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Zana

The Legend:

In the mid-eighteenth century, hunters in the Ochamchir region of Georgia (a Province of Russia on the edge of the Black sea) captured a 'wild woman' who had ape-like features, a massive bosom, thick arms, legs, and fingers, and was covered with hair. This 'wild woman', named Zana by her captors, was so violent at first that she had to spend many years in a cage with food being tossed to her. Eventually, she was domesticated and would perform simple tasks, like grinding corn. She had an incredible endurance against cold, and couldn't stand to be in a heated room.

She enjoyed gorging herself on grapes from the vine, and also had a weakness for wines, often drinking so heavily she would sleep for hours. As Colin Wilson points out in The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries, this is likely how she became the mother of many children to different fathers. These children usually died when she tried to wash them in the freezing river, a mistake that is understandible if she expected the children to have her own resistance to cold; but being half Homo sapiens, they just froze. The villagers just started to take her children away from her and raise them as their own; unlike their mother, the children developed the ability to communicate as well as any other villager.

Zana died in the village about 1890; the youngest of her children died in 1954. Her story was researched by Professor Porchnev who interviewed many old people (one as old as a hundred and five) who remembered Zana, as well as two of her grandchildren. the grandchildren had dark skin and a Negroid look, and the grandson, named Shalikula, had jaws so powerful that he could lift a chair with a man sitting in it.