Big Food and Beyond with Cliff and Bubo. These guys are your favorites,
so like to say subscribe and read it five star and me grgeous question today
listening watching RENEM always keep its watching and now you're hosts Cliff Berrickman and James
Bubo Fay. All right, so everybody listening, please welcome doctor Jeff Melgerum
from Idaho State University, professor of anatomy and I think physiology, but he's
definitely in the anthropology department. But god, if you don't know who Jeff
is, I don't know why you're listening to this. So doctor Meldrum,
thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sparing an hour or so
of your time today. Oh you bet, I'm honored. Thank you for
the invitation. Thank you, Jeff. Yeah, we really really appreciate it.
And of course, Jeff, you do what you do a lot of
these things all the time basically, so thank you very much again just for
coming on. And because you know, the finding Bigfoot thing kind of put
us on the map, but you know your academic work put you on the
map, and that's an entirely different thing. Well thanks, Yeah, it's
all perspectives have some douthor I think so well now, Doctor Meldrim. We
were talking before we started the recording that you've actually been catching up on the
Finding Bigfoot episodes, Like what possessed you to do that? Well, I
had, I had some time on my hands, and I just you know,
wanted to be able to see what's been done. That's the thing.
I mean, I had a sense of of what you all were up to,
but had only only watched I think he Actually you gave me a couple
of thumb drives several years ago, several seasons back, and I was able
to catch up a little bit. But it's been really fun to sort of
go through and as I've had questions about maybe a particular region that has caught
my attention or or you know, some encounter, some account or report has
h has emerged, I've gone back and looked at some of your experiences and
and uh, you know a little about the geography, the town hall meetings,
it all. It all just helps me to put myself, you know,
in the in the environment, in the in the picture a little bit.
And it's been really fun to know you guys better from from the perspective
of your activities and and approaches to the evidence. It's been a fun ketchup
and some novel ideas other attractive sasquatch too. I know I watched that episode.
We can tell very carefully. Uh, but I still haven't got the
rave ball yet to say. Yeah, we get a lot of heating,
especially from the hunters and stuff. You know, that's no way to get
an animal, is well, we know that, but like, who's going
to watch you know, Cliff sitting in the tree stand for four hours silently.
That's lame, that's bad TV been. I work for their animals,
but they can work for the sasquatch. We know that. Uh right,
Yeah, that's that is the question. You know, the curiosity of a
of a somewhat higher into like you know, smarter than the average bear.
As Yogi would say, I think there is an element of curiosity and interest
in in our activities and the sites and smells of campsites or cabins and backyard
barbecues. I think I think all those elements have the potential. Uh you
know, if you're in the right place at the right time, or if
the sasquatch is in the right place at the right time, two to poke
his nose or hit her nose into uh, into our business. That's that's
one way make it interesting when I their survival needs like calorie intake, and
they have you know, a suitable place to stay, I mean once they
you know, if they if they're in a really rich abundant food sources,
they can fill up a day's worse than four or five hours. Like what
else are gonna be the rest of the If there's some interesting thing and they're
gonna they want to see what's going on in their territory, they'll come.
They'll come, They'll into something like that, like some weird attraction. Yeah.
And that's a really good point too, Bobo, And one that maybe
turn on its head for a minute is for your listeners to think about when
they you know, I have people who come and lay claim to a sasquatch,
you know, poking around, harassing them or disturbing them, depending on
their frame of mind, all night long and complaining about they're not getting any
sleep because these things are coming around every night all night long. Well,
if you stop and think about it, that just doesn't make sense if it
was a real flesh and blood animal that like you point out has needs.
It has to meet those daily caloric requirements. It has to stay warm,
it can't be exposed to the elements, you know, indefinitely, and so
forth. And I think people need to think about that when they're evaluating what
they're interpreting as a squatch activity. To borrow a phrase, uh and uh,
that's important. So I think that's an important point. Yeah. And
you know, one of the biggest things that stands out to me with all
the witness interviews in the nine years of finding Bigfoot, in my ongoing Bigfoot
little world that I live in here, is that people I speak to have
a tremendous amount of not all by any means I want to point that out,
but a good section of the people, a good percentage of the people
I speak to, have a really difficult time differentiating between observation and interpretation.
Yes, I've had lengthy conversations where, you know, like just like you
said, I've spent time out with with investigators and and I will repeatedly point
out now, is that an observation? Did you do you have documentation of
that statement? Or are you imposing an interpretation on your experience, you know,
putting you know, projecting yourself into the supposed mind of the sasquatch whenever,
and this is you know, quite if all our cards are on the
table. This is one of the criticisms that's often leveled not only Finding Bigfoot,
but at other documentaries out there. Documentary series is when assertative statements are
made by the cast members that sesquatch like this, or sesquatch do that,
or as if. Even my wife the other night, who was indulging me
in watching a few of these shows, she goes, how could they possibly
know that? Why do they say things like that? Because I know that's
exactly right, but sometimes people don't even realize it. I mean, I
was in the in the pickup truck driving with this fellow and he was going
on relating some of these past experiences and he'd do it, and I would
just look at him and I said, I'm just going to raise a finger
every time you cross the boundary from observation into speculation or you know, or
into interpretation. Boy, you know, my head just kept popping up there,
like I very often feel like raising a finger when people do that,
but it's probably not the same finger you would choose. I was going to
specify it was an index finger. Yeah, it might have made that.
It might have made the point with a little more force if I had used
another digit. That's the natural human condition is to I mean, that's what
a human naturally does is see I from You're going to see it from your
perspective. Everyone has a point of view from your past experiences, your education.
And that's where the science has really come in is because science, that's
what they did is is cut off your interpretation and just what's the facts,
What's what's observable facts? Right? Well, and you know we we are
by nature a storytelling species. We we just like you say, we naturally
sort of connect the dots and fill in the gaps, and you know,
our brains do this. I just was lecturing to my students about the special
senses and showed them. You know, we were talking about the blind spot,
the point at which the optic nerve enters the back of the eyeball and
there are no photoreceptive cells in that spot. It literally is a blind spot.
But we since we have two eyes, one of the eyes is able
to make up for the deficit in the other. But you can do this
fun little experiment to show how your brain is so wired in order to fill
in the missing information. And you probably have seen these little tests where there's
a black dot and little X, and you cover one eye and then you
move that You move the image closer and closer, staring at the X,
and suddenly the black dot disappears. But it's not just a blank. The
black dot is on a field of cross hatching. But when the black dot
disappears, there's not just a cloud there, there's cross hatching. The cross
hatching pattern is perfectly complete. So your brain sees what the information is surrounding
the missing data, and it fills in perfectly well with with that information what
it expects must be in that missing space. And so we do that with
other things too, with stories, and so it's it's all too easy for
a witness to take these very tenuous, you know, bits of observation and
weave them together into a tapestry and then convince themselves this is what's really happening.
Yeah, it's kinda I always say, I quote the Bible verse and
add on to it, you know, like the seek and nichell find,
and I always add on even if it's not there. Yeah, Yeah,
because if you're looking for something and you expect to find it, or you
expect bigfoots in your backyard, or you expect big whatever, they're going to
be there, whether they are or not. And as part of not only
our storytelling, I guess epigenetics, I guess, I guess that's what it
would be, but it would we're kind of a mythological species as well,
you know, like these storytellings and how the stories relate to our regular life.
