Who believes in Bigfoot?

maninasia · 15-03-2013 7:06am

Fake or not fake it's poor evidence. Now DNA of an unknown ape species, THAT would be interesting!

CollardGreens · 15-03-2013 7:15am

Very hard to spot a bigfoot in America so...large, primitive, & a fear of outsiders. Bigfoot would blend right in

{Apologies to any Americans, but, c'mon it was funny...right? Right??}

If I were a small framed, insecure, non-American, then I would probably think it was funny to try to build my low esteem and self indulged ego to my peers.

Myrddin · 15-03-2013 10:20am

CollardGreens wrote: »

If I were a small framed, insecure, non-American, then I would probably think it was funny to try to build my low esteem and self indulged ego to my peers.

Your arguing with a post I made six months ago, & not only that, one that was clearly aimed at injecting a little humour into the thread, hardly born of any sincerity {my American relations will attest to that}. So I'd suggest dropping the psychoanalysis routine, it clearly needs more work. And while your at it, getting back on topic would be nice please .

googled eyes · 16-04-2013 3:06pm

Coming along late, I'd like to believe Bigfoot could be real but doubt it. Although how long are the legends around? Could the story/legend etc. of Bigfoot be in human culture as long as we've been human? Maybe Bigfoot was another branch of the Homo family tree or even Neanderthals ? Just a memory passed from generation to generation and we've now named it Bigfoot

tac foley · 01-05-2013 7:23pm

Let's get some reality injected hereabouts, well, a hint of reality. Let's assume, for the moment, that there IS a BigFoot - where might he/she live in the forested areas of the West or East of North America?

Ignoring the UN-forested areas of Oregon and Washington, the bits we have left are as follows -

Washington state forestation - 23,000,000 acres.

Oregon state forestation - 28,000,000 acres.

Total - 51,000,000 acres, or to put it into context, an area 2.23 times larger than the entire island of Ireland - ALL trees, and many of them seriously BIG, like the 250 footers on the back-lot of my cousin Joe's place just outside Eugene.

That does not take into account the contiguous forestation of the state of C*******a, and neighbouring British Columbia - respectively with 33,000,000 and 61,000,000 acres...

...and that is just the Pacific North West.

Between them, Québec and Ontario add another large amount of forest - 188,000,000 acres and 123,000,000 acres.

We have ignored ALL the East Coast states that are mostly forest in their entirety, even the teeny state of Pennsylvania still has 17,000,000 acres of forest. Even that area is bigger than the island of Ireland - and remember, that's ALL just woodlands and NOTHING else.

Are we totally sure that there is NOTHING there that we don't know about already?

tac

Brian Shanahan · 01-05-2013 10:34pm

tac foley wrote: »

Let's get some reality injected hereabouts, well, a hint of reality.

A hint of reality; the likelihood of there being a bigfoot out there (never mind a whole species with a population large enough not to die from inbreeding within three generations), is about as large as me getting a contract from Man Utd of £300k per week in the morning.

tac foley · 01-05-2013 11:37pm

Brian Shanahan wrote: »

A hint of reality; the likelihood of there being a bigfoot out there (never mind a whole species with a population large enough not to die from inbreeding within three generations), is about as large as me getting a contract from Man Utd of £300k per week in the morning.

Well, Sir - a few of points here...

I DID write '...a hint of reality...'.

I DID write '...let's assume'...

I DID provide you with an area of TOTAL forestation more than half as big again as the entire area of Western Europe.

I DID point out that I had omitted ALL of NE USA except Pennsylvania, a state actually named after woodlands.

I therefore readily agree that in leaving out another 121,500,000 acres of forest in the rest of the northern parts of the USA and SE Canada my 'supposition' case might have been a wee bit stronger if I'd put it all in, but most folks have difficulty assimilating real forest like we have in Canada - real forest that covers an area bigger than France, and that's just in Quebéc...

Somebody a whole lot cleverer than me once noted 'Absence of proof is not proof of absence'.

Me, I'd like to think that there is 'something' out there, but I guess that's the child in my head.

Don't be a dream-killer for an old man, eh?

tac

Wibbs · 02-05-2013 10:08am

I posted this in another thread on another forum hereabouts...

Not my tale, rather a mate of mine who claims he saw bigfoot/sasquatch. He's a Canadian by birth and a very rational guy with a strong science background. No hippie digging crystal healing is he(to the point where he'd suck the life from an anecdote by bringing in dry "facts"). Anyway, as he relates it, he and a mate were visiting another ex college mate deep in the Canadian hinterlands for a spot of trout fishing one summer. This place was well remote. Teeny "village", more like a loose settlement of people hundreds of miles from pretty much anywhere. Cut off in the winter kinda place.

Annnyhooo... They decide to go up this river and follow it into an area the local lad hadn't tried as the fishing was very good. Fly fishing types tend not to stand on top of each other, so they were quite separated at times. This lad goes up a tributary that looks very "fishy" and he gets a fair few hundred yards/metres away from the nearest fellow angler. He's getting into some decent fish and can see signs of better so keeps on concentrating on his task.

He's fishing a nice wide pool full of taking fish and his attention kept being slightly drawn to a tree stump on his left about 20feet/6 odd metres away. He noted in hindsight that this was odd as it was a bloody forest so tree stumps not exactly rare... He kept casting and waiting to strike. Then he took one step forward into the pool and the "stump" stood up.

He said the "stump" stood up and looked at him. Now he's a big lad, 6'5+ and he said it was his around his height. Not 11 foot tall or any of that guff. He said it kinda looked like a gorilla only not nearly as bulky, like a well built man with an apes head. Not shaggy fur either, quite short, very dark in colour. The face was hard to make out because of it being dark all over.

For what seemed like an age, but he reckons 3 or 4 minutes anyway they both stood there rooted to the spot. Just looking at each other. He got the stron feeling of "ok you're grand, but no further" from it. Not a threat but defo a statement of some sort. Then when he started to collect his thoughts and look more, it turned around and calmly walked off into the brush barely making a sound. At that point he says tears started to flow down his face. He said it was because of fear yea, but mostly the real very visceral shock of seeing something that wasn't human walking away on two legs just like you or me and he said it was just like you or me when it walked. No giant strides or any of that, no "apelike" gait, just a normal purposeful walk(he didn't notice the size of the feet. I asked ).

Now he had a handgun with him as there was always the threat of bear(though remote that one would actually cause you hassle), but he didn't think of using it. He admitted he barely realised he had it and even if he did he says he probably wouldn't have used it.

He backed down the river back to his mates. He thinks he heard it following at a respectful distance for a time. When he told them they initially laughed it off, but seeing his face and deadly earnest and knowing him as I do, they then hightailed it out of there.

When they got back to the local guys gaff they had a confab, but it came to nought. Subsequently the local guy a while later mentioned this in passing to one of the old guys in this settlement and he said he wasn't that surprised as he had seen one twice in his time in the backwoods in similar "this is my territory" situations(once not far from this guys encounter) and the native Canadian guys and gals took it very seriously(though they saw it as a "spiritual" thing), but that they were rarer now.

Year later the guy swears what he saw was what he saw. Being of a rational bent he thinks maybe it was a hallucination brought on by some recent stress in his life, but that it was the weirdest and most vivid effin hallucination ever.

Do I think it possible? Well the above guy who saw it I'd believe. I'd believe he saw something anyway. Is it possible something remains hidden in those deep forests? As Tac points out the scale of them is enormous. Near stretching credulity for Irish folks and their idea of forest, unless you see it for yourself. Parts of Asia the same, if not even less traveled, less populated than in the Americas.

