Mysterious Creatures : A Guide to Cryptozoology

News,” Cryptozoology Review 4, no. 1 (Summer
2000): 8.
Yahoo
WILDMAN of Australia. Usually equated with
the YOWIE, the term that displaced it in the
1970s, though Graham Joyner considers Yahoo
to be a more authentic name and discounts latetwentieth-century
reports.
Etymology: Australian word for “devil” or “evil
spirit,” according to James Holman. In the
Snowy Mountains region of Victoria, the Aborigines
refer to a songbird, the Gray-crowned
babbler (Pomatostomus temporalis), as the
Yahoo. Place-names (Yahoo Peak, Yahoo Valley)
occur in areas where the Yowie is said to
exist. Another source claims that escaped convicts
from Botany Bay used to steal food by
rushing into camps shouting “Yarhoo!” and
scaring away the Aborigines.
Aborigines may have picked up this term
from white Australians, possibly deriving it
from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, first
published in 1726, in which he described a fictional
race of primitive men. (Isaac Asimov has
speculated that Swift got the name from the
Yagua people of Peru, known in Swift’s time as
wards of the Jesuits.) The term could be transferred
to any more primitive race, including the
Aborigines themselves. Joyner has pointed out
that in 1814, an Orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus)
was exhibited in London as “the Great Yahoo or
Wild Man of the Woods.”
Variant names: Boorong, Debil-debil, Devildevil,
Yaahoo, Yah-hoo, Yahor, Yahu. See also
YARA-MA-YHA-WHO, YEHO.
Distribution: Queensland; New South Wales;
Tasmania.
Sources: James Holman, A Voyage Round the
World: Including Travels in Africa, Asia,
Australasia, America, etc. (London: Smith,
Elder, 1834–1835), vol. 4, p. 480; Sydney
Morning Herald, July 12, 1843, p. 2; Moreton
Bay (Queensl.) Courier, February 6, 1847, p. 4;
Frank Chapin Bray, The World of Myths (New
York: Crowell, 1935), p. 232; Frank Cridland,
The Story of Port Hacking, Cronulla and
Sutherland Shire (Sydney, Australia: Angus and
602 YAHOO
Robertson, 1950); Graham Joyner, The Hairy
Man of South Eastern Australia (Kingston,
A.C.T., Australia: Graham Joyner, 1977);
Graham Joyner, “The Orang-Utan in England:
An Explanation for the Use of Yahoo as a
Name for the Australian Hairy Man,”
Cryptozoology 3 (1984): 55–57; W. S. Ramson,
ed., The Australian National Dictionary
(Melbourne, Australia: Oxford University
Press, 1988), pp. 195–196, 198, 754.
Yahyahaas
CANNIBAL GIANT of the western United States.
Etymology: Klamath-Modoc (Penutian) word.
Distribution: South-central Oregon.
Source: Kyle Mizokami, Bigfoot-Like Figures
in North American Folklore and Tradition,
http://www.rain.org/campinternet/bigfoot/
bigfoot-folklore.html.
Yamamaya
Unknown CAT of Japan.
Etymology: Yaeyama (Japanese) word.
Physical description: Size of a sheepdog. Has
tigerlike stripes.
Distribution: Iriomote-jima in the Ryukyu Islands,
Japan.
Possible explanations:
(1) An unrecorded subspecies of Tiger
(Panthera tigris), known in southern China
though rapidly declining.
(2) An insular subspecies of Clouded
leopard (Neofelis nebulosa), suggested by
C. A. W. Guggisberg, also known from
southern China.
(3) A striped variety of the smaller Iriomote
cat (Prionailurus iriomotensis), which is
spotted or banded.
Sources: “New Mammal Discovered,”
Animals 10 (March 1968): 501–503; C. A. W.
Guggisberg, Wild Cats of the World (New
York: Taplinger, 1975); Karl Shuker, Mystery
Cats of the World (London: Robert Hale,
1989), pp. 109–110.