You know that that's our foundation essentially as a species. And I guess
it's pretty hard to shake, even in our so called enlightened era, I
guess sure, even and even in science. The other the other thought I
was going to add to that. While I was a graduate student, there
was an anthropology student, Misha Landau, who got her dissertation in quite some
notoriety based on her research about how anthropologists tell stories, how they create these
these epic, these hero epics in their portrayal of the evolution of humanity,
and you know, forging out from the protection of the forest into the into
the dangerous planes where there are these large predators, and so forth and so
forth, and so even even when we try to impose discipline of scientific methodology
to our approach, we still can fall prey to that tendency to try to
craft and narrative that makes sense. I mean, I quite honestly a lot
of the paranormal if I can get myself in trouble here with half your audience
and yep. So I think that's what leads to some of the acceptance of
paranormal explanations is people find their inability to explain in normal terms their experiences and
so giving up on that, they resort to extraordinary claims or paranormal explanations.
You know, if I can't find where the footprints go, then they must
have just vanished into thin air, even though I didn't see them vanish into
thin air. That must be what happens. Is the only explanation for you
know, disregard the fact that I'm not a good tracker and I can't follow
a track way to save my life, you know. But I'll come with
I'll believe that the sasquatch just poofed into it into an orb of light and
floated away. You know. But on the on the other side of the
flip of that coin, I guess the other side of that coin is that
we can actually mine the folklore of the past to hopefully find some information about
Sasquatches. And that brings to mind another finding Bigfoot episode. I don't know
if you watched I think it was in Utah. When we were there,
we visited doctor Lynn McNeil I believe her name, was a professional folklorist,
you know, PhD and folklore and all that jazz at the university there,
and on our day off, she basically allowed me access to their folklore files
and they had files on bigfoot stuff, is that right? Yeah? Yeah,
And I went to the library and paid for paid the library to make
me copies of the entire file. So there's a very rich obviously, there's
a very rich folklore tradition on bigfoot stuff as well as a Native and indigenous
stories. But yeah, so that kind of gives us another end for some
sort of research about the real situation as well. So those state Utah state,
Okay, yeah, no, that I agree and I and I you
know, those elements are certainly very important and they're and they're part of the
human experience, so they are of value there. There even have been some
field zoologists who have recognized the utility of relying upon or resorting to rather maybe
not relying upon, but using as a starting off point the folklore, the
stories about the wildlife in a given region that the indigenous people talk about,
and oftentimes their ability to discriminate and identify species, even down to very fine
distinctions, is often remarkably accurate. I mean a lot of good field biologists.
The first thing they'll do is they'll go to a village when they're when
they're exploring for new species or trying to find out what the endemic species are,
and who do you interview? You interview the best hunter, the one
that brings in the most, you know, the most successfully brings in the
game, or or brings in rare and exotic animals, and you go through
the litany of what they're familiar with, and it's it's a very useful tool.
So it's not the folklore and indigenous knowledge is not something to be to
be treated lightly. Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bogo
will be right back after these messages. Yeah, people throw out the baby
with the bath where you know they talked to me and said, well,
Kittie Kyte pulled down the moon and created this. You know, they're like
kin of these people think that kite pulled down the moon out of the sky,
you know, because they throw everything out with it, you know.
But yeah, you look at the whole total of what they say, like
whistling in the dog are, you know, knocking our things that we can
observe today, They're they're right on right absolutely. I think one of one
of the interesting little tidbits that I gleaned from John Bendernagel's book was he drew
attention to the fact that while many of the names given to Bigfoot or Sasquatch
by the indigenous people are translate to you know, the hairy man or the
wild man of the woods, a lot of them actually point to natural behaviors,
you know, the eaters of cockles, and you know, other terms
that describe aspects of their their natural history. You know, here in Idaho,
one of the Shoshone references is the eater of children, which is a
theme that's pervasive through many different tribal groups throughout the Pacific Northwest and in the
Mountain West. And so you know, perhaps based on real incidents somewhere in
in the mists of time, we certainly know there's precedent amongst the living great
apes for that very behavior, snatching of human children or toddlers and consuming them.
And so it's not I don't think it's a just so story. It's
actually probably has a based on a grain of truth of a real experience that
then became you know, since given the fact that it was such a traumatic
experience, became a central theme in identifying these beings. It could be pretty
rare, but it just the fact it could happen seven hundred years ago,
it could happen seven years ago, and back before they had TV in Western
culture, that story would come down, whether it's seven years or seven hundred
years would be like anythings eat kids, right, it becomes part of the
world tradition, part of the characteristic Yeah, because that's a pretty distinctive though,
right exactly. Yeah, it could be rare. Let's hope it's rare.
Yeah, well, you know what it sounds like, and you probably
have thoughts on this. But like everything that we know now, we're kind
of almost even rehashing. Yeah, we know it, and there's been new
things uncovered, but we're kind of still in the same spot. Like I
was digging through my files a little a few months ago and I ran across
that essay and I think it was Warren Thompson from the Bay Area Group.
I think it was Warren Thompson, or it might have been Archie Buffy.
I think it was Warren. And he basically wrote what we know about the
Sasquatch And it's a few page essay, and I was reading through it and
thinking, we really haven't moved on so far from here. And I think
that was written in seventy one or seventy two, So like, what do
you think the state of bigfooting is today? And then is that a good
thing or a bad thing? Or do we have a direction? Or are
we just like treading water? Well, yes, it feels that way sometimes
that we are just kind of treading water. And I know that's been kind
of weighing on me lately, especially I guess as I get closer to that
horizon of retirement and so forth, and and wondering what what what legacy?
What mark have I left? And and and what will be the trajectory thereafter?
But you know, I I've had that same experience. I wrote a
similar kind of essay with Richard Greenwell when we put together a state of the
science of Sasquatch. It ended up not getting published. It turns out there
was a curmudgeon on their scientific advisory board and it got kabashed, but or
the kebash was put on it. I guess that can't make that into a
verb, but we can do it if we want. But anyway it was,
it did not get published. But reflecting back on the things included there,
You're right, there are a lot of fundamental aspects. Well even It's
funny is the next book that I'm working on is actually the more it takes
shape and as I as I formulate and flesh out the things that I want
to accomplish, in some ways, I realized in some ways I was redoing
what Ivan Sanderson did when he did his global survey of subhuman creatures primates around
the world. And it's interesting how so many of the things that he concluded
seemed to have been borne out by the accumulating data that we have. I
guess what I'm hoping that we are accomplishing as this goes along, So we're
not just treading water, not just doing the same old, same old.
But as a scientist, I'm trying to lay some more credible foundational works and
trying to orchestrate others undertaking such things, you know, so that things like
more incisive evaluation of the Patterson Gilllan film, for example. I mean,
it's interesting how as time has gone forward we have increasing these sophisticated methods of
addressing what is in that film, and as well as a broader scientific context
from which to interpret what's in the film. But you know my work with
the Footprints, there are still lingering things that really need to be kind of
codified and formulated and archived in such a way that they're accessible to researchers down
the pike. But as far as new trajectories of research itself, well,
I see a couple of things. For me, it's in and I've said
this before, and we'll see if they're born out in the future or not.
But I think that the two prongs. One is in the field utilizing
the ever increasingly improved drone technologies and thermal imaging, and we see that.
