MYSTERIOUS PLACE: The Yantian area in Shennongjia district, the place where the wild man has allegedly been seen (IC)

After being shelved for many years, a plan to search for the wild man in the Shennongjia forestry district is once again under way. This time, scientists want to raise as much as 10 million yuan ($1.6 million) to employ advanced technology and recruit staff worldwide for the project.

Wang Shancai, a 76-year-old research fellow with Hubei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, and one of the initiators of the plan, is preparing for the search. For more than 30 years, Wang has been continually collecting data related to the wild man of Shennongjia, a place long said to be its home.

After three months of preparation, more than 50 people have been enlisted for the search. Twenty are archaeologists from Hubei Province. Others are company employees and postgraduate students from around the country, Wang said. The team members will be divided into three to five groups.

Shennongjia, in the western part of central China's Hubei Province, was named because of the legend of Emperor Shennong who taught people farming and tasted herbs to discover medicinal qualities in remote antiquity.

Anecdotes about a wild man inhabiting the area have made the district famous. Since last century, from time to time, people have claimed to have sighted them. They say they are as tall as 2 meters with reddish brown hair all over their bodies. They walk upright. Supposedly, when they caught a human, they laughed until they fainted. When they recovered, they would eat the captive.

Legends about a wild man in Shennongjia have been handed down for several hundred years. It is said that more than 200 years ago, a famous poet of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) Yuan Mei tried to track them but failed.

"The scientific value would beyond measure if we could uncover the mystery of the wild man," Wang said. If they found proof of the existence of a wild man, it would equal finding the cousins of human ancestors.

The stories about a wild man are doubted by many. From 1976 to 1980, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) organized three explorations, but no direct evidence of a wild man's existence was found. The 1977 exploration was the largest. With 110 involved and covering an area of 1,500 square km, the search took nearly a year.

"The result of the expedition denied the existence of a wild man from any scientific viewpoint. Most participants thought so," said Zhou Guoxing, a paleoanthropologist who was a member of the team.

Zhou said the survival of a species must rely on a community. "If wild man could survive thousands of years, they would have surely formed a community, but we even didn't find a shelter of theirs."

"There is not any wild man at all," said Feng Zuojian, a research fellow with the Institute of Zoology of the CAS, also a participant in the 1970s' exploration. He said he thought, if there was a wild man, even if there were no photographs, at least their skeletons or bodies could be found.

An alleged imprint of the Shennongjia wild man's foot (FILE)

Feng is dedicated to the identification of the hair of the wild man. With the help of his colleagues, Feng tested collected hair, comparing it with nearly 40 types of local animals' hair. He found all so-called wild man hair was fake, normally just hair of local animals.

In 1999, experts, during a seminar held by China Wildlife Conservation Association, came to the conclusion there was no wild man in Shennongjia. The conclusion was officially announced by the then Ministry of Forestry.

But Wang insists there is still a large area of several hundred square kilometers of unexplored jungle to search for wild man. "Fossils of anthropoid, ancient humans and Gigantopithecus have been unearthed time and again in the Three Gorges area, which indicates the area was the home of large primates. It is very close to Shennongjia, and so we cannot easily deny the existence of Wild man," Wang said.

Yuan Zhenxin, a research fellow with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the CAS said, the possibility of the existence of a Wild man could reach 85 percent, based on analysis of data provided by 24 witnesses, quoting the research of ecologist Liao Qingsheng, who studied supposed activities through existing materials.

"Generally, the wild man is more active from the 15th to 19th day of a month of the lunar calendar. Lunar April and August are their active months, the time of wheat and corn harvests. Besides, their active areas are often in remote mountains, canyons and karst cave areas. They like to come out for food at night, which is very different from bears. Also, the way they pick corn is totally different from bears," Yuan said.

Though doubts about a wild man exist, scientists say they think more energy should be applied to the protection of animal and plant resources and the biological diversity of Shennongjia rather than looking for a wild man.

"It is better to spend money and time researching the animal population rather than searching for the so-called wild man," Zhou said. "If the ecology and the animal and plant species in Shennongjia are figured out, the mystery of wild man will be solved."