Mapinguari

The Mapinguari or mapinguary is a mythological creature from Brazilian folklore. Referred to as the 'Brazilian Bigfoot' in popular media, the Mapinguari is described as extremely foul-smelling and hairy. Other accounts of the creature reference it having hook-shaped nails, a bipedal gait, a gaping mouth in its belly, and a single eye like a cyclops.

Cascudo and later commentators speculate the name mapinguari to be a Tupi-Guarani compound mbaé-pi-guari (Guarani: mba'e "that, the thing"^[1] + pĭ "foot"^[2] + guarî "crooked, twisted"^[3]) meaning "the thing that has a clubbed, twisted, or backwards-turned foot".^[4][5]

Mapinguari is known to the Karitiana people as kida harara (Karitiâna: "laughing beast"), kida so'emo ("beast with black face") or Owoj/Owojo (lit. "maternal grandfather" or "mother's brother's son").^[6][7][8]

The Mapunguari also answers to the segamai of the Machiguenga people, according to some commentators.^[9][8] However, ethnologist Glenn H. Shepard, who conducted the fieldwork among the Machiguenga of Peru and obtained testimonies about the segamai^[10] had focused on a different Machiguenga mythical being as comparable to the Mapinguari, namely the so-called oshetoniro ("mother of spider monkeys"), a large monkey-like creature "equipped with demonic powers and gigantic penises. They can summon wind and darkness, cause panic and confusion, and are said to rape and kill human victims". Shepard not only stated the oshetoniro may be a variant of the Brazilian Mapinguari, but added these may both be folkloric memories of the ground sloth (cf. § Cryptozoology).^{[11][12][a][b]}

The juma has been listed as an alias for mapinguari,^[8][14] but Candace Slater distinguish the two as different beings,^[15] though both of them together with "Matinta-Perera" (alias of Saci) are grouped together as "Curupiras" by her.^[16]

There are various depictions of the mapinguari. It is a man-eater,^[17] and may eat the victim head-first, plunging the victim's head in the long gaping oral cavity (that runs from nose to stomach, cf. § Mouth in abdomen) and chewing slowly.^[18][19] While legend says it only devours the head,^[21] one documented rubber tapper witness has seen the creature devour the entire body piecemeal: the head, limbs, entrails, and torso of a man fallen victim.^[22][24]

It was still believed to haunt the forests of Pará, Amazonas and Acre into the 20th century.^[17]

The lore of the anthropophagous giant mapinguari may well be a composite, taking on the characteristics of the Gorjala (a giant or gigantes^[25]), the Pé de Garrafa ("bottle footed"^[26]), the invulnerability, the inverted feet of the Curupira and Matutiú (black-haired, long-armed and clawed giant).^[27][17] Its giant stature is cloaked by long black hair, it has long arms and clawed hand, etc.^[28][17]

It is not nocturnal like other monsters, but lies in wait in the dim light of the depth of the forest by daylight, and lunges to attack. It also announces itself with heavy screaming, frightening the humans into terrified flight.^[29] Cascudo suspects this to be relatively young lore, found in the narrative of the rubber tappers, since the old chroniclers of the colonial period do not mention it.^[18]

The mapinguari (mapinguary) in the Purus River basin of Amazonas is described as a gigantic monkey, as hairy as a coatá (spider monkey), with donkey hooves for feet that are turned backwards (like the Curupira),^[30][19] This description was by a witness who was a seringueiro at a rubber plantation who liked to go hunting, and one Sunday, dragged along his co-worker roommate with who he shared the same hut or tent,^[c] though the latter was against not observing the day of rest (cf. § Christian element). They got separated in the woods, and then the man saw his tent-companion devoured by such a mapinguari, which had jaguar-like claws and a mouth (lower jaw?) "as big as lapel",^[d] "torn" to the level of the stomach (interpreted to mean a mouth split from around the face to its stomach).^[22]

The lore of the state of Acre tells that Indians who attain an advanced age transform into this monster, and describes it as having an alligator-like hard-shelled skin, with identical feet like the (ends of) a pestle or Brazil nut capsules.^[e][32]

The mapinguari has been recorded in the belief among the Macuna of Colombia as a man-eater, greatly feared. It was supposed that men who grow too old turned into these. The custom existed among the Indians of the Yotahy (Jotahy) River of killing the superannuated for fear they will turn into Mapinguaris.^[33]

In a book on rubber farming, one informant has told it to be an "ancient king of the region".^[35]

Some folklore also describe it as a former human shaman turned into a hairy humanoid cyclops.^{[36][better source needed]}

Cf. also Quibungo (aged black Brazilians turned monster) described below.

This traditional mapinguari is often said to have a gaping mouth on its abdomen,^[9] with its feet turned backwards, as already testified by the rubber-tapper of the Purus River basin, Amazonas.^[22] Creatures with such feet, which confuse those trying to track it, are found in folklore around the world.^[36]

A parallel can be found in the legendary Quibungo, a monster which old black men turned into,^[37] which also has a strange gaping mouth running from nose to stomach^[18] (or throat to stomach^[38]) from which the Mapinguari may have borrowed the trait.^[39][40] Though the Quibungo according to some accounts has its mouth on its back.^[41][42]

Thus the alternative description is not a mouth at the stomach, but an oral cavity that slits vertically from face/throat to navel, as already touched upon in the rubber-tapper's testimony above.^[22]

Also, the spot around its navel is the only place where a gunshot would penetrate, and elsewhere his dense hair makes him invulnerable to bullets.^[17][43]

