“Snow! Gor had traveled far, but never had he seen a storm like this with white cold in the air. Again a shiver that was part fear rippled through his muscles and gripped with invisible fingers at his knotted arms.

“‘The Beast of the North is angry!’ he told himself.

“Through the dark and storm, animals drifted past before the blasts of cold. They were fleeing; they were full of fear – fear of something that the dull mind of Gor could not picture. But in that mind was the same wordless panic.

“Gor, the man-animal of that pre-glacial day, stared wondering, stupidly, into the storm with eyes like those of the wild pig. His arms were long, almost to his knees; his hair, coarse and matted, hung in greasy locks about his savage face. Behind his low, retreating forehead was place for little of thought or reason. Yet Gor was a man…”

From Two Thousand Miles Below : A Four-Part Novel by Charles Willard Diffin, published in Astounding Stories between June 1932 and January 1933. New research suggests Diffin may have been writing about a fictionalised version of the Grunty Man who is, as we know, older than the Earth itself.