Saskeptic’s first post.

[norseman]

This is a trip down memory lane.

 

This member is no longer here. But I would definitely place him at the top of the skeptics list in terms of a well thought out rebuttal to the existence of Bigfoot. I do disagree with him on several points.

 

1- Homo Sapiens are not the largest sub species of the genus Homo. Homo Heidelbergensis, Meganthropus and even some Homo Erectus could be larger and of course more robust in bone structure. I do not agree that archaic species of the genus Homo could not be responsible for the size reported Bigfoot to be. 

 

2- Gigantopethicus if it was bipedal radiated out of Africa at some point to Asia. Why after walking all the way to Asia would it then refuse any further expansion? Prof. Grover Krantz reconstructed a jaw bone based on the fossils at hand and theorized that the wide ness of the jaw compared to the narrowness of the jaw of a Gorilla which is a knuckle walker, was there to accommodate a bipedal neck.

 

3- He claims there is no Bigfeet in the fossil record. And yet we don’t really know what Bigfoot is until we put one on a examination table. But we can certainly say that several candidates are present in the fossil record that represent the size and shape of Bigfoot. 

 

4- He complains that there are plenty of predator fossils in North America and yet no mystery primate...... Ok so what Homo Naledi taught us? This species of human was discovered super recent in AFRICA. It was discovered by cavers squeezing through narrow passages. When the site was excavated? They hired small framed women to do the excavation! So if a mystery primate can be hiding on a continent that is combed over and over by anthropologists seeking mans origins? What’s out there in real dense wilderness? Like Siberia? Or dare North America? Denisovans?

 

5- Riparian areas are great fossil beds. I just posted a video of a camp site exhumed by anthropologists of early Homo sapiens populating the Americas. They were using a sea route of sorts and skirting the glaciers that blocked inland routes from Berengia south to British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and California. It’s quite possible that most of this evidence and presumably the fossil evidence of a mystery primate are now under salt water. As the ice age ended the oceans rose. Ancient riparian habitats that would link the old world to the new are now gone for the most part. Also..... new world anthropologists are only digging to time line levels that are associated with the Homo Sapien migration 12000 years ago. 

 

6- Australia..... The Island of Flores was known to be an island before the Hobbit arrived. Which means that archaic forms of the genus Homo must have had the ability to build rafts and cross waterways. 

 

Its been a while while since he wrote this, and yes we still have no physical proof that Bigfoot exists. But! We know a lot more about our cousins and their abilities and resilience than ever before. The 130000 year old Mastadon kill site is icing on the cake. I truly believe that somebody made the journey before us. And it was possible.....it’s not pure fantasy to theorize such a journey. And hopefully some day irrefutable proof will arrive!

 

==========================

 

Why I’m a skeptic (with apologies for the length).

Dear fellow sasquatch enthusiasts,

Here’s a little something for folks to gather around. I am an academic in a relevant field (vertebrate ecology) who maintains an open mind about the sasquatch phenomenon, but I just can’t shake my skepticism. This little essay will explain my position. I’m not out to tick anyone off or even change anyone’s mind – these are just my thoughts explaining why I’m not ready to believe – but I think they pretty well sum up why “mainstream†scientists dismiss anything to do with sasquatch. I decided to post here because I am impressed with the healthy skepticism I’ve seen displayed by some members of this forum regarding stories that I also concluded were utter nonsense.

I’ve been enjoying the discussions on this forum for some time now, and this is my first post. I don’t know when I first became interested in the subject, but I do recall seeing The Legend of Boggy Creek from the “way back†of a Ford LTD station wagon at an upstate NY drive-in theatre in the 1970s. I’ve also read a few sasquatch books and have been checking out the latest sightings and discussions on boards such as this. So I guess you could say I’ve nurtured a roughly 30-year interest in bigfoot. The subject is fascinating to me, despite the fact that in those 30 years, nothing has really changed. Sure, more people claim to have seen these creatures, more plaster casts have been made – even the Skookum cast – and the reports now come in from across the continent, but still no conclusive, physical remains have emerged to allow taxonomists to catalogue these alleged creatures. 

I hate to sound like a typical “show me a body skeptic,†but I am, and I want to carefully explain why. To all who do claim sightings, I am in no position to tell you that you didn’t see what you saw; this is just my explanation of why I am not able to make the leap from non-believer to believer.

