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I'm curious to find out what others do when it comes to camp security. How do you keep your camp safe and protect yourself from intruders albeit man or beast? My approach has evolved over the years and I always welcome input and ideas with open arms. Camp Location - The two areas I go have lots of ponds so my camp is generally on or near water. The locations are sufficently away from humanity and accessible only by backpacking in a good distance that I don't ever expect to have anyone come strolling nearby. Most times I camp away from the water but will be close enough to exit into the water if need be. I will have a fire near the water as an enticement and to let a sasquatch know of my presence. Protection - I am armed when I enter the woods. I'll usually, but not always, carry bear spray and also wear a neck knife whenever I enter the woods. The knife is used for bushcraft purposes. Awareness - I'm always quiet, on guard, and listening. Sometimes, just sitting and carefully listening for periods of time can be instructive. I'm also vigilant to inspect the area around camp by looking at grasses, moss, ferns, branches, and vegetation for prints or disturbances to see if something has been in my area recently. I canvas the camp and nearby area each day I'm there. I want to know if something/someone knows I'm there. Detection - Technology has helped immensely. Nowadays, I always have my thermal imager. It helps at night to see things before they reach my camp. Was that crunching noise a deer, bear, or raccoon? It will identify that so you know what you're dealing with. I also use personal sound alarms and fishing line attached to them acting as trip wires near vulnerable areas. If something comes through, they'll unknowingly tug on the fishing line which will set off the 130db alarms. I've pondered using IR detectors with lights as another means of camp security to detect anything nearby. Visibility - There are several schools of thought. I subscribe to being less visible and not easily seen. My tent is muted in color as is my clothing although I generally don't wear camo. I don't keep my camp nor tent lighted and only use enough lumens from flashlights to accomplish the task at hand. Sound - I'm cognizant to be quiet as a church mouse when at camp or moving about in the woods so I do not give away my location. I think my hearing is pretty good as I am almost always the one who says, "Did you hear that?". Sounds amplifiers, both in-ear and external, are something I have not yet invested in but plan to do so. If you can hear something coming, you have another arrow in the quiver. The general security rules above are obviously violated when I make vocalizations, wood knocks, or other sounds and when using lights or other visual displays as a means to attract a sasquatch. My only stone-throwing incident occurred when a friend brought his backpacking guitar and was playing it. Those are a few general thoughts about camp security and I welcome other ideas or suggestions.

https://www.sapiens.org/column/field-trips/neanderthal-locomotion/ I found this article interesting. They were not bumbling cave men. They were sprinters, better at climbing steep inclines and rested by squatting instead of sitting. Sounds a lot like Bigfoot. Ostman talks about them squatting and climbing I believe. And Krantz and Meldrum talks about their heels and toes presumably being longer.

You can fly to Africa and view the femur yourself? Im not suggesting Heidelbergensis was a giant. Im suggesting the earlier species could produce giants just like Sapiens can. So your theory is that a African species who is ALSO not 8 feet tall who has never been even found outside of Africa walked to north America? It also is no smarter than a gorilla. We have those in zoos. Its also a herbivore based on its dental morphology. How is a plant eating ape going to sustain itself in Siberia or North America in winter on plant life? Sasquatch in order to remain hidden from modern science is going to be smarter than a gorilla. (Or a comparable species like paranthropus) Otherwise we would simply find them dead in the forest. Case closed. Also Gorilla level intelligence doesn't attempt to hide oneself from humans either. I will add the caveat again that we will not know until we produce a body. But your theory has way more holes in it than mine does? Which archaic Hominid was best suited for a journey to north America? Paranthropus would be at the very bottom of the list.

Good afternoon all! I’m Bry and I live in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. I have been interested in the big guy since I was a child and saw a movie about him on tv. I’ve never had a sighting but always on the lookout when driving through the mountains. I’m happy to have found BFF to read about others sightings and experiences.

Hahaha, that's exactly what I was thinking. NorthWind and I are gonna get out there and camp one of these days. IF we take his dogs, then they ARE the security alarm. If we don't have them along (which is the plan at several places we've scouted), then camp security is something we're looking at. As always, @wiiawiwb, your plans are well made. We could do most of that - choosing the location, having situational awareness, personal protection measures, using technology. I'd like to look into fishline warning systems etc.

I don't think so because the limb index numbers are too far apart. The chart pic shows neanderthal humerofemoral index in the 60s. Patty is estimated to have a humerofemoral index of 91.8 in the thread below. Graphic and analysis well done by SweatYeti. Scroll about halfway down the page for the grapic of Patty. Looks to me the disparity in limb ratios between neanderthals and what we have on Patty is too large. I looked through many web pages trying to find an intermembral index figure for neanderthals and couldn't find one. What did keep popping up were stats for australopthecus. Australopthecus and Patty have similar numbers in humerofemoral index, intermembral index and there are also multiple australopthecus skulls with sagittal crests.

Mugwamp

Film subject, mythical beasts, man ape and of course my favorite Sasquatch. I don't like the name Bigfoot. Exploited commercial name not taken seriously. Also the name of a monster truck.

I tend to call Bigfoot Sasquatch more often than I call Sasquatch Bigfoot. Sometimes, I call it by each name in the same post. To me, it is the same creature, so what does it matter? Would a North American hominid by any other name still smell as rank?

