Man-eating apes are almost ubiquitous as giant snakes in Robert E. Howard’s fiction.

Howard used big ones in two Conan stories, one El Borak story, and a modern weird story. He also had a smaller type in another Conan story and a gorilla in the first Solomon Kane story.

Apes and ape-men were in some of the fiction that Robert E. Howard read: Jack London’s Before Adam, the Sagoths in Edgar Rice Burroughs At the Earth’s Core, A. Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

The story of primate evolution is hazy in the beginning. There is speculation of a separate branch of mammals going back 80 million years. The first primate might have been Purgatorius, a tree shrew like creature that existed right at the time of the asteroid impact 66 million years ago.

This in turn lead to the Plesiadapiforms in the Paleocene epoch. The first true primate may be Altiatlasius 57 million years ago in North Africa. Primates took advantage of increasing diverse number of trees moving toward a diet heavily dependent on fruits. The snouts got shorter and the faces flatter.

Shadows in the Moonlight

The first ape fossil is that of Proconsul from 21 million years ago in Africa. Genetic analysis indicates hominoids diverged from monkeys around 25 million years ago in the Miocene epoch. Orangutans split off 14 million years ago, gorillas around 7 million years ago.

Robert E. Howard describes what I call Vilayetpithecus: 

“In general outline it was not unlike a man. But its face, limned in the bright moonlight, was bestial, with close-set ears, flaring nostrils, and a great flabby-lipped mouth in which gleamed white tusk-like fangs. It was covered with shaggy grayish hair, shot with silver which shone in the moonlight, and its great misshapen paws hung nearly to the earth. Its bulk was tremendous; as it stood on its short bowed legs, its bullet-head rose above that of the man who faced it; the sweep of the hairy breast and giant shoulders was breathtaking; the huge arms were like knotted trees.”

Conan describes it as a “gray man-ape” that dwell on the eastern shore of the Vilayet Sea. In size, the Vilayetpithecus is possibly bigger than a gorilla. It brings to mind the Gigantopithecus, a relative of the orangutan. Gigantopithecus became extinct 100,000 years ago. It stood almost 10 feet tall and weighed up to 1,1190 lbs. It was a vegetarian.

Gigantopithecus

Conan would encounter another  Vilayetpithecus in The Hour of the Dragon: 

“It was a gray ape, one of the grisly man-eaters from the forests that wave on the mountainous eastern shores of the Sea of Vilayet. Half mythical and altogether horrible, these apes were the goblins of Hyborian legendry, and were in reality ogres of the natural world, cannibals and murderers of the nighted forests.”

The gray ape continued to survive. Francis X. Gordon aka “El Borak” encountered one is Three-Bladed Doom:

“The creature was a giant ape, as tall on its gnarled legs as a gorilla. But the shaggy hair which covered it was of a strange ashy grey, longer and thicker than the hair on a gorilla. Its feet and hands were more man-like, the great toes and thumbs more like those of the human than the anthropoid. . .Gordon knew it for what it was: the monster whose existence even he had refused to credit, the beast named in myth and legend of the north – the Snow-Ape, the Desert Man of forbidden Mongolia.”

This ape is from Mongolia and not Afghanistan.

There were possibly two species of the gray ape, Asian and African. A gray ape is the grisly horror in “Moon of Zambebwei” (Weird Tales, Feb. 1935).

“The thing chained to the stake was an ape, but such an ape as the world at large never dreamed of, even in nightmares. Its shaggy gray hair was shot with silver that shone in the rising moon; it looked gigantic as it squatted ghoulishly on its haunches. Upright, on its bent, gnarled legs, it would be as tall as a man, and much broader and thicker. But its prehensile fingers were armed with talons like those of a tiger—not the heavy blunt nails of the natural anthropoid, but the cruel simitar-curved claws of the great carnivora. Its face was like that of a gorilla, low browed, flaring-nostriled, chinless; but when it snarled, its wide flat nose wrinkled like that of a great cat, and the cavernous mouth disclosed saber-like fangs, the fangs of a beast of prey.”

 The ancestral species might be the Servant of Bit-Yakin in “The Jewels of Gwahlur.” It is described as “gray deformed shapes” that “shamble.” The arm is described as “giant” and it hurls Conan “as a fly  is flicked from a wall.”

 There is another species of ape represented by Thak in ‘Rogues in the House.” Nabonidus states they are found to the east in the mountains on Zamora’s border. Thak has black fur and appears to be smaller than the gray Vilayet apes. Nabonidus speculates that Thak’s species might become human in 100,000 years.

One prehistoric creature that while not an ape, comes close to Howard’s deadly primates is the Dinopithecus.  This was a monster baboon from Africa. Early humans may have exterminated it.

Dinopithecus

Howard had the snow-apes evolve into the Nodheimer. It is as if mankind better look over its shoulder all the time or some ape would evolve and overtake them.

Had Howard heard of the Yeti or rather Abominable Snow Man? There were stories of Yeti sightings in the 1920s. There is also a lost silent movie from the 1920s.