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Hairy EvidenceCelebrating three decades of Pulse of the Planet, here's a program from our archives.chinese musicIn China, there's a legend which tells of a Wildman, a large apelike animal which inhabits remote, inaccessible areas. Today, laboratory experiments are providing the first evidence that a creature like the Wildman may actually exist. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.Poirier: I first encountered the story of the Wildman in '82 when I was in China looking at rare species of monkeys. I was given a hair sample which we later showed came from a monkey and not an unknown creature at all.Dr. Frank Poirier is a professor of anthropology at Ohio State University, who studies endangered primates. Poirier: Recently the Chinese have been doing some sophisticated scientific analysis on some of the hair samples, for example looking at mineral content, another analysis looking at internal and external structure of the hair.These analyses suggest rather strongly that the Wildman is a hitherto unknown primate, that is hitherto unknown at least to scientists, and it's the hair that we're currently following up on right now.If the Chinese Wildman exists, and I'm not saying right now that it does, but if the Chinese Wildman in fact does exist, and if it exists as a higher primate, that is a monkey, ape or a human, and if it exists and it is more closely related to humans than to monkey or apes, it is at least for anthropologists one of the most significant discoveries made in a long, long time, perhaps comparable to the discovery of some of the first human fossils in Africa. This archival program is part of our thirtieth anniversary celebration. If you want hear more, check out our podcast. Im Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet