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Gimlin said on Mysterious World, "An overall description, it looked like a huge hairy human being. I just noticed the post from JanV from another thread. I appreciate the kind words. To paraphrase my main point, I never liked anthropologist use of the term human in describing ancient hominids. I find it presumptuous to assume something like a Homo habilis or even some Homo erectus were human just because it is in the genus Homo. It becomes an almost meaningless subjective term when "human" is used like that. All hominids including us should be thought of as 100% ape and some unknown amount of human. Human is what we are now. As you get more distantly related or farther back in time you are logically going to be less like us by some unknown amount. "Human" is too poorly defined to know what it really means. How fast something can evolve is dependent on selection pressures so nobody really knows how fast we changed or how human any ancient hominid was. No ancient hominid lineage could be completely excluded as possible ancestors of bigfoot because change could theoretically happen very quickly. Even a few hundred thousand years isn't out of the question. Bigfoot is logically most likely some form of hominid much more closely related to us than it is to chimpanzees. That is just my opinion based on all the Asian fossils. That doesn't mean I think it was descended from what I would call human. They are likely descended from a branch of our lineage that became cryptic basically to avoid competing with probably more aggressive and more technologically advanced hominids. Some of that cryptic lineage also may have become cold adapted which often includes getting larger. That would explain how they might have better night vision if they were forced to come out at night to avoid other hominids. Homo heidelbergensis seems a good candidate but that may be too closely related to us. I think "erectus" is the best candidate but many of the fossils that are called erectus probably shouldn't be. I think some erectus were not necessarily or even logically technological based on enormous teeth and jaws, relative lack of advanced stone tools found and other factors like some with reduced frontal lobes relative to other "erectus". There were apparently multiple species of hominids so tools could have only meant that a technological hominid also lived there. We seem to have lost a lot of the characteristics that are generally and colloquially considered apelike as we became technological. There is no strong evidence that all lineages of ancient "humans" became increasingly technological together. Our ancestors probably weren't very "human" even a million years ago and if they separated and lived a totally different lifestyle they are logically going to be very different than we are. The way I look at it is that they are apparently bipedal apes that probably diverged from our lineage about a million to 2 million years ago. Much more recent is possible but more distant is less likely in my opinion for various reasons. I wouldn't presume to call an ancestor even a million years ago a human. That would be close enough though that they probably would share some human traits with us.

If you think about it? Nothing is beyond the reach of science......it can all be weighed and measured, even if we lack the ability for now.