Yeti Grimoire

My recipe for creating a Tibetan "Yeti" Ogre skull was simple: Start with the the very best and most well-reconstructed Homo heidelbergensis skull ever found, a skull with well developed brow ridges, which was the Broken Hill or Kabwe Cranium found in then-Rhodesia-now-Zambia. Amongst the Genus of Homo, the species Heidelbergensis which ranged across Africa, the Levant (Middle East) and Europe, are the giants of our genus. As the largest and the direct ancestor of the Neanderthals and the Dmanisi of Georgia, was the one most perfect skull choice for me as an artist to use.

My recipe for creating a Tibetan "Yeti" Ogre skull was simple: Start with the the very best and most well-reconstructed Homo heidelbergensis skull ever found, a skull with well developed brow ridges, which was the Broken Hill or Kabwe Cranium found in then-Rhodesia-now-Zambia. Amongst the Genus of Homo, the species Heidelbergensis which ranged across Africa, the Levant (Middle East) and Europe, are the giants of our genus. As the largest Hominid and the direct ancestor of the Neanderthals and the Dmanisi of Georgia, was the one most perfect skull choice for me as an artist to use.

(Imagine what fun both Heroic Fantasy Author Edgar Rice Burroughs and Heroic Fantasy Illustrator/Painter Frank Frazetta would have had back in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century if they had known all of the evolutionary anthropological science we know now in 2021!)

I then added the prominent ridge of bone that projects superiorly (upwards) from the cranial vault along its midline that is called the sagittal crest or keel on the skulls of chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. I added in extra mass to the zygomatic arches that extend back from the maxilla (Cheek) bones as well as bone knobs along the brow ridges. It's always a tricky business design-wise when creating a creature effect which requires the balancing of cranial vault size versus jaw size and mass.

Experts in cranial-facial comparative evolution between humans and apes now near universally subscribe to the notion that the larger the jaw, the smaller the cranial vault ("And thus cranial capacity as measured in cubic centimeters--intelligence--is proportionally reduced. Add a larger cranial vault, and then you have to proportionally shrink the jaw. When overall mandible--jaw--size reduces, so does potential teeth size. Therefore the fangs are reduced in my drawing and a chin had been imaginatively built up--something not found in Homos like habilis, erectus, heidelbergensis, and most especially the Dmanisis, and our well known sister species whom we more-than-occasionally interbred with, the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis). We Homo sapiens sapiens (Homo sapiens archaic is extinct--or assimilated into us genetically), the only known surviving Homo, have chins naturally, built up by evolution and "Mother Nature" on the most gracile and fragile mandibles within our lineage.

The snake's model was a live Bungarus caeruleus common or blue krait from Northern India, a member of the family Elapidae, as it is a "Hoodless" cobra and is a sister species to the banded krait which is a famous sea snake. This snake's subdued bands are even more subdued by me as the artist because it belongs to an imaginary "Troglodytic" population of common kraits for the drawing. I learned to wrangle venomous snakes as a kid. I'm not kidding. I catch both pit vipers and Elapids, milk them for their venom, collect my full ounce, feed them, and release them back into the wild.

The only venomous critter that ever bit me and envenomated me was a tiny baby southern blue ring octopus in the Great Barrier Reef of Australia when I was on a diving trip at the age of fifteen. PS. I'm still here. I survived Tetrodotoxin. Knock on Wood!

The common krait, also known as the blue krait, is a species of highly venomous snake of the genus Bungarus native to the Indian subcontinent. It is a member of the "big four" species, inflicting the most snakebites on humans in Bangladesh and India. Their bite will kill an unwary human as fast as a king cobra.

The entire drawing is infused with and influenced by Lovecraftian elements borrowed from the total pop cultural "Cthulhu Mythos" of the last 130 years.

The Kabwe cranium, found in 1921 at Broken Hill, Northern Rhodesia (now Kabwe, Zambia), and originally called Rhodesian man. The skull is now considered to be representative of Homo heidelbergensis. The Heidelberg jaw, also called the Mauer jaw, lacks a chin and is exceptionally thick and broad.