I mean, light ar is still another opportunity. There's little snippets of that
that show up on some of the documentaries, but I think light ar has
an opportunity to provide some further insights and in combination with that kind of aerial
survey, helping to focus at using GIS to greater advantage. I don't have
the skill set to really do that, but at every opportunity I encourage others
who do to take an interest. The other is in the environmental DNA that
those DNA methods are expanding, the potential are expanding, probably geometrically, and
there's a couple of aspects, a couple of challenges. I think that that
addresses. One is we have this dead end, not dead end, but
we have this roadblock to previous DNA attempts analysis attempts which usually focus on hair,
and the lack of a cellular adult in that hair makes it very challenging
to get DNA. That's further complicated by the fact that if this creature is
is closely allied to the human species, as many suspect, then the difference
between us and them as far as DNA sequence could be very very small.
I mean, we could be talking less than one percent. I recently kind
of pulled out of the air a little analogy to help people to visualize what
this means. Imagine, and we had an advance calendar. Everyone knows what
an advance calendar is. A little panel with windows or doorways that open up
in the twenty four days leading up to Christmas, with a little goodie behind
each door, and the kids would anxiously wait for the next day when they
could open and take that little piece of chocolate or a little goodi or small
toy or something. Well, imagine you had an advance calendar that had one
hundred windows instead of twenty four And well, let's let's break it down even
a little better than that. I'd say a thousand windows. So a thousand
windows, and if each of those windows represents a percentage of difference, and
certainly that's not you know, the difference is not homogeneously scattered throughout the genome.
It can be in clusters and so forth, or comprise distinctive gene markers
that are localized particular points in the genome. But the point is, well,
you've got this advance calendar and there's only ten windows that have any useful
information for discriminating between humans and sasquatch. But you have a study that only
lets you open ten windows, because that's all the funding, and that's all
the time your research your molecular biologist is willing to devote to it. And
so what are the odds that the ten little doorways you open up stumble upon
one of those ten out of a thousand windows that will have useful information.
Yeah, and if you don't find that, then what's your conclusion? The
evidence points to simply being human, your sequence being human? Jeff, excuse
me, I have a question. Now, I know that's what I understand
what you're saying. But if it was a gigantic ptification off that line,
like if it's not one less than one percent like we think it's in the
homo line, what percent, like would it be like you you do well,
then it would fall if it's If we're correct in our current opinion consensus
opinion that Gigantopithecus was most closely related of the living apes today was most closely
related to the orangutan, as was suggested by some DNA research recently. Now,
that doesn't mean it's really really close to the orangutan compared to gorillas and
chimps. It means it's just it's just somewhere on that side of the fence.
Since the orangutan diverted lot lineage diverged from the hominoid trunk, and so
it would therefore be bracketed somewhere in that range of distinction. So like for
chimps, values you'll see reported depending on which part of the genome is being
examined anywhere from you know, ninety four percent to ninety eight percent identical to
humans. And so I think gigantic bitic is you know, we could be
talking a percentage or two or three more distinctive than if it was say a
paranthropist or some some offshoot of a robust australopithecy of some sort, at which
I think is another viable hypothesis to be to be considered. So I guess
my question is if it was gigantoline, we would know that already. Not
necessarily, No, I don't think so, because again the studies that have
been done. I mean, for example, I I did. I pulled
some soil samples from the nest sites up to the Olympic Peninsula that the Olympic
Project has been examining, and those were examined by Todd Disstel at NYU,
and basically he looked at one portion of a gene in the mitochondrial genome and
he chose that one because it's a good one to differentiate the species of mammals,
and it works fine, he pointed out. When I queried, he
pointed out that it identifies or distinguishes between humans and Neanderthals. There are like
three markers in that stretch that separate Neanderthals from humans. So you would think
if sasquatch is less related to us than a Neanderthal, that it should pick
up differences there. But the problem with that is the point that I made
earlier is that these differences aren't just scattered regularly throughout the genome, and even
the comparison between you know, when you use Neanderthals as a benchmark, Neanderthals
and humans have evolved one way and are differing ways, resulting in the three
markers that he's talking about. The three substitutions not even really markers, but
I can call the markers, but single nucleotide substitutions. Who's to say that
a sasquatch would have had those and more? You know, it could have
evolved in ways that didn't affect that stretch of DNA that was being compared between
humans and Neanderthals. So there's an assumption made there, and I've brought this
up. This is kind of an interesting that I brought this up with numerous
geneticists that I've come in contact with, asking this question. Is the question
being are we doing enough? I mean, is there is there confidence?
Are we justified in confidently including that the studies that have been done so far,
which usually produce one of two conclusions. Either when human DNA quote unquote
human DNA is identified, it's assumed therefore that the witnesses have handled it and
contaminated it in such a way that we're picking up their DNA, or that
it's simply a misidentified human hair that's been shed, you know, it's just
cast about in the environment, or one of the investigators picked up their own
hair or whatever, you know. But the third option that is not really
raised is that we haven't sequenced enough to differentiate between what appears to be human
and what actually is human. And so these geneticists have uniformedly said, oh,
you're absolutely right. If I were doing it, they say, I
would sequence the entire mitochondri genome and at least oh a dozen or so nuclear
genes to really come to a conclusion, to draw a conclusion, Well,
that takes a lot more effort and a lot more work, and a lot
more funding and time. And that's been the problem. Is the funding not
necessarily an insurmountable problem, but to get the lab to devote the time and
resources to this question, well, that's just money then, right, Because
I mean I talked to you two years ago when you were in Colorado.
I got to speak here at length, and I believe you said it was
the guy from New Zealand, right that did the DNA study at Lockness and
all that about the eels. He said it would be four hundred and fifty
thousand dollars correct to do you, well, somewhere in that range. He
said, two hundred to four hundred thousand dollars for a multi year project basically,
and to do it, he would want to have a post stock and
maybe a couple of gradual students devoted to the project. Because he's pulled in
so many different directions you couldn't devote his attention singly to this one project.
And exactly he was one of the geneticists. It was actually one of his
former graduate students that I bumped into. And so those conversations are still underway.
They kind of they kind of got the dampers put on them when COVID
hit, and so the past year it's sort of stalled, and he's very
eager to come over to assist with sample collection and so forth, and so
until travel restrictions are lifted and it's more feasible for him to do that ad
vice versa than We're still in the very formative stages of those conversations. But
I think that's the way, that's the way to go. I mean,
it tackles two things. One, it tackles the issue that we've been discussing
right here. But then even more importantly perhaps is the fact that we're looking
for the proverbial moving needle in a haystack, and given the rarity of these
creatures, it's just you know, finding the sample, collecting the tissue is
very challenging. And if we can employ a technique that takes a much broader
approach to collecting DNA from the environment instead of from directly from the donor,
then it ups the odds of winning the lottery. Stay tuned for more Bigfoot
and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo will be right back after these messages. One
of the other challenges I think is that the thing that's kind of missing from
a lot of eyewitness accounts or you know, bigfoots make this structure, bigfoot
broke this tree, bigfoot business, or that is a one to one correlation
between an actual sasquatch and the thing you're collecting from. And the nests are
promising, but we don't know, no one's seen them make it. I
mean, but it's a very good bet, I guess. The other which
brings up my thought of how viable is it to collect the soil from underneath
footprints or perhaps the soil on footprints that you have to clean off later,
like from the cast. How viable a collection strategy would that be? Well,
I think it's that is a good, good and viable strategy, right,
And and you raised the excellent point, and that is this moving needle
in the haystack. You know, like I said, it's going to be
one of the rarest elements in any environmental DNA sample that's taken. And with
the hope with the caveat, you know that that you know the assumption that
there is some sasquat contribution, and you're right, the nests we think based
on the circumstantial evidence and and and some of the associative evidence that they were
made by sasquatch, but we don't know for certain, And so not finding
sasquatch DNA in that doesn't rule out the existence of sasquatch, but it just
it may cast out on them as being the source of these nests. But
yes, collecting samples from under footprints is another way to up the odds.
