Rex & Heather Gilroys Mysterious Australasia

Full Update August 2008
New Zealand expedition - Te Urewera National Park Sunday 16th March 2008-Tracks & Casts of the Moa

Full Update August 2008

New Zealand expedition - Te Urewera National Park Sunday 16th March 2008-Tracks & Casts of the Moa

New Zealand History

Moa Evidence

Moehau Evidence

Black Cat Evidence

Celtic Evidence

Phoenician Evidence

Stone Alignments

Stone Circles

Museums

N.Z Researchers

URU Evidence

N.Z Scenery

Looking back over my 50 years of research on the Yowie mystery, I see an evolutionary pattern in my work, beginning with the youthful enthusiasm of a teenager gathering old Aboriginal and early settlers stories of encounters in the bush with the “hairy man”, to the beginnings of my earliest field investigations and footprint finds; how I at first believed that the “hairy man” was some form of longhaired bipedal primate, which might be a surviving population of Gigantopithecus blackie which had made its way into Australia during the Pleistocene period.

Yet I eventually realised that the cast footprints of the Yowie that began appearing in the 1960s, and also those recovered during the early 1970s, were more hominid than primate. At the same time I was beginning to uncover recently-manufactured crude stone implements from remote areas of the Blue Mountains. These, together with Aboriginal accounts of the “hairy men and women” being able to make fire and cook their food, soon led me to realise that I was dealing with remnant populations of living Homo erectus.

This belief was meanwhile being reinforced by discoveries first with my late father, Mr W F [Bill] Gilroy, and later by my wife Heather and I, of actual fossil skull-types of Homo erectus over a wide area of Australia, mostly in areas once inhabited by the “hairy people” according to Aboriginal traditions. I learnt also that ‘Yowie’ was but one of many, indeed a great many names throughout Australia, by which these beings were known to our Aborigines.

In fact, I discovered that these names all identified any non-Aboriginal race with which they once shared the continent, be they average modern human height beings, pygmies or giants. All these names meant “hairy man”, “hairy woman” or “hairy people”, and they were all called such not because they possessed long body hair, but because they wore cloaks of kangaroo and other marsupial [fur] hides, just like the Aborigines in early historical photographs which can still be seen today.

Thus as my information and evidence grew I was able to discard previous ideas on the physical appearance and identity of the Yowie. A similar evolution of my theories, both on the origins of the Yowie and of pre-Aboriginal hominid evolution as a whole, can be seen in the way that my ideas have changed over the years as my collection of fossil hominid skull-types grew. In September 1969 I recovered a 52mm tall giant hominid lower back premolar tooth at a fossil site now covered by Westmead Children’s’ Hospital in Sydney’s west.

The discovery of my first giant hominid fossil footprint followed in April 1970 at Mulgoa, at the eastern base of the Blue Mountains. Then in May 1972 my late father found the mineralised endocast of a large ‘archaic’ Homo sapien skull at an old Pleistocene site at Tarana, just west of the Blue Mountains; followed by my own discovery of a smaller endocast of a ‘late’ Homo erectus skull-type about 30 metres away in the same strata, demonstrating upon various grounds to be discussed further on in this book, that Homo sapiens were already present in Australia by 300,000 years ago, and that they shared the land with their ‘father’, Homo erectus.