I like the caloric take on why Bigfoot is unlikely, but we have to also consider the technical side, as pointed out by XKCD at xkcd: Settled
Here’s the deal. We’ve got so many cell phones with cameras in the world that a few years back, some Mongolian herders photographed a young snow leopard sleeping on the roof of their yurt, and posted the picture to the web, where it was seen by zoologists worldwide.
We’ve got so many wildlife cameras in northern California (a bigfoot hotspot), that we spotted both the single wolf and the single wolverine that came across the border into the high Sierras. The researchers know “who” the wolf is (because they’re studying the Oregon pack from which he departed), and they used DNA from a hair sample to track the wolverine back to his source population in Idaho.
Now with all this surveillance, no researcher has spotted a sasquatch. The only way this works is if all sasquatches know what cameras are, know where all the cameras are, and actively avoid them. Considering that humans have trouble with this (I’ve missed a lot of cameras in my day), this is an impossible standard.
The other thing to add is that there’s little disincentive to scientifically work with real sasquatch. Look at what happened with Jane Goodall after her chimp studies. The fame a primatologist would get for acclimating a sasquatch population to her and doing the basic biology, population, genetics, and culture work on the species would be enormous. The real disincentive in the scientific community is publishing shoddy work, and sadly, most studies proving bigfoot end up in this bin, as Cecil noted.
If Big Foots do exist (Big Foots? Big Feet?), they’d have to be evolved from the apes (Hominoidea). The apes evolved about 25 million years ago and by that time, the Atlantic Ocean was at least 1,400 miles back then across. How did a large ape ancestor get across the ocean?
Most likely based upon behavior and description, Big Foot would have evolved from a great ape ancestor (Hominidae). In that case, we’re only talking about 10 million years ago, and the Atlantic Ocean would have been 1,600 miles across. (The modern Atlantic is a bit over 1,700 miles across at its closest point).
This is the main problem with Big Foot: There’s just no way a great ape to have reached the New World in order to evolve into a Big Foot.
I’m a huge disbeliever in sasquatch. There are a million reasons to doubt them, but this is one of the weakest arguments against them.
Humans made it to North America thanks to a land bridge across the Bering straits. We didn’t cross the Atlantic until at least 14,000 years later. This Pacific land bridge would have been open on and off for at least a couple of million years, during each of the glacial periods. I understand that there are even gigantopithecus fossils in eastern Asia at around the right time for a possible migration to the Americas over that same land bridge.
Sasquatches are actually relatively small animals shaped like oversize feet. They can be over a foot long and 6 to 8 inches wide but they are no more than 3 inches tall escaping the notice of ‘critter cams’ intended to catch them in the wild. They travel by hopping, sometimes in pairs.
And if this is true, then they could plausibly be visitors from Tralfamadore. That’s an interesting idea, as long as they don’t go about kidnapping anybody.
Gigantopthecus lived mainly in Southern China and Vietnam over 4,600 miles from the Alaskan land bridge. This is about the same distance between Central Africa and South China. In other words, they barely made it half way there. The area where gigantopithecus lived is also a fairly tropical climate where almost other primates live. The exceptions are the Japanese macaque and of course, us. It’s doubtful they could have survived in the Russian Steppes.
That’s why I don’t consider the Alaska land bridge a possibility. It’s just too far away – even for apes that lived in Eastern Asia.
Fundamentally, I agree with you. I don’t think they did.
On the other hand, “Gigantopithecus crossed the Bering land bridge” is far more plausible than the idea that sasquatch can live everywhere from Alaska to Florida without a single dead body or live capture as proof.
It’s also not a given that Sasquatch, if it existed, would be an ape. Maybe, for instance, it’s an ursine that evolved to be more bipedal. No, I’m not saying that that’s likely, but it’s possible.
Which leads us to turn to all of the other lines of evidence.
The alleged water requirement of 100ml of water per kg per day is ridiculous.
It means they would have to drink 10% of their body weight each day.
For a larger human of 100kg / 220lb this means 10 litres or 21 US pints per day. Actual human consumption is typically well below 2 litres per day except in extremely grueling conditions at high temperatures where an intake of 1 litre per hour is required, but only for a few hours max.
And yes I know about moisture content of food. And no I wouldn’t enjoy eating 20-30 kg of food each day just to get the moisture.
I’d like to add that I’ve seen a black bear carcass in the wild. This was in the Alleghenies, about 1984. These days, pix or it didn’t happen, but I did pry out a canine tooth as a memento.
The first paragraph has: "Sixty-five-plus years of keeping hope alive — Bigfoot prints first hit the news in1958 — can take quite a toll on the psyche."
Just to point out, 1958 was only 56 years ago, not 65+.
I have been in some really remote areas of the PNW. All day without seeing another group, etc.
But every square mile gets visited by somebody sooner or later. There can’t possibly be even a dozen Sasquatches anywhere. A lone one might get by for several years, but working backwards in time raises a bunch of questions about their former numbers and range that can’t be reasonably answered. E.g., an immense percentage of old growth lumber was taken out a long time ago. And none of these areas happened to contain Sasquatches?
Even if UFOs dropped a thousand of them into the remotest area, by the next hunting season someone would have bagged one (or probably even sooner).
(One of the oddities of actually meeting people in remote areas is that there’s a good chance you know someone in common or better. E.g., last summer fourwheeling waaay out in the sticks with cousins and a friend of theirs we ran into two groups. In the first the friend knew someone in the other group so he stopped and chatted. In the second the the wife of a guy in the other group worked with one of my cousin’s wives which meant they themselves were sort of on a first name basis. Ergo, if someone actually met a Sasquatch, they’d know people/cryptids in common.)