Robert Holden recounts several stories that support this from the nineteenth century, including this European account from 1842:The natives of Australia ... believe in ... [the] YAHOO ...

This being they describe as resembling a man ... of nearly the same height, ... with long white hair hanging down from the head over the features ... the arms as extraordinarily long, furnished at the extremities with great talons, and the feet turned backwards, so that, on flying from man, the imprint of the foot appears as if the being had travelled in the opposite direction.

[14]On the other hand, Jonathan Swift's yahoos from Gulliver's Travels, and European traditions of hairy wild men, are also cited as a possible source.

In a 1987 column in The Sydney Morning Herald columnist Margaret Jones wrote that the first Australian yowie sighting was said to have taken place as early as 1795.

The earliest account in November 1876 asked readers; "Who has not heard, from the earliest settlement of the colony, the blacks speaking of some unearthly animal or inhuman creature ... namely the Yahoo-Devil Devil, or hairy man of the wood ..."[17] In an article entitled "Australian Apes" appearing six years later, amateur naturalist Henry James McCooey claimed to have seen an "indigenous ape" on the south coast of New South Wales, between Batemans Bay and Ulladulla:[18]

[20] The yowie appeared in Donald Friend's Hillendiana,[21] a collection of writings about the goldfields near Hill End in New South Wales.

Holden also cites the appearance of the yowie in a number of Australian tall stories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

[23] In 2010, a Canberra man said he saw a person described as "a juvenile covered in hair, with long arms trying to steal his car" in his garage.

[10] In 1977, former Queensland Senator Bill O'Chee reported to the Gold Coast Bulletin he had seen a yowie while on a school trip in Springbrook.

According to Joyner, the notion of the yowie arose following a review in a Sydney newspaper of John Napier's 1972 book Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality, Jonathan Cape, London.

However, the image of the enormous primate that Gilroy eventually presented to the Australian public in May 1975 as the yowie, while overtly modelled on exotic forms like the yeti, was apparently inspired by muddled recollections from the newspaper's readers of much earlier stories about the yahoo (Joyner 2008, pp. 5–8).