Because my training is in wildlife ecology, biogeography, and evolution, it is on these grounds that I approach the sasquatch phenomenon as a living, breathing, creature that has not yet been described taxonomically. I’m not talking about spirit beings, shape shifters, or interdimensional travelers. The idea is to work from the assumption that we have a small (2000 individuals?) population of large, nomadic, intelligent, apelike mammals roaming most of the North American continent, right now, as you are reading this. All right, if that’s the case, what are they, how did they get here, and why can we not seem to produce a biological specimen?

What are they? Despite eyewitness accounts of sasquatch “human-ness,†we are most likely not dealing with a human animal here. Modern Homo sapiens, while somewhat less robust than archaic forms, is still the largest species in the genus. Certainly there were exceptionally large individuals of “Cro Magnon†men and the earlier Homo erectus that would have been larger than a man of average size today, but, on average, we are probably as big as humans have gotten to date. In contrast, most sasquatch reports describe creatures as big as Shaquille O’Neal (7’ tall, 300+ lbs), or even substantially larger. Sasquatch may be a close relative, but they are not human. If sasquatch is a real animal, then it is some kind of ape.

If sasquatch is an ape, then it is unique, to say the least. Unlike all known apes, sasquatch is North American (if not worldwide) in distribution, bipedal, truly enormous, arguably nocturnal, nomadic, cold-adapted, and capable of surviving in a wide variety of habitat types. These habitats include river bottoms and cypress swamps, broadleaf forest in the Eastern US, farmland, grasslands, boreal forest, and remote mountain ranges. Sasquatch isn’t hanging around your local suburban park, but he is quite the habitat generalist, at least while dispersing.

Some propose Gigantopithecus as the type genus for sasquatch. They maintain that this species must have been bipedal and migrated to North America across the Bering Land Bridge about the same time that other Pleistocene megafauna were doing likewise. Gigantopithecus is an ape known from fossil deposits of middle Pleistocene age from southern Asia, with earlier members of the genus apparently documented from at least one location in India. Gigantopithecus was in the size range of modern sasquatch reports, and is thought to have survived primarily on a diet of bamboo, much like pandas. Apart from its size, however, Gigantopithecus actually offers little as a likely sasquatch suspect. Claims of bipedalism are completely speculative, and are not congruous with a large animal adapted to eating vast quantities of low quality forage like bamboo. Gigantopithecus was probably rather sedentary, and spent long hours each day resting while its digestive system processed many pounds of vegetation. This doesn’t strike me as a recipe for an active, nomadic, bipedal animal.

Gigantopithecus is known to science from at least 1000 teeth and jaw fragments. Many thousands more were likely uncovered down through the ages and used for medicinal purposes in ancient China. Despite the fact that no complete skeleton has been unearthed, Gigantopithecus is relatively well represented in the fossil record. We have no evidence whatsoever that Gigantopithecus was particularly widespread, and certainly no evidence that it (1) survived to recent time or (2) ever dispersed to North America via a land bridge.

Forget a fresh body, I remain a skeptic primarily because there is no sasquatch fossil record. Yes, fossilization is a rare process and the record is not complete. Yes, we’re talking about an animal that was never really abundant. But as any first-year ecology student will tell you, top predators are the least abundant members of any animal community. Well, top predators abound in the North American fossil record from Pleistocene to recent time. I’m not just talking about sabre-toothed and related cats that may have lived in groups like modern lions, even the solitary short-faced bear is well represented in the fossil record. Why not sasquatch? 

How about habitats? I see a preponderance of sasquatch sightings reported from creeks, rivers, lakes, swamps, etc. If these animals exist, they tend to be riparian. Well, riparian habitats are among the most fossil-conducive around. It’s the animals that die in areas where their bodies are rapidly covered in sediments that hold the most promise for fossilization. I just don’t see how several hundred thousand years of Gigantopithecus survival, dispersal across Asia, dispersal to a new continent, and frequent use of riparian habitats could be completely unrecorded in the fossil record. When I say there is no conclusive evidence for sasquatch, this is what I mean. 

While on the subject of distribution and the fossil record, recall that the North American sasquatch is not the only creature that fits the description of a large, hairy, bipedal apelike creature unknown to science and unrepresented in the fossil record. There are similar creatures reported from Russia, eastern Europe, the Himalayas, and – the one that really gets me – the Australian “yowie.†The eyewitness reports and footprints are no less convincing than any story out of Bluff Creek. So if sasquatch is real, then it currently occupies an enormous range, spanning the entire Nearctic, Palearctic, Oriental, and even the Australian zoogeographic realms – all without a shred of fossil evidence in any of these places in the last 300,000 years. Can someone please explain to me how Gigantopithecus or anything like it managed to disperse to Australia?