You know, I don't have a good sense of how much tissue or a
trace is shed with each foot step. You know, I know that there
certainly there's abrasion, and there's oils and secretions and so forth that are potentially
could transfer to the soil surface. And you know, I always have this
vision of any any animal walking along and having its appendages literally just kind of
melting away into the soil as it leaves all of its its DNA and cellular
structure left behind in each footprint. In other words, you know, there
can't be a lot of material that's shed left behind. Otherwise we would just
kind of whiddle away, wouldn't we disappear? So it's going to be a
real trace. And although you know they're there, there certainly is precedent and
there was that example. I was looking for it actually in between watching episodes
of Finding Big. But I was trying to find that episode where the researcher
collected the or the documentary not the episode the documentary where the researcher collected the
snow under the Yetti footprint and identified some DNA from that sample. And I
have been able to find that. I did find the episode with Mark Evans
and the samples from Bhutan that turned out to be bear And you know,
I've identified that researcher, but did the DNA on that. I'm always my
my know, my ears always prick up when I see a researcher who's willing
to, under the right circumstances, to apply their skills to questions like this
without without fear of ridicule. The retribution. Jeff, if you get someone,
say half a million dollars, and you're talking about one thousand windows like
the advent calendar, like with a thousand slots, how many windows would you
be able to open with Like I say, you gave half million dollars in
these geneticis Well, according to doctor Gamble, that's that's what he'd need to
conduct thousand well staffed, Yeah, to open all thousand, Yeah, to
conduct a well staffed study that would allow him to examine. And I would
assume, you know, in the conversations I've had with him, I'm assuming
that that that's his intent is to do as much sequencing as is necessary.
But you wouldn't know it's to damage sample or not get no sample until he
got so far into it, right, So you could burn up a bunch
of your capital, Yeah, you could, and then may have to drop
back ten yards and hunt and gather some additional samples and turn your attention to
those. I mean, I'm sure he would that his research design would not
be focused on a single sample. I'm sure it would involve the collection of
mini samples. I mean, just like they did with Locke Nest. They
filtered water from probably hundreds, if not thousands of locations at various depths in
the lake in order to make a very thorough survey of the of the water
in the lake. So it wasn't just you know, one sample, one
one test tube that many many times repeated. Didn't you guys get didn't you
you thought your best bet was some like real remote mountain lake and the rockies
like. I don't know if it was a John Manchinski that got it or
somebody I thought you thought your best chance for these samples you got some Mason
jars or something from up and up high ward. No one goes was that
it? Well, no, we hadn't to talk much beyond. I mean,
I think the study would would do well to start with things like the
nests that have been found in the Olympic project, you know, and if
if another set of very fresh nests could be found, I think that would
be an ideal place. Or as you pointed out, if someone finds a
set of footprints, then hey, if we can be on that spot a
S A P and you know, before a lot of onlookers and so forth,
and scoop up the soil from from those footprints beneath those footprints and collect
that, uh, then that would be another ideal situation. I think.
You know, some of the are our previously tried methods like double sided tape,
you know, industrial strength double sided tape, and the hair snags that
John Minzinski designed and and other you know there are, uh, there are
tried and true if you will, hair collecting techniques for wildlife studies and and
those can be perhaps modified so as to lessen the chance of interaction with common
wildlife, and you know, choosing the proper height or the proper types of
baits or or whatever in order to potentially engage a sasquatch preferentially over you know,
over a bear, a porcupine, or a marmot or something you mentioned
earlier on the drag Atipithecus that was published not too long ago, putting them
directly in liners at least closely related to Shevapithecus and therefore orangtans later. And
that was a study of the proteins, if I remember correctly, proteonics is
that the right word? Since we do have a small sampling or small set
of hairs that have been attributed to sasquatches or at least great apes collected in
North America of some sort, could that same technology of studying the proteins be
applied to the hair and get some idea of the lineage there. Well,
that's an interesting proposition I really hadn't thought about. And if the keratin and
the hair would lend itself to that kind of analysis, and if there are
sufficient distinctions in the structure of keratin in hair between mammal species, that those
differentiations could be made, and honestly, off the top of my head,
I'm not sure sure. Another approach with hair that has been discussed I've discussed
with people who are involved in this type of research is a stable isotope analysis,
where stable isotopes of various molecules are are deposited in the hair and produce
a very distinctive signature based on the particularly the diet of the organism growing that
hair. And that while this is not a precise science in the sense that,
well, the science is precise, but the identifications are not precise,
but that the correlations are not precise and so and but baselines and generalizations can
be made about various taxonomic groups based on the signature of the stable isotopes,
and those technologies are getting more and more accessible. And so I've had people
who do that kind of research who have expressed interest in and willingness to maybe
try their hand at that so we could determine that, you know, these
alleged sasquatch hairs have a have a stable isotope signature that is quite distinct from
humans in that region and from bears and you know, the gross morphology of
the hair is such that there aren't very many potential candidates for producing that hair.
I mean, when you have a hair that's three to four inches long,
four to five inches long, that has all primate characteristics rather than the
features of the long guard hair of a mammal like a bear or an elk
or a fox or coyote. You know, there aren't many animals that mammals
that would produce a hair of those dimensions and those configurations. So you're only
you immediately, just by the process of elimination on the basis of the morphology,
narrow it down to just three or four candidates in my mind, in
my book. You know, there's some people say, oh, you've got
to test, You've got to make sure, you know, but I mean,
you know, we can rule out all the little tiny rodents that have
hair that's only a quarter of an inch long and much finer than any hair
from a potential sasquatch. Do you have many legitimate hairstyles like that are past
mustered as far as you know, without genetics, But how many? I
mean, I imagine there's way more foot casts. I mean, it's got
to be a factor in twenty to one. How many how many hair how
many hairstyles are you aware of that you think are legitimate? You know,
I don't have a precise count for you, But before doctor Fahrenbach retired,
he felt like he had somewhere between a dozen and two dozen samples that in
his book met the quote gold standard which he arrived at, and that was
basically, you know, they look like human, they have parallel sides,
they're about sixty five microns in diameter, they lack a cellular medulla, they
have a wear pattern, there's no taper to the tip. They have some
very distinctive combination of pigment granules and lozenges. They show a range of variation
between proportions of view melanin and fale milanin. So you get all the color
phases from almost white through beige and buckskin to reddish brown and then dark brown
and black almost mahogany black with a reddish hint to it. So, yeah,
somewhere between twelve and twenty four in that rain, and I've identified additional
ones that when we really had to push back, when doctor Sykes had his
study underway and we were screening hairs, to potentially include in his study.
