Why No Troublemaking Adolescent Squatch?

[Guest Tontar]

I don't suppose it's just the question of the more vulnerable bigfoot being lacking but also that 10% that you always have that follows the beat of a different drummer. If they are as intelligent as most think they are where are the ones that flaunt the cultural norms for their society? With intelligence comes choice. Have you ever known any higher primate to be 100% cohesive with a group? What happens when they buck the system if their society is that organized? Do they take them out for the common good like Tom Cruise did in War of the Worlds in that basement when the other guy threatened him and his daughter's life by exposing them to the aliens?

That was one of the best parts of that movie, eh? It had to be done...

[Guest Tontar]

Saskeptic, the difference in what we see on the Animal Planet with gorillas and lions watching carefully over their young, is that we SEE them on the Animal Planet. We do not see sasquatch on the Animal Planet, even when the BFRO guys go to hot spots where sightings have happened, and not even when they say they hear them all around, or sense them, or almost have them on the thermal scope. They are always close, very close, but never get a shot at them, then just when it looks like they will see something, they pack it in for the night. Would that work for any other species being featured in a documentary? Never. Unless it was a chupacabra or something like that.

If we can get people into the forests to film gorillas, chimps, lions, the spirit bears in Canada, then we should be able to locate and get some footage of bigfoot here or there. Some places are so rural or even suburban, and not so primitive and wild, that it's embarrassing how if they were there they could not be located and filmed.

And what about cameras? Where were these sightings you have had? JDL, where did you see yours, do you think you could repeat the situation again? Driveroperator, could you do the same? Where'd you guys see yours? What were the circumstances? And better yet, could you give a very detailed description? Did they look like Patty? In what way did they, and in what way didn't they?

[xspider1]

Well said, driveroperator. We're offered the premise that 'there are no troublemaking adolescent squatch' which, in and of itself is a huge presumption. And when plenty of counter-evidence is presented, all of that must just be worthless speculation, even the eye-witness testimonies. Well, in fact, we may all 'find more answers by entertaining the thoughts and experience of others'. Thanks! That's what it's all about! : B

[JDL]

I visited Lemmon Valley, Nevada in January. It's changed a lot since then, so I doubt the sightings there could be repeated. I believe it used to be the corridor they used to bypass the Reno area. Now it's too built up to serve that function, in my opinion.

I think the isolated mountain clusters in Northern Nevada would probably yield results. It seemed to be where they were headed as they moved North out of Lemmon Valley and past Pyramid Lake. For some reason they were cutting Northeast out of the Sierras to some destination of interest. The Pah Rum Mountain cluster would at least be a likely stopping point between legs along their route.

I also believe that the spot where we used to camp in Nevada County, California remains as likely as it was over 35 years ago. Still looks good on Google Earth

For the record, I've never gone out looking for a squatch. Never carried a camera back then ('70-'78). The ones I've seen have looked similar to Patty in size and build. The females are bulky and seem to carry more body fat than the males, who are all muscle.

[Guest]

I thought this passage from a Loren Eisely essay might go a long way in explaining the difference from our own growth from infants to adolescence, with that of even the closest of our anthropoid relatives.

"Among the purely human marvels of the world is the way the human brain after birth, when its cranial capacity is scarcely larger than that of a gorilla or other big anthropoid, spurts onward to treble its size during the first year of life. The human infant's skull will soar to a cranial capacity of 950 cubic centimeters while the gorilla has reached only 380 cubic centimeters. In other words, the human brain grows at an exponential rate, a spurt which carries it almost to adult capacity at the age of fourteen.

This clever and specifically human adaptation enables the human offspring successfully to pass the birth canal like a reasonably small headed animal, but in a more larval and helpless condition than its giant relatives.

The brain burgeons after birth, not before, and it is this fact which enables the child, with proper care, to assimilate all that larger world which will be forever denied to its relative the gorilla.

