Mapinguari

The issue of South America’s unknown primate population is confused by credible reports of giant Bigfoot-like beasts from the Andes, the Ucu, as well as by accounts of Giant Monkeys. Even so, a number of sightings as well as other evidence keep the question of human-sized and smaller ape-like creatures very much alive in the various regions of the continent. Some are called Mapinguary, a term that merges with another local moniker, Didi.

The Didi is a site-specific name for a red-haired bulky anthropoid restricted to a narrow strip of northwestern South America. It appears to be shorter than the Mapinguary of Brazil, but both are unknown hominoids, and both sometimes are described as having red fur. For hundreds of years, native peoples in the Guyanese montane forests from the highlands of Brazil over through Suriname and Guyana have reported encounters with little hooting creatures they call didi, dru-di-di, or didi-aguiri. Once they had penetrated these areas, Westerners heard and recorded comparable accounts. In the course of the European discovery of British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1596-97, Sir Walter Raleigh and Laurence Keymis recorded rumors of the creatures. In 1769, Dr. Edward Bancroft, Benjamin Franklin’s friend and later a British spy in Paris, took note of stories of what he assumed were five-foot-tall apes with short black hair.

In 1910, the resident magistrate of British Guiana, a man named Haines, saw two Didis along the Konowaruk, near the junction of the Potato River. Eight years later the guide Miegam and three others were up the Berbice River, a little beyond Mambaca (in what was then British Guiana), when they spotted two figures they first took to be men on a beach. Soon, however, they “were staggered to find that the footprints were apes’, not men’s.” The Didi and Mapinguary, it seems, have similar feet, more anthropoid than human. Both also reportedly emit a similar range of whistles and sounds.

Typically, the Mapinguary is described in native traditions throughout southern Brazil as a mostly red-haired, sloping, bipedal, long-armed giant ape associated with unique “bottle” footprints. Most cryptozoologists, including Bernard Heuvelmans, Ivan T. Sanderson, and Loren Coleman, have written of the Mapinguary as a form of primate. But biologist David Oren told The New York Times in 1994 that Amazonians were in fact seeing supposedly extinct medium-sized giant Ground Sloths. Though some ostensible Mapinguary sightings may be of such an animal, others clearly are not. Mark A. Hall has written, “The popular discussions of David Oren’s research have done nothing to clear up the picture [regarding Mapinguary], They may have only confused the issue all the more for the time being.”

Likewise, Sanderson found the Didi a confusing creature to classify. He wondered if it was a regional version of the Mapinguary. But the Didi are smaller and usually darker than the Brazilian rainforest-dwelling Mapinguary. So we are left with questions. Are the Didi a small, dark, localized montane population of apes—or are they Proto-Pygmies?

SOURCE:

The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters,Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature
Written by Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark – Copyright 1999 Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark