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Some possibilities: 1) Meat caching, which bears do even during the non-winter, and which helps explain why sometimes sasquatches stink like bears or stray dogs that roll in carrion 2) They follow deer and elk down in elevation as the snows drive them lower, anyway, so hunting is still very possible 3) There are still a remarkable number of anadromous fish runs in the PNW in mid-winter, and I'm hoping to get into some of those winter steelhead and striper runs myself. 4) Again along the coast and lowest elevations, clam tides expose a hearty enough dinner in mid-winter to attract plenty of humans 5) Sasquatch activity level goes down, which reduces food intake needs a bit 6) Humans (to detect said sasquatches that are now closer to human habitations) are more prone to stay indoors or in town during winter and school season. 7) I'm always amazed when folks in the coastal PNW talk about winter as if it was some kind of burden. I travel through regularly from southcentral Alaska in mid-winter ow, and it's like a Garden of Eden compared to home, just like my home is balmy compared to the Arctic North Slope. And even here brown bears commonly wake up mid-winder and wander about.

In our country the million dollar question is what happens during winter? How does a 800 lbs primate get enough groceries, without being detected when other 800 lbs omnivores are fast asleep?

You'd have been just as well off staying at a Holiday Express Inn last night. I'm going to use the Denisovan case to illustrate my problem with this DNA shell game: First of all, before ever discovering any fossils whatsoever, the Denisovan markers in the human family have been there all along, if you believe what they're saying. It's supposedly high in people from southeast Asia, which is interesting since southeast Asians tend to be small people and Denisovan fossils regularly reveal "robust" critters. So why did they finally "discover" this species with the 2008 finger bone find? The 40,000 year old and uncontaminated finger bone, I might add. Adding to the confusion is the question: where is the rest of this supposedly young female? Why wasn't the marker identified as a mysterious hist, then the later bone find confirm it? Is it the chicken, or the egg? Why would it matter? The DNA should be the same, no? Secondly, if a fossil is contaminated, the DNA should tell us just who the contaminator is, right? If everybody within the chain of custody has DNA, and it doesn't match theirs, whose was it? Like everything else, their claims about what DNA tells them doesn't match their own line of claims. The bottom line is that if what they want to believe can be supported with DNA evidence, voila'! They will call it "compelling", "convincing", "conclusive", "immutable", or otherwise <adjective> evidence. But if it leads them to where they do not want to go, it was contaminated. It's as much an OJ trial as science. Perhaps more. The stakes are much, much higher. A 40,000 year old cave woman is cool stuff. An 800 lb. caveman running around the outskirts of Seattle or Portland is a bit unsettling. They really don't want to go there.

BF have to be the same. It's the only way for them to breed...and I would say they are much more mobile and smarter/more aware than a Grizzly.

Your going to notice if a troupe of 800 lbs primates are living next to you. I had a thread of Caloric intake you can do a search on. Things can hide that are externally supported in 20 acres of woods. A sniper with a months worth of rations and a water supply could easily hide from you. But that is not the same thing as a breeding population of very large primates. You can look at Grizzly Bears (a large omnivore) as a comparison. A male Grizzly Bears home range is 600 square miles. A female? 150 square miles. 600 square miles equals 384000 acres. And this animal hibernates half the year. Apes do not hibernate.

There is another possibility for wood knocks, rock clacks, etc. that I haven't seen mentioned yet. Hunting. It is very plausible that in addition to communication, hunting is a purpose to which sound has been used by primates for tens of thousands of years. How did our ancestors hunt in the earliest of days? A group would split into two or more parties. One party would stealthily lay in wait downwind of potential prey. The second group would move in from the upwind direction in a noisy fashion, whooping, clapping, stomping, and generally making a lot of noise. Prey animals will almost always move in the opposite direction from perceived danger if terrain allows...right into the kill zone of the waiting hunters. Chimpanzees have been documented using similar tactics when they hunt monkeys and other chimpanzees. Why wouldn't sasquatch? Sure, I agree that communication is also a viable and reasonable explanation for the noises, but why wouldn't a moderately to highly intelligent primate find multiple uses for a given skill? Chimpanzees do it. Humans do it. Why not sasquatch? My apologies if someone else already made this point and I missed it.