Zana of Tkhina, the abnauayu wild woman of Abkhazia

Long before Bigfoot, the Caucasus had its own wild people. In Abkhaz tradition the abnauayu was the wild man or wild woman of the forest. Elsewhere the figure is called the almasty. In the mid-19th century Abkhazia was part of the Russian Empire. It also had a trade in African slaves, banned in 1858 but poorly enforced.

The 1850s, most accounts say. Hunters took a woman from the forest, perhaps near Mount Zaadan, perhaps on the Ochamchire or Adjara coast. She passed from Prince D. M. Achba to his vassal Chelokua, then to the nobleman Edgi Genaba. He brought her to his estate at Tkhina, on the Mokva River, 78 km from Sukhumi. For about three years she was kept in an enclosure, then slowly given more freedom.

Dmitri Bayanov later retold the village's memories. She was very tall, about 6 ft 6 in. Massive and broad, with long, thick fingers. Her skin was dark. Reddish hair covered her body, except her face, feet and palms. Her eyes were reddish. Her teeth could crack the hardest walnuts. She never learned a word of Abkhaz, but she answered to her name.

She slept outside in a hole she dug herself, even in winter. She lay in cool pools with the water buffalo. She swam the Mokva even in high flood. People said she outran horses.

She was made to grind grain and fetch water and firewood. She bore children to local men under coercive circumstances. At least four survived, among them Khwit. Zana died around the 1880s.

In 1962 the Moscow biologist Alexander Mashkovtsev and Boris Porshnev collected the stories in Tkhina. Porshnev saw a surviving Neanderthal. With Bernard Heuvelmans he made that case in print in 1974. In 1971 Khwit's skull was exhumed. Moscow anthropologists noted very large cheekbones and jaw.

In 1975 an Academy of Sciences excavation found a woman buried on her side, without a coffin, with a mirror. The skull was labelled Tkhina-75. At the time it was rejected as Zana. In 1992 the other remains, held at the Sukhumi Museum, burned during the war. Only the two skulls in Moscow survived.

In 2013 Bryan Sykes of Oxford tested a tooth from Khwit's skull and saliva from six descendants for Channel 4's Bigfoot Files. The result was "100% fully sub-Saharan African." His "most obvious solution" was an Ottoman-era slave. In 2021 a team including Margaryan and Igor Burtsev sequenced both skulls. Tkhina-75 was Zana, the mother of Khwit. Her ancestry traced to present-day East Africa. The authors floated congenital generalized hypertrichosis as a possible partial explanation, a hypothesis rather than a diagnosis.

No hoax was ever alleged. The people were real, and so were the bones. The debate is over what the village saw. Jason Colavito argued that the apelike portrait was written down more than a century later, in an age that routinely described Black Africans that way. The 2021 authors framed their work as showing how 19th-century prejudice helped create cryptid myths. Zana remains the founding specimen of the almasty legend. She was also, the genomes suggest, an African woman held captive for decades.