Table of Contents
If Bigfoot Exists, Why No Fossils? Why no North American Snow Monkeys?
Bigfoot Reports Should Say Some Things, Whether Or Not It Exists.
Recommended Book:Quaternary Extinctions-A Prehistoric Revolution
Early Man In North America, and Extinct Lemurs
What can Tasmania tell us about Bigfoot?
Cars Kill 40 Black Bears A Year In Florida ALone. Why No Bigfoot Roadkill?
Bigfoot Would Be A Truely Odd Ape.
More Things Bigfoot Sightings Should Be Saying.
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Speaking of animals surviving past their time, I read in the New York Times a couple of days ago that Russian scientists found fossils of Wooly Mammoths that had apparently survived on Wrangel Island (off the coast of Siberia) for something like 6 or 7000 years after they died out every place else. That puts them at about the same time the Egyptians were doing pyramids if I understood the article correctly. These Mammoths were relatively speaking pygmies--about a third the size of normal ones I think. That puts them at 6 feet tall and over 2 tons--small for a Mammoth.
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If you get the impression that I'm not an extreme skeptic on Bigfoot, you are right. I am skeptical but I could certainly be convinced. Absence from the fossil record does not necessarily mean that the animal doesn't exist. On the other hand, in the case of Bigfoot, there are 2 subtle things about the fossil record that make me more than normally skeptical.
Problem 1: I can't come up with a scenario that would make Bigfoot rare throughout it's time in North America. A rare animal might not be fossilized. A common and widespread one would be more likely to be. So what would keep Bigfoot from becoming common and widespread? If it came in at the same time the early Indians did then that's easy. Men would have been formidable competitors. I'll point out a little later why it is unlikely that Bigfoot came over as late as the Indians. If Bigfoot came over before man did, what would have competed with it? There were no monkeys or apes in North America, so why didn't it have a population explosion? There are some possible answers to that. Bears are strong competitors for apes. Generally when you find one you don't find the other. There is only one place where bears and apes overlap in range. That is in the islands in Indonesia where the Orangs live. A small (100-150 pounds) bear called the Malayan Sun Bear that lives in the same areas that the Orangs do. It would be interesting to see if this bear does compete with the Orangs in those areas. It would also be interesting to plot the distribution of bear fossils and of bears when the settlers first arrived. Were there unexpected gaps? If so, that might be prime Bigfoot territory.
Problem 2: Bigfoot would have probably been in North America a long time if it made it at all. Animals that crossed the Bering Strait recently were adapted to VERY cold weather. Now unless Bigfoot ranks up there with the Wooly Mammoths and that kind of thing, they probably didn't come over 10,000 years ago. A million or two plus is more likely. You could probably figure out the most likely time for Bigfoot to make it across by looking at the other animals that did and didn't cross at various times.
If animals from warmer climates made it during a period, it is much more likely that Bigfoot would have. Some other things that make an earlier date more likely: It would be very hard to explain why Bigfoot could get across a land bridge and Homo erectus couldn't any time after Homo erectus arrived in Asia. H. erectus was in Asia at least by 1 million years ago. Actually it is very hard to explain why Bigfoot would make it over and none of the old world monkeys made it. Some of them, like the Japanese snow monkeys are very hardy and cold resistant--unlike any known ape.
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Another reason I'm a Bigfoot skeptic: Homo saps (at least according to the official line) did not make it to North America until they had heavy duty cold weather technology--fire, spears suitable for big game hunting, cold weather clothes.
I look at Bigfoot as a longshot, but one that should be explored because the potential payoff is large. Bigfoot reports should be collected and analyzed in a scientific manner. Even if Bigfoot doesn't exist, the patterns of reports would be informative.
Things that Bigfoot reports should tell you if the animal really exists:
1) What is the social structure? Solitary? Mother and child? Family groups?
2) What kinds of animals are being seen? If mostly males, why?
3) What kind of a territory does the animal claim? The tracks might give enough information that
you could identify individuals, and determine that the track you just found was or wasn't of the
same individual as the one you found last week.
