Beyond the Beyond: The De Loys Ape Photo

Beyond the Beyond: The De Loys Ape Photo

François De Loys, a Swiss oil geologist, was exploring the Colombia–Venezuela border region in 1917–1920 with an expedition party. During the trip, his party encountered two large, tailless apes walking upright along the bank of the river. A keen conservationist with a deep love of all living thing great and small, he shot and killed one of them. I mean, they were supposed to have been waving their arms and shrieking, but still. And they threw sticks at the men. But still. And they threw feces at one of them. Okay, maybe they had it coming.

When I was in high school, there was a group of teens who would hang around at the local park and flip people off as they went by. Y’know… the cool kids. They were a mishmash of emo bangs and bowl cuts, smokers and tweakers, thirteen-year-olds and that one dude who was twenty-five and still hung out at the park with teenagers. One time when I was driving past that park at maybe sixteen or seventeen, two of them threw dog shit at my car. Even then, it reminded me of the De Loys Ape story. It also reminded me of the decline of life in the west.

So De Loys shot one of the apes, and the other one ran off into the jungle. The crew propped the dead one up on a crate with a stick and then photographed it. Supposedly they were too sick and too tired from being attacked by local tribespeople to do much else.

There is an interesting twist to all of this. The photograph did not enter the public eye until years after the supposed encounter. De Loys reportedly kept the photo among his personal belongings, and there are conflicting accounts about whether he told anyone outside his close circle. The photo came to light because of a man named George Montandon, a Swiss anthropologist who urged De Loys to publish the photo after discovering it among his possessions. Montandon wrote a paper in the Illustrated London News (1929), presenting it as evidence of a new South American ape species he called Ameranthropoides loysi.

The photo was quickly dismissed by zoologists as being a photo of a spider-monkey. It’s hard to gauge the creature’s size because there really is no reference point. The stick is, well, a stick. And the crate has no discernible markings on it. Some have alleged that the crate is not one of full size, but rather a fruit crate which are considerably smaller. The discovery was not made during the expedition, but rather more than a decade later when a friend urge De Loys to publish the photo. There is no corroboration, only one photo, and the creature in said photo looks like a spider-monkey.

While the scientific consensus is that De Loys’ Ape is not what the claims make it out to be, there are still people who believe it might have been real. Some have suggested that it could be a member of a relic species, perhaps distantly related Protopithecus, a large prehistoric New World monkey. Others think the pair may have been a rare mutation.

What appears to have happened is that Montandon wanted to lay claim to a new species. De Loys may have gone along with it to gain some notoriety and perhaps some monetary benefit, but without a preserved specimen, there was never any solid evidence to back up the extraordinary claim.

Have you been shot and propped up on a fruit box? Message @beyondthebeyond1 on Instagram.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Eastern Sierra Now. Readers are encouraged to conduct further research and consult with relevant experts or professionals before making any decisions or taking any actions based on the information provided in this article.

–

Catch up on more “Beyond the Beyond” here.

TM Rush