FINLAND — A man in eastern Finland says he saw two hairy Neanderthal-looking humanoids.

Raautavaara resident Iisakki Mieto told Cryptozoology News he was chopping firewood next to his house when he came upon the two beings on Dec. 21, 2017.

“I live in a relatively secluded area, with the nearest neighbor living kilometers away,” the 48-year-old, who claims to hold a PhD in Aerosol Physics obtained at the University of Eastern Finland, said about the encounter. “The weather was dry and cold, well belong freezing temperatures, and there was already a layer of snow on the ground.”

After firing up the stove in his sauna, says Mieto, he went back inside the house to “have a snack”.

“I checked through the window if smoke was still coming from sauna’s chimney and I noticed two vaguely humanoid figures exiting the sauna, leaving the door ajar and stalking into the woods.”

The two creatures, he adds, were big humanoids “walking in a hunched posture”.

“After I lost sight of the figures in the woods, I checked the sauna and it had warmed already pretty well, only that the door was left open leaking the warmth out. I produced an electric torch from the anteroom of the sauna and with its light I saw that the unexpected visitors had left brownish coarse hair around.”

Mieto also added that he was able to observe a few footprints but that the alleged creatures were barefoot.

“It was hard to examine the footprints on snow in the incoming dark, but they were human like, only larger.”

Two weeks ago, a woman in Portugal claimed to have spotted two similar figures that looked like “primitive men”.

In 2015, a man in North Carolina reported to have seen a 10-feet-tall Neanderthal.

Neanderthals were a species of humans believed to have gone extinct about 40,000 years ago. Some people, such as a state trooper from Washington who claimed to feed ape-like animals many refer to as Bigfoot, believe the cryptid could be some sort of “primitive human species”.

Raautavara, a municipality that is part of the Northern Savonia region, has a population of 1,700.