Not only have we never found a Bigfoot, we have never found Bigfoot fossils. And wouldn’t we? There can’t be just one of any animal, not unless it’s the last of its kind, and even then there must have been a breeding population at one time. If a species of hominid primates have been living in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, they must have had ancestors, in a line going back to the time when those ancestors first came to this continent. And that means at least some of their ancestors would have left fossils, somewhere.
There have been a lot of paleontoligical digs on these continents. Scientists have found the fossils of Jurassic and Triassic dinosaurs in the Americas. They have found fossils of Pleistocene saber-tooth tigers, cave bears, dire wolves, proto-horses, mammoths, ground sloths, carnivorous pigs, giant armadillos. (Visit the La Brea Tar Pits museum in Los Angeles and you’ll see some of these.) But so far as I know, no non-human hominid fossils have ever been found in the Western Hemisphere – no Neanderthals, no Homo erectus, no Homo habilis – no humanlike things at all, except for the perfectly human Indians and Inuit.
If Bigfoot exists, why doesn’t he show up in the fossil record?
The problem is that the Moose is just a much better woodsman than you, and you pretty much announce your presence as you move through the woods and you don’t know what you’re looking at.
I am only a very poor hunter, but I know enough to know that every animal leaves its impact upon the environment. With skill and knowledge this can be read.
Doubtless, as you walked through the woods, lots of moose knew you were there.
If sasquatch live in the woods, they are going to have to move around, and eat, and crap and drink water, and generally make an impact on the environment.
While this is something that a nonhunter might not notice, and also something that a poor hunter like myself might not notice, most every area of the country has competant outdoorsman capable of reading signs enough to know what’s been hanging around doing what.
So, even if we never found a bigfoot there would be credible reports from serious local outdoorsmen who would be able to describe its habits.
For example, they would know that there is a large bipedal creature that likes to eat ____, prefers to sleep in ____, travels either solitary or in groups of ____, is nocturnal (or not), winters in _____, and we would have lots of hair and feces samples.
The larger the animal, the bigger the impact it makes on the environment. It has greater needs.
We would know the sasquatch by the impact that it makes. It simply can’t be hidden, and this impact could be used to track down the animal.
The fact that we don’t have credible local outdoorsmen building a framework for the sasquatch’s preferred environment and habits is pretty much a killing blow for the possibility of it’s existence.
Similarly a lot of these bigfoot tracks are pretty ridiculous. As tracks degrade with age they change shape.
IMO the sasquatch does exist. I call it a “bear.” If you’ve ever seen a bear in the distance walking directly towards you or away from you, it’s pretty easy to confuse with a large biped.
Bear tracks also degrade with age to make a pretty damn good impression of a giant humanoid foot. Doubly so, because a bear tends to have some overlap between it’s front and rear prints. Even when they don’t, they are close enough together that with time the thin ridge seperating them will crumble giving the idea of a single large track to the untrained eye.
I’m a very casual outdoorsman (do some hiking and camping, but no real hunting) and I’ve seen several bears, a bobcat, and a mountain lion. No badgers.
I’ll believe in Bigfoot when I see a body. Nothing else will convince me. And, as an avid student of paleo-anthropology, I’d love for there to be something like Bigfoot out there. I’m not biased against it-- if anything I’d be biased in favor just because it would be so interesting if it were true.
Is the elephant’s graveyard bit a myth, Cervaise? I know someone from Africa who gave a very detailed account of one after a visit. Have I been whooshed?
Quack: Elephants don’t hide their dead, but they have been documented “visiting” the bones of dead herd members. They sniff the bones and touch them with their trunks. It’s easy to anthropomorphise and assume they are grieving lost family members. But in truth, we really don’t know why they exhibit this behavior.
I’d imagine all newly discovered species that are above a certain size were all found in relatively remote areas of the planet. If a new large mammal was found in Montana or Oregon and not Asia or Africa, then I’d give more credence to the possibility that Bigfoot could have lurked in the Americas for x-number of centuries without any trace of its existence being found beyond blurry footprints.
