For Those Of Us Who Don't Think Sasquatch Is Genus Homo...

[southernyahoo]

Fascinating find. I guess they'll have a hard time dating the bones, but it would seem they'll be quite old being from South Africa and having a foot indiscernible from modern human would mean a very early rise of bipedality and little selective pressure to change in those bones.

 

root, is a braided stream: a river that divides into channels, only to merge again downstream. Similarly, the various hominin types that inhabited the landscapes of Africa must at some point have diverged from a common ancestor. But then farther down the river of time they may have coalesced again, so that we, at the river’s mouth, carry in us today a bit of East Africa, a bit of South Africa, and a whole lot of history we have no notion of whatsoever. Because one thing is for sure: If we learned about a completely new form of hominin only because a couple of cavers were skinny enough to fit through a crack in a well-explored South African cave, we really don’t have a clue what else might be out there. erger himself thinks the right metaphor for human evolution, instead of a tree branching from a single root, is a braided stream: a river that divides into channels, only to merge again downstream. Similarly, the various hominin types that inhabited the landscapes of Africa must at some point have diverged from a common ancestor. But then farther down the river of time they may have coalesced again, so that we, at the river’s mouth, carry in us today a bit of East Africa, a bit of South Africa, and a whole lot of history we have no notion of whatsoever. Because one thing is for sure: If we learned about a completely new form of hominin only because a couple of cavers were skinny enough to fit through a crack in a well-explored South African cave, we really don’t have a clue what else might be out there. 

[Patterson-Gimlin]

Not to be a Debbie Downer ,but this is still not evidence in North America.

[gigantor]

How Old Is It?

The mysteries of what H. naledi is, and how its bones got into the cave, are inextricably knotted with the question of how old those bones are—and for the moment no one knows. In East Africa, fossils can be accurately dated when they are found above or below layers of volcanic ash, whose age can be measured from the clocklike decay of radioactive elements in the ash. At Malapa, Berger had gotten lucky: The A. sediba bones lay between two flowstones—thin layers of calcite deposited by running water—that could also be dated radiometrically. But the bones in the Rising Star chamber were just lying on the cave floor or buried in shallow, mixed sediments. When they got into the cave is an even more intractable problem to solve than how.

 

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Still a cool discovery...

[Guest Stan Norton]

Dating techniques have limitations. There will tend to be clusters around the 40,000, 600,000 and 1.8 million Mark.

[Celtic Raider]

Really fascinating discovery. and a very enjoyable read.

 

Just wondering if there is a way to date the bones themselves, I think Radio carbon dating is only accurate up to a certian age, maybe 50k years or so before the carbon isotope is insufficient to use, maybe there is something else present which has a longer half-life needed to date. It would be great to know where this creature fitted in the scheme of things.

[norseman]

Not to be a Debbie Downer ,but this is still not evidence in North America.

Very true.

[Drew]

If Bigfoot is alive and lacking classification, the focus should not be on fossil digs in Africa.  the Focus should be on collecting a specimen from anyone of the 48 States, 7 Provinces and Northern Mexico, in locations accessible to any person with a pick up truck or a jeep.  This is all just window dressing to the fact that a Live large mammal, is far easier to classify and obtain a type specimen for, than a new Genus of human, from southern Africa.

[Guest DWA]

^^^Agreed.  But a lot of focussed effort - and an significant dose of dumb luck - led to what we have from this South African discovery.

 

Scientific confirmation of sasquatch is going to require (1) either the same combination of effort and pure dumb luck or (2) a 24/7 full-court press of the kind scientists put on when they know there is something to be found.  Lee Berger at least had the advantage of a mainstream that, while disagreeing with him, kept a moderately - not sufficiently, but moderately - open mind on the subject.

 

I might say that right now, NAWAC is putting in less effort (not their fault, only having vacation time and personal funds), and haven't gotten the dumb luck yet (actually, the Overwatch bullet that hit a twig on its way to a sasquatch's head might count as a significant dose of *reverse* dumb luck).

