Bigfoot research and credible researchers!?

[johnmiic]

The Aboriginal American populations were not "wiped out". Impacted, yes, but not eradicated. Just as the European population was impacted, but not eradicated, by diseases like small pox, leprosy, the plague, and cholera which were introduced from the Middle East and Asia.

OK. "wiped out" is perhaps an extreme description. The Aztecs and Myans were of South America were "wiped out". I have seen some documentaries that have said this. The North American, Native peoples/tribes were not totally "wiped out". However I don't think "impacted" goes far enough. When estimates hover between 1/3 to 1/2 of the total population of Europe died off because of the plague, "impacted" doesn't quite cut it. In a similar vein the peoples in North America were cut down for centuries. Maybe "devastated" would be a better word.

With many Native American's gone so too does much knowledge of this animal. Some legends are still recalled by people who survive but how much more info is lost to us as different tribes were killed off? Maybe there were some which had better information/more detailed legends and are now gone.

[Brazoo]

Joe90 - Very cool - as I said I wasn't positive that primate fossils were found in North America, but the article you referenced confirms my basic point. The monkey's appearance in North America was during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum a massive global warming event. The world at that time didn't even have polar ice caps, and the fossils were still only found as far north as Mississippi - not British Columbia.

Here's that article you sited again, for other people to check out if they missed your post: Oldest Primate Fossil in North America Discovered

[Brazoo]

I admit I know nothing about aboriginal stories that may relate to big foot. I think what you guys are talking about is interesting, because it's new to me - but confirmation of those legends existing probably won't sway me much, to be honest.

Almost all cultures, including European cultures, have stories of men turning into wolves, for example - that's quite a coincidence, but I still don't think men can (or ever did) turn into wolves.

Dragons are cross cultural - and existed in legends for centuries - I don't think they existed.

There's a long history of reports of Mermaids - I don't think those people were lying - I just think that suggestion mixed with pareidolia is a very powerful thing.

Even first hand accounts don't have much impact for me, because our senses and memories are subject to all kinds of flaws.

And again, no matter what we can't PROVE 100% that mermaids didn't (or don't) exist - the best we can say is that probability works against the theory.

[Werewolf]

However I don't think "impacted" goes far enough.

No, it doesn't.

[Brazoo]

There is still a lot of land left unexplored even in the USA & Canada. Just like those links I put in a previous entry about the undiscovered Gorillas in Africa. Even the poachers didn't know about them and they are estimating more than 100,000 of them have just been discovered in that one area. That doubles what they thought the entire Gorilla world population was. If that many Gorillas can be found, in a region where you have people and poachers and wars going on it does mean there could be a large number of Bigfoots spread accross the US & Canada; but we can't actually place a figure on it. We haven't tracked them all down because there are no professionally funded expeditions charged with tracking them down, finding their hiding spots, using equiptment to capture them unharmed. Who goes into the woods in the US? Hunters, naturalists an campers. There's not enough people dedicated, canvassing the woods, searching for Bigfoot that you can claim they should have found one. The animal may be hiding or they're clever and avoid humans or they go to places in the wild where people do not go or fear to go.

Well, again, I think our abilities to perfectly account for populations of known species isn't the same as finding new ones. And my point about the coelacanth works here too. This is a very remote and dense forrest in Africa, and we still found the lost gorillas eventually.

I completely disagree that big foot research is underfunded or that big foot hasn't been found because of lack of looking. We're coming up on 50 years of big foot enthusiasts.

After only 5 years a small group of researchers uncovered full skeletal Tiktaalik fossils in river sediments on a island in northern Canada, Nunavut. They didn't have millions in funding or any super new technologies. Big foot has hundreds (if not thousands) of people interested and looking and investing a lot of time and money for close to 50 years.

Tiktaalik was just predicted using scientific evidence and reason - but my argument to you would be that it's the same evidence and reason that predicts that big foot isn't very probable.

Dr. Krantz originally set out to prove all Bigfoot evidence was fake back in the 1960's. He was a University professor and would be able to tell fakes from real foot-prints. Instead of declaring it all baloney, he recognized which casts were real footprints and which were fakes. He turned his opinion around and concluded it had to be a real animal. He even went to the FBI to support his theory. Footprints have traces of lines from the individual like fingerprints. These are called Dermal Ridges. In the book Big Foot-prints he states he submitted casts to the FBI for verification. The FBI's position is: there is no known way to fake fingerprints. They stated that the casts were of real feet-not fake feet. The casts were not forgeries. They could not state these were Bigfoot foot-casts but stated they were of living persons. Dr. Krantz mentions in his book 1 FBI guy would not finish the examination because he got upset and said it just couldn't be real. That is a case of an emotional reaction. When your senses tell you something is real but you just can't accept it. Another of these FBI guys did appear on Legend Meets Science. He was an expert in human and known primate foot patterns. He went on camera to say the prints submitted in the special were authentic-not fakes-but a living person. That goes a long way in this investigation. Some of those foot-prints are 17, 18, 20, 21 inches in length. The size and wieght of the individuals that made those are almost out of the range of a human being.

Krantz claims have been around for a while and haven't made much traction though. I think part of the problem is he didn't do much work to falsify the dermal ridges evidence. It's one thing to say they couldn't be faked, but it's another thing to try and fake them to see if that's true.

I think a guy named Matt Crowley actually created fake casts that were able to fool experts. His claim was (I believe) that the dermal ridges were artifacts of the casting process. Have you looked at his claims at all? Obviously there are people who refute Crowley's claims too.

