What Is Sasquatch?

[Guest zenmonkey]

Ya'll are asking a different question than I ask ... when I ask what are they, I'm asking about culture, intelligence, intentions ... not biology.   When I say people, I mean behavior.   What I've interacted with behaves more like a non technological person than behaving like a mere ape.   There appears to be higher cognitive function, deliberate planning, experiments performed to learn specific information, not just instinct, no matter how complex. 

 

I don't have any idea what their biological roots are.   We have no scientific basis to support elimination of any possibilities right now, only personal biases pressuring us to do so. 

 

MIB

kinda what I had in mind.

[norseman]

Some thoughts I have towards the debate .

Bergmann's rule states that the farther north you go the bigger animals get within the species. Shiras moose in the selkirks are smaller than Alaskan moose.

The trouble I have with Eskimo or Neanderthal height to adapt to cold climates is that Scandanavians per average are the tallest people in the world. And most of them do not have thin, basketball player builds either. The tiny island of Iceland dominated the worlds strongest man competition for decades.

So I think there is more to the story than just height.

As far as bears out competing apes in

Northern climates, I think is correct . For one bears hibernate during the worst months while squatches split up the meager food stuffs that can be gotten in forest. Secondly Orang babies take 7.7 years to raise, with twins being extremely rare. That is a incredible amount of time, second to only human babies. Bears in the larger scheme of things are slow breeders compared to many other predators such as Wolves, but are easily two to three times more productive than an orang.

Lastly there is a difference between tool use and tool manufacture. Apes are good at picking up rocks or sticks and putting them to use. Or manipulating a branch or twig to serve a purpose. This hardly places them in the Stone Age. To be truly human we should see flaked stone hand axes.......and not discarded at the end of the job but valued and carried from Africa to Asia

[salubrious]

Short and thick would be a better adaptation to cold then being tall.  Less surface area/volume.

 

A spear would be much more effective than running down a deer.  I think the whole bigfoot wrestles down deer and other prey is bigfoot fanfiction.  At best they are probablly taking sick/crippled/old deer or eating carrion.  If its so easy for bigfoot to hunt deer, which there is lots of, then why such low populations.

 

Bears out-compete bigfoot or if they have completely different ecological niche are much more successful.  This is simple lots of bears, lots of live bears, lots of dead bears, lots of bear fossils all over asia and north america.  No live bigfoot confirmed, dead confirmed, fossils confirmed.  If bigfoot does exist it's poplulation is small and has most likely always been small.

Hmans can run a deer down too. This is because we have the brain to give us advanced tracking skills, such that we can focus on one individual even when it moves through a herd, and keep it moving. There is an annual race from Prescott, AZ, over Mingus Mountain to Jerome. You can run it or you can ride a horse. Its common for the runners to overtake racers on horseback at the base of the mountain. Its miles from Prescott. Horses and deer cannot maintain a run unless its very cold- they overheat. We sweat, so we can run further.

 

BF have very powerful legs. BTW while they are tall, they are also wide! The one I saw had shoulders 4 feet wide. In the short term, I have no doubts they can run pretty fast- faster than we can. So catching a deer does not seem that far-fetched to me.

 

We don't know how big their population actually is. They are pretty good at staying out of sight.

 

Lastly there is a difference between tool use and tool manufacture. Apes are good at picking up rocks or sticks and putting them to use. Or manipulating a branch or twig to serve a purpose. This hardly places them in the Stone Age. To be truly human we should see flaked stone hand axes.......and not discarded at the end of the job but valued and carried from Africa to Asia

 

Native Americans used various sites for butchering after their hunt. In such sites its common to see worked stone tools that were obviously discarded. I suspect a lot has to do with how elegant the tool is and what one's chances might be for finding more materials and how easy it will be to work them.

[Nipissing]

Hmans can run a deer down too. This is because we have the brain to give us advanced tracking skills, such that we can focus on one individual even when it moves through a herd, and keep it moving. There is an annual race from Prescott, AZ, over Mingus Mountain to Jerome. You can run it or you can ride a horse. Its common for the runners to overtake racers on horseback at the base of the mountain. Its miles from Prescott. Horses and deer cannot maintain a run unless its very cold- they overheat. We sweat, so we can run further.

