Finding Bigfoot

JLibourel said:

Of course they're super-sneaky! How else could an eight-foot-tall creature avoid detection and classification by science over the past 400 years while living all over North America right under our very noses, it would seem.

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Gibonius said:

Also rather amazing that we've never found any fossils (since the hedgehogs get all the normal corpses) of anything resembling one.

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Gibonius said:

I bet idfnl has some theories to explain that.

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A Harvard scientist has said it would be possible to clone a Neanderthal baby from ancient DNA if he could find a woman willing to act as a surrogate.

The process would not be legal in many countries and would involve using DNA extracted from fossils.

George Church, a genetics professor of Harvard School of Medicine, said that the process was possible and that far from being brutal and primitive, Neanderthals were intelligent beings.

...

He told Der Spiegel, the German magazine: "I have already managed to attract enough DNA from fossil bones to reconstruct the DNA of the human species largely extinct. Now I need an adventurous female human."

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JLibourel said:

There was also Oliver, the bipedal chimp, who was once supposed to possibly be the result of a human-chimp crossing although testing showed him to be just a regular chimp. I once saw Oliver exhibited many years ago, back in the '70s sometime. The ape cashed in his chips this past year.

Not sure what you'd get with a modern-Neanderthal cross. The contemporary reconstructions of Neanderthals make them look very much like us, much more so than a lot of older images. Of course there is much we don't know, e.g., how much body hair they had and such. I note that some scientists are challenging the recent claims based on DNA analysis that most moderns have Neanderthal ancestry. Gib may get on my case for being anti-scientific, but I am profoundly distrustful of an awful lot of the DNA analysis that goes on.

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JLibourel said:

This business about creating a modern human x Neanderthal hybrid reminds me of the experiments of Ilya Ivanov in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. He tried hybridizing apes and humans without success. According to some accounts, this was at the suggestion of Comrade Stalin, who thought such hybrids might be useful as front line infantry or mine workers. The experiments were unsuccessful, and Ivanov fell out of favor with Stalin and died in a labor camp (I think) in Kazakhstan. The local Bigfoots of the Caucasus mountains, usually called kaptars are sometimes supposed to be the results of Ivanov's experiments.

There are some freaky humans who look like ape hybrids, e.g., Bassou the ape-man of Morocco, and Julia Pastrana, the Mexican ape-woman, in the 19th century. Bassou is (not sure if he's still alive or not) probably just a poor malformed, developmentally disabled fellow, but Julia Pastrana was a talented singer and dancer and fluent in three languages. If anything, she looked the more apish of the two.

There was also Oliver, the bipedal chimp, who was once supposed to possibly be the result of a human-chimp crossing although testing showed him to be just a regular chimp. I once saw Oliver exhibited many years ago, back in the '70s sometime. The ape cashed in his chips this past year.

Not sure what you'd get with a modern-Neanderthal cross. The contemporary reconstructions of Neanderthals make them look very much like us, much more so than a lot of older images. Of course there is much we don't know, e.g., how much body hair they had and such. I note that some scientists are challenging the recent claims based on DNA analysis that most moderns have Neanderthal ancestry. Gib may get on my case for being anti-scientific, but I am profoundly distrustful of an awful lot of the DNA analysis that goes on.

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JLibourel said:

Looked at the opening of the 16-minute video but didn't sit through the whole thing. The claim that there are between 40,000 and 100.000 BFs in North America sounds rather preposterous. That would mean there are more BFs than grizzly bears if their numbers were much higher than his low-end estimate. I should think there would be a lot of similarity in habits between grizzlies and BFs (assuming the latter existed)--highly intelligent, opportunistic omnivores with no natural enemies to speak of except man. Yet anyone with a bit of money and motivation can certainly see wild grizzlies without much difficulty.

At the risk of being repetitive, the claim that BFs are nocturnal animals seems most improbable. Although prosimians like lemurs and tarsiers are largely nocturnal, none of the higher primates (monkeys and apes) is nocturnal, with the sole exception of the tiny, rather primitive South American owl monkey.

And why would they have become nocturnal animals and why are they so stealthy and such masters of camouflage? What would have been the evolutionary imperative? True, in the Late Pleistocene they would have faced a more formidable array of predators: the giant North American lions (about 25% larger than modern lions), sabertooth cats, homotheria (aka scimitar cats), giant short-faced bears and such, but they have all been extinct for ten thousand years or more. The grizzly faced the same competitors and the Indians when they arrived, but grizzlies were lords of the mountains and prairies and would swagger fearlessly into the camps of early white explorers like Lewis and Clark.

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idfnl said:

Ya, that guy is a bit over the top, that's a crazy number.

The eye-shine claimed to be seen by many sightings indicate eyes which are tailored for nocturnal use. I believe it also explains the rarity of the sightings.

Regarding the nocturnal adaptation, I think you answered your own question. Also, deer feed at night. If the Ketchum report is true, the split between us and a BF happened approx 15k years ago so it falls within the timeline to develop such an adaptation.


Read that there is a guy that recently got a very good trail cam pic of a mom BF and kid. Waiting for it to appear....

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JLibourel said:

The split between humans and BF only occurred 15K years ago? You realize, don't you, that the major races of humanity deviated from each other far longer ago than that--between about 100,000 and 40,000 years ago, according to some theories? Yet we are all much, much more similar to each other than any of us is to a Bigfoot. For that matter, we are all much closer to our common ancestor, ol' **** erectus, than we are to BFs.

I shall be eagerly awaiting the the "very good trail cam pic" of Momma Bigfoot and her kid. If it is a clearly focused, convincing image, I shall have to eat humble pie for all my skepticism in this thread. Please keep us posted.

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