There are so many stories of Bigfoot and sasquatch allegedly coming near civilization and yet somehow eluding capture, but what if the creature really was captured and taken into civilization either temporarily or permanently in order to study its behavior and biology? If it happened, it would surely be the first time, according to some researchers. Those researchers may, however, be mistaken if the story of Zana of Russia turns out to be true.
There is no shortage of stories about people who were abandoned in their lives by their parents and who were instead raised by a pack of wild animals. Animals that have raised children range everywhere from wolves to apes, but there is one story of a woman who may or may not have been raised by animals but rather seemed to be one herself. In the Ochamchir region of Russia’s Georgia there is a tale that in the 1850s a group of hunters came across something that would shatter modern day conceptions of what humanity was if it were repeated and documented thoroughly. As they were hunting, they came across a young woman that would have looked to many members of modern society like a Neanderthal. The woman was large, broad shouldered, and even in the freezing wilderness of Russia didn’t require any sort of clothing to protect her from the elements. She was taken from the wilderness and to the small village nearby where she was studied and slowly integrated into society.
For several years the woman worked grinding corn and slowly learning how to be within the village. For years she avoided the interiors of buildings as their warmth made her clearly uncomfortable. As time wore on she eventually became more accepted within the village and even gave birth to many children. But Zana’s clear ability to withstand the elements did not translate well to her children who seemed far more like contemporary humans than she. Eventually most of them were taken from her and raised by caring families in the village after one of them died due to hypothermia.
Many accounts of the woman suggest she was quite similar to the modern day sasquatch in many respects, even sharing the large hair covered feet. Her children, on the other hand were entirely human looking. By the time those children grew to adulthood and gave birth to a new generation there was no way of telling they had been descended from Zana the wild woman. Little is known of Zana’s later years in the village, and many find it difficult to discover where she could have gone or where she could have come from. Most people captured from the wild exhibit signs that they were merely separated from civilization and raised by animals. Zana, as all accounts suggest, must have been herself in the wild all her life. Rumors since her discovery have spread through the region that in the area around the Ochamchir region there must (or must have been) a lost tribe of Neanderthals still living and completely uncontacted by civilization.