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Or personal experience and the knowledge of the circumstances.

Shut the front door! Alluding to young earth? Really? SMH What next, great flood? Cmon. Incorrigible, ou may want to polish up on your reading comprehension. Maybe get a dictionary too. Your jump from "A" to "L" is quite a leap, establishing your unfamiliarity with OOPARTS, or Out Of Place Artifacts. Real artifacts - out of place geologically. Not one or two, but many, many artifacts that are geologically impossible. At least according to geological dating. Nowhere in there did I say anything about a young earth. Nowhere. Only you. Again. Nowhere did I say anything about a flood, great or not. Nowhere. Only you. Again. You're real good at putting words in other peoples posts, and then deriding words YOU put in. Classy. Your ability to reach around and pull something out of seemingly nowhere can only be fully appreciated by a proctologist, but I find such fabrications to be purposed to just start an argument. You want it? Scientifically? In 1987, a world wide survey of human mitochondrial DNA was published by Cann, Stoneking, and Wilson in Nature magazine. It's main point was that "all mitochondrial DNA's stem from one woman." (you'll have to read up on how that works - it's not my job to educate you.) Essentially, our mitochondrial DNA comes only from our mother, and gets passed from generation to generation without recombination. This world-wide survey pointed that we all came from one "mitochondrial Eve." Not my term - others. And that this mitochondrial Eve existed about 200,000 years ago, but the evolutionary time frame was completely at odds with that timeline. Only 40 specimens of H. Erectus have been found, and they've been geologically dated 220,000 to 500,000 years. One science is off, apparently. Or, somehow, this mitochondrial Eve's descendents were the only humans to survive, as all other females were sterile. Or that a catastrophe occurred worldwide, and she was the last fertile female left. Or her offspring were so superior, they wiped out all other species without any interbreeding. Or, Eve must have lived in Africa 200,000 years ago, and her offspring 100,000 years ago left Africa to conquer all other forms of man, causing them to vanish without a trace in our genetic record. Rebecca Cann, one of the original authors of the study said paleoanthropologist could never be certain that any specific fossil left descendants, however, there was "100% certainty that genes in modern populations have a history that can be examined and will trace back in absolute time to real ancestors." The fight was on, and every opportunity was taken to discredit these determinations. Then in 1993, Maryellen Ruvolo from Harvard, presented new DNA sequencing rather than restriction analysis, to study a part of the cytochrome oxidase gene found in mitochondrial DNA. Ruvolo's work was based on studying a slowly evolving portion of the mitochondrial genome, and guess what? Got the same results as the original mitochondrial DNA study. Before one gets offended and takes exception that any suggestion that fossils may not be dated accurately - you really have to study the tests used to get these dates they use. The scientific principles they're based on is sound, scientific calculations. Problem is, they never, EVER verify one another, and the real world is not a pristine scientific lab. They can run the same tests, and dates are all over the map - and I mean not even close. So how to they pick a date? They pick the date within that wide, wide range that fits with their narrative. I spent nine months once, just studying in detail different test methods and the problems with them. It's a joke. A scientific joke on all of us. Potassium-Argon dating? One little characteristic of a gas. It migrates - upward. You'd think common sense would bring that to their attention, but it doesn't. So. DNA? Or piles of bones and guesses? I don't really care. I just wanted to point out that the science is not as precise as some would suggest.

The skeptics all sit and watch this proponent angst with glee. I hate to see this discord but at least it shows we are not monolithic in our beliefs.

I can certainly appreciate the reasons Norse applied the ignore status.

Ok, gotcha ... or at least closer. Thanks for clarifying. Position-wise, I'm no-kill other than self-defense. Norseman is a pretty decent guy. He might be misguided .. or not. He's heard all the no-kill side has to say. I suspect he's given it due consideration, at least as he views that. I'd rather leave him in peace and let him figure out what he's going to do if/when he sees one through the scope. I think things work better if we don't force him into a position of having something to prove, something to "show us", by incessant nagging. Maybe he's bigger than that. I'm probably not. If some self-righteous d-bag nagged at me long enough, I'd probably get steamed enough to take whatever action "shows them" rather than what is simply right or wrong. If I have that level of human weakness, others likely do to. So ... don't back them into a corner. Don't let your need to BE right overwhelm your desire to see right done. Just my advice, though. Just as he's gotta do what he's gotta do, you've gotta do what you've gotta do. Peace, eh? MIB

