Ancient Chimps or Tano Giants?

Harry Trumbore’s sketch of the reportedly local hairy hominoid of Africa’s Gold Coast, the Tano Giant, which was seen using a cow skin as a cape to keep itself warm.

Breaking news from an international research team, led by archaeologist Julio Mercader of the University of Calgary, Canada, announces that chimpanzees may have been using stone “hammers” as long as 4,300 years ago, in the West African country, the Ivory Coast.

What if the owner of the tools too large for human hands was the Tano Giant, a huge unknown hominid known from the country today called Ghana, with the last sightings around 1911?

Côte d’Ivoire in International French, officially the République de Côte d’Ivoire, or, translated into English, the Ivory Coast, is a country in West Africa that borders Ghana to the east.

The Ivory Coast hammers were apparently used to crack nuts, and the Canadian team indicates that a “chimpanzee stone age” may have begun in ancient times. The earliest reports of stone tool use by chimpanzees in West Africa date to the writings of Portuguese explorers in the 1600s.

The scientists found that the stones were about the size of cantaloupes with patterns of wear indicating use to crack nuts. The rocks would have been too large for human hands, but about right for the larger, stronger hands of chimpanzees, the University of Calgary researchers said.

But no fossils, no subfossils, no bones were found. They are guessing about the owners of the “ancient hammers.” What if they belonged to something else that was allegedly there? What if the stones were being used by unknown hominoids that enjoyed nuts? (The nuts, we are told, are not liked by humans.)

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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