Could Bigfoot be real?

[RivkahChaya]

@Urbanredneck

It isnt unusual for locals to keep some secrets like the best fishing or hunting areas so I think this is plausible.

It’s also plausible that since safety razors and body waxing have been popular, Bigfoot has simply been removing its fur and living among us. Maybe it’s not typical for them to be over seven feet tall, and we’ve been led astray by a few atypical individuals who, not surprisingly, stand out more, and have a harder time hiding; they are really just a little taller than humans.

A couple of years ago, some guys who were hunting bigfoot, claimed some creature put its face up against their SUV window, and left fingerprints, and maybe even DNA. Unsurprisingly, we haven’t heard much more from them.

I never understood why the big headline wasn’t “Bigfoot has fingerprints!” because that would seem to confirm some kind of primate.

Everyone assumes that bigfoot must be a primate, even though, if you ask me, that’s the least likely scenario. How did they get here, and why don’t we have examples of them anywhere else? they didn’t evolve here from Australopithecines that crossed the Bering Strait, because we know about Australopithecines, and nothing people report from bigfoot sightings sounds like Australopithecines. An inbred group of bears where a recessive gene causes a hip defect that makes bipedal walking more comfortable for them is more likely. Which is not to say it’s likely, just the more likely of two very, very unlikely scenarios.

FTR, I don’t think either of those things happened. I still think bigfoot is more or less, 70% mistakes, 15% pranks and hoaxes that got out of hand, 10% drug & alcohol induced hallucinations, and 5% outright lies.

[Learjeff]

Possible? yes. Likely? Hell no.

Even recently, a rather large new species was discovered in a fairly populous country (Madagascar?) It’s hubris to assume we’ve discovered them all. But it’s not hubris to look at what it would take and asses the likelihood.

@Revtim

We have skeletons of things that have been extinct for millions of years and have undergone the extremely rare process of fossilization, but no skeletons from these things that are allegedly still running around? Sorry, no.

Arboreal species tend not to leave fossils. We have almost no fossil record for chimps, for example (if I’m to believe Richard Dawkins).

@RivkahChaya

However, what could be the source of a bipedal animal in the Pacific Northwest? Apes migrated here from somewhere, left no populations between their original place, and what is now Washington State, yet established a population there that has continued, viably, for thousands of years, despite being a very small group? That just doesn’t happen. Small groups either dwindle away, or expand (save for the intervention of something like the WWF, that maintains them on the brink of extinction). It happens because that’s the way genes work. A small population over many, many generations is weakened by inbreeding.

That seems like a better argument to me, and I’d like to hear someone with a good evolutionary biology pedigree like Colibri comment on it. If you have such a pedigree, forgive me for being unaware of it!

Unless “bigfoot” isn’t a primate, in which case, it’s the occasional bipedal walking bear.

Or possibly, a bipedal ursine. Very unlikely, but probably not impossible. However, the population size argument still applies.

[RivkahChaya]

@Learjeff

That seems like a better argument to me, and I’d like to hear someone with a good evolutionary biology pedigree like Colibri comment on it. If you have such a pedigree, forgive me for being unaware of it!

No, I don’t. I’ve just read a lot. I’m open to correction by someone who knows more.

Unless “bigfoot” isn’t a primate, in which case, it’s the occasional bipedal walking bear.

Or possibly, a bipedal ursine. Very unlikely, but probably not impossible. However, the population size argument still applies.

Umm, a bear is an ursine. Are you talking about some theoretical non-bear relative of a bear?

[Astroboy14]

@blindboyard

Didn’t Theodore Roosevelt fistfight a bigfoot?

That was Lincoln.

[John_Mace]

@RivkahChaya

No, I don’t. I’ve just read a lot. I’m open to correction by someone who knows more.

Fossils are extremely rare, so one has to be careful of the “absence of evidence is evidence of absence” argument based on such rare events. Physical evidence of very large mammals in North America is, however, not a rare event, so in that case it’s not a bad argument at all. I think most of us are satisfies with saying, instead of “Bigfoot does not exist” that “there is no credible evidence that Bigfoot exists”.

It’s entirely possible that an ape could have migrated from Asia to the Americas. It would have been unusual, but not impossible. And they may not have left many fossils along the way, especially if such a migration was done during a time of lower sea levels. But as it stands, there is no credible evidence that any ape, other than us, ever did.

[RivkahChaya]

Technically, we’re primates, but not apes. Anyway, it’s not the contention of bigfoot believers (as far as I know) that there ever was an ape in the Pacific Northwest, but that there currently is a living colony of some very large, bipedal, hairy, primate-like animal, and it has been there for a long time-- in other words, it wasn’t one runaway illegal pet chimp no one would own up to that was occasionally sighted, as it survived for a couple of years, conflated with sightings of bipedal bears, and the hoaxes that followed. I could actually believe something like that happened, particularly as there were quite a lot of people who attempted to raise chimps as family members in either chimp language experiments, or misguided nature/nurture experiments. For some reason, a lot of these happened on the West Coast. Some people had permission to keep chimps, but other people just had them, and didn’t realize what they were getting into when their cute little Curious Georges hit puberty.