The big anthropoids enjoy no such expansion. Their brains grow without exponential quickening into maturity. Somewhere in the far past of man something strange happened in his evolutionary development. His skull has enhanced its youthful globularity; he has lost most of his body hair and what remains grows strangely. He demands, because of his immature emergence into the world, a lengthened and protected childhood. Without prolonged familial attendance he would not survive, yet in him reposes the the capacity for great art, inventiveness, and his first mental tool, speech, which creates his humanity. He is without doubt the oddest and most unusual evolutionary product that this planet has yet seen.

The term applied to this condition is neoteny, or pedomorphism.

Basically the evolutionary forces, and here "forces" stands for complete ignorance, seem to have taken a roughewn ordinary primate and softened and elmiminated the adult state in order to allow for a fantastic leap in brain growth. In fact, there is a growing suspicion that some, at least, of the African fossils found and ascribed to the direct line of human ascent in eastern Africa may never, except for bipedalism and some incipient tool-using capacities, have taken the human road at all.

Some with brains that seem to have remained at the same level through long ages have what amounts quantitatively to no more than an anthropoid brain. Allowing for upright posture and free use of the hand, there is no assurance that they spoke or in any effective way were more than well-adapted bipedal apes. Collateral relatives, in short, but scarcely to be termed men. All this is the more remarkable because their history can now be traced over roughly five if not six million years-- a singularly unprogressive period for a creature destined later to break upon the world with such remarkable results after so long a period of gestation.

Has something about our calculations gone wrong? Are we studying, however necessarily, some bipedal cousins but not ancestral men? The human phylogeny which we seemed so well on the way to arranging satisfactorily is now confused by a multiplicity of material contended over by an almost equal number of scholars. Just as a superfluity of flying particles is embarrassing the physicist, so man's evolution, once thought to be so clearly delineated, is showing signs of similar strain. A skull from Lake Rudolf with an estimated capacity of 775 cubic centimeters or even 800 and an antiquity ranging into the three million year range is at the human Rubicon, yet much younger fossils are nowhere out of the anthropoid range.

Are these all parts of a single variable subhumanity from which we arose, or are some parts of this assemblage neotenous of brain and others not ? The scientific exchanges are as stiff with politeness as exchanges between enemies on the floor of the Senate. "Professor so and so forgets the difficult task of restoring to its proper position a frontal bone trampled by cattle." A million years may be covertly jumped because there is nothing to be found in it. We must never lose sight of one fact, however: it is by neotenous brain growth that we came to be men, and certain of the South African hominids to which we have given such careful attention seem to have been remarkably slow in revealing such development. Some of them, in fact, during more years than present mankind has been alive seem to have flourished quite well as simple grassland apes.

Why indeed should they all have become men? Because they occupied the same ecological niche, contend those who would lump this variable assemblage. But surely paleontology does not always so blind its deliberations. We are dealing with a gleam, a whisper, a thing of awe in the mind itself, that oceanic feeling which even the hardheaded Freud did not deny existed though he tried to assign it to childhood.

With animals whose precise environment through time may overlap, extinction may result among contending forms; it can and did happen among men. But with the first stirrings of the neotenous brain and its superinduced transformation of the family system a new type of ecological niche had incipiently appeared- a speaking niche, a wondering niche which need not have been first manifested in tools but in family organization, in wonder of what lay over the next hill, or what became of the dead. Whether man preferred seeds or flesh, how he regarded his silent collateral relatives, may not at first induced great competition.

Only those gifted with the pedomorphic brain would in some degree have fallen out of competition with the real. It would have been their danger and at the same time their beginning triumph. They were starting to occupy, not a niche in nature, but an invisible niche carved into thought which in time would bring them suffering, superstition, and great power."

(End Quote)

So, applied to Bigfoot, if so many of our other anthropoid relatives (all in fact) lack this neotenous brain growth that we as humans posses- is it a stretch to assume that they probably would have a similar brain growth to other large non-human anthropoids?