Finally, and with respect to obtaining a recent (non-fossilized) specimen, many people write about how wary and secretive sasquatches are, yet I don’t see this borne out in the eyewitness accounts. There are plenty of broad daylight encounters, stories of sasquatches approaching homes and farms, and other conspicuous elements of these creatures like their legendary odor and loud vocalizations. How many reports are there of encounters with people in cars, multiple witnesses talking or partying around campfires, or even kids on dirt bikes? Any self-respecting wary animal can detect humans - especially humans using motor vehicles – a long way off, and take steps to go un-noticed. This is why I rarely encounter bears in the field. But sasquatches seem to rather often be surprised by people, and they certainly take few pains to hide themselves from us if that’s really them out there “whooping†and screaming in the night.

The real surprising thing about how unwary the reports make them seem is the number of encounters along roads. If anything, sasquatches are attracted to roads where some say they are scavenging roadkill. But think of how many accounts you’ve read of one of these things almost getting hit by the motorist that sees it, or how the beast just saunters away unconcerned about traffic. Turkey vultures, coyotes, ravens – these scavengers really are wary, and they frequently get taken out by cars. Yet still no sasquatch.

So what do we have in sasquatch? We have many convincing reports of eyewitness accounts, plaster casts of big footprints, ambiguous vocalizations – these things keep me interested just like all of you. But we don’t have a road-killed specimen, despite the fact that for decades folks have claimed near misses with them on lonely roads in the dark. We don’t have a scrap of fossil evidence, despite the fact that reliable witness claim encounters over more than half the globe and the species should date back to at least the middle Pleistocene. We don’t have a similar known creature anywhere in the world today – all other apes are quadrapedal (gibbons are a special case), at least partly arboreal, more or less sedentary, occupy specialized habitats, and are equatorial/subtropical in distribution.

If you ask the “scientific community†to accept sasquatch as real, you are betting that not every report could have been faked, hoaxed, misidentified, or be the result of some complex psychological phenomenon. But you are also asking scientists to reconsider so much of what is known and demonstrable in the fields of evolution, biogeography, ecology, and probability theory. This is why mainstream science is completely disinterested in anecdotal sightings, sound recordings, and plaster casts – you could pile a million of the same on the steps of some hallowed hall for scientific research and your argument would carry no more weight than it does right now. Can you think of a single example of another species described and “known to science†without some kind of a type specimen (e.g., skin, jaw fragment) cataloged in a museum somewhere? I cannot – that’s just not how it works. Until someone produces a body (or part thereof), we have no scientific evidence that sasquatch exists, and therefore, neither reason nor means to study it.

If you want to convince me that sasquatch exists, forget night vision video, audio recordings, dermal ridges, and twisted saplings. Instead, find me a Gigantopithecus molar in some British Columbian alluvial deposit that dates back about 14,000 years. Then find something similar in Australia. When bigfoot researchers produce something like this, I guarantee the scientific world will take notice. Until then, I remain skeptically yours,

~The Saskeptic

[Incorrigible1]

Truly a shame this member no longer frequents our bbs. He generally upheld the highest standards, and taught all of us many a good life's lesson.

 

I was more an unblemished believer during his time here. I've since kinda migrated south. I still hold out a belief most anything is possible, while curling up against the frequent impossible positions held by some.

 

Saskeptic was a fine example of a skeptic. Come back, pal!

[Rockape]

29 minutes ago, norseman said:

Gigantopethicus if it was bipedal radiated out of Africa at some point to Asia.

 

How do we know that?

[norseman]

17 minutes ago, Rockape said:

 

How do we know that?

 

Because all Apes evolved in Africa right? And unlike a Orangutan? Bipedalism is a rather recent African gift to Apes.

 

So if Gigantopithecus was bipedal? It migrated to Asia not unlike Homo Erectus or others.

 

I believe it was bipedal based on Krantz. I’ll look for the video.