4) Supposedly there are collections of feces. That should tell you what it eats.
5) Does it hibernate or become significantly less active in the winter?
6) What if any tools or other technology does it use?
Things that Bigfoot sightings should tell you if most or all reports are not really of a large unknown primate:
1) How do descriptions of the animal vary? It would be interesting to see if there is a correlation
between:
a) Widely circulated reconstructions of early man and descriptions of Bigfoot.
b) The Patterson film and descriptions of Bigfoot.
c) Tabloid "photos" of Bigfoot and descriptions.
If descriptions of Bigfoot change in the aftermath of those three things, it doesn't disprove Bigfoot,
but it could tell you something about human perceptions.
2) What type of people sees Bigfoot?
- Occupations?
- Economic status?
- Previous knowledge of Bigfoot claims?
- Were they believers before the sighting?
- What are their attitudes toward other "fringe" beliefs?
- Have they made claims about seeing other unexplained things?
3) When and where do people see Bigfoot? Is there a difference between sightings in the Northwest and sightings in say Illinois?
4) What would motivate a Bigfoot to be where it supposedly was? Water? Food? Curiosity? Human garbage should be a major attraction.
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I highly recommend Paul S. Martin and Richard Klein's "Quaternary Extinctions-A Prehistoric Revolution", if you are interested in fossil candidates for Cryptozoo animals. It has an extensive list of the animal found as fossils in the Pleistocene.
It is getting a little old (Copyright 1984), and is HUGE (800+ pages, and pretty technical in places) but it is an excellent source for understanding what was around in the way of mammals for the last million or so years.
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The earliest widely accepted human culture in North America was called Clovis. It was based on the hunting of very large mammals--Mammoths, Ground Sloths, etc.. Most of those animals died out very shortly after the Clovis culture showed up. Clovis was then replaced by a series of cultures that hunted smaller animals and utilized plant food more extensively. The Quaternary Extinctions book is a debate between a group of paleontologists that believe that the people of the Clovis culture actually exterminated the large North American mammals and another group that says they died out due to the climate changes at the end of the last ice age. The book covers extinctions worldwide, and is fascinating. The world was a much richer place in terms of animal life 10 to 20,000 years ago than it is now, and it included some animals that scientists would give a lot to be able to study in the flesh. For example, a large island off the coast of Africa called Madagascar has been isolated for several tens of millions of years. Small animals from Africa get to this island from time-to-time, and when they do, they develop into large variety of different forms. For example, in Africa a bunch of primitive little relatives of the monkeys called lemurs come out at night and play a minor role.
A species or two of lemurs got over to Madagascar and developed into a huge number of different species. The lemurs have been studied extensively for clues to what the earliest primates were like. But the living lemurs are just a remnant of the ones that were around 2000 years ago. In Madagascar, lemurs didn't have to compete with monkeys or apes, so they took over roles that those animals play in Africa. There were very large lemurs, ones that to some extent mimicked apes, some that came down from the trees and made their living on the ground like our ancestors did (though they probably looked and acted more like baboons than like our ancestors). If those animals were still alive they could be looked at as a giant experiment to see what other ways there are to do the things that monkeys and apes and men do. Unfortunately the most interesting ones are officially extinct.
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As I pointed out earlier, the lack of a fossil record can't really disprove Bigfoot. It is a reason to be skeptical. It also puts some limits on the kind of theories that make sense for Bigfoot. It means that they can't have been here very long and they can never have been very widespread. The fact that they can't have been here very long in turn means that they had to have been extremely cold adapted, more cold-adapted than any known non-technological primate. That is another reason to be skeptical.