And if so- it would indicate that they most likely mature into adolescence and adult hood much faster than humans do, and as such are more prepared to deal with their surroundings and life in general than the human youngster- with its noted necessary lengthened and protected childhood.

As someone noted however- without knowing what the actual cranial capacity for an adult or adolescent Bigfoot is- its kind of hard to really formulate any kind of theory when it comes to this area....

Just some food for thought.....

Art

[Guest wild eyed willy]

Here we all are, with the same questions being asked in many different ways. The whole WHY of it all seems so large. We argue over the potential answers to the never ending question of WHY. We all, every one of us know that no side can prove one single point. The nay sayers can't prove they don't exist, the flesh and blood believers can't prove they do exist and the Paranormal gang is in the same boat. The only thing we can all agree on is that speculation on all sides is all we have to talk about. Heres a thought for the members of the fighting factions to consider: since speculation is all we have to discuss, lets discuss it without trying to convince the rest of the world that your view is the correct one. I think we are all here to bounce ideas into the ring and thats all we can do, because without a body, nothing is ever going to stick. We, all of us are bright intelligent people ( we figured out how to operate the computer well enough to be here), so why not respect the speculation being thrown around by your peers?

The subject matter at hand is certainly an interesting topic, lacking Bigfoot to talk about, we might all be here debating how ageing effects the bowles.

BTW, I don't fart dust yet either.

[indiefoot]

A highly disiplined upbringing and zero tolerance for rebellion within the group would be my guess.

[Guest Jodie]

I thought it was a good question and one that can't be ignored despite the fact that I know bigfoot exists. I'ld be fooling myself if I didn't admit there are some glaring conflicts in this creature's supposed behavioral and physical characteristics that folks report when compared to any other primate's, including humans, yet we persist in assuming it's a primate for lack of a better category. I did not take the OP's question as provocative so I'm not getting the posts about infighting on the topic of believer versus skeptic here. Did I miss something?

How about this, suppose bigfoot's senses work slightly different from ours? There are precedents for this in humans like synsethesia, hypersensitivity to sound as occurs in autism, their visual perception is probably different than ours.....perhaps what we consider abnormal for humans, a genetic variant of some sort, is actually their norm and they have adapted their lifestyle to suit their own peculiar physiology. Assuming bigfoot would grow and develop like any other known greater ape or human is equally as speculative as what I've posted above. If bigfoot thought and reacted like a human or ape I would think we would have surely found him by now. So I'm all about the questions, bring them on, speculation leads to thinking outside of the box.

[Guest]

A highly disiplined upbringing and zero tolerance for rebellion within the group would be my guess.

I think this may be correct, but if it is true...zero tolerance would probably sometimes result in death for those youngsters who don't learn from discipline alone.... sacrificing one for the sake of the whole.

.... i mean IF discipline is used to keep youngsters quiet and hidden...there has to be some that resist the discipline...then how is it handled.

Edited October 26, 2011 by driveroperator

[Guest Tontar]

Art, that was a great piece of writing. Since we all ponder the existence of bigfoot, I'll mention a few things I have considered about them, when assuming they exist. It's always easy and common for people to anthropomorphize animals. W watch cats or kittens, dogs or puppies, and we laugh and giggle even at their behavior. We ascribe familiar thoughts and feelings to them. I watched some videos of this guy Kevin Richardson, also called the Lion Whisperer, recently. He spends a ton of time with various African predators, but his first love is the lions. He says that over time one develops a sort of sixth sense about they behavior, and what's going on in their heads. He says he gets to know when one may be out of sorts and might take a snap on his hand. One of the videos shows one taking a snap of his hand. Looked painful. Looked like any other day he could have lost his hand. Looked an awful lot like the events that end up with a hand snap at first, followed by a full on prey drive attack. No matter how much we as humans think we can get into the heads of animals, we are also limited by our way of thinking, our way or rationalizing, as well as our inferior physical attributes. I think that Kevin Richardson will meet his end in the mouths of some of his much loved lions. I think that he will end up misjudging what they are thinking, but even more so, how fast what they are thinking can change to completely other thoughts. How they can possibly be thinking how nice that chin rub feels, and then rapidly switching to how badly they want to bite and then eat this soft morsel of a man.