Haven’t you been paying attention? These species were all known to the local people. They were only “discovered” in terms of being described by scientists. Given the fact that there are lots of “local people” - Native Americans plus Americans and Canadians of other ancestries - living in the areas in question, such people would know where to locate a creature such as Bigfoot if it existed, and be able to find better physical evidence than easily-faked footprints.
I’ve worked on several large scale biodiversity surveys in remote areas, such as Amazonian Peru, Panama, and Gabon in Central Africa. My own specialty is birds, but I work alongside mammalogists who know very well how to find sign (tracks, nests, scratching posts, feeding sign, droppings) of even the most wary animals - jaguars, leopards, tapirs, bush dogs, gorillas. Even I, who am not particularly adept, regularly find tracks and other sign of these animals, even though I see them rarely (or never). I’ve never seen a jaguar in the wild, for example, but I’ve found plenty of tracks, droppings, and scratching posts (not to mention hearing one grunting outside my tent one night). I’ve only seen gorillas once, but if they’re around, you’ll see nests, tracks, droppings, and feeding sign. Large herbivores (as a Sasquatch would mainly have to be) in particular leave a lot of feeding sign around. My Indian and African assistants would unquestionably be able to track down such animals within a few days or weeks if they were asked to.
Could one or a very few Sasquatch escaped detection in a very remote area that is rarely visited? Possibly. Could a population of hundreds (or even dozens) exist, spread over a large geographic area, without any solid physical evidence being found despite many decades of searching by experienced woodsmen? No chance in hell. Those who are not familiar with the outdoors, I think, vastly overestimate the difficulty of detecting large mammals when they are present in an area.
Is it possible that you are erring in comparing the evidence for the presence of bobcats and moose etc. to bigfoot, because there are tens of thousands of these animals and relatively few bigfoots (bigfeet?). So the likelihood of even a professional hunter/outdoorsman missing out on signs of the latter is a lot higher.
Also, it is a lot easier to detect animals that you know exist than animals that you don’t. Meaning that for all we know there might have been many occasions where hunters/trappers have stumbled across signs of bigfoot, but just assumed they were signs of bears (or whatever) and not paid that much attention. Not everyone is obsessed with hunting down bigfoot.
FTM, can you document just how much and what sort of effort has been put into tracking down bigfoot? I’m sure there’s been a lot of discussion, like this one, but in terms of serious searches, I wonder about your statement about “the amount of effort that’s been put into it”.
Native Americans have passed along legends of Bigfoot-like creatures to “the white man,” over the centuries. (the earliest reports of “bigfoot” in the New England area that I’ve read came from Native Americans cautioning settlers in the 1700s) At least in the northeast. So the locals have actually observed them over time, maybe, even if scientist haven’t. A partial history of their bigfoot legends/reportings can be found in the book Passing Strange by Joseph Citro.
The fact of the matter is, anyone coming up with “evidence” is going to be dismissed as a loon no matter what their color or where they make their home. That’s sort of sad, but understandable. Even admiring the whimsy of the idea, it would have to take rather compelling evidence to convince me never mind people who are interested in debunking the idea.
As best I can tell, Roosevelt merely passed on a Bigfoot story, in his book The Wilderness Hunter. Here’s a partial quote from here:
Roosevelt himself heard some strange noises while spending the night in a place which his native guide suggested avoiding. My money is on the pissed of guide as the source of the noise.
As I said, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that a very small population could escape detection in a very remote area. However, that’s not the situation postulated by Bigfoot believers. Supposedly it lives across a huge swath of territory in the Pacific Northwest (discounting supposed sightings from farther afield such as Texas, Rhode Island, and Florida.) It is common enough so that there are multiple (dozens to hundreds, depending on how many you credit) sightings per year, plus many tracks found, yet so extremely rare and elusive that no verifiable physical evidence has ever been found. These two characteristics are not compatible where real animals are involved.
One has to consider what might be a viable population density for such an animal. The Florida Panther, a subspecies of Puma, can serve as a basis for comparison, being not too different in size and extremely elusive. This very shy and wary animal avoids people and is one of the rarest large animals in the world; there are only about 70 left in southwest Florida. (Yet they are findable; we know where they are.) At this very low population size they have very severe problems with inbreeding. Similar problems would beset Bigfoot it existed at the kind of population densities proposed.