So you have the resources and the knowledge now to definitively say gold standard if
you have enough to judge yourself now without going to someone else with your resources
with someone give you a hair sample, right, Oh yeah, yeah,
and I've done that. You know, a couple have fallen through the cracks
of trying to find you know, a misplaced sample here or there. But
yes, I've been receiving quite a number of samples, and of course not
all of them actually, you know, it runs about one in ten are
of interest and one in ten match the gold standard. So I wouldn't say
definitively it's always a it's a bit of an art form. I mean,
it's still anatomy and you put them under the microscope and there are features,
but there's but the art, the art and the skill comes into play because
of the variation of the appearance of hair on a single individual depending on where
it's collected, you know, I mean with a human their head hair or
body hair, pubic hair, you know, or eyelashes or eyebrows, and
that's about it. But you know on your dog, the hair on its
back, the hair on its belly, that you know, all those they
have different appearances and different pigmentation and banding patterns and so forth, and and
but you know, it's it's pretty straightforward. If it's a fur bearing mammal,
which again the candidates that are on the proper scale to potentially be suspected
or attributed to a sasquad, they have fur, not just hair. And
that distinction refers to the differentiation of the outer guard hairs, the longer,
coarser hairs, which provide mechanical protection basically that's their principal function, So they're
longer, stiffer courser. The underfur is the insulative layer. So those hairs
are very fine, the kind of kinky sometimes to create that sort of pufft
appearance rather than laying down flat. And those are very very different. But
when someone sends a sample of a tuft of hair and it has both of
those types of hair within it's fur, and we can immediately we can immediately
eliminate it, or we can stick another microscope and point out all the distinctions
between the two types and from a typical primate hair that yeah, but when
you I mean, yeah, the image is pretty distinctive. And when you've
got a sample that matches the gold standard and these things. That's what's crazy
about it. Is so compellingly crazy about it, I guess, is that
here are samples that are collected by independent investigators that are from various geographical regions
across the map, and yet they all look like they came off the same
critter. They all have the exact same morphology. And that's really quite compelling.
I mean, that's what kind of set us down this road. When
I first met and conferred with doctor Fahrenbach, we both were kind of puzzling
over this situation with the hair, and there were various reports that had been
disseminated. Invariably, the reliable reports came back as indeterminate for those samples that
held potential of being sasquatch hair. And that was really the only justifiable conclusion
that could be arrived at, because the way you identify hair is to compare
it to a known standard. Well, if there is no known standard for
sasquatch, then what you end up with this enigmatic hair. It doesn't match
anything else, but you have no standard to match it to, so it's
indeterminate. Well, we thought, if these hairs, if there is a
population of hairs out there, a sample of hairs that all defy attribution to
any commonly known wildlife out there, there must be some common denominators that discriminated
that set it apart. So we started backtracking. We actually contacted some of
the sources of these reports and asked for more detailed descriptions of their samples.
Low and behold, there were you know, they had these same characteristics that
I already rattled off, and across the board. They consistently all these indeterminate
hairs which if they were sasquatched, they're conceivably coming from one species and therefore
should show a consistently distinctive suite of characters. And sure enough they did,
and that sort of became the gold standard, as Hannah referred to it,
So everything else he would find, you know, that became our default standard,
even though we didn't have, you know, claims to the contrary,
any examples of hairs physically pulled out of a sasquatch and unidentified as such with
which to compare it. So I'm pretty confident, I mean no hair,
Like I said, anatomy is anatomy, and we have hairs that defy attribution
to any form of wildlife. How can ignore that? I don't understand if
something like other hair like hair specialists, zoologists, whatever, if you show
them this, what, how do they just dismiss it? Well, it
boils down to the fact that, and this is why Hender was always a
little bit reluctant to go out on the limb and publish, try to get
this published in a mainstream journal, was that these primate characteristics are also displayed
by humans to varying degrees. I mean some of them consistently. The sasquatch
hair is about the same coarseness as average human head hair. Now, obviously
there's variation there. You know, some people have very stick, stiff,
wooly hair, coarse hair, some have very fine hair. Some humans even
have an acellular medula. Usually it's it's individuals that are kind of toehead that
are very pale blonde and have very fine hair because that central core, that
modula lends some further rigidity to the hair shaft. And so the one could
always fall back and say, well, it's a more parsimonious conclusion to arrive
at that these are just misidentified human hairs, even though they've never been cut.
They show no evidence of having been cut. You know, they're grown
to length essentially with a worn blunt tip, and and and they displayed some
distinctive features of the of the follicle, but we didn't. We don't only
rarely have an active follicle that would display those. So so it boils back
down to the way. The final arbiter that one would rely on then is
what DNA to make the final conclusive determination. And and that one factor of
the acellular medula made it very problematic to get DNA from the shaft. Stay
tuned for more Bigfoot and beyond with Cliff and Bogo. We'll be right back
after these messages. Well, you know, there's another avenue that I don't
think has been explored that I think shows a lot of promise. And it
wasn't my idea of any means. A gentleman came into the museum here and
he's a veterinarian, and he said, this has been tried, and it
turns out it works. I'm studying the parasites in an area. You can
kind of it sounds like e DNA, but you gather a bunch of ticks
or something, and then you test them somehow, and you can tell what
they've been feeding on. Has anything like that ever been tried to your knowledge,
Oh, sure, there have been been studies, and in fact,
that's one element we hope to incorporate. So I'm glad you brought that up
into our EDNA study. Is the mass collection of of the mosquitoes in regions
where there's bigfoot activity or reports. You know, it's again it's it's a
shot in the dark given the rarity. I mean, what are the odds
that you catch the a dozen or so mosquitoes that have bitten the few sasquatch
they're in that geographical area. But that's that's a way to do it,
and there are methodologies that have been developed. You know, you put dry
ice in the trap and it attracts the mosquitos and they're caught in the trap,
and then you just sample them in total and mass and try to determine
if there's any blood elements that can be identified or DNA from those blood I
mean from that blood. So yeah, that's that's one way to do it.
I think that would be more straightforward than trying to find ticks. And
yeah, and they want to go get like stripped down, run naked through
the brush. Yeah, like, yeah, I have a feeling that's something
that I'd be roped into. Come on, Cliff, you like Bigfoot do
this. I do it because because the ticks don't feed. I mean,
once they've fed. My understanding is once they have that blood meal, then
they go off and they lay their eggs basically and don't diet. Yeah,
it's just like their annual plants or something, right, right, And so
I don't know what the chance I mean. And you know, the mosquitoes
are quite ephemeral as well, so I don't it's uh, you know,
you have to have your your sites lined up pretty precisely in order to hit
the bullseye. It's uh, it's you know, just to contemplate it.
It's almost overwhelming to think about the odds of success. But like I said
earlier, I think that's the direction unless you want to just keep on doing
the same old, same world. And quite honestly, I'm getting to the
point where I'm not going to physically be able to do the kind of remote
field research. And I've done so much of it with you know limit.
