I'll address the second half of this question.

Man-like ape creatures pop up in mythology all over the world, from the Russian almas to the Himalayan yeti to the Indonesian ebu-gogo to the Australian yowie. The gorilla - whose existence is now 99% verified - was in a similar mythological category until 1902..

It's likely impossible to track exactly when any of these myths got started, as some cryptozoologists point to vague rock carvings as their earliest evidence while others stick to much more recent (1800s) sightings - but it's definitely not just tied to North America.

The Himalayan creature actually got some decent press from none other than Sir Edmund Hillary, following sightings in 1942 and native sightings from time immemorial - In this article in Stars and Stripes, from 1960, he talks about the implausibility of the original "abominable snowman" despite having a purported scalp in his possession.

Jumping around a bit, there might be a kernal of truth to the ebu-gogo story. On the island of Flores, skeletons of "hobbits" have been found. The age of the skeletons seems to indicate that they inhabited the island at the same time as anatomically modern humans. Perhaps the ebu-gogo are an ancestral memory of a time when two hominids shared the island?

So, in conclusion, myths about large (and not so large) ape-like men or man-like apes are to be found just about everywhere that humans are.