Biologist Wang Zelin and the Shot Female Wildman (Yeren) on the Baoji to Tianshui Road, 1940

The yeren, or "wildman", has a long history in Chinese writing. In 1788 Yuan Mei recorded a female "hairy man" from Shaanxi. But the modern legend took shape during the "wildman fever" of the late 1970s and 1980s. That was when Wang Zelin's story reached print.

Wang was from Xuzhou. According to Myra Shackley, he was "a graduate of the Faculty of Biology at North-western University, Chicago" who "returned to China at the start of the Second World War." By 1940 he was working for the Yellow River Water Conservancy Commission, which Shackley calls the Yellow River Irrigation Committee.

September or October 1940. Wang was travelling with colleagues from Baoji, in Shaanxi, towards Tianshui, in Gansu. They heard gunshots, and near Jiangluo the vehicle stopped. A crowd of local people stood around a body. The "wildman" had just been shot dead and laid on the roadside.

It was lying face down. The more inquisitive passengers turned it over to have a better look. It was a female. Shackley's account describes "a mother with a large pair of breasts, the nipples being very red as if it had recently given birth." The body was still supple.

Wang put its height at about 2 metres, with shoulders some 80 to 90 cm wide. Thick, dense hair covered it, dark reddish black in one Chinese version, greyish red or grayish brown in English ones. Head hair hung long to the shoulders. The narrow face had deep-set eyes, jutting cheekbones and protruding lips, and the palms and soles were hairless. The feet were over one chi long, about 33 cm, with toes pointing forward.

The villagers had more to tell. The creature had lived in the area for about a month. It climbed mountains with ease. It had no language, only howls. One popular retelling adds that the hunters planned to take the body to the county government, though nothing confirms they did.

Wang later told the story to his colleague Mao Guangnian. It started Mao's own interest in the yeren, and he went on to champion research into the creature. The historian Sigrid Schmalzer records the link in The People's Peking Man. The fullest Chinese version appeared in the journal of the China Wildman Research Society, introduced with the words "according to recollection."

Shackley took the case seriously. Wang's biology training, she argued, "seems to rule out any possibility that the creature was a bear, or anything else already known to science." Zhou Guoxing of the Beijing Museum of Natural History listed the case too, but concluded that wildmen do not exist. In his fieldwork, people who claimed to have killed wildmen "all confirmed that the 'Wild Men' they killed were bears." He did not single out this case, and his work is cited for the Asian black bear as an explanation of yeren sightings in general.

Sceptics can point to the gaps. No body, hair, photograph or official record survives. The account reached print some 40 years after the event. Versions differ on the hair colour, and on whether Wang rode a bus or a car.

Even so, the roadside corpse of 1940 became the standard earliest 20th-century yeren case witnessed by a scientist. It is often paired with the geologist Fan Jingquan's report of a female and her young near Baoji in the early 1950s. Later came the Shennongjia sightings of 1976 and 1977, and an expedition by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.