Wasn’t sure if this should be posted here or in General Questions, but here goes:
So I’m dating this girl who is wonderful and intelligent and attractive. The only failing I can find in her is that she is convinced that Bigfoot/Sasquatch/Yeti is real creature who either exists now or at least did until recently.
I was able to resist the urge to demand she have a hysterectomy, and because she is skeptical of most other types of pseudoscience (UFO’s, psychic abilities, etc) and rejects ideological faith systems, I asked her why she believed what she did. I also began exploring the issue further in my spare time.
The biggest argument I can find for WHY folks all through the ages have had tales and superstitions of big, hairy wild men has to do with genetic memory. Our Cro-Magnon ancestors having lived side by side with, and competing for resources against, Neanderthal Man. My question is this: how long were Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal exposed to each other, and how widespread was this exposure? I ask because it seems that the idea of genetic memory demands a long period of time to become ingrained in our culture. A couple hundred (or thousand) years does not seem long enough to make such a drastic impact on human life and thought processes.
Alongside this, what are the most common reasons for the belief in the existence of Bigfoot? While the idea of a large bi-pedal ape on the North American continent sounds preposterous, it does seem to have a lot more going for it in terms of plausibility than belief in God or alien abduction, at least to me.
Neanderthals and Modern Humans existed side-by-side for about 10k years +/-. They overlaped in all of Europe and into parts of Asia, including the Levant. Modern Humans also overlapped to some degree with H. erectus in Asia, and H. floresiensis on the Island of Flores. The latter were around until about 12k years ago. There was no overlap with other *Homo *species in the Americas or Australia.
I don’t believe there is any evidence for “genetic” memory, but cultural hand-me-downs are certainly possible.
Yes John, but maybe THIS time it will be different…
Ok, probably not. For the first part of the OP (about dating someone who has some kind of irrational idea) I would say…don’t fret. Everyone is irrational sometimes, and it can be quite surprising to find out what people believe. I remember my astonishment when my father (who is an engineer, owns his own company, and who I THOUGHT was quite rational) told me he gives some credence to the space aliens in Roswell thingy (something I for one consider one of the stupidest things widely believed by a hell of a lot of people). Bigfoot and the folks who believe in a lot of cryptozoology type stuff aren’t any more irrational than most other people…and it’s easier for me to believe that there may be some undiscovered great ape in North America than, say, that space aliens crashed in the desert outside of Roswell.
From memory (I’m sure someone will be along soon to give you precise figures) Neanderthal was about from something like 350,000 years ago until somewhere between 20-30k years ago. Cro-Magnon were (IIRC) pretty much fully modern variants in Europe and they lived something like 50k-10k years ago…so there was a long overlap (take all this with a grain of salt…I could be off by thousands of years or even misremembering completely).
That said, I seriously doubt that sightings of bigfoot type creatures are some kind of genetic memory…I’m even doubtful it’s some kind of passed down cultural memory (which I would say is the more likely of the two), i.e. stories and legends passed down and then conflated later on. Having been in the deep woods several times in my life I can say that it can be kind of freaky…and the human mind is a fertile ground for imagination going wild.
My guess is the most common reasons for this kind of belief is simply that this is the way humans work. It’s a hell of a good story and people WANT to believe such things. Our ancestors were no more immune to a good story or to conflating natural events into the supernatural/quasi-supernatural than we are today…after all, our imaginations haven’t changed much. The idea of a really large ape like man roaming about out there somewhere is appealing after all…especially today when a lot of people are groping for something besides science to give them a sense of wonder than I guess they aren’t getting. I think this adequately explains the UFO thingy as well…but as a touch stone I think it’s part of what makes up humans and their society today and in the past. UFO’s and space aliens were the gods, angels and demons or our past. Instead of demonic possession we have alien abduction and anal probes now. Bigfeet (bigfoots? ) are simply another manifestation of this…just one that hasn’t changed as much as the angels/space aliens one.
The reason I personally doubt it (the non-existence of “genetic memory” aside) is that I highly doubt Neanderthals were very big and hairy, as Bigfoot and Yetis are commonly portrayed. I’ve seen Neanderthal skulls, I think the average Neanderthal wouldn’t draw attention on Times Square if you put him in jeans and a T.
Let’s get this straight: You’re thinking of breaking up with your girlfriend because she believes in a subject (Bigfoot) which is (at best) silly. You, on the other hand, believe in another subject (genetic memory) which is (at best) silly.
Tell your girlfriend that you don’t want to discuss Bigfoot and that while she can believe in anything she’s wants, you’d rather not hear about it. Reciprocate by not discussing genetic memory in front of her. Be glad you’ve got a girlfriend at all.
Plus, what evidences are there that Neanderthals were hairy? They weren’t big, in any case. And they lived in a limited area of the world, and most certainly not in north America or the Himalayas.