As much as I enjoy it with limited results, I don't know that it's
the best use of time and resources. Yeah, we should just cancel all
the Bigfoot conventions and gatherings and everyone take a year off. Squatch. You
can take all that money you spend on gas and food and all that and
throw it all a job pot. We'd have enough money to get this DNA
study done well. Yeah, and certainly will appeal. I mean once I
have some benefactors who have been very generous in supporting other research initiatives. But
yeah, I would like to see sort of a grassroots participation by those who
are interested at some point. But we'll wait until we get a very solid
research design and commitments and so forth underway. I'm hoping to do some smaller
scale preliminary is this summer things of you know that the timetable on vaccinations and
travel restrictions and everything, I think is moved up sufficiently to be able to
do that, just to just to go through the I mean, if nothing
else, just to go through the motions. But who knows. You may
get lucky on the first sample or two and something that produces something, but
that would be great. Well, then the other samples just go to reproducing
that same thing, which is the effect of science. Of course, that
a lot of people overlook. You know, I thought about bringing ladders out
in the woods and got up and checking bird nosh or you can find them
pretty easy that way. You know, people don't realize how and this is
one of the challenges that people don't realize how persistent hair is in the environment.
So there have been numerous cases where a potentially credible, an authentic encounter
or observation was made and then a sample of was found nearby and it was
again connecting those dots or back to the storytelling, and so it was taken
in and analyzed. You know, one that comes to mind because it actually
resulted in a published paper, was up in the Yukon when there was a
sighting and then they found some tuft of hair on a barbed wire fence I
think it was, and took it into the fishing game and they, to
their credit, looked at it and sent it into the lab and had it
analyzed and it came back as muskox or something like that, and of course
then that got published. If it had come back as an indeterminate primate,
I can guarantee you it wouldn't have been published. But the you know,
it's kind of like in politics, the bad news is always gets the headlines,
and the good news that rarely rarely gets mentioned. But see that's what's
so unfortunate too about that situation then, is is it biases the perception with
the negativity. In other words, it's just like my My biggest criticism of
doctor Syke's published study was that all of his samples, you know, when
I when I visited with him before the project was underway, and I offered
to help screen samples, to focus his attention on those gold standard samples,
I mean to really try, because he thought he, you know, could
overcome the challenge of the lack of a cellular medula and glean some DNA from
the shafts using his techniques. So I was very eager, you know,
to focus his attention because he was limited in the resources. Again, he
only had enough money to open ten doors, you know, and but instead
he insisted, oh no, no, we can't impose any preconceptions, you
know, we have to we have to look at everything. I said,
well, you throw open the barn doors, and I said, the whole
barnyard is going to come in then, And that's what happened. But the
thing that the real criticism was he got DNA from every single sample. That's
just not conceivable. That's just not conceivable. And there were samples that were
submitted that apparently were not acknowledged in the study. So my fear is,
and you know, I hate to disparage or say something negative, but my
concern was that there were samples that didn't yield DNA that weren't mentioned, that
weren't included in the final analysis. Well, that that produces a very different
result if you publish a result that every sample you receive turns out to be
something else. Every single sample was attributable to a commonly known form of wildlife.
That's very different than if the result was we had thirty samples and twenty
four of them were attributable to other forms of wildlife because I threw the barn
door open. But there were these six that we couldn't even get DNA from.
And isn't it interesting those six also looked very similar to the gold standard
doctor Mildrim has described repeatedly. Now, wouldn't that be a different result than
the first? Yeah? Much more promising. Yeah, I mean that leaves
your open that one of those samples you have might actually have come or one
of those six samples might have actually come from a sasquad. Did you sub
be the samples at sex examine that you thought were good? Yes, that
weren't collected by me personally, but came through me, and they weren't They
weren't acknowledged in the paper. So I think you're talking theoretically, So that
did happen? Oh no, I was not talking theoretically. No. No.
What I described is what happened and what didn't happen. You know,
what I described is what happen. There were myself included. There were people
who said, but I don't see my sample. I sent him three samples
and I don't see them mentioned here. You know, he may have gotten
far more than he could possibly process and test because, like I said,
he was on a limited budget, which is why I encouraged him to focus
on those that had the most promise. You know, it's like I said,
you can eliminate the fur bearing animals right away. You know we know
that. I mean, if sasquatch exists, it is a primate. Anyone
who can tests that just doesn't understand biology or you know, it's just that's
simple. I mean, we've got to be able to say some things based
on eyewitnessing counts, accounts, and the anatomy of the foot, you know,
unless some strange creature has emerged from the ether that has a primate foot
and a non primate physiology anatomy otherwise anyway, So I mean we I think
we're perfectly justified and safe in making the assumption that if sasquatch exists, it
is a large primate of some type, and so it will have hair that
is most similar, more likely than not, most similar to other large bodied
horminoid primates. So and none of them are fur bearing. Even the mountain
gorilla that gets up into freezing temperatures at times, it still has hair.
It's denser, it's much denser than its sibling species down in the tropical lower
elevations, but it has hair, and one type of hair. So yeah,
now that that was a real frustrating, frustrating outcome and disappointing outcome of
that of that whole enterprise. But but no, that was real. I
was not. I wasn't just theorizing, you know, what if scenario,
that's what actually happened. It sounds like the obtaining a piece of the sasquatch
in some way. I mean, obviously a type specimen would be the end
all be all, but obtaining some little piece of the bit of a sasquatch,
whether it's DNA or hair or something, seems to be the direction that
amateur researchers like myself should be focused on. Would you agree with that?
Right? Oh, definitely, yeah, if we could, you know,
And and I've thought a lot about that too, you know, in addressing
the question of where's the bones, you know, I end up with this
kind of con not convoluted, but a lengthy laundry list of factors involved in
the disposition of remains once an animal dies, you know, the science of
taponomy. And so the question is where would you find remains? You know,
of the one point five million years in which Giganopithecus had a tenure in
Eastern Asia, where did we find the the fossils in limestone caves? Right?
And we only found those because porcupines dragged them in there. So you
know, for all that all that time and all those dead Giganopithecus, we've
got two jaws and a few thousand isolated teeth, and only in those areas
where porcupines live south of the Yellow River in China. I've thought, I've
often thought about that and thought, well, gee, maybe, Well,
first of all, sasquatch may have only been in North America for a few
hundreds of thousands of years, not millions of years. Perhaps not. I
mean, we don't know, we have no way. Annoying, but I'm
or even less really right less, Yeah, of course, I mean tens
of thousands of exactly exactly. It could very well. So the chances of
finding remains, fossilized remains are very slim, really, But where would we
find them? Probably in limestone caves. So I've often and I've asked.
I talked to some cavers, and there are some who mentioned, you know,
finding bones of various mammals and so forth in caves that they've explored.
But to reach out to societies or clubs, cavers clubs and see if anybody
has any stories. You know, there's kind of a cultish kind of secrecy
about their favorite caves. They don't want people, they don't want to manage,
they don't want people disturbing them. And so there's not a lot broadcast
about the location of caves. But if you could win over the confidence of
some cavers. I have reached out to some in the region here and nothing
has come forward. No one has any interesting experience to share of stumbling on
a jar or a tooth or a giant eyebone in a cave deposit. But
that would be that would be the place to look. I think, yeah,
be ideal because whether people like it or not, a dead one is
the path to discovery, right of course. And it's just again it's it's
a rare commodity, that's the thing. You know. We've had conversations,
I've talked on various settings about addressing the question how many sasquats are out there,
and anyway, without without going into that, I don't think there are
very many. You know, here in the state of Idaho, there's a
lot of wilderness area. We have two thirds of the state is roadless wilderness
area, and in the entire state of Idaho, I would put the number
somewhere between probably around three hundhundred compared to the thirty five thousand black bear that
live in Idaho. Black bear only live to be about twenty years old before
they die, and sasquatch may as a large bodied eight may live you know,
fifty years at least twice that of Black Bear. Of those three hundred,
how many are in their golden years? So what would be the mortality
rate of sasquatch on an annual basis in just a state of Idaho? And
then what are the odds that the sasquatch that dies is somewhere where a backpacker
a hiker, you know, in these vast wilderness areas is going to find
it. If it even is left somewhere, then it might be found.
