Zana of Tkhina

The details of Zana's origin and life are unclear. According to local folklore, she was forcefully captured in the forest by hunters and sold into slavery. She was sold multiple times and ended up in the ownership of the Abkhaz nobleman Edgi Genaba, who took her to his estate in Tkhina. She was kept in an enclosure for the first three years, but was gradually allowed more freedom to roam the estate as she became less aggressive. She was described as being abnormally tall and athletic with dark skin and red hair. She often swam in the river, ate fruits from the trees, and slept in a natural pool with the local water buffalo. Although she could not speak, she knew her name and could perform domestic labor.She allegedly showed no signs of aging even after decades of living at the Genaba estate. Zana had at least four children with local men, under obscure circumstances: Dzhonda (died 1930s), Gamasa (died 1925), Kodzhanar (unknown death date), and Khwit (died 1954). She died around the 1880s and was buried in the family cemetery. == Academic research ==

Research on Zana began in 1962, when Moscow biologist Alexander Mashkovtsev and a young Boris Porshnev (who would later become a prominent figure in Soviet cryptozoology) traveled to Tkhina and collected local stories about her. They were told that Zana and her son Khwit were both buried in the Genaba family cemetery. Porshnev made a number of attempts to locate Zana's grave, but was unsuccessful. In 1971, he decided to exhume Khwit's remains, as his grave was still clearly visible. The anthropologists who analyzed the skull found that she probably died in her 40s and was possibly of sub-Saharan African descent based on her features. Because they did not think Khwit had African ancestry, the skull was disregarded as being his mother despite their resemblance. In 2021 a team sequenced the full genomes of both Tkhina-71 and Tkhina-75, and conclusively identified Tkhina-75 as Zana. They found that Zana was of majority eastern African descent, with possible western African admixture. Khwit was of mixed African and Caucasian descent. They hypothesize that Zana could have had congenital generalized hypertrichosis, a disorder which causes excessive hair growth all over the body as well as intellectual disability and dismorphic facial features, which could explain her unusual appearance and behavior. Zana's African origin has been connected to the Afro-Abkhazians, a small African-descended community historically found in a number of villages in Abkhazia whose origin is disputed. Cryptozoology During her life, locals believed Zana was an . Zana's story was first published in Boris Porshnev's 1968 work "The Struggle for Troglodytes", which describes his views on and search for relict hominids. In 1974 Porshnev and Bernard Heuvelmans published a book titled ("Neanderthal Man is still Alive"), in which they argued that Zana was a surviving Neanderthal. Cryptozoologists such as Myra Shackley, Dmitri Bayanov, and Igor Burtsev have also promoted the Neanderthal theory. == In popular culture ==

Abkhaz poet and writer Fazil Iskander briefly described Zana's origin story in his work The Human Campsite, which tells the story of a mentally disabled but large-framed woman who escaped into the mountains and became wild. == See also ==