the right hind paw of an Asian black bear (Ursus thibetanus); Zhou issued the identification in writing on the letterhead of the Beijing Museum of Natural History. The most consequential case was the pair of hands and feet from Jiulong Mountain in Zhejiang. On the afternoon of 23 May 1957 a black-haired, man-like animal came at a twelve-year-old cowherd, Wang Congmei 王聪美, near Zhuantang village; her mother, Xu Fudi 徐福娣, and others killed it in the mud of a paddy field, the villagers ate it, and a biology teacher, Zhou Shousong, preserved the paws. They resurfaced in October 1980 and were briefly world news as the first physical proof of the Chinese wild man. Zhou Guoxing measured them, X-rayed the bones and examined the fingerprints, palm prints and hair, and published the result in Cryptozoology in 1984: a large terrestrial macaque, about 1.2 m tall and 25–30 kg. A "hairy man" bought at high price in Hunan in 1985 was an ordinary macaque too. The skulls of the "monkey boys" offered as human–yeren hybrids belonged to people with spinocerebellar ataxia, whose small braincase, low forehead and heavy brow ridges superficially resemble those of archaic hominids. As for the footprints, Zhou's explanation is mechanical: a bear places its hind foot over the print of its fore foot, and the merged track, weathered and then cast in plaster, easily exceeds forty centimetres; in a 2008 experiment at Liuzhou Zoo a brown bear's overlapping prints came out far larger than Zhou's own size-44 shoe. Worse, he found that casts made during the 1977 expedition itself differed markedly from the prints examined on the ground — "artificially altered during the process of production". In 2012 Zhou put the odds that a relict hominoid exists in China at five per cent. The other camp deserves its own names rather than a shrug. Liu Minzhuang 刘民壮 and Cao Hanmin 曹汉民, both of East China Normal University, argued that hair was the strongest indirect evidence and worked out how to distinguish modern human hair from other primates' by its submicroscopic structure; Yuan Zhenxin 袁振新 and Huang Wanpo reported that the hairs picked up in 1976 at Gong Yulan's sighting site in Fang County differed sharply from brown and black bear and lay closer to the primates. But the two working scientists interviewed on the point by the Academy of Social Sciences' newspaper in 2013 were candid about the limits: Feng Zuojian noted that 1980s identifications were morphological because that was all the technology allowed, and Liu Jinyi 刘金毅, curator of the IVPP specimen collection, explained that DNA identification works by exclusion and that no yeren sequence exists in any database to compare against. As of this review (August 2026) no published genetic analysis has ever assigned Shennongjia material to an unknown primate. The zoology is not exotic. The World Heritage citation for the site lists the Asian black bear, the Chinese goral and the Chinese serow — precisely the animals Zhou kept finding at the end of the hair samples — and it records 1,550 golden snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus roxellana) inside the property, a population that is the most endangered of China's three subspecies and occurs nowhere else. Chen Renlin's observation is the one worth keeping: a golden monkey's coat looks gold up close and red at a distance, and grouping the witness statements loosely, red covers more than eighty per cent of them. The American anthropologist Frank E. Poirier, who came to Hubei to investigate, found that bears, stump-tailed macaques and golden monkeys were all called "yeren" locally — and villagers who had never seen a European reported him. And the expedition found something. Wang Shancai, who took part in all three campaigns and still believes in the animal, said it twice for the record, in 2010 and in 2013: in a year of fieldwork the 1977 expedition obtained no objective evidence of the yeren — apart from the discovery of the golden monkey. The scepticism is also institutional and dated. The ornithologist Tang Zhaozi 唐兆子 argued during the 1977 expedition that no ape could have freed its hands in terrain that steep. Hu Hongxing 胡鸿兴, zoologist at Wuhan University, points out that thirty years produced not a body, not a bone. The science writer Fang Zhouzi 方舟子 objects to public money going into it at all. In 2007, when forty-six specialists petitioned to restart the search, the State Forestry Administration and the Hubei forestry department turned them down. And in 2014 the Shennongjia reserve's own research institute examined a collector's "fossilised yeren footprint" and reported an ordinary water-worn siliceous pebble. Which leaves the economics, and they are not subtle. In June 2025 the Shennongjia scenic area advertised for sixteen "yeren" performers at 500 yuan a day, to roam the six main scenic spots in costume: strictly forbidden to speak in front of visitors, communication limited to grunts, expected to accept food from tourists, candidates who like eating raw preferred. Some ten thousand people joined the recruiting groups. The year before, the same operation had hired three "nature observers" at 6,000 yuan a month, one requirement being "in good shape, runs fast if you meet a yeren". The district's own intangible-heritage office, meanwhile, has entered the yeren legend on the municipal register as folk literature — which is, in the end, an official and rather elegant verdict.