My issue in the US would not be lack of current decent evidence as such, but a lack of evidence for any great ape(including us before 20Kya) in the fossil record. I do hold out much more hope for something lurking in the forests of Asia. The Orang Pendek for one. Many reports of a small bipedal ape, inc one from a Orang utan researcher who knows her stuff. Considering the Hobbit of Flores lived into near historical times, I'd not be too shocked to find a living version of another great ape lost to science and maybe just maybe a hominid that isn't us. The Russian stories of the Alma intrigue me too. Again coming from country sized areas of deep forest. Some have reckoned relict Neandertals but I think that very unlikely myself. They had a culture not so unlike our own, left cultural artifacts and would be noticeable in the landscape. Maybe a relict Erectus? They did leave cultural traces but a lot less so.

tac foley · 02-05-2013 10:41am

A great story, and related in a believable fashion. As for the size of Canada, here's a little reminder -

The entire island of Ireland fits into Québec - one of the nine provinces of Canada - not five times, or even ten times, but almost seventeen times...and most of it is forest.

Even Ontario, the second-largest province, is 11.6 times the size of entire Ireland.

I'd also point out that Canada, the second-largest country on earth, has slightly over half the population of the entire UK - mostly situated within about 120 miles or so of the border with the USA. Have a look at 'Canada by night' on the internet to see what I mean.

Me, I just keep what's left of my mind open on these things...

tac

Dave! · 02-05-2013 10:59am

I think at this stage we've all grasped the fact that there is a lot of forest in North America.

However some of the Bigfoot proponents seem to want to have their cake and eat it. If the claim is that the N American forest is big and there might hypothetically be some undiscovered mammals in there, then that is one thing. I'm sure that some would challenge this for evolutionary reasons, or for population viability reasons, but I don't know the specifics of this.

However at the same time as pointing out that N America is full of forest, Bigfoot proponents also tend to point to first-hand encounters, eye-witness accounts, videos, photos, etc., as evidence. We've had thousands of them of the years (back as far as Native American etchings). So if we're to believe half of these accounts, then Bigfoot isn't hiding away in some unexplored forest regions (and their corpses dissolving in the acidic environment to leave no trace), but rather they're crossing paths with humans on a semi-regular basis, bumping into hunters, and so on.

So which is it? Either they're hiding away and the eye-witness accounts are 99% bullsh*t, or else they're being seen by people camping/hunting in rural areas, but the people just can never get a clean shot on, or picture of, the creature.

Myrddin · 02-05-2013 11:07am

Fully agree with Dave there. Yes the area is in the hundreds of millions of acres...yet we still get 'sighting' after 'sighting'. In such mind bogglingly vast areas, the chances of running into an elusive, intellignet & evasive species are astronomical. Its an argument that works both ways, which the proponents of the myth seem to overlook imo

Star Lord · 02-05-2013 11:18am

I'd fall somewhere in the middle. I thoroughly believe that the majority of 'sightings' are nonsense, mistakes or just made up for attention.
I do believe there are genuine sightings of... something though, such as the one posted by Wibbs.

Myrddin · 02-05-2013 11:28am

DamoElDiablo wrote: »

I'd fall somewhere in the middle. I thoroughly believe that the majority of 'sightings' are nonsense, mistakes or just made up for attention.
I do believe there are genuine sightings of... something though, such as the one posted by Wibbs.

Have to admit, stories like that are intriguing

Wibbs · 02-05-2013 2:03pm

I liken them to the oul UFO sightings. 99.999 or whatever % are cases of mistaken identity, imagination or just pure BS. However some a tiny amount do make you ask questions. Little green men? Unlikely, but something unidentified anyway.

With bigfoot the interweb has added to the BS IMHO. Because of the dissemination of the tiny amount of interesting reports copycatism kicks in. Somebody hears a moose in the undergrowth and thinks bigfoot and adds in the details to make it sound more believable(to themselves if nothing else). Personally I take post web reports with a large amount of skepticism. Ditto for stories/reports from the middle of relatively high human populations.

Footprints are a bit dubious too for the most part and easily faked. Again the web would help the fakers. However I do recall reading of some survey team(I think in Washington state in the US), who were dropping in scientific equipment of some nature or other in very remote areas by helicopter and one occasion they found a line of footprints. A tad outa the way for pranksters you'd think.

Still it would be my gut feeling that Asia, both in the temperate and subtropical areas would be more likely places. For the reason I give previously, they have had millions of years of great apes and hominids traipsing around. On the latter we only found out about one extinct hominid recently from the DNA in a fingerbone. The Americas as far as we know so far have not. Neither did Australia and they have their own bigfoot myth in the Yowie. Then again you can be damned sure we don't have the whole picture and it is possible that some great apes did indeed make it to the Americas in the last 5 million years. Their fossils might be everywhere, but buried under a couple of million years of temperate forest.

