Would the scientific discovery of Sasquatch revolutionize Paleo Anthropology

[Guest Cryptic Megafauna]

I wonder how the discovery of a Sasquatch would revolutionize the study of hominid evolution and the understanding of the evolution of Man?

The discovery of Australopithecus sediba seems to be changing the picture of studying features of Australopiths in relation to similar morphology in humans and apes and what that means and why that is a mistake. So the greater variations in Australopiths may be relevant to understanding what Sasquatch is and in what ways they may be related to our own evolution. This was an interesting science video related to the recent discovery so I include it here. It seems to be an eye opener and worth viewing.

 

Edited September 29, 2016 by Cryptic Megafauna

[WSA]

As near as I can tell, the field of human anthropology exists in a constant state of revolution anyway. I don't believe it needs a Sasquatch confirmation to become a more dynamic field, at all. Which is a good thing. Maybe, just maybe, those that practice in the discipline are starting to realize the so-called standard model for the linear ascent of ape to  man was only as good as the next fossil hominoid species that was excavated... which now seems to be happening on a regular basis. There is no "done" in this field, or at least my prediction is we are a very long way from having the all the answers, and might never.   

 

One of my standard gripes about scientists is they know better than to scoff at the idea of BF, and of those scientists, human anthropologists should know best of all. 

 

Now, the biologists? Oh yeah. They will probably get the biggest jolt of all, and I'd line them right up behind the anthropologists as ones who should be the least surprised, but will probably be more so than experience would predict. 

[Guest Cryptic Megafauna]

WSA, now that they know there is no clear boundary between Australopiths and Humans I guess you could extrapolate and say there is no real clear boundary between US and Sasquatch. I'm not a monkey's uncle, however.

 

[guyzonthropus]

Revolutionize? Maybe, maybe not so much... it will broaden perspectives in at least most of the lines of anthropological study, not only physical/evolutionary, but cultural anthropology may be proffered a glimpse into what might prove a parallel to either our early social developmental stages, or those of our future, and the potential for linguistic studies of non-sapien hominid language  systematics with a creature so similar to us yet obviously distinct would be unprecedented. Of course, within the field of physical anthro, such discovery would certainly shake things up a bit, in that it would demonstrate in no uncertain terms that our dependence upon the fossil record providing the proof of our pathway is  misguided due to the incomplete nature inherent in its formation.

On the flip side, it may well motivate a lot of folks to get back to diggin' in attempt to fill in some of the now glaring holes of what was seen as at least a graded road, so to speak....

 

And yes, biologists will be in on it, physiologist s, neurologists, parasitologists, ethologists, well..pretty much all of those ologists...should it prove telepathic, that'll bring in the psychologists, and if they're transdimentional you know the physicists will be clamoring to join the party...oh, and the government agencies may show some interest at some point as well, although they may hold back, at least publicly, in that it will seem likely they invested the most effort, time and resources in preventing the "discovery"and wish to avoid recriminations and explanations...

[WSA]

CM...indeed.  One thing our expanding encyclopedia of knowledge confirms for us, over and over, is the universe is far weirder than we always previously imagined. I guess we want to believe our discoveries will reach a point where the weirdness will abate, or at least not come at this seemingly accelerated rate. Not gonna happen, I think, and if anything we'll see the accumulation of weird and startling knowledge start to accelerate even more as each new discovery piles on top of another.   There will always be those who embrace the weirdness, and those who resist the news.

 

Paleo Anthropology, where it intersects with DNA analysis is probably one of the areas where the startling, weird news will be the most surprising and delightful (or the scariest, depending on your perspective). Posed right athwart this intersection looms the idea of a man/ape, ape/man, giant lemur, mutant alien, proto-human, hyper-evolved or evolutionarily retarded....take you pick from the menu of what you think BF is...whichever you put your money on, you'll probably still be astounded by what the actual answer turns out to be, and how many questions the answer raises in turn.  

[MIB]

Revolutionize, no, not at all.   Internal audience vs external audience.   The uninvolved public's attention might be piqued.   Ooh look big wow shiny ... for 20 seconds 'til something draws their ADHD attention.  That's all hype for the superficial.   To an internal audience, people who are educated and fully engaged in the topic, it is merely one more data point among many to consider.    "Revolution" is shock and awe.   You don't shock and awe a professional.

 

MIB

 

[Guest Cryptic Megafauna]

My theory of the day is that something similar to Australopithecus sediba or Homo Habilis crossed the land bridge from Asia to the North America about 2-4 million years ago, about the same time that camels and horses were crossing but going the other way. So a new evolution happened in North America of this relative, they moved into the mountain rain forests after the end of the last ice age since environment may be more similar to the glacial period that they had adapted to and also factored into the coming of modern human groups that put pressure on them in areas they preferred such as coasts, in land shorelines, rivers, low land forests, and plains.

 

As far as Aliens etc, it came to me in a dream last night, but I assume you were just entertaining the fringe element, and it was so strange that even I didn't get the full picture. As Fermat said in the margins of his Last Theorem "I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this (alien) theorem which this margin is too small to contain".

[WSA]

I mean, who knows CM? Nothing is off the table until it is, I say.  Our imaginations are not deep enough to envision it all. That is what reality is for!  

[gigantor]

18 hours ago, guyzonthropus said:

And yes, biologists will be in on it, physiologist s, neurologists, parasitologists, ethologists, well..pretty much all of those ologists...should it prove telepathic, that'll bring in the psychologists, and if they're transdimentional you know the physicists will be clamoring to join the party..