[ShadowBorn]

My belief is that most humans migrated out of Africa  in two groups and that one group went to Asia and the other migrated to the middle east. So in my belief is that everything started out of Africa and I think that our DNA some what proves this, Now I am not sure how the Chimps or the Apes which are some what related to us in some way have ever migrated or have only stayed in one general area. But if they ever did then we would be finding remnants of them here in North America which makes me disbelieve that Bigfoot is not an Ape but more of a mix between us and a Ape or a new primate of some sort.

 

Now there has been bones of giants found in North America but that has been kept silent. And there has been bones found of Giants found in other parts of the world as well, again that has been placed silent as well. These giants that I am talking about have been measuring out to 8' - 10' tall with reddish hair and muscular. There traces are all over the world and who knows what role they played out since there is no history on them. But at some point the truth will come out about them.

 

I am trying to remember Saskeptic and am trying to remember when he/her last posted, Who knows maybe their views have changed on what these creatures may be.

[Rockape]

26 minutes ago, norseman said:

Because all Apes evolved in Africa right?

 

Yes, but that doesn't mean Gigantopithicus did, just it's ancestors.

[norseman]

42 minutes ago, Rockape said:

 

Yes, but that doesn't mean Gigantopithicus did, just it's ancestors.

 

Thats still a radiation out of Africa.

 

Unless your suggesting that bipedalism evolved twice? I’m not sure what your driving at Rock.

 

My point was that there was no clear reason why that radiation should just stop in Asia.

Edited April 15, 2018 by norseman

[norseman]

 

[Patterson-Gimlin]

Thank you for sharing that. His explanations as to why the likelihood that the creatures do not exist is spot on. 

 

I have heard similar explanations from fellow scientists and is exactly why without a body the creature is a mythical beast until proven otherwise. 

[Night Walker]

12 hours ago, norseman said:

 

Because all Apes evolved in Africa right? And unlike a Orangutan? Bipedalism is a rather recent African gift to Apes.

 

So if Gigantopithecus was bipedal? It migrated to Asia not unlike Homo Erectus or others.

 

I believe it was bipedal based on Krantz. I’ll look for the video.

 

Around 20-19 million years ago Proconsul had evolved in central Africa.

 

Between 9 and 17 million years ago apes from the genus Dryopithecus were living not just in Africa, but were the first known species’ of ape to have migrated in to Europe and Asia.

Between 8.5-12.5 million years ago, three species of the genus Sivapithecus were living in the rainforests of Asia.

The genus Sivapithecus is now acknowledged as being the direct ancestor of modern day orangutans and the lineage that descended to modern day orangutans, branched off from the line that descended to modern day gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobo’s and humans at around 12 million years ago.

 

Gigantopithecus also evolved from Sivapithecus around the same time as the orangutans.

Bipedality occurred much later in Africa. The European and Asian apes remained quadrupedal...
 

[Rockape]

11 hours ago, norseman said:

 

Thats still a radiation out of Africa.

 

Unless your suggesting that bipedalism evolved twice? I’m not sure what your driving at Rock.

 

My point was that there was no clear reason why that radiation should just stop in Asia.

 

Just pointing out we don't know how Gigantopithicus came about. I'd say probably a hybrid of species that originated in Africa.

[WSA]

There is only one thing that keeps the idea of Sasquatch on the periphery, and my debates with Saskeptic and some others here showed that to me very clearly. It is as simple as the arrogance to insist that a witness could not possibly have experienced what they say they did. “Irrational rationalism” is my description of it. “Unbridgible chasm” is another.  You would do better spending your time teaching your dog how to solve quadratic equations.

[Rockape]

Hey WSA, good to see you around. I'm afraid those who say they have seen one are just going to have to accept some will doubt them, that's just the way it is. And yes, you'll never convince them with stories, they demand hard evidence. But Skeptics and even scofftics play an important role in my opinion. They question what is presented and help separate the wheat from the chaff. Those such as Saskeptic could do so in a well founded way. It is those who have nothing but snide remarks that bring nothing to the table.

[Squatchy McSquatch]

Saskeptic aka the Shrike is a very insightful individual.

 

He still posts regularly about his views on Bigfoot.

 

On a different site.

[Guest jerrywayne]

Meldrum vs. the Shrike (Saskeptic). Article by Meldrum, various responses by the Shrike, Meldrum, and others. The Shrike makes some good points (generally), as does Meldrum (specifically concerning the midtarsal break).

 

https://beta.capeia.com/zoology/2017/10/20/on-the-plausibility-of-another-bipedal-primate-species-existing-in-north-america