Still I'd love to know what my mate saw. Like I said he's not one for wild imaginings. Quite the opposite, almost to a fault*. He also knows what bear and moose look and act like and according to him this was most definitely neither and this wasn't a 100 yards away, he was within 15 - 20 feet of it(we flyfishing types are pretty good at judging measurements at those distances). There was no overpowering smell as some report, nor did it make any vocalisations. I found it interesting that he gave it's height close to his at around 6'5". None of this ten foot tall stuff. He couldn't remember the hands or feet, but does remember the general heavily built body shape and arms and legs and it's human like walk. This happened back in the late 1980's.

*EG when telling fishing stories, unlike the vast majority of fishermen, his fish pointedly refuse to grow after death/release.

:D

maninasia · 02-05-2013 4:37pm

I think the likeliehood of a big foot existing in the present day must be very small, but not 100% impossible. I'd be more of a proponent of one existing in N.America, just due to the large population in Asia more than anything else, and relative paucity of people in N.America (even though as Wibbs pointed out plenty of hominid species have been found in Asia and none except Homo Sapiens in N.America). I'm thinking the land bridge could have let a big hairy guy and gal over there along with the native Americans!

There are ways to further check for the existence of big foot. He/she didn't just evolve from nothing, so there HAS to be fossil evidence and skeletons of them out there if they exist. These bones should be be found in the same type of places archaeologists look today, cave bottoms, sandtraps and tar pits, bottoms of lakes. This is how Flores man in Indonesia and the Denisovans in Siberia were discovered (and even with that both of them were controversial until a lot of work, especially DNA sequencing, helped to prove they were unique species).

I guess there's one more important thing I have to add here. What if Big Foot are some type of humans who have gone feral? Now why I mention this is I recently saw some Nat Geo programs on feral kids part raised by wild animals in various forests and jungles. In at least two cases when the kids were found they were described as hairy all over. Perhaps hair grows on humans as a physiological reaction due to cold and exposure but only when exposed at a very young age and in the absence of any clothing whatsoever over the critical development period?

Edit- Seems I'm not the only one who has thought something along these lines.
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread917116/pg1

Here's another example of a feral hairy kid, 'Peter the Wild Boy'.
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/photos/9-children-who-were-raised-by-animals/peter-the-wild-boy

tac foley · 02-05-2013 6:10pm

I guess that somebody is going to tell me now that 'Harry and the Hendersons' is not a real-life documentary?

tac

Myrddin · 02-05-2013 6:15pm

tac foley wrote: »

I guess that somebody is going to tell me now that 'Harry and the Hendersons' is not a real-life documentary?

tac

Of course not, everyone knows that and Mac & Me (Aliens!) are real life documentaries.

tac foley · 02-05-2013 6:21pm

That's a relief - thanks for restoring my faith in TV.

tac

Wibbs · 03-05-2013 11:10am

maninasia wrote: »

I'd be more of a proponent of one existing in N.America, just due to the large population in Asia more than anything else, and relative paucity of people in N.America

While the Asian population is far higher, if you take the vast areas of wilderness that stretches over the north of the landmass from Russia to the Pacific, it's very sparsely populated. That's before you look at the SE Asian jungles. They're still finding new species in those regions on a yearly basis, including large animals like antelope.

I'm thinking the land bridge could have let a big hairy guy and gal over there along with the native Americans!

If a great ape made it to the US I'd suspect it was long before the Native Americans. The latter had the advantage of clothing to offset the harsh climate around the trip to the new world. There would have been few periods when it might have been hospitable enough for an unclothed great ape or hominid, no matter how hairy. Look at Homo Erectus. Those lads made Aussie backpackers look like homebodies with their wanderlust. In remarkably short order they left Africa and made it to the coasts of the Asian Pacific and even made pretty hazardous sea journeys if Flores man(and others) are anything to go by. Yet Australia remained out of reach(though I have a hunch they might, just might have made it, but didn't thrive) and no sign of them in the Americas. The other advantage hominids have/had was diet. They were meat eaters as well as foragers. New environments don't bring unsurmountable dietary issues that might befall herbivores. I mean if it moves you can generally eat it. If we'd stayed as nuts and berries apes we'd likely have never left Africa. IIRC your bigfoot is seen as more of a forager that eats meat the odd time? That would be an issue. NOt to say diets can't adapt over time of course.