As a large animal with no natural predators, et cetera. You know,
they secrete themselves off into some nook or cranny, and even if they're exposed,
they're going to quickly be deconstructed and decomposed and parted off by the gnaars
and the chewers and scavengers and and pretty soon there just isn't anything left.
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bogo. We'll be right
back after these messages. You know, we have a display here in the
in the museum on where the bones are, and I was fortunate enough to
get two photographs donated to the museum to use in the display, and each
of those photographs shows an elk eating away at a bone, and even the
seasoned hunters who come in here are blown away by that those photographs. I
had no idea. Yeah there's an elk like there you go, and deer
do it too, and yeah, and of course squirrels and porcupines, and
you know that those that have the teeth ever growing in sizors, I mean,
there's another motivation for them. But calcium is at a real premium in
spe particularly in what coniffers for environments, and so that the recycling of the
skeleton is prompt and thorough. That's like with the you know, with Gigantopithecus.
The only remains we have are the the fact that they have teeth with
hyper thick enamel on these crowns and these very heavy, heavy jaws that the
thickest parts are not are those that survived, and only two of them so
far, I mean, we've only discovered two, but it shows that a
very few number of them of the jaw elements have survived to be discovered in
these caves, and there's been a lot of harvesting in those caves. The
people who you know, excavate that limestone really go to town, and of
course they find anything interesting, they hold on to it for trade, for
various purposes. Ye feed their family mostly right. Krans mentioned in his recreation
of the gigan Epithagus skull based on the jaw that the jaws showed divergence that
was really big. I think even said maybe even unmatched at that point.
Is that still true? Like, do you think that that the divergence of
the Gigano jaw does lean towards or indicating by pedalism? You know, That's
that came up in a conversation recently, and I thought then too that I
really need to go back and look very careful at his argument my understanding of
it, I mean you, you, Bipedalism has not, to my understanding,
influenced the span, the absolute span between the jaw joints, between the
temporal men deep joints. But what he was trying to draw attention to was
the angle that was subtended by the bodies of the jaw, and and that
angle was more acute in say a gorilla, but more obtuse, more open,
in other words, in Gigantipithecus. Therefore, that indicated that there was
room for the neck in between the bodies of the mandible. Now there there's
I mean, the one weakness. Well, let me point out first first,
there's one little gap in my knowledge, and that is is And I
could resolve this just by going over here to the benchtop and measuring, but
the absolute breadth of the cranial base the distance between those two jaw joints versus
that angle. Now the angle is going to change simply because the face of
Gigantipithecus was flatter. Probably we don't know for certain because we don't have a
skull. But if the megadontia, if the hypertrophy of the teeth and the
thick molar hyper thick molaring enamel is convergent with the condition in the robust australopithecenes
like paranthropists and Astrolopithecus robustus in South Africa, then it stands to reason that
Gigantipithecus was loading the posterior teeth and had a flatter face. Now, the
anterior teeth, it had shorter canines. They didn't have the huge projecting canines
of a gorilla. Say, but the incisors are kind of spatulate, they're
kind of shoveled and you know, the central incisors are large compared to the
lateral which is more like an orangutan than say a chimper gorilla, but they're
not greatly reduced in size as in the robust astrolopithecenes, where they really emphasized
the posterior enticition in combination with this kind of dished out face, these jutting
cheekbones and so forth. So the point is the short version of that is,
Gigantipithegus and robust Australopithesenes seemed to have converged on diets that had similar mechanical
properties that selected for these robust jaws and thick enameled teeth, thick crowned teeth,
but they did it in different ways. They clearly were not related in
that respect, because again here's where stable isotope analysis comes in. The stable
isotope analysis of these two species show that they had a very distinctive diet.
The diets may had tough, hard objects in common, but the nature of
those food stuffs was quite distinctive. Different habitat types and so forth, the
different plant communities. So back now circle way background. Sorry, I didn't
need to go down that paths so far. If you shorten the face,
the angle between the two halves of the jaws becomes more of tupes and gives
the appearance of opening up for the accommodation of a neck that comes out under
on the head. Now one of the distinctions, if we can rely for
a minute on the PG film, Patty has a forward lean of about five
degrees, her trapezius attached on the back of her skull, about halfway between
the very high attachment and a gorilla with a foram and magnum way behind the
skull versus a human which is tucked down underneath, and the muscles likewise are
very small and tucked in underneath. Head balances much more easily because of our
smaller face and big globular brain case. If you look at robust Austrolopithecus,
it's more towards the human condition by far than the gorilla, but it still
is not quite there. It doesn't have that huge enlargement of the cranial cavity,
and so the forame and magnum appears to be a little bit further back,
but not as far as in a gorilla. Muscles are still quite substantial
that attach on the base of its skull, but don't attach nearly as high.
Doesn't have that big flat plane of muscle attachment, that nucleplane that's distinctive
with the gorilla. So was so? In other words, back to your
original question, was Grover's analogy was his Was his theory about bipedal posture and
gigantophithic is justified? Well, I don't know if it really is in that
sense. Now see I come at it as a locomotive anatomist, and one
of the reasons for bipedalism. One of the mechanical factors in any theory about
the evolution of bipedalism is that your starting point is a large bodied hormonoid that
has a pectoral girdle, the upper limb bones that are rearranged in such a
way that they're adapted for suspending from supports, hanging under branches, and or
climbing with the arms up overhead, climbing up through branches or up tree trunks.
Our chest is flatter, our shoulder blade is back. Our glenoid the
shoulder socket faces outward. If you look at a grill or chimp, it
faces slightly upward. The problem with that arrangement is when you come to the
ground and assuming a quadrupedal posture. Now, the shoulder blade, if you
can imagine, it's horizontal and the humorous the armbone is vertical, so the
shoulder meets at an angle, at a ninety degree angle almost well, joints
don't like that. That produces sheer forces pushing one bone past another, and
so all dedicated quadrupeds like your dog, look at where it's shoulder blade is.
It's vertical on the side of a of a narrowly compressed chest, and
it's aligned with the shoulder or with the armbone. So now that joint is
experiencing compression. The bones are pressing together, and they prefer that mechanically.