In the lower 48, sometimes your main danger isn't the wildlife, but humans. Here in WA state I have found discarded propane tanks, clear hose, beakers and other glassware etc...all the usual makings of a Breaking Bad operation out in the woods...at the end of little-used Forest Service roads. Now these folks are seriously dangerous because you can go to jail for many years for making that stuff, and the operators might just shoot first and forget the questions entirely. If you pull up on something like that, you should just turn around right away and leave with haste. But there are other practical things that are more useful and you would probably need more than worrying about bears or meth makers. I always carry any spare belts I replaced, the old ones, and a good tool kit. Two spare tires is a good idea, along with a tire plug kit and a pump. I went out in the hills above Naches, WA once and found out it WAS possible to get two flat tires on the same trip. Using the plug kit on the second flat, I still had to shove a bolt into the hole on the tire (pretty big hole) and made it back to civilization. Slowly. Recently, I picked up the item shown below and an Amazon return 50 watt solar panel and ditched the little gas generator I was using previously. I gave it a five star video review at Amazon. This one even beats the Jackery portable power units. It uses not just a lithium battery, but the LI-PO 4 battery, which will take many more charges than straight lithium and is far less dangerous. But it is a heavier unit due to the lithium iron phosphate battery. However, this unit comes with a nice little zipper case that includes the charging connectors for wall power, cigarette lighter, AND solar panel. It also comes with a built-in MPPT solar controller, if you can believe that. So you can plug a solar panel of any type right into the thing and it will stop charging automatically when it's full up. I personally recommend this 300-watt hour unit. Last trip I took was a group campout north of Rainier and the group generator stopped putting out power. Still, I was able to run a Samsung 32" TV and a small DVD player from this box and watch two complete movies...ran it down only to 40%. That's pretty good. LI-PO 4 battery will also give you full power right up (almost) to the point where you need to recharge. Some units get fading power and the cheapies that use a bunch of strung-together 18650 flashlight batteries aren't worth your time. You get one or two bad batteries in that series and the entire unit works much less. Here is the link to the unit at Amazon. Currently it is 265 with a 50 buck off coupon. You will never be sorry with this one. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08GPL38M3/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o09_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1

As for the boost in size, figure they were also encountering progressively larger megafauna as they moved north, not only prey species but predators as well. And who's to say they weren't hybridizing with other hominids along the way, perhaps gaining in stature without losing the stocky basic framework. Like MIB states, evolution often occurs in jumps (or bottlenecks) and few contexts could better press for more size than and ever colder environment filled with ever bigger predators!

I was thinking "science" would be someone saying that Homo sapiens are not the only surviving member of the genus Homo. The fossil record for neanderthals is not great and there's no way to know for sure how their body mass would have changed over time if they survived as a small fringe species. The theories you and MIB discuss of increased mass do seem reasonable. I'm just not seeing where such theories fit into what "science" currently says about neanderthals. Theories are good since you never know when "science"might find something that fits. btw, I'm far from a scientist. I'm not even a theorist when it comes to this kind of stuff. The closest I get is reading ancient origins.

Absolutely. It goes a step further though, via two factors. First, the smaller a population is, the faster it can drift genetically because it does not have the buffering effect of members of the larger population's genetic contributions. Second, the more extreme the environment, the more it will be pushed to adapt .. or die out .. via natural selection. Taken together, a very small population of some known ancestor or cousin of ours could have arrived in North America under very climatically challenging conditions and have had to have drifted a great deal isolated from its parent population or die out. Science shows that unlike what we presumed, evolution is not a smooth, steady process, but rather is periods of sameness broken by large, abrupt changes. What we are looking for today here might not look all that much like its biological ancestor did. We need DNA to study (whether that comes from a freshly dead body or not) if we are to find out just how close we are to them genetically. A body on a slab has two pluses ... first, it may be easier to obtain than DNA from the field, and second, there can be no doubt about the source of the DNA if you are taking it from a body rather than collecting hair from the environment. MIB

Your with science about what? Neanderthals went extinct or Bigfoot doesn’t exist? What would account for an increase in body size? Bergman’s rule. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergmann's_rule In Europe Neanderthals are found in Germany, France, Spain and Italy. They were also found in the Middle East. Roughly 30-50 degrees north. In order to defeat the land bridge in North America they would have had to have been at least 60 degrees north. The migration could have lasted 10’s of thousands of years. So an NE Asian variant could have needed to have become larger than those in Europe and the near East. OR? A related species like Homo Heidelbergensis or Denisovans or even Homo Erectus experienced similar evolutionary pressures. Bergman’s rule works with all mammalian species.... Also, I don’t think the science is settled on where archaic Homo species landed on the planet. In my opinion it’s increasing clear SOMETHING made it here. And may still be scratching by in America’s hinterlands. http://patagoniamonsters.blogspot.com/2019/12/more-on-erectus-calvaria-from-chapala.html

I don't know norseman, not knocking your theory but the article also says Neanderthals were short and stocky. What would account for such enormous increase in body mass to evolve into a Sasquatch? I'm with science on this one. Neanderthals supposedly faded out and what was left merged with homo sapiens. I don't know enough about genetics or fossil evidence to prove all of this but we will have to wait for the professionals to sort it out.

Camp security? How about CHEAP (and lightweight) camp security? I go off about 25 ft. from camp with a spool of good thread and a bag with four cowbells in it. I tie the end of the thread to tree number one at about two ft. off the ground, string it along about for about 50ft. and tie it off to tree number two, hang a cowbell on it over a rock, tie a second piece of thread to tree number two, and run it to tree number three and repeat the process until a 50ft. square, four-quadrant bell system is created. Small animals can get by under the threads but taller ones will break through one of the "barriers" and the cowbell dropping onto the rock will tell me where. Four cowbells and thread? $25.00. Tin cans would make the system cost next to nothing.

In house private security team. Costs about $5/day in provisions plus the occasional destroyed shoe or under garment when bored.