In general, the whole ecology and population biology that Bigfoot would have to have in order to escape detection is just highly implausible.
The point has some validity, since some Bigfoot sign (if it existed) could probably be mistaken for that of bear. However, Bigfoot is such a part of popular culture that I think almost anyone would be aware of it. Even if some sign is overlooked I would think that an experienced woodsman would be likely to notice sign that was atypical for bears.
There’s certainly a lot of Bigfoot research sites out there. Here’s a whole page of links. But it’s hard to assess how much of this consists of serious searches by competent observers, and how much of this is just a compilation of every off-the-wall sighting and scrap of information they can find.
I am making an assumption here: That at least some proportion of these many “researchers” are competent trackers or woodsmen, and that they have put in a significant time searching for Bigfoot in the areas from which the most promising evidence comes. If that is the case, then I think that is strong evidence that the creature doesn’t exist.
The alternative hypothesis is that, despite the large degree of interest in the topic and the very high reward if one of these critters was found, all of the “researchers” who have gotten involved have been incompetent in the field; or that competent observers have never looked in the right place or spent enough time looking.
I think this is an error common to skeptics/debunkers. Just because not every claim made by proponents of some theory or other is true does not mean that you can dismiss the entire theory outright. I’m sure you will agree that there are a lot of very real phenomena that are subject to widespread misconceptions - it is hardly surprising if a lot of proponents of a bigfoot theory will be in error on many points. The question here is whether bigfoot might exist, not whether this or that claim by “Bigfoot believers” is true.
Personally I might be open to some slight possiblity that bigfoot exists. But that certainly doesn’t mean that I accept every puported sighting of bigfoot as being real, or every bigfoot theory as being valid.
Raythe’s OP mentions “Chinese Wildman hairs” and “Yeti-hair root.” Does anyone know more about this? I’ve never before heard of any recovered hair samples purported to be those of a Yeti.
Not that I doubt the Yeti’s existence, of course. We of the Church of the SubGenius are ourselves descendants of the antediluvian Atlantean Yeti (shamefully crossbred with those inferior beings known as “humans”), and our favorite smokeable recreational substance, habafropzipulops or “'frop,” can only be grown on the Plateau of Leng with Yeti-dung fertilizer. www.subgenius.com Praise “Bob”!
Oh, goody! Then the Jersey Devil has an even better chance of existing - there are actually white people who’ve sworn they saw him. Same for the Jackelope and Nessie, come to think of it.
Dude, ever hear of a “tall tale”? How about telling the naive visitors what they want to hear just so you can laugh at them later? Think Indians can’t feel that temptation?
And have you actually been to Montana, or anywhere else out West? Seen how dense the human population really is? Still think it’s possible for a large creature that a lot of people have actually looked for, intensively, to somehow find a hiding place anyway?
I’ve stated twice that there is some small possibility that some very small population could exist in a very remote area and escape detection. What’s not possible is that dozens-to-hundreds exist over a large area without being discovered or leaving physical evidence.
Well, you can argue and debate about it all you want, I have had the fact of the existance of an unknown hominid in the Pac Northwest proven to me first hand.
Take this with a grain of salt from someone on the web who isnt using their real name if you wish, I really cant and wont blame you. But yes, there is some sort of hominid living in the hundreds of thousands of square miles of unexplored forestland in the western US and Canada.
And yes, it is only a matter of time until its ‘proven’, which is why Im not too worried about trying to convince anyone.
Well, you can argue and debate about it all you want, I have had the fact of the existance of an unknown hominid in the Pac Northwest proven to me first hand.
Take this with a grain of salt from someone on the web who isnt using their real name if you wish, I really cant and wont blame you. But yes, there is some sort of hominid living in the hundreds of thousands of square miles of unexplored forestland in the western US and Canada.
And yes, it is only a matter of time until its ‘proven’, which is why Im not too worried about trying to convince anyone.
Is this a reference to the fabled (and mythical) elephant’s graveyard?