A real source for Europe's "wildman" tales?

Stories of "wildmen" on the Eurasian continent date back to the ancient Greeks and beyond. Such tales likely have more than one origin, but folklorist Michael Heaney suggests a the new hominin species from Siberia (see my post on this from March 2010) may have persisted long enough to inspire stories from Europe's wudewosa or wodewose to the almas of the Pamirs. Actually, given that the anecdotal evidence for the living almas is intriguing, if not definitive without a specimen, cryptozoologists would suggest the "wildman" could be with us yet. (See Dr. John Napier's superb 1972 book Bigfoot for a basic grounding in almas tales.)