I think your point is well taken Crow. I'm talking about The Science in the sense of what the narrative of choice is amongst credentialed and peer-reviewed practitioners in their respective fields of specialty, whatever the scientific discipline. To a large extent, their failure to come up with ANY narrative hypothesis that can be tested in the field largely explains the lack of progress....I mean, you have to propose an explanation of SOME kind that makes sense for the majority of the evidence before you can adequately explore what is going on. OTOH, the narrative most seem to have chosen reaches a conclusion without testing or even, really, any deep analysis at all. That is a betrayal of the entire discipline. For instance, you take the position the entire BF phenomena is a human generated experience. Fine. That is not something any of us haven't considered, and seriously, I feel pretty sure. The reason I rejected it is the implausibility of it approaches a magnitude greater than that of actual BF existence. But, that aside, where is the real effort to present a cogent and comprehensive theory of how something of this unprecedented scope and scale gets created and sustained? If somebody presented a theory, and cited a test to show how this explained every (not a few, not some, and even not most) piece of BF evidence, I'd be a buyer. Even this is something Science apparently doesn't have the interest in giving life to. Instead, we have hip-pocket theorists making their cases with perfunctory dismissals of all evidence with nothing more to cite than a deep seated aversion to the very idea of considering and investigating any evidence, in any detail. Why would they? There's nothing to investigate, right? They've created a sort of perfect anti-narrative, which is about all you can say kind about it. And their counterpart on the proponent side of things? Lacking a comprehensive narrative of that kind, it is almost a default result, and it creates a vacuum for all the wahoos, jack-legs and seat-o-the-pants field researchers to thrive and create their own narrative. I happen to agree with you that a lot of that is pure baloney, but at least it is an attempt to work at an explanation, no matter how inadequate. Between these two extremes is where true scientific enquiry gets done, I believe. When we mature enough as a species to seriously entertain the possibility of BF, the answers may come. I expect to be waiting a long time though, and as I said, I could possibly even die waiting. That can't be helped.

Bigfoot is not, at least for the most part, responsible for the Missing 411. What gets us also gets them. Ponder that for a while. MIB Ponder this...until you have personally had an encounter with one of these beings and are thus impressed with a visualization that was heretofore totally incomprehensible, IMO, 99.44% of what is found on the internet by the encounter virgins is really nothing more than rhetorical masturbation. I have no idea what you think you're trying to say. However, since I've already had 2 sightings for sure, probably 3, and a fair bit of other interaction, whatever it is you're trying to say, you're posing as self appointed expert to the wrong person. So ... would you mind translating that gibberish to English? MIB

Shadow, I've been criticized for being "anti-science," and in a number of ways it may appear to be that way, but I'm really not. I'm just saying that many conclusions that paleoanthropologists make are based on very flimsy evidence, and that as new discoveries are made, we find them always having to back up, turn around, and go backward or forward and have to strain to cobble together another scenario. This Out-Of-Africa narrative. All the ancient hominoid fossils have been found in only two regions of Africa - which just coincidentally happens to be geologically favorable to find old fossils. Just because someone finds dinosaur bones in Mongolia and the Western US doesn't mean they originated in Mongolia and the Western US. Then, we have the paleoanthropologists at odds with DNA scientists. So does one trust in DNA, mitochondrial science, or do we trust those who dig, guess at what era the exposed surface bones belonged in, and what they are and where they fit? One side has specific DNA science, the other has small piles of bones and a lot of guessing. The Laetoli footprints were determined to be real footprints left long, long ago. But a very, VERY large (4-5 times the size of a modern human) human-type footprint is also in rock - on Gower's Mountain in the Cleveland National Forest. But this is considered anomalous. A number of human tracks have been found in the Cretaceous limestone near Glen Rose, Texas, but they too, are anomalous and disregarded. Thirteen 22-inch tracks, with a four to five foot stride were found near Alamagordo NM, and they're disregarded. A very defined shoe track, 16 inches long from toe to heel was found IN ROCK, and dated to 10-20 million years old - likewise anomalous and to be disregarded. Either geologists cannot date rocks and strata with any degree of accuracy - or we have another problem.