The hunter's encounter with the Mapniguari contextualized as punishment for breaking Sabbath on Sunday is seen as a Christian influence.^[44] The hunter goes out to hunt game saying "one goes hungry even on a Sunday" despite his wife's warning — tale published by Galeano (2014),^[43] as well as the version edited by Silva Campos (1928), where the tapper defended his hunting habit saying "one still must eat on Sunday".^[22] The "Catholic catechism" had already been noted by Cascudo (1976) who writes that the Mapniguari deliberately chooses a holiday or Sunday to do its prowling, so that the hunter who hunts on those days is risking death.^[45]

Cascudo noted that like the ogre of Europe, the Labatut,^[46] the Mapinguari, and the Capelobo of Brazilian lore were all ascribed a single eye.^[47][f][g]

Some additional ethnography from other tribal peoples attest to the Mapinguari being described as single-eyed,^[49] like a cyclops,^[50][44][36] as follows:

The woodsmen of Amazonas have known of the Mapnguari as a hairy man, sometimes with an eye on the belly, sometimes a single eye on the forehead like a cyclops, according to Mário Ypiranga Monteiro [pt] (1977).^[50]

A collective narrative tale describes a hunter who lives in the Amazon near Tefé, Amazonas who went out to hunt on a Sunday against advise, and encountered a Mapinguari which was like a hairy black ape, with a single green eye. It also had a shell like a turtle's.^[43]

As another example, the lore among the present-day Mura people is that the Mapinguari has a single eye on its head and a mouth on its belly, according to the gloss given by indigenous writer Márcia Nunes Maciel (aka Márcia Mura).^[51]

Monteiro [pt] (1977) conjectured that the Amazon natives were reporting on their fears for the Amazonian bear or spectacled bear, known in Quechua as the [h]ucumari ("bear that hugs").^[50]

Cascudo (1962) commented there was close similarity between the Mapinguari and the Mongolian "wild man" or kümün görügesü.^[h][17] This creature is otherwise designated by its Russian name Almas,^[52] and discussed (as cryptid) by Ivan T. Sanderson's Abominable Snowmen (1961).^[53][i]

Bernard Heuvelmans (1958) and other cryptozoologists also speculated that the mapinguari might be an unknown primate, akin to Bigfoot.^[36][55]

Then David C. Oren in a 1993 paper, suggested it might be a modern-day sighting of a giant ground sloth, an animal estimated to have gone extinct at the end of the Late Pleistocene.^[9][10]

Oren, an ornithologist, who during his research (1970s–1990s in the Tapajós River basin) heard stories about recent huntings of this creature (including anecdotes that some hunters kept the hair and claws but were discarded due to the stench), and hypothesized they might be the extinct ground sloths. One of Oren's arguments was that some ground sloths had bony plates like protective armor (cf. mylodontid pelt below), which coincided with the lore that the mapinguari was invulnerable to projectile weapons on most parts of its body. Oren's conjecture was met by criticism by scientists at the time, but an article Oren's 1993 announcement was picked up by major newspapers despite no evidence.^[36]

Ethnologist Gerard H. Shepard (2002), focused not on the segamai of the Machiguenga (syn. mapinguari) but rather the oshetoniro ("mother of spider monkeys") as a likely variant of the Mapinguari lore, which might be folkloric memory of a ground sloth.^[11][12] Manuel Lizarralde (2002) writing in the same essay collection compares his findings on the legendary red-colored "giant monkey" shaaroba^[b] of the Barí people to Shepard's creature insofar as it may also be the memory of a living ground sloth encounter in the remote past.^[56][13]

Long before Oren, Florentino Ameghino (1898) claimed the ground sloth was still living in South America.^[57] He obtained a samples of scales from a pelt he considered fresh, and he published his opinion that ground sloth were recently alive, fortified by the testimony of a trained geologist about witnessing a pangolin-like creature in Patagonia (Santa Cruz Province, Argentina).^[58] But the identical pelt sample bearing osteoderms from a mylodontid ground sloth^[j] has recently dated to 13,200 years ago, in the late Pleistocene.^[59] The investigation was conducted by the team of Néstor Toledo.^[62][k]

Skeptical geobiologist Paul S. Martin has also argued against any credible possibility of such survival (in the face of encroachment by mankind), pointing out that there have not been any ground sloth remains found in any of the modern (Holocene) fossil records spanning many thousands of years.^[63] While the youngest dated ground sloth fossil found on the South American mainland is from Brazil, from 13,000 BP (Pleistocene), the ground sloth did survive much later into the Holocene in the Caribbean, to anywhere from 5,600 to 2,500 years ago based on radiocarbon dating.^[64][65]

A 2021 published study headed by paleontologist Julia Tejada (now at Caltech^[66]) indicates that the ground sloth was not a strict herbivore as had been assumed, but was an omnivorous creature.^[67]

A 2023 academic study of the 1995 discovery of giant sloth bones “modified into primordial pendants” suggested that humans lived in the Americas contemporaneously with the giant sloth, though these artefacts date back to 25,000 and 27,000 years of age. The reporter comments that though the ground sloth went extinct 11,000 BP (or BC),^[l] their fossils are plentifully to be found, so they may very well have "served as inspiration for the Mapinguari, a mythical beast that, in Amazonian legend, had the nasty habit of twisting off the heads of humans and devouring them".^[68]

A reference to Mapinguari occurs in the 2020 animated film The Red Scroll, during the final scene when the character Wupa transforms into a giant sloth monster.^[69]

• List of legendary creatures
• Capelobo - resembles Mapinguari but with snout like giant anteater (Xenarthra)
• Homo floresiensis – Extinct small human species found in Flores, aka "Hobbit" man
• Mylodon – Extinct genus of mammals
• Pai do Mato [pt] - "Father of Forest", compare to Mapinguari, part of "ciclo dos monstros" (Cascudo)
• Quibungo - resembles Mapinguari, same mouth at (reaching to) stomach, transformed from aged black men.