There are ways to further check for the existence of big foot. He/she didn't just evolve from nothing, so there HAS to be fossil evidence and skeletons of them out there if they exist. These bones should be be found in the same type of places archaeologists look today, cave bottoms, sandtraps and tar pits, bottoms of lakes.

+1 Even if they are/were there the environment they're supposed to live in isn't the best for preservation of remains unless rapidly buried. Even then the acidity would dissolve bones pretty quickly. The odds come down even more if they're rare in the first place.

maninasia · 04-05-2013 5:03am

There's another way to possibly detect the presence of Big Foot or an unknown hominid species in NA. Look at the DNA of native Americans. They could well have a signature there of another Hominid.

Why do I say this?
http://io9.com/5939148/new-dna-evidence-could-explain-what-happened-to-the-neanderthals

Now maybe studies have been done before, it would be worth a look.

EDIT- Bingo!
http://anthropogenesis.kinshipstudies.org/2012/03/american-indians-neanderthals-and-denisovans-pca-views/
There IS some evidence suggesting something along these lines, and it points to Neanderthals and not so much Denisovans. In fact Native Americans seem to have the most Neanderthal DNA of any living population. Yet Neanderthals were not supposed to have existed in North America. Even the author of the BLOG doesn't believe it (although he does believe some other very far out there theories), while the answer may be staring him in the face.

Going back to “archaic admixture,” higher frequencies of Neanderthal alleles among North American Indians and slightly lower frequencies of Denisovan allelles in South American Indians are very unexpected and don’t fit the “archaic admixture” theory, as there were no Neanderthals or Denisovans in America.

And this fellow too - misses the obvious point
http://www.archaeology.org/issues/60-1301/trenches/311-hominin-neanderthals-humans-siberia

According to David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School and a member of the research team, the new DNA sequence also shows that Native Americans and people from East Asia have more Neanderthal DNA, on average, than Europeans. Archaeologists have long thought that the largest population of Neanderthals lived in Europe, so the finding complicates the picture of the way modern people and Neanderthals are related. Either there was a separate event in which Neanderthals interbred with people in Asia, or the genetic contribution of Neanderthals in Europe was diluted by later migrations of Homo sapiens.

Of course it could be further complicated by the fact that a 'Big Foot' species and humans from Asia would have shared their original environment before migrating to North America. The extra Neanderthal DNA in Native Americans could simply be because they were a small relatively inbred group which went across, and by coincidence carried more Neanderthal DNA than the rest of the population (or subsequently the population in Asia further diluted the Neanderthal DNA component in their genome overtime). Still it's a very interesting conundrum that the population that has the highest incidence of Neanderthal genes is Native Americans, when a) Neanderthals were supposed to have barely existed in Asia and

are not supposed to have existed at all in North America.

A small piece of evidence pointing to a possible North American origin for that Neanderthal DNA in modern Native Americans i.e. this fellow that lived in what is now China 40,000 years did not have more Neanderthal DNA than modern contemporaries.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130121161802.htm

Clovis people being first immigrants to North America coming into question more and more
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/13/science/clovis-people-werent-alone-in-north-america-spearheads-and-dna-suggest.html?_r=0

So what we know about immigration into North America and hominid history in North America (and the world to be frank) is very little indeed.

If Neanderthals existed in North America, there is a way to narrow down the search. Check each tribe for Neanderthal DNA and the one with the most COULD have had the most contact with a Neanderthal population in North America, and would give you a place to narrow down your search, for Big Foot (Neanderthal/Neanderthal Hybrid) or fossils of such. You would simply check their ancestral homelands.