 

Horses do sweat. It's a rare trait in the animal kingdom, admittedly. Horses also have excellent endurance compared to most other animals. As for the Mingus race, check out the times here: http://managainsthorse.net/result.html Endurance rides of 50 to 100 miles are common. Sorry, just wanted to clear that up.

[Incorrigible1]

Author Louis L'Amour, who wrote scores of good American Westerns, stated a man could out distance a horse in a determined tracking effort.  Dunno whether it's true, but the author made it seem quite factual in his writings.

[norseman]

It would depend on the terrain and the head start, but the tv show man tracker catches his quarry often.

[BobZenor]

Some thoughts I have towards the debate .

Bergmann's rule states that the farther north you go the bigger animals get within the species. Shiras moose in the selkirks are smaller than Alaskan moose.

The trouble I have with Eskimo or Neanderthal height to adapt to cold climates is that Scandanavians per average are the tallest people in the world. And most of them do not have thin, basketball player builds either. The tiny island of Iceland dominated the worlds strongest man competition for decades.

So I think there is more to the story than just height.

As far as bears out competing apes in

Northern climates, I think is correct . For one bears hibernate during the worst months while squatches split up the meager food stuffs that can be gotten in forest. Secondly Orang babies take 7.7 years to raise, with twins being extremely rare. That is a incredible amount of time, second to only human babies. Bears in the larger scheme of things are slow breeders compared to many other predators such as Wolves, but are easily two to three times more productive than an orang.

Lastly there is a difference between tool use and tool manufacture. Apes are good at picking up rocks or sticks and putting them to use. Or manipulating a branch or twig to serve a purpose. This hardly places them in the Stone Age. To be truly human we should see flaked stone hand axes.......and not discarded at the end of the job but valued and carried from Africa to Asia

That is also exactly my dividing line for what should be called human but it is just my opinion. 

 

If we could identify our parent lineage from an even 600,000 year old fossils I would probably call that a human also but we can't.  We have huge uncertainty at 600,000 years ago which lineage of heidelbergensis led to us.  When it gets to a million year old fossil there is even less relation to us so it is less certain to work out which are our ancestors.  The one of a particular age with the most traits in common with us is assumed to be our ancestral lineage.  It becomes very difficult with an incomplete fossil record to say what hominids were actually ancestors and which were were just one of the side branches. There seems to be many side branches so we may have never found a fossil of our actual ancestor a million years ago or older let along the ancestor of bigfoot. Our ancestor was probably some eregaster lineage a million years ago and it also later spawned the heidelbergensis lineage.  That is probably the best guess but it isn't certain and the number of fossils is very low.  We don't really know exactly which lineage led to us.  That is the uncertainty of modern paleoanthropology.  

 

Stone hand axes may have fundamentally changed us.  They required extensive passed down knowledge and they were developed into things of value and possessed.  The process could be continuously improved on.  That likely started a sort of arms race where technological hominids could dominate the other species.  That was supposedly only about 1.5 million years ago last time I checked.  It is logical to assume that one of the erectus lineage was the first to start making hand axes.  They had the largest brains and were most like us of the known fossils of that age.  All erectus at the time didn't posses that skill.  It logically started with one population.  Tool use in chimps doesn't spread fast at all.  They don't communicate very well with each other.  I could see the value of teaching skills as well as the general arms race all pushing greater communication skills as a vital survival skill in those populations.   That wouldn't apply to all the other groups that couldn't even manage to make crude stone axes before that time.  I am thinking even the first hand axes was just a start.  They probably still needed 1.5 million years to get to our level of communication and logic skills.   If you could identify the hominid that first made the hand axe then it could be called the first human by that definition.  That is only a subset of erectus. Not all of the erectus at that time were even at the beginners level in my not totally arbitrary human delineation point.  That is why I see all "older" hominids as logically probably not significantly capable of technology.  That is a subset of erectus and long after early Homo which at a million years earlier is probably decidedly non human by those standards.  Modern humans would learn to make something better very quickly with our communication and logic skills than a stone hand axe.  Populations with thousands of years to teach each other new skills that couldn't even do primitive hand axes probably weren't capable of being significantly technological.  That is why I see it as a dividing line.  The older stone tools aren't really beyond what a chimp might manage.  The chimps might even manage to eventually spread the broken sharp rocks to other chimps if they were especially useful.  Maybe the early Homo were slightly better communicators than chimps but probably not really that far above them.   It is all just speculation on my part but it seems likely to me.