Another problem is that while rarity and restricted range might explain the lack of a fossil record, it also runs into the fact that small, rare populations don't survive well over thousands of years. You have to have a minimum population to keep enough genetic diversity to keep going. Small populations are vulnerable to inbreeding, having one bad year, or just having the sex ratios for one generation skewed too much toward males. A recent issue of Discover magazine describes a natural experiment into how large of a population is needed to survive over a ten thousand year period. Humans got to Tasmania and a smaller nearby island during the last ice age over a land bridge. Around 10,000 years ago the sea rose and cut these people off from the rest of humanity. Tasmania supported about 4000 people and the other island about 400 people. The Tasmanians survived the 10,000 years, only to be exterminated by white settlers. The people on the other island survived for 4,000 to 6,000 years, then went extinct. Their island was uninhabited when the first settlers came. So you would probably need somewhere between 400 and 4,000 in the population on average to keep the species going. By the way, there are several other cases with other animals that tend to support the idea that there are minimums below which a population can't sustain itself. So, while being rare explains the lack of fossils, it runs into its own set of problems.
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Another reason to be skeptical of Bigfoot. I read in the latest issue of OMNI magazine that Florida is trying to set up a system that keeps their rare Black bears from being killed by cars. They have a population of 1000 to 1200 bears and 40 of them are killed by cars on average EVERY YEAR. Now that would mean that something like 1000 black bears would have been hit by cars in Florida alone in the past 25 years. Now I can buy Bigfoot being somewhat smarter than the average bear :) but bears are pretty smart and adaptable creatures. I find it hard to believe that no Bigfoot body has been recovered from a run-in with a car, over the 90 or so years that we've had cars. I can believe maybe 40 bears and one Bigfoot getting hit given similar populations, and I can even buy 40 bears and no Bigfoot getting hit in one year given that Bigfoot population might be smaller and they may live in more isolated areas. What I can't buy is lots of bears getting hit every year and no Bigfoot anywhere in the last 90 years.
This doesn't disprove Bigfoot, but it does give yet another reason to be skeptical.
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To me, Bigfoot is in an irritating class of things. There isn't enough proof for me to accept it, and there are some very good reason to be skeptical. Let's face it, even if we can accept that there are no fossils in North America and no bodies from run-ins with cars or hunters, or natural causes there are still some very weird things about this creature. For instance:
1) It is supposedly nocturnal. There is only one known nocturnal monkey and no known nocturnal apes. This would be a very different animal from the rest of its relatives.
2) It is supposedly VERY cold adapted in a group of animals that are generally not at all cold adapted.
3) It is wide ranging, in a group of animals that aren't. No known great ape can swim, and even a small river poses a major obstacle for them. Either Bigfoot found a way around all of that, or the lack of swimming ability would make life very difficult for them in North America.
Overall, if Bigfoot existed it would have had to evolve very far from its relatives. That doesn't make it impossible, it just makes it unlikely.
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I'm trying to work out some ways that Bigfoot's likelihood could be increased or decreased by using existing or obtainable data.
First, does any of the available information indicate that Bigfoot is capable of swimming or using some other means of crossing bodies of water? If not, that would reduce the possibility of it existing to some extent, because it would make it difficult for the population to interbreed throughout its range, which given a small population would increase the inbreeding problems. It would also rule out major sources of food that bears use--fishing would be dangerous for an animal that can't swim obviously.
Second, how does Bigfoot survive the winters? Bears seem to indicate that there is enough food
to support large omnivores in some of these areas, but they also indicate that isn't true during the
winter. Bears cope with that by hibernating. How does Bigfoot cope? I can think of 3 ways, but
each should show up in the sightings.
a) They could store up fat in the fall and then scrounge and make it through the winter. That
should show up in the form of fat Bigfoot in the fall and skinny, hungry ones in the late winter and
spring. There should be more sightings of Bigfoot raiding human generated food sources like
garbage cans or dumps during late winter or fall too.
b) They could actually store food for the winter. Any sign of Bigfoot gathering storable stuff in the fall? Any signs of a big animal caching storable food?
c) They could do a seasonal migration. Any signs of that in the sightings?
None of this gives you definitive answers, but it does give you some means of reality checking the data. If there are no signs of an ability to cross water, but the distribution of sightings and footprints doesn't reflect rivers being a barrier, then that reduces the likelihood of Bigfoot a bit--not much but some. If there are no patterns that indicate seasonal food shortages during the winter, or some means of coping with winter, then again the likelihood is reduced.
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