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1 - Your opinion is based on nothing but assumptions. Derek owns his own business and has been booked for months in advance ( over a year ) out on work and has not had much opportunity to sit down and get the entire group together to discuss the results. Shane has been spearheading current efforts also in an effort to locate new nest sites to try and find fresh samples for testing. I will respond to hiflier separately as I have time, I am also starting work as I have moved and what time I do get it is out in the woods locally researching ( we all have day jobs ) reports. 2 - Yes, Derek and Shane spoke at one event this spring and Shane spoke at the other in OR just last month ( I was there holding the booth ), both of these should be on youtube. 3 - That is also nothing more than an opinion based on no substance. I am a member of the Olympic Project. Free time has been short for leadership in the OP and what time has been spared has gone back into field operation/expeds. I understand the frustration some have about this effort as it has been quiet for a long time now but things are still going on.

You are forgetting the big pushes out of Africa occurred during the last ice age. In my case the maternal side DNA marker L3 indicated an East African exit about 67,000 years ago and on my Paternal side the M178 marker indicated a exit out of East Africa 70,000 years ago. The Sahara was never a factor and the nile river valley and the middle east was much wetter than it is now. However the mid latitudes of Africa were probably plagued with water shortages. During ice ages much more of the earths water is tied up in the arctic and glaciation, and mid latitudes become very arrid. The half of the US not under ice was arid grasslands because the expanded polor zone pushes the jet stream where the storms form and ride South. I would guess drought and famine were larger factors in the push out of Africa than human wanderlust. Wolly Mammoths were Northern lattitude animals. Being herbivores they needed grass growing at least most of the year to have something to eat. The fact that the polar ice and extensive glaciation covered much of Europe and Northern Asia there was very little habitat left for the Mammoth. Concentrating them where human hunters were forced by the same ice to live also. Mammoth numbers had to have been much smaller because the elephant habitat in Africa and SE Asia in the last ice age is pretty much as it is today. Humans and Mammoths in the same habitat promotes hunting. The human pushes into Asia did not occur until about 60,000 years ago. That gave Asian elephants a big head start before being hunted. Remember the human spread into SE Asia and Polynesia began about 60,000 years ago. To island hop, humans needed boats. If they had them then they certainly had boats 14,000 years ago for the trip into North America. Probably different boats but Japan and parts of China have been sea faring for most of human presence. New evidence suggests that Europeans reached NA first about 23,000 years ago in boats out of ireland... Most likely following the ice sheet across from Europe. Most of Western Alaska and British Columbia are islands with deep inleted coast lines. Easy to traverse with boats but difficult to impossible to walk. Boats were and are still part of the culture and heritage of the Native Alaskans. It is more likely they arrived in boats than developed them after they came. As I mentioned the glacier fields are a formidable barrier. While some sort of North Slope of Alaska traverse East past the mountains into the interior of the Yukon Territory then South is possible, it would be as difficult as crossing antarctica on foot. The migrations of the camels and horses which migrated from NA to Eurasia, bison, and other herbivores predate the movement of modern humans. So humans did not follow them across. The last ice age started about 100,000 years ago. It had nearly ended by the time humans are thought to have come into Western NA. The lower sea levels were still present when the melt started and that is about the time the humans made the crossing. The camel migrated in an earlier ice age which have been going on for the last 2.5 million years. We have had many ice ages lasting about 100,000 years followed by interglacial periods lasting 10,000 to 15,000 years during the last 2.5 million years.

The phrasing here suggests you've thought about the "why". I may be mistaken, of course. Do you think this is because of wide variation withiin one species or because there are more than one species, maybe existing cooperatively? Or something else ... ? MIB

I agree nearly entirely with your posting, and regret I'm out of plusses for the day. However, the warming that doomed the mammoths was entirely natural, and that I doubt any current warming trend due to "our friends on the right," but again due to natural causes shouldn't shade my consensus with your posting.

Hominins have always been an adventurous race. What drove us to brave the deserts of the Sahara and the Middle East in wave after wave after wave in order to leave Africa? It’s just in our biology to be explorers and it’s one of the reasons we began to walk upright in the first half place. I’m still skeptical of the Marx Overkill Theory. Why were elephants in Asia and Africa spared but mammoths (amongst other ice age megafauna) in Europe and the Americas systematically targeted for slaughter and wiped out? I think it’s always been about the warming climate rendering shaggy fur obsolete (no matter what our friends on the right accuse of simply being a Chinese hoax or a “greenie/liberal” conspiracy theory). I’m not saying we didn’t occasionally hunt them or even scavenge from kills but surely they weren’t the easiest quarry to bring down and decimate?? I think they were here long before we were. The Cerutti Mastadon site is thought to be 130,000 years old. Big assumption tying this to Sasquatch I admit but I have to ask ‘what else had the means of smashing a mastadon bone with a crude cobble 117,000 years before the first paleo-Indian showed up?’ Homo had entered Eurasia as early as 2 million years ago. It’s anybody’s guess how long it took them to find Beringia and trek it but the potential is there for it to be a pretty long while back. I don’t doubt the difficulty of the terrain one bit but if mammoths, bison, wolves, bears, etc were able to make the trek numerous times without boats then it’s entirely possible that a bipedal hominin was able to follow these herds into the new world without boats as well when the water levels were much lower.

MIB has a good point on lack of data available to make a determination of relative size and relationships. Jack Horner, a Canadian Palentologist, basically caused several species of dinosaurs to go extinct. Extinct is not the right word exactly, but he showed the species never existed. www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_shape_shifting_dinosaurs/transcript?language=en Entertaining video. He wondered why baby dinosaurs were not found more frequently. They should be found more often than mature adults in the same strata because most likely do not achieve adult size. In our search for the origin of BF we are making a lot of assumptions based on very few findings. Relative size of likely candidates are perhaps premature because of lack of specimens. The size and morphology of giganto, homo erectus, etc are all based on very little data. From the mistakes made with the dinosaurs, I would expect similar problems with man kinds ancestors and members of our family tree. There is too little data to have any likelihood of assuming the correct evolution and origins of BF. .Meldrum contends that several species in our more recent human lineage likely have yet to be found. Fossels and ancient bones are very rare.

Nature is remarkable. Evolution and punctuated equilibrium can work wonders in quick (geologic time) order. Species overall size has been enlarged/shrunk countless times. Indeed, we have our own Homo floresiensis as an example. Regarding diet, I've observed gray squirrels and prairie dogs cannibalizing neighbors. A deer species has been found to be a major predator of ground-nesting birds. As MIB states above, best not to limit the possibilities.

Welcome , ChB & FX4 !

To be clear, are you comparing the FLIR Scout TK and the Leopold Tracker 2? If so, there are several things to consider based on what features are important to you. The Scout can record videos and pictures which I don't think is available with the Leopold. The refresh rate (frame rate) with the Scout TK is 9Hz whereas it is 30Hz with the Leopold. That means a fast-moving animal will be a bit blurry with the Scout compared to the Leopold. That favors the Leopold however almost all of my thermal recording/viewing has been of animals moving slowly or stopped. The refresh rate is less important in those instances. The clarity of the lens and image as better with the Leopold. Finally, check my numbers but I believe the FOV of the Scout is wider than the Leopold (20 vs 14). I think the wider FOV is better because it allows you to see more without having to move the scope. If I were choosing between the two, I'd choose the Scout all day long. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahNgbENa_MI Edited to mention ---- I've viewed both scopes in a store but never in the field.