We know Denisovans lived in Eastern Asia and Siberia in tough climates, but this was only discovered a few years ago (which goes to show the large gaps that have existed in the models). Then the possibility exists for Neanderthals, Denisovans or Neanderthal/Denisovan hybrids (Denisovans were basically a subset of Neanderthals) to migrate into NA from Asia. The land bridge to N.America was supposed to have been there on and off for over 2 million years, particularly existing at various times from 70,000 years ago to about 6,000 years ago. It was also supposed to be dry and not glaciated.

If this has not blown your mind already, I'll just remind everybody we are possibly Big Foot hybrids ourselves, with up to 5% of our DNA coming from Neanderthals and Denisovans and probably a bunch more from other species we don't even know about!

Wibbs · 04-05-2013 10:36am

Yea, whatever about Erectus not making it to the Americas, it's kinda surprising Neandertals/Denisovans/others didn't. Like you say they had time to and the technology to resist incredibly harsh environments. Before the major cultural and technological explosion in our own subspecies around 40-50,000 years ago there was surprisingly little difference between us and other archaic folks. Indeed some researchers are suggesting we may have picked up some tech/culture from them. The old idea of us coming along near fully formed moderns striding out of Africa decimating all and sundry is becoming a bit old hat these days.

I've no doubt they could have done it, but did they is the million dollar question. reasons why they didn't? Population size would be a biggie for me. IMH Population size is what marked us out as much as anything. We grew in size much faster than them, so we would have needed to keep moving into new territory more than them(plus we would need to deal with other tribes more often in trading of ideas and war which would drive innovation). Perhaps they didn't get to the Americas, simply because they didn't need to? Neandertals et al were always small in number in the landscape. For a start they lived in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years, apex predators with big appetites, yet we don't see any evidence of local animal extinctions. We come along and you can usually match up our arrival with local extinction events, usually of the bigger animals. Look at Australia. When humans show up, animals start to go rapidly extinct. We were only in New Zealand since about the tenth century AD and we wiped out the moas among other animals.

That also means it's harder to trace previous humans if you don't find direct evidence. If Neandertals caused extinctions like us and you found such a pattern in the Americas at say 80,000 years you'd be thinking "ah ha!".

I do recall reading a US forum on native American flint tool collecting(quite popular hobby over there) and one bloke reckoned he'd found evidence of Mousterian industry in the US, IE Neandertal. TBH it didn't look definitive to me at all(and I've collected that stuff for years), but apparently a British scientist he had sent samples to reckoned it might be. As you say though M, we've only begun to scratch the surface of the human story and you never know, they may find evidence of earlier folks in the Americas looooong before Clovis.

maninasia · 10-05-2013 4:37pm

I posted this link earlier, as the conversation shifted to Asia somewhat I think it's worth posting again, 'The Red Deer People'. The Red Deer People existed in China up to at least 11,000 years ago and they have ALSO only been recognised as a distinct group/species/hybrid since 2008 or so. I'm eagerly looking forward to hearing about the genetic data if any becomes available.

http://vampyrefangs.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/an-entirely-new-species-of-human-discovered/

http://www.livescience.com/19038-photos-human-species.html

For all these dates of extinction including Neanderthals and Denisovans we cannot be sure on their accuracy due to the lack of data.

These are incredible existing times for human archaeology. I think they would be getting a lot more press if found in N.America but the Christians are probably finding it a bit difficult too to fit all these cousins and ancestors in with their world view.

degrassinoel · 16-05-2013 10:44pm

documentary on bigfoot and friends in Alaska here if you wanna take a looksee, fairly cheesy but it's 45 minutes of fun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2lNErAnDxo

maninasia · 04-07-2013 7:04am

'Bigfoot DNA' samples most like possums..and a bunch of other critters.

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/36302/title/-Bigfoot--Samples-Yield-Opossum-DNA/#articleComments

Lelantos · 04-07-2013 7:52am

tac foley wrote: »

A great story, and related in a believable fashion. As for the size of Canada, here's a little reminder -

The entire island of Ireland fits into Québec - one of the nine provinces of Canada - not five times, or even ten times, but almost seventeen times...and most of it is forest.