The bottom line is that a more substantial piece of evidence is still missing.

Finding fossils is a tricky business. Conditions have to be right for fossils to be preserved. The American West is like a dinosaur fossil treasure trove. They're always digging up stuff there and it gives the impression that fossils are easy to come by and plentiful but that is not the case. That is one location in the US where fossils are found. They are found there because we lucked out and conditions were right when the Dino's died and their remains were preserved. A dead animal has to be covered up quickly to prevent it from being eaten by scavengers or broken down by the environment. You don't find fossils all over the USA. Also those are Dino fossils. How many fossils of ancient man are discovered every year in the US? Thousands? Hundreds? Tens? One? Zero? Compare that with how many Neanderthal remains have been found here or in Europe. People are the most widely spread animals on the Earth but we don't turn up ancient human fossils all the time.

Well - it depends on how you define early humans though here? Tons of Homo Sapiens are found in North America. If you're talking about finding pre-human relatives like Homo Erectus we haven't found any in North America and don't expect to based on our current theoretical models.

Neanderthals have only been found in Europe because that's where they mostly lived. They're members of the Homo Genus, but we didn't evolve from Neanderthal as thought years ago - they're on a separate branch of evolution than us. Though very recently some genetic evidence of interbreeding has come to light.

The earliest human skulls found in North America so far are 13,000 years old:
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Human skulls are 'oldest Americans'

Sometimes a gap exists because we haven't found something yet - sometimes gaps exist because there's nothing there. They both look the same - so how do we distinguish and then model our theories from gaps?

Also look at that environment. Fossils of early man have been found in dessert regions in Africa like Ethiopia. There's no tree cover, no leaves on the ground to hide things, there's no acidity in the location to break down carcasses. It is totally opposite of a forest environment where most people say Bigfoot lives. There are not many sightings or claims that Bigfoot lives in desert locations. Things left out in the open in a forest get re-absorbed by the forest.

I think this all depends on the age of fossils you're looking for. As you said Neanderthals and early Homo Sapiens are found in Europe and Asia in different climates and conditions. It doesn't bring to question big foots existence entirely - but it doesn't prove it exists either. Again, gaps are gaps - we need other pieces of info to determine what's in those gaps.

On Monster Quest they did an experiment. They took a deer road kill and tied it down to a spot in the middle of the forest and mounted a time lapse camera to a tree right by it. They came back after something like a month to see how long before that carcass decayed and/or was devoured by scavengers. They discovered from the time-lapse camera that carcass was gone in under a week-approx. 5 days, I think. Lets say there is a Bigfoot that has just died. It's waiting in the forest to be discovered. You have 5 days to find it. If you don't already know where that carcass is how are you going to find it before it's gone? Saying there are no bones is a dead end argument.

I've heard about this experiment, they talk about it on the podcast I linked to earlier. Again, we can't say from this that big foot exists either.

There is also animal behavior to consider. If an animal is hurt or injured what does it instinctively do? Does it lay out in the open to be found? Or does it hide until it gets better. An animal is not going to lay about in the open in the event a predator finds it and makes it dinner. It's going to hide. Chances are if it's ill it will hide, die, decay, be eaten by bugs and scavengers attracted to the smell, and whatever is left will break down and be re-absorbed by the forest.

A small group of animals can escape our detection - that's not the argument that matters for me - the argument that hasn't been answered effectively from your side is: predicted by what we know of animals and animal populations how small can the population be for how long and still survive?

So again, there's two sides, and people try to use the gaps to work as evidence for both sides - but the bottom line is no found big feet.

Proofs? Do you make counterfeit money or something? I want in! You didn't get carried away. Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy!

Ha - I wish I could print my own money! I'm a freelance graphic designer. Cheers!

[Hector]

-- and Hector, my metis cousin from the sovereign Mexican territory of California.

[Brazoo]

The first Gigantopithecus remains described by an anthropologist were found in 1935 by Ralph von Koenigswald in a mainland China apothecary shop. Even though Gigantopithecus had existed in the fossil record, evidence had never surfaced because no trained anthropologist had ever looked for it. I suspect that if an anthropologist expressed an interest in looking for Bigfoot remains that pronouncement would most likely kill his or her credibility.

The interesting thing about Gigantopithecus is that Krantz (the big foot researcher that johnmiic keeps siting) was the main guy behind thinking it was a bipedal animal - almost everyone else in the field currently thinks it walked like an ape. No pelvic bones were found yet - so here again we have Krantz pointing to gaps for his evidence. It's just not enough.

New species are being discovered all the time. Granted, they're not tall, smelly, hairy apes (well... not in the last 100 years) but there is much that we don't know of the animal kingdom.

And the region where they are allegedly inhabiting is vast. There are areas where it's understood that European-Canadians haven't stepped foot in. Aircraft go missing in these parts and are never found despite organized and intensive searches. If you can't find an aircraft that's crashed and burned in that country, it's easy to understand that something hiding there would be much more difficult to find.

I'm certainly not disagreeing with you for most of this - but I think you're way underestimating what's required for a species like big foot to avoid solid confirmation.

[Hector]

My point was there are still new Species being discovered all the time, whether it be in the Ocean, or that new Species of Monkey in South American. Heck...a new missing link was recently found:

Missing link between man and apes found - Telegraph

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy".

A fossil is one thing...and a supposedly large creature that has never been documented walking amongst a country with a population of 300 million...is another.

Besides, as much as I'm a believer of evolution, the exacto mundo missing link has never really pinpointed as of yet.