[Guest Stan Norton]

Birds manufacture tools and carry them around. Tool manufacture in itself is not a defining human trait I'm afraid.

[the parkie]

In my opinion, the desire to define what is meant by the label "human" leads the debate down a blind alley. The word is subjective depending on scientific and cultural beliefs.

If and when Sasquatch is scientifically acknowledged it will likely not fit any label that humans have invented for past archeological discoveries and need its own new label.

[Lake County Bigfooot]

What make things more interesting is the fact that "humans" as we now call them, seem to have had a quantum leap of

sorts only 10,000 years ago, as evidenced in cultures around the planet.  Perhaps we as a specie had simply evolved

to this point, but this would not explain the sudden burst of technology and culture.  I know this sounds like the whole

ancient alien thing rehash, and perhaps I have my own twist on that scenario.  Whatever the cause for "humans" making 

that jump, I think it was at that point that Sasquatch were ultimately confined to their current niche, and have done a

remarkable job of making the best of the situation.  I mean it could perhaps have turned out quite different, and maybe 

down the road that will be the case, given our current course as a civilization.  The age of the Sasquatch may be yet

forthcoming, if it happened to us, well then......our instinct to survive as the dominant specie on this planet may be their

undoing, if we do not stop it.

Edited December 11, 2013 by Lake County Bigfooot

[southernyahoo]

In my opinion, the desire to define what is meant by the label "human" leads the debate down a blind alley. The word is subjective depending on scientific and cultural beliefs.

If and when Sasquatch is scientifically acknowledged it will likely not fit any label that humans have invented for past archeological discoveries and need its own new label.

 

I think Bigfoot will cause massive redefining of what it is to be human or they will be accepted as one, hairy and non-technological. They've got all the other bases covered where the evidence is concerned.

 

The label is used to set ourselves apart from other animals, and justifies how we treat other living things.

[Guest DWA]

In my opinion, the desire to define what is meant by the label "human" leads the debate down a blind alley. The word is subjective depending on scientific and cultural beliefs.

If and when Sasquatch is scientifically acknowledged it will likely not fit any label that humans have invented for past archeological discoveries and need its own new label.

As somebody once said about another species:  we need to redefine "man," redefine "tool," or accept chimpanzees as men.

 

All too often here, I see the word "human" - really a technical definition - used improperly.  It's used, generally speaking, to deny animals the dignity of what they are.  I very much doubt we'll accept sasquatch as human.  But the differences won't make it, or us, better.  They're not us, and don't need to be.

[Guest UPs]

The slippery slope of human vs. animal debate will be endless without a specimen to study and even then, we may not have an answer unless they can be studied alive. As it stands now, the general public equates bf with monsters and all the arguments in the world will it change the publics perception of a reclusive, 8ft tall, hairy, upright being that is not supposed to exist according to science. That being said, one trait that has not been discussed is that of reproduction. If bf is able to reproduce with humans, that should end the argument and if unable to reproduce with humans, could they ever be considered human?

My own opinion is that they are neither human nor ape, but a completely seperate species and one that we can learn a great deal from.

[norseman]

Let's put it this way.

If you were put into a chimp termite fishing class and had to put to use what you observed concerning collecting and modifying sticks to fish with? I am confident we would all master the class in five minutes.

Whereas if we were put into a early human stone flaking class? Your not going to master flaking stone in five minutes. Not even a simple hand axe let alone a work of art like the much later Clovis point.

Sasquatch doesn't exhibit any of these skills, which makes me believe they are not a member of the genus homo. Now if we expand our definition of what it means to be human to include the great apes? Then of course they would be included.

[Ike]

Hello AaronD,

Even mentioning the word Anunnaki can be a very slippery slope for a Bigfoot Forum

I don't want to derail this thread nor slide down this slippery slope and may even get in trouble for posting this; but the writings of Zecharia Sitchin and the whole Anunnaki business has been debunked as a fraud...http:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

 

Nope...edited it myself to keep out of trouble (or at least try), but Google ancient aliens debunked and you'll see what I reference. If the mods find this to be out of line, I apologize in advance and please delete as you see fit, I just didn't want to see some good discussion get sidetracked with unsubstantiated "out there" theories.

Edited December 11, 2013 by Ike