 

[Patterson-Gimlin]

The answer is of course yes. This is not new news and certainly the fossil record speaks for itself.  However, discovery in North America remains elusive as  the creature. Perhaps, it is just a matter of time before both can be rectified. At least the possibility remains open.  Especially the fossil record. Live specimen, well that is another story of it's own.

Edited October 1, 2016 by Patterson-Gimlin

[Guest Cryptic Megafauna]

18 hours ago, WSA said:

I mean, who knows CM? Nothing is off the table until it is, I say.  Our imaginations are not deep enough to envision it all. That is what reality is for!  

Truth is stranger than fiction.

The "word" is wyrd?

Edited October 1, 2016 by Cryptic Megafauna

[norseman]

On September 29, 2016 at 8:23 PM, Cryptic Megafauna said:

WSA, now that they know there is no clear boundary between Australopiths and Humans I guess you could extrapolate and say there is no real clear boundary between US and Sasquatch. I'm not a monkey's uncle, however.

 

 

Australopiths gave rise to Homo, so of course there will be a transitional "graying" between the two genus. 

[MIB]

23 hours ago, Cryptic Megafauna said:

My theory of the day is that something similar to Australopithecus sediba or Homo Habilis crossed the land bridge from Asia to the North America about 2-4 million years ago,

 

CM -

 

Maybe.   The Pleistocene began about 2.6 MYA, prior to that, no land bridge (known) for a very considerable amount of time.   Through the Pleistocene, we had "many" times with bridges and many without.   There should be fossils wherever bigfoot arose.   Compare the situations between Afrcia/Asia and North America.   In North America there are no known great apes so the bones of a great ape ancestor 2 MYA should stand out like a red nose at a tea totaller picnic.    By contrast, in Africa/Asia, we have many hominids / hominoids running around in that same time period.   It would be much more probable that "one more" could be lost / unnoticed in the "background noise" of all of the others.  

 

Going a little different direction, think about Native American lore, think about a timeline for DNA drift that still allows for very infrequent, frequently fatal, barely viable pregnancy.    If the timeline is longer, there's no cross at all .. human and chimp.   If the timeline is shorter and the crosses are highly viable, the populations do what seems to have happened in our past a lot (why we have Denisovan and Neanderthal DNA among other things) and somewhat re-merge when they meet again.   What's the window for an ancestral-to-both species splitting giving the results we seem to see?    Lets say one of those descendants was found in some numbers in Siberia when the other started to push back in crowding them across a land bridge but not following ... yet.    We'd wind up with sasquatch having some 10s of thousands of years, but maybe not much more, to develop in isolation, diverge from the characteristics of their kin like Yeren and maybe Almasty (who knows, even Woodwose :)) in the old world, before we show up again using the most recent land bridge ... or maybe most recent 2.  

 

I think if they had been here in N.A. a greatly longer time, there'd be a fossil record.   There should be anyway barring deliberate effort not to leave one.   The Lovelock Cave and Mound Buiider remains, if relevant, are tens of thousands of years too recent.  

 

Just speculating aloud and the speculation will change twice by tomorrow as I factor in some other thing I've overlooked.    We've got ourselves an enigma wrapped up in a conundrum. 

 

MIB

 

[guyzonthropus]

I'm not sure...but it looks like that little round yellow dude in the post right above this one is having a seizure...somehow, I don't think it's laughing with me....sniff..those little guys can be just so cynical!  And until these  creatures are more fully understood, we may dismiss potentials  yet to do so absolutely is to constrain inquiry, directly limiting  the extent of possible observation of unknown elements laying outside the accepted boundaries of what we think can and cannot be...

[guyzonthropus]

They course of this thread got me thinking (l know.."oh, great...here we go again...")

 

Over the cycles of glaciation and ice sheet formation covering large expanses of this continent, with the concurrent ice bridges/significantly lowered sea levels, there may very well have been successive migrational events or periods.

 

So, just possibly, say the first time around, a species or population is pushed out of a region, as described by MIB, and crosses over to the new world. Either through continued movement, or expanding numbers, this group comes to occupy this new territory as it opens up with the receding ice sheets, absent the more assertive competitors that got them moving in the first place.  Then, as the cycle repeats and the ice sheets return, this first wave of hominids get pushed south as the ice extends, depriving them of food sources and manageable weather.

 

But, just as these guys are moving south, to the north, the land bridge is reforming and the sea levels drop once again allowing a next wave of migration. However, this second wave is comprised of "a species" which, while initially may have been of  the same stock as the first group, has developed faster, in that by the time of the second cycle they have had to compete and survive with those that drove out the first group. This results in a population more advanced, to some degree, than the first, moving through  the same corridors, into the new territory. 

As this cycle repeats, the original forms get pushed father and farther south by successive ice formations, while more developed(socially, physically, cognitively) forms cross over and expand into the regions emptied by the glaciers and opened by their receeding. Of course, these distinct groups or forms will inevitably come to cross paths, resulting in either domination of habitat, or zones of integration.

Meanwhile, those of the latest group to migrate who didn't get across, will once again face the selective pressures of the original habitat, and either evolve or perish. One would think that over repeated cycles the numbers of the stragglers populations would progressively diminish.

 

This paradigm would account for the seeming gradiation of form from the more ape like forms seem in the south east to the "I couldn't shoot cuz it looked so human" forms of the PNW. 

Of course, the population dispersion of the various forms and integrations hasn't stopped, resulting in diverse populations, as reported by witnesses in recent times, with numerous types observed within the same region...

 

Just a thought.....

I realize this may have been proposed previously, but I'm now old enough not to remember that occurring, which also allows me to feel insightful, rather than grasping that I just formatted something I read in the past as original thinking on my part....