Heck, I would be shocked if it didn’t happen that at some time in the 1950s, 60s, or 70s, someone turned out a pet chimp into the wild, and it certainly could have happened in the Pacific Northwest. But even if someone turn out a male and a female, they would probably die, and not establish a colony of chimps. Even if they did breed once, there wouldn’t be enough genetic diversity for a colony.

I guess this post boils down to, I wouldn’t be shocked at any stupid thing some person had done, and stories get blown out of proportion all the time. I still don’t think there is a large unknown species living in the Pacific Northwest.

[John_Mace]

@RivkahChaya

Technically, we’re primates, but not apes.

1. There is no technically about it. We are primates.

2. We are apes. Unless you want to invent some new, non-Cladistic classification scheme, we are apes. Our closest relatives are apes, and there are apes more closely related to us than they are to other apes. We are primates first, we are apes second, and we are great apes third. It makes no biological sense to create any other classification scheme.

[RivkahChaya]

@John_Mace

1. There is no technically about it. We are primates.

2. We are apes. Unless you want to invent some new, non-Cladistic classification scheme, we are apes. Our closest relatives are apes, and there are apes more closely related to us than they are to other apes. We are primates first, we are apes second, and we are great apes third. It makes no biological sense to create any other classification scheme.

It’s news to me that we are classified as apes. Apes are our closest living relatives, but we have had closer-- other hominids that were not Homo-- the Australopithecines, and other Homo that were not H. sapiens. “Ape” isn’t actually a part of formal cladistics. We apes are hominids, but not all hominids are apes, and usually the term is defined to specifically exclude humans. Sometimes the Barbary Macaque is called an ape, because it’s tailless, even though it’s a monkey, and not a hominid. Apes are primates, so I’m not sure how you could say that “we are primates first, we are apes second…”

Yes, I know there is no “technically” about us as primates. That was sarcasm.

[John_Mace]

@RivkahChaya

It’s news to me that we are classified as apes. .

This is not news. It’s decades old. You can read about it here.

If you don’t think we are apes, what do you think we are?

[Siam_Sam]

@Astroboy14

That was Lincoln.

Huh. And here I thought he was a vampire slayer.

[common_good]

I’m just amazed this thing keeps going. Like Nessy. If people can’t figure this one out…I don’t know what to say about their gullibility.

[John_Mace]

@common_good

I’m just amazed this thing keeps going. Like Nessy. If people can’t figure this one out…I don’t know what to say about their gullibility.

There are probably more people who believe in ghosts or angels than in Bigfoot. Irrational belief in some form or another is, for good or bad, more the norm than otherwise.

[RivkahChaya]

@John_Mace

There are probably more people who believe in ghosts or angels than in Bigfoot. Irrational belief in some form or another is, for good or bad, more the norm than otherwise.

At least it’s relatively harmless-- I mean, there’s always the occasional group of bigfoot hunters who get lost in the woods, and require an expensive search party, or Nessie hunter who can’t swim, and drowns in the loch, but the yearly body count is a lot lower than say, anti-vaxxers, or other types of fringe believers.

[common_good]

Of course you’re both right. It’s harmless enough, these lesser beliefs; Ghosts and Angels don’t even leave-behind footprints. But religious myths matter more than these and are accepted more widely. Harm does come from holy books.

[vontsira]

@David42

I have heard some kooks say he is an outer-space alien and someone here even mentioned he is a being from an alternate dimension.

There’s no evidence for these claims either, but at least the hypothesis explains why we can’t find any “wild-Animal style” evidence.

@MrKnowItAll

My rule of thumb is “What are the odds that someone saw something real over the odds that they either misunderstood what they saw, dreamed the encounter, or hallucinated it due to drugs, alcohol, or fatigue?” Almost always, that ratio is very low.

Have been mostly away from SDMB for a spell – just lately noticed this thread.

Pace the above quotes – concerning North America’s Bigfoot, and its reputed “cousins” elsewhere in the world – I consider that one sees basically three possibilities.

(1) it is a hitherto unknown-to-science purely-flesh-and-blood creature, which has amazingly for many centuries eluded detection-and-cataloguing-for-certain, by mankind.

(2) at the present day at all events, it does not exist: everyone who claims that it does / claims to have encountered it, is either consciously lying; or honest but, in some way, in error.

(3) something is truly going on, re this issue; in which there is in play in some way or ways, the supernatural and / or paranormal – possibly, natural phenomena which science has not yet caught up with – possibly other things, in one or more of a number of imaginable areas – not automatically excluding even David42’s cited space-alien connections or dimension-hopping.