Even Ontario, the second-largest province, is 11.6 times the size of entire Ireland.

I'd also point out that Canada, the second-largest country on earth, has slightly over half the population of the entire UK - mostly situated within about 120 miles or so of the border with the USA. Have a look at 'Canada by night' on the internet to see what I mean.

Me, I just keep what's left of my mind open on these things...

tac

size of a landmass doesnt equate to existence of mythical beings. In order for a hominid race to coexist in parallel with humans from cromagnon times, there would have to have been in excess of 30,000 dead bodies & in excess of 2000 live bigfoot in existence. Take into account that no where in the world do actual primates live in non tropical or sub tropical lands. Then I think we can safely conclude that it's nothing more than the stuff of legend

maninasia · 04-07-2013 9:01am

Eh humans have lived in sub tropical and non tropical lands for hundreds of thousands of years no?
Not only modern humans, but 3 different species of archaic humans have lived in Asia and Europe at the same time as Homo Sapiens.

Many modern primates live in non tropical areas, perhaps you mean 'apes'?

If bigfoot is a hominid primate then what's stopping him if he's hairy enough ?

I do agree with your general estimates of a breeding population and the fact that that a skeleton or partial skeleton should have been found.

There is one other possibility for big foot not often discussed, that they are feral humans. When I worked in the woods before I encountered feral cats, feral dogs, feral possums, feral foxes...and yeah maybe I encountered a few feral humans come to think of it

.

Lelantos · 04-07-2013 10:16am

maninasia wrote: »

Eh humans have lived in sub tropical and non tropical lands for hundreds of thousands of years no?
Not only modern humans, but 3 different species of archaic humans have lived in Asia and Europe at the same time as Homo Sapiens.

Many modern primates live in non tropical areas, perhaps you mean 'apes'?

If bigfoot is a hominid primate then what's stopping him if he's hairy enough ?

I do agree with your general estimates of a breeding population and the fact that that a skeleton or partial skeleton should have been found.

There is one other possibility for big foot not often discussed, that they are feral humans. When I worked in the woods before I encountered feral cats, feral dogs, feral possums, feral foxes...and yeah maybe I encountered a few feral humans come to think of it .

sorry, I was referring to primates as in non hominid. Apes, yes, but again, a feral human being isn't going to procreate with others for tens of thousands of years imo. Basically it's a folktale that has entered the imagination & people look for answers to unsound questions

maninasia · 04-07-2013 12:09pm

I think some of your above statements were very unsound too

. I mean if you are going to waltz into a thread it would help to read through it first wouldn't it?

For instance, some primates live in temperate areas, namely macaques in Japan, Taiwan and China. Then you've got baboons in the Atlas mountains in Africa. I'm sure there are some other examples. All of this completely missing the point that up to 10s of homo sapiens ancestors and relatives lived in non tropical areas for millions of years.

Our friend Homo Erectus certainly got around didn't he?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus

Homo erectus (meaning "upright man," from the Latin ērĭgĕre, "to put up, set upright") is an extinct species of hominin that lived from the end of the Pliocene epoch to the later Pleistocene, with the earliest first fossil evidence dating to around 1.8 million years ago and the most recent to around 143,000 years ago. The species originated in Africa and spread as far as England, Georgia, India, Sri Lanka, China and Java.[1][2]

It's possible some type of big foot archaic hominid survived into the recent past, I agree that it's unlikely they still survive, but it's a remote possibility.

maninasia · 04-07-2013 1:05pm

Lelantos wrote: »

.....a feral human being isn't going to procreate with others for tens of thousands of years imo. ....

Feral doesn't have to mean that they are a sustained breeding population. Feral actually means 'gone wild', which can happen at a certain low rate over time. In this manner 'big foot' could appear and disappear and appear again.

Lelantos · 04-07-2013 3:12pm

maninasia wrote: »

Feral doesn't have to mean that they are a sustained breeding population. Feral actually means 'gone wild', which can happen at a certain low rate over time. In this manner 'big foot' could appear and disappear and appear again.

Aha, but feral doesnt mean hairy or gorilla like.