The Neaderthal species emerged at about the same time our own did-- about 200K years ago; maybe 250k. Modern Humans moved into Europe sometime around 35 - 40k years ago, and the last Neanderthal died out about 30k years ago.
At no point in the OP did I say anything about breaking up with her; I made an obviously sarcastic remark about getting her sterilized. Second, as far as my “belief in genetic memory” goes, I could have phrased it much better. What I was wondering about was more along the lines of XTISME’s cultural memory. If youre asking if i believe in a hard written block of memories encoded in our collective DNA, the answer is no.
And usually, when people say “Let’s get this straight” they then attempt to “get this straight”, not distort what I said and extrapolate my motivations from it, and ESPECIALLY not extrapolating my worthiness in your eyes to having a girlfriend. Was it the part about her being attractive that made you jealous? Jeez…
As for the cultural memory thing… that’s a difficult proposition to prove, and is probably not correct. For instance, there is a pervasive myth about dragons that cuts across many cultures, and can’t be explained by cultural diffusion. But I don’t think anyone would say that that implies an overlap of modern humans and dragons, which we can be sure never existed.
As I recall, the broad consensus of cryptozoologists is that of all the dodgy paranormal animals that might be out there, bigfoot is the least dodgy (sorry, no cite today, my collection of Fortean Times is on its way to Vancouver), and most likely to be someday validated. That may not mean much, just that the scanty evidence for BF is better than the evidence for some other even more improbable things. Nonetheless, if you’re going to believe in any Fortean thing, Bigfoot is probably a better choice than many, and has at least the possibility of being proven.
Applying Occam’s razor brings up another problem: Which explanation is simpler - A hairy monkey in the bushes, or some kind of racial-genetic-hairy-neanderthaler-memory hand wave thing?
Your title reminds me of something I saw once at a museum. I can’t remember what museum, but it was a respectable museum with lots of paleontology and archaeology exhibits. And they had an exhibit about something the name of which I don’t recall, but it was basically an extinct great ape, a very large one, that (apparently) walked (at least sometimes) upright. And they had a couple of wax models of this thing up, and the thing was, basically, Bigfoot. Not that it looked exactly like drawings of Bigfoot or anything, just that you would look at it and think “Ah. A new artist’s take on Bigfoot” or something like that.
This was a little striking, because you might think they did this on purpose and were playing it up for “gee whiz” value, but the exhibit never mentioned bigfoot, and the museum was in all other respects perfectly respectable, so I actually suspect they did not even have bigfoot in mind. They just reconstructed an extinct great ape and came up with something you look at and immediately think “Oh, that’s Bigfoot.”
-FrL-
ETA: A little below halfway down this page is, I think, a picture of another model of the same creature.
ETAA: And apparently at least some scientists think these guys coexisted with Humans in Asia 300,000 years ago…
Yes, my GF brought up Gigantopithicus as a possible answer to the bigfoot question. I don’t believe that any fossil evidence of this creature have been found on the North American continent though, and that what fossil evidence HAS been found is extremely scant, consisting of a few jaw and skull fragments. Also, I have a hard time believing that anthropologists can determine that Gigantopithicus was bi-pedal based on such limited fossil evidence. Your first link shows him standing upright, chest out, and walking like a man (and also how Bigfoot is presumed to walk). Would Bigfoot still be Bigfoot if we found he wasn’t bi-pedal? It seems that in all sightings and descriptions of him, this is the most familiar trait…
It did, however, exist in Eastern China and a case could be made that it migrated over the Beringia at some point. Again, the lack of fossil evidence makes this hypothesis very hard to prove.
I think that recreation was just to show how tall the animal would be when it did stand on two feet, not to imply that bipedalism was its normal mode of locomotion. There would be no reason to think it was bipedal as it does not appear to be in the line of descent that led from the human/chimp common ancestor to us.
I agree with both of your comments. And in the spirit of full disclosure, I should have pointed out that I was a biologist.
That said, cryptozoologists are the people who worry about this stuff most of the time, not mainstream biologists, and very occasionally things are found - usually, of course, some deer or other moderately sized mammal, or some beastie that was thought to be extinct turns out not to be. I’d be shocked if Bigfoot were found.
My point was merely that there is a continuum of things out there beyond the pale, and that Bigfoot is one of the best of a bad lot, in terms of probability of existing - a longshot, but not the longest of longshots, more likely than sea monsters, mermaids, pixies, and a lost valley of tyrannosaurs.
The comment about the two choices and Occam’s razor was because this was the option posed by the OP - The girlfriend’s derided belief in Bigfoot, versus “The biggest argument I can find for WHY folks all through the ages have had tales and superstitions of big, hairy wild men has to do with genetic memory.”
Bigfeet (bigfoots? 
) are simply another manifestation of this…just one that hasn’t changed as much as the angels/space aliens one.