I am one of seemingly rather few people who consider option (3), the least unlikely of the three. (A position which tends to prompt anger, or indeed hatred, on the part both of those who are keen proponents of Bigfoot and / or its relatives as a hitherto uncatalogued purely-flesh-and-blood creature; and those of a scientific / sceptical turn of mind, who are totally certain that “BF and friends” have no existence outside the human imagination, and that there is no paranormal.)

Would defend self along the lines of: in present conditions re planet Earth, such huge purely-flesh-and-blood creatures still living their lives in secret from mankind – with next to no physical evidence – seems quite impossible to credit. However – there seem to have been, over the decades, so many sober and credible accounts of sightings / encounters with what would appear to be giant ape-men in parts of the globe where per biological science, nothing remotely like that is supposed to occur. I’ll willingly allow that the large majority of such accounts result from the bolded in MrKnowItAll’s post – and I’d add to the bolded, “people consciously lying”: but, everyone who has ever made such a report, being “mischievous or mistaken”? – that, too, strains my believing-apparatus past breaking-point. Am thus driven to what many regard as yet wilder shores of credulity: a tough choice, but the supernatural / paranormal explanation seems, for me, the least unlikely option out of the three.

[vontsira]

@Siam_Sam

I’ve read of some police districts in Nepal still attributing “death by Yeti” to some unsolved cases. Really.

I understand that as of some years back, nearby Bhutan designated a national park as a reserve for the Migoi (local name for the yeti-creature) – its not being recognised in the worldwide natural-history / taxonomic canon, being neither here nor there, as per those who decide things in Bhutan…

[PlainJain]

@Telemark

There’s lots of folks who bushwack, hiking off trail. When you do so you stumble across all sorts of skeletons and corpses, not to mention lots of spoor and other evidence of creatures. There are just too many humans in the woods for something like this to go unnoticed.

This. I’m one of those people. I’ve found bones of an amazing number of animals. Multiply that by lots and lots of other hikers and hunters and it just doesn’t make sense that they could stay hidden.

I think a lot of believers give them special powers to explain away this type of rational.

[Urbanredneck]

@vontsira

Have been mostly away from SDMB for a spell – just lately noticed this thread.

Pace the above quotes – concerning North America’s Bigfoot, and its reputed “cousins” elsewhere in the world – I consider that one sees basically three possibilities.

(1) it is a hitherto unknown-to-science purely-flesh-and-blood creature, which has amazingly for many centuries eluded detection-and-cataloguing-for-certain, by mankind.

(2) at the present day at all events, it does not exist: everyone who claims that it does / claims to have encountered it, is either consciously lying; or honest but, in some way, in error.

(3) something is truly going on, re this issue; in which there is in play in some way or ways, the supernatural and / or paranormal – possibly, natural phenomena which science has not yet caught up with – possibly other things, in one or more of a number of imaginable areas – not automatically excluding even David42’s cited space-alien connections or dimension-hopping.

I am one of seemingly rather few people who consider option (3), the least unlikely of the three. (A position which tends to prompt anger, or indeed hatred, on the part both of those who are keen proponents of Bigfoot and / or its relatives as a hitherto uncatalogued purely-flesh-and-blood creature; and those of a scientific / sceptical turn of mind, who are totally certain that “BF and friends” have no existence outside the human imagination, and that there is no paranormal.)

Would defend self along the lines of: in present conditions re planet Earth, such huge purely-flesh-and-blood creatures still living their lives in secret from mankind – with next to no physical evidence – seems quite impossible to credit. However – there seem to have been, over the decades, so many sober and credible accounts of sightings / encounters with what would appear to be giant ape-men in parts of the globe where per biological science, nothing remotely like that is supposed to occur. I’ll willingly allow that the large majority of such accounts result from the bolded in MrKnowItAll’s post – and I’d add to the bolded, “people consciously lying”: but, everyone who has ever made such a report, being “mischievous or mistaken”? – that, too, strains my believing-apparatus past breaking-point. Am thus driven to what many regard as yet wilder shores of credulity: a tough choice, but the supernatural / paranormal explanation seems, for me, the least unlikely option out of the three.

This is kind of where I am on this. The scientist in me says “no, it can’t be”, but then I keep reading credible sources who saw - something.

[GIGObuster]

@Urbanredneck

This is kind of where I am on this. The scientist in me says “no, it can’t be”, but then I keep reading credible sources who saw - something.

I also know that credible witnesses claim that they saw UFOs around crop circles, when the preponderance of the evidence is that they are man-made.

QI and crop circles, with the makers of the circles making a QI crop circle.

[Siam_Sam]

@Urbanredneck

This is kind of where I am on this. The scientist in me says “no, it can’t be”, but then I keep reading credible sources who saw - something.

Unless they’re just having a laugh, no doubt they did see – something. But it wasn’t a friggin’ Bigfoot, which does not exist.