Having had a wide variety of pets all my life, and having had dogs all of my adult life, I can see how alien their heads can be. They can go feral pretty easily in the right circumstances, and it is pretty impossible to "get them back" very quickly. And these are animals that we have had domesticated for eons. I don't know when that article was written, but apes do have fairly pliable brains, capable of thinking quite a lot of things. The studies using sign language are pretty revealing. Koko, the gorilla, would even abstract. I remember one story of her breaking something. She had misbehaved, broken something, and was getting in trouble for it. She said, in sign language, that she had not done it. She lied. Then she said the monkey had done it. She blamed another animal for the deed. She then said the monkey was poop. She abstracted, associated the monkey with poop. So these are some similar ways of thinking that people have, the sense of getting in trouble, denying it, blaming someone or something else, and disrespecting them with name calling or insults. Very "human", sort of. But as human as that might sound, she could just as easily attack, push, bite, break an arm, or other seemingly uncontrolled, non-civilized behavior. Completely unpredictable. Chimps are worse. They can and tend to go ape crazy as adults, and can tear people apart. Doesn't matter if they are domesticated or wild, it's happened both places, both environments.

Having similar thoughts as people do at times is one thing, being predictable, or being rational even, is yet another thing. Having been around people that are not normal, mentally affected to some degree, it's easy for me to imagine what a bigfoot might be like. Like that article says, we people had something unique happen to us, to our brains. We evolved a different operating system, which is quite different from all other animal brains. It developed the capacity for culture, for an expanded creativity, and the ability to control instinctive and erratic shifts from one state of mind to another. Our brains are a bit more stable typically, allowing us to operate intellectually under stress. That's another difference between humans and animals, how we react to stress. How we handle adrenaline. Our brains have a better ability to think through it rather than just responding, reacting, with the fight or flight responses.

I suspect, that if bigfoot exists, it would be like that. It would be like us, except for the ability to rationalize the same way, to think further out of the box, to control our reactions. I think they would be a lot more like some of the mentally affected, or defected people who think and act much more primitively, who have a limited development or expression of what makes us different from most other animals. As human as we might like to see animals act, they are not human, and they are not as reliable as human. I would think that if bigfoot existed, they would likely be a lot like us, think similarly to us in many ways, but were we to have some around that we had raised domestically like we have raised gorillas and chimps, that there would be limits to what they could grasp, and limits to what they would put up with. They live feral (if they exist, mind you), and so would always be feral no matter how they were raised. I don't think that would make them apes by any means. They could be as "human" as we are by most measures, but lacking in the cultural, linguistic, tribal, behavioral aspects that set us apart from everything else. Smart, bright, interesting, but missing something that is inherently human, or characteristic to our particular evolutionary lineage.

That's how I always thought of them. Like people that were slightly lobotomized. :-)

I don't know if you've seen programs about feral children, people that were deprived of language during their formative years, and thus the window closes at some point in time, like at 3 years old or something, and if they haven't had language by then they never really can grasp it no matter how much teaching they might get. They stay somewhat like animals in a lot of ways. The part of the brain that in humans has an open switch from the beginning, gets the switch closed at a particular age, and that ability is lost if not ignited. In apes that switch does not exist the same way. I suspect it would be the same for bigfoots, otherwise why would they not advance their lifestyles beyond the forests? Living wild might be romantic, but it isn't an easy or pleasant life. I would think they just don't have the capacity to think beyond they way they are. Like apes in a way, but it doesn't mean they would be apes. They'd just be missing a few cards from their deck that our line managed to pick up along the way...

