Forgive me for returning to Pliny’s Natural History yet again. Here (in Philomen Holland’s English translation of 1634) he is surely describing the tribe or grouplet which spawned the Grunty Man:

“Tauron writeth, That the Choromandae are a savage and wild people: distinct voice and speech they have none, but in stead thereof, they keep an horrible gnashing and hideous noise: rough they are and hairy all over their bodies, eies they have red like the houlets, and toothed they be like dogs.”

Earlier, I cannot remember where, I have said that the Grunty Man is older than the Earth itself, but now I may have to revise that statement in the finished version of my ten thousand page biography The Life And Times Of The Grunty Man! (The exclamation point in the title is quite deliberate, and intended to impart a sense of excitement to what is otherwise, I have to say, quite a dull narrative, consisting as it does chiefly of scenes in which the Grunty Man grunts from within his grim dark foul-smelling lair, century after century.)