[iamsb]

Interesting but I doubt it. Vaanaras do not appear prominently in any of epics/puranas following Ramayana. Only Hanuman is present in Mahabharata and he is clearly living a solitary life when he meets Bheem.

By no means expert, so happy to be proven wrong.

[sundarurfriend]

That's an interesting point (no idea why you've been downvoted for it). I have a few theories why that might be:

1. Groups like these were more likely to survive if they were isolated and not occupying territory that the (presumably) more sophisticated Homo Sapiens coveted, so maybe they just didn't get interacted with otherwise. Rama had a Vanavasa (forest-living) and a generally weird out-of-pattern life for the time, so had a slightly higher chance of encountering them.

2. If people in later stories did come in contact with them, they were probably trying to expand their territories or otherwise conquer the land. In that case, the stories are going to mythologize them as savage Asuraas, to give further justification to the conquests.

3. We only have a few stories, of unknown time origin, remaining out of hundreds of thousands of stories told by different groups in different places over the millenia. So even if a significant portion of the stories featured Vaanaraas, it's plausible they might all have been lost before they could reach us.

4. In particular, given that such groups were declining in numbers over time, and the fact that more recent stories are more likely to survive, it makes sense that stories featuring them are more likely to have been forgotten and lost to time.

[jelliclesfarm]

There is also Jambavan who appears in both Ramayana and Mahabharata. Jambavan’s army fought alongside the Vanara army in Ramayana.

Even though he is depicted as part of the monkey army, he was really known to be a bear. A bear like giant creature.

He appears again in Mahabharata as the possessor of the Syamantaka Gem that was stolen and was in his possession. They live in a cave and hidden from the rest of the people. He is defeated by Krishna and he accepts defeat. He also offer Krishna his daughter Jambavati’s hand in marriage.

In the Puranas ..after the Ramayana war, all the monkeys and bears who lost their lives were brought back to life and they returned to their abode. Mahabharata is to have happened in a different yuga.

Hanuman keeps appearing in all puranas because he is Chiranjeevi..one without death. And hence more of an archetype than a character in every yuga.

[pradn]

The Vedas do not mention monkey people (vanaras), but the Mahabharata and the Ramayana do. The Vedas were composed 800-1000 years before these two epics. So the invention of the vanaras probably happened later, perhaps due to influence from indigenous religious ideas or perhaps a new set of myths. Interestingly, the Ramayana only gives vanaras monkey-like features but doesn't identify them as such, so there is some ambiguity about how they are to be represented.