[WSA]

Well granted, this is not evidence of any kind of robust primate on the NA continent, and not even on the continent where it was found. Aside from the revisions of the anthropology textbooks this discovery will require, it points out a much larger omission in how we are currently going about filling in the gaps in the family tree, and this mindset is probably contributing to the lack of curiosity about Mr. Big, and the lack of concerted effort to document that animal. 

 

That mindset is this: We've found all we need to find. Stop looking.

 

Truth is (See: H. nadali), we are probably far from scraping the bottom of the tub when it comes to discovering the evolutionary test models for modern  H. sapiens, and some of them will probably not be direct ancestors to us at all. A few of them might be evolutionary dead-ends, and maybe the evidence is telling us one of them might have hit the Darwinian lotto # and found a niche we are only just recently starting to fathom. The implications for the field of BF study are obvious to me, as they should be to anyone who has given this any thought at all.   

[Guest DWA]

^^^Which is why I put this thread up.  Well, part of it.  First:  it won't be naive something-in-his-eyes of someone seeing one that tells us what sasquatch is.  It is nothing but our conceit that tells us "what it is to be human."  One "this defines humanity" marker after another has fallen, seemingly more and more rapidly as time goes by.  (We aren't even the only ones with culture anymore.)  Something doesn't have to be of our genus, or family, to remind us of us.

 

But it's also the how-to-think, and the clear demonstration that scientists get locked in groupthink way too often.  This topic of our very own origins is at once the most subject to wild random speculation...and the most locked in groupthink.  Every find is "now we have everything...even though it's all different!"  Well, that is stupid and crazy to boot!  Scientists have no call to think that way; and it's always the mentality of 95% assumption 5% fact - that is only barely beginning to shift - that keeps us mired in Needing To Know The Whole Thing So We'll Say This Is The Whole Thing.

 

And don't we see that on a topic near and dear to all who post here.  If the rapidity of breakthroughs in paleohominology doesn't get at least ten scientists a day to start wondering about sasquatch, yeti, almas, orang pendek, yeren...well, I have just got to wonder what the hell is going on with those people.

 

Because YET AGAIN! we see:  what you didn't know yesterday...was going on all along.  You just didn't know it, did you.

Edited September 11, 2015 by DWA

[Guest DWA]

This guy knows that he is unlikely to find discoveries such as this so what does he do? He networks with cavers and tells them what to look for and let him know if they find anything interesting. Apparently, it was some cavers that actually discovered the bones and told him about their find and also how difficult it was to get to the chamber where they were found. It is probably easier for him to recruit people because of his past discoveries and I wonder if any of the scientists interested in bf are doing the same thing.

WRT this, I know that the BFRO has advanced the thesis that this sort of search will suddenly go into high gear when sasquatch is confirmed.  What puzzles me is that Meldrum, Bindernagel and other proponents haven't made this a more prominent feature of their own pronouncements on the topic.  I get the funny feeling they'd have as many volunteers as they could possibly handle.

[MIB]

Really fascinating discovery. and a very enjoyable read.

 

Just wondering if there is a way to date the bones themselves, I think Radio carbon dating is only accurate up to a certian age, maybe 50k years or so before the carbon isotope is insufficient to use, maybe there is something else present which has a longer half-life needed to date. It would be great to know where this creature fitted in the scheme of things.

 

There, is, potassium-argon, but it is generally not accurate for dates less than 100,000 years.  (When I was in school the figure of 500,000 years was often cited.)   If these bones are **buried**, not just scattered on the surface, then the burial process would negate the assumptions of older material being deeper and younger material being shallower, so it would have to be done based on the bones themselves, not the age of the deeper and shallower layers.

 

MIB

Edited September 11, 2015 by MIB

[1980squatch]

I'm not believing a word of any of this without a blurry photo and a red circle.

[Drew]

They could however, if the rodents found in the cave, can be matched to rodent fossils that were found in timeframe layers elsewhere, determine a date.

 

Ex.

 

Fosillized rodent found in cave matches a fossilized rodent that has only been found in layers of dirt elsewhere, dated to 200,000 years ago, or something like that.

[Rockape]

Not to be a Debbie Downer ,but this is still not evidence in North America.

True, but it is evidence we don't know it all and the fossil record remains open.