[Guest StankApe]

The problem with this topic is that it lends itself to too much imagination. People start to hypothesize about way too much to address a simple issue. A question about why nobody sees young bigfoots ends up with an ever expanding cultural fleshing out of a species that is not even confirmed to exist. A sort of Dungeons and Dragons thing, where a whole virtual world is created from people's imaginations. And over time, these musings end up becoming accepted as fact by a lot of people. Reports about sightings have to filter down into differing degrees of credibility, and the number of reasonably credible accounts of little bigfoots are rare indeed. It's nice to think that there are bigfoots living in the woods, whether solitary like orangs, or in groups like chimps and gorillas, and it's also nice to imagine how they do it, where they go, what they do, how they rear their young and all of that, but to answer the question why are there no trouble making adolescent squatches around is probably best answered with an "I have no idea, that's strange indeed". better that than going down the imagination path that quickly leads to telepathic encounters with bigfoots that come and go between different planes of reality.

What a great post !! +1 from me sir!

[indiefoot]

Bigfoot timeout..... They have to go to the Himalayas and think about what they've done.

typo

Edited October 26, 2011 by indiefoot

[Guest StankApe]

Well said, driveroperator. We're offered the premise that 'there are no troublemaking adolescent squatch' which, in and of itself is a huge presumption. And when plenty of counter-evidence is presented, all of that must just be worthless speculation, even the eye-witness testimonies. Well, in fact, we may all 'find more answers by entertaining the thoughts and experience of others'. Thanks! That's what it's all about! : B

No offense, but that sounds like a supreme cop out... Anytime someone presents a question that could present a problem in regards to the existence of Bigfoot the answer always is " well they probably don't have that sort of problem, or how do we know they don't act completely differently?" True we don't "know" any of these things, but that's hardly "evidence" enough on it's own to dismiss my question.

I seriously think that if there are Bigfoot there would be adolescents sneaking away from the group and getting caught on film more. Or elderly ones, or brain damaged ones...something.

I really want to believe that Bigfoot really exists, but the more I read on here and consider how someone should have better photos and films by now, the more my hope is fading..... Maybe the Erickson thing will be true. But I'm not holding my breath.

I still assert that the lack of footage or photos of adolescent Bigfoot is troubling.

[Guest RedRatSnake]

No offense, but that sounds like a supreme cop out... Anytime someone presents a question that could present a problem in regards to the existence of Bigfoot the answer always is " well they probably don't have that sort of problem,

BF can also stun you with there sound waves as a last resort, that most likely erases your memory of the sighting ~ so there really would be many more reports and possibly a few captured if this didn't happen.

Tim

[Guest]

Tontar posted:

"I suspect, that if bigfoot exists, it would be like that. It would be like us, except for the ability to rationalize the same way, to think further out of the box, to control our reactions. I think they would be a lot more like some of the mentally affected, or defected people who think and act much more primitively, who have a limited development or expression of what makes us different from most other animals. As human as we might like to see animals act, they are not human, and they are not as reliable as human. I would think that if bigfoot existed, they would likely be a lot like us, think similarly to us in many ways, but were we to have some around that we had raised domestically like we have raised gorillas and chimps, that there would be limits to what they could grasp, and limits to what they would put up with. They live feral (if they exist, mind you), and so would always be feral no matter how they were raised. I don't think that would make them apes by any means. They could be as "human" as we are by most measures, but lacking in the cultural, linguistic, tribal, behavioral aspects that set us apart from everything else. Smart, bright, interesting, but missing something that is inherently human, or characteristic to our particular evolutionary lineage.

That's how I always thought of them. Like people that were slightly lobotomized. :-)"

I tend to disagree, look to the prisons, the mental institutions. The helpless masses who survive only because of technology and somebody else doing the dirty jobs and then tell me about superiority. Show me a deer who murders its family, or a hummingbird that abandons it children for a life of drug abuse. No, I think mankind is the only animal species capable of moral turpitude. Call it evil or sin, but it seems we have a monopoly on it here on earth. Perhaps bigfoot (if it exists) is what we would be if we weren't capable of ethical choice, having branched off before that was an option.