Plus there's other you know, you could we could bring in the elbow and
the wrist. You know, a lot of people have trouble. I mean,
the reason the reason they sell these these gadgets that have hand grips on
a base to do push ups, you know, on the floor, is
because a lot of people if you put your hands on the floor, it
causes pain in your wrist because your wrist is not designed to be flexed like
that. And then have compressive force applied through it. You know, when
I do push ups, I do them on the backs of my knuckles so
that my wrist is lined up with my forearm. And you try that,
and it's much easier on your wrist. So the bottom line is any large,
urge bodied eight that comes to the ground is going to modify the way
it moves around. Now, a grade eight that has tremendously evolved in the
direction of arm hanging, arm swinging like a gorilla, so that its arms
are almost twice as long as its legs, it's already at this funny angle
when it comes down. It's not like a true quadruped, and weight is
actually actively retracted back onto the hind limbs. They carry more weight on their
It doesn't look like it, but they're actually If you haven't walked across a
force plate, it shows their hind limbs are supporting more weight than their fore
limbs. They avoid the stresses on their wrists by walking on their knuckles instead
of on their fists or their palms, for the same reason you just mentioned
knuckle pushups exactly. So if you were a great big eight getting even bigger
than a gorilla, like a Gigantopithecus. First of all, it's dangerous to
be climbing up in trees. It's just like the big male gorillas rarely go
up. They do, we've discovered for a long time they thought they didn't.
But it's dangerous. If you fall, there's probably going to be a
fatal experience, either either immediately or as a result of the injuries occurred,
and so you're going to spend more time on the ground. In other words,
if you're on the ground, there's only two options open to you.
You either walk on all fours or you stand up like and bam they're at
the London Zoo likes to do, you know, in that way. So
that's my argument. All of the things I just discussed are going to be
amplified with increasing body weight, and so a gigant a proto proto sasquatch,
is going to tend to walk upright more when it's on the ground to avoid
those stresses on its upper extremity, and would probably be much better at it
than even am Bam the gorilla. Because evidence continues to mount that the Miocene
apes had a pelvis that was much less like the living great apes, especially
the chimp and the gorilla, it was much less like those and and so
the the selection pressures to reshape that into a more human like and and Patty
doesn't have a fully human like pelts, and you can see them. You
look at her back loin area she has she has a dish shaped pelvis,
but she's got a pretty tall ilium. It's not as shortened as it is
in humans. And so, I mean, there's there's indications of that.
So there you go, there's there's the short answer. Next time we have
have you on, we'll just we'll last for the long answer, and Bob
and I will go get a drink. Which is really an issue though.
See my point is is that, I mean, you know, you ask
a question like that, and in a documentary, I could never give an
answer like that. And yet and yet the answer involves a lot of background
contextual information to really understand what the significance of it is. Yeah. Absolutely,
you know, sasquatch isn't designed for our sound bite culture unfortunately, and
I think that's part of the reason people think it's ridiculous. Still exactly exactly,
and those that take the time to educate themselves and really ask the question
and listen to the answers and discuss them. I mean, like when we
were talking about the Patterson Gimblin film. I mean she shows that non human
bipedal adaptations, as you what might expect for something that has evolved, perhaps
convergently, nature repeatedly produces similar results through convergent evolution. There's a news item
last month, if I'm interrupted very briefly, that I think evolution has led
to crabs I think five or six times independently, you know, because because
crabs happen to be. The shape and function and niche of a crab happens
to be what things gravitate towards. Sure, yeah, yeah, arthropod,
you know, exoskeleton adaptation or strategy. Definitely, it's I mean, it's
always been a fast because to me it's such a testament of evolution. I
when I when I deal with students who are reluctant to at least entertain the
notion that the life you know, evolved through discent with modification, you know,
I throw out just example after example after example of convergent evolution, like
the classic one with all the marsupial mammals in Australia and the placental mammals of
of the ne Arctic, and you have you know these convergent well they fill
each niche in remarkably similar ways, but they they both started for very different
starting points of these little rat like creatures, you know, that radiated out
to fill all these niches, and so so bipedalism could have evolved independently in
a large bodied eight in Asia, in parallel to the australopith scenes that are
already epithosenes. I mean, there's already now evolution of multiple examples of bipedal
like behaviors in various Miocene primates from Oreopithecus. The latest was this D.
Nuvius was a very interesting about a anobo sized ape that had elongated lower limbs
and a pelvis that was more human like than chimpanzee like. And it so
it shows that that the change from that to us. You know, people
always, even academics sometimes tried to connect the dots between extant chimpanzees and modern
humans and that evolution was intermediate between that. Well that's not the case.
Evolution started for both those species started from a starting point a creature that had
some features that were much more chimpanzee like, but others as particularly the pelvis
and other things that were much less derived than the modern chimpanzees. And you
know, if there was a hominoid species in Asia that especially if it began
to or was isolated in a more temperate climate where resources were on the ground
rather than up in the trees, and it was utilizing fish, say,
and as a protein source, and carbohydrates were coming from the understory, and
it's I mean, you can, yeah, there's all sorts of interesting,
compelling scenarios that could account for this in very rational, reasonable ways. But
anyway, I'm starting to ramble. Yeah, well you say ramble, but
I think I know I can speak for myself. I'm eating it up and
I'm sure a lot of our audiences as well, because I don't think that
you get because we do live in a sound bite culture and people do go
to I mean, Finding Bigfoot is an entertaining show. We did legitimate Bigfoot
stuff to the best of our ability. New stuff was brought up and stuff,
but at the same time, it's TV, you know, and we
Bobo and I and Bobo will grumble about it much longer length than I would
the stuff they cut out was great as well. And you can't get the
quick, easy answer you and so you say rambling, but I personally appreciate
it. People come into the shop and say, well, what would be
the one piece of evidence? When they say, this just doesn't work like
that, man, it's how everything fits together. And then I give them
an eight minute like what. I start rambling for eight minutes and they eventually
get it and kind of get the idea. It's like, this isn't something
that you just stick your toe in. You get it right away. I'm
just getting warmed up. At eight minutes exactly. I'm starting to massage my
jaws and getting into it right. But you know, Cliff, one of
my favorite stories to tell is when you were here after before you went off
on your solo, and after that little brief visit to my lab by the
cast and then you went to rifling, you know, turned you loose in
the lab and you called me out when you had the two footprints side by
side, one cast by Paul Freeman and one by West Summerlin, and we
began to discuss. You posed the question are these the same individuals? And
we started talking. I was making comments about how negatives. Things had been
said about distinctions in toe rows, angle and stuff like that, and how
this one looks like it has an arch, And then you know, it
was you asking the question of me that put me, you know, put
my feet to the fire and made the penny drop. And when we laid
that, one cast over the other, lining up the toes which matched perfectly,
and in so doing the edge of the forefoot was still perfectly in alignment.
It was simply the angle of the heel segment that differed between the two.
And illustrate it beautifully, the action of pronation and supernation, which is
expressed to a bit greater degree in the sasquatch foot than the human because of
the greater mobility of the transverse tarsal joint. And I'm sitting here, you
know, you talked about a smoking gun if one person, if person pressed
you for one example, I mean, that's one that I would throw out
there, because boom. You know, no way that a hoaxer is going
to incorporate the subtleties of detail that clearly demonstrate to someone like you or I
who have spent a lot of time looking at footprints to recognize the commonalities between
the two that distinctive distal pad on that gigantic big toe and the distinctive angle
of the little toe flaring out to the side. But then to recognize or
to be able to incorporate appropriately the signature of a superinated versus a pronated foot,
a very flat foot versus one that's arched up a little bit, and
the expression of that angle of the heel inflecting at exactly the proportional point of
the mid tarsal joints, as as Renee to Hindon would say, it boggles
the mind to even think to even think that that could happen, you know.
And then you add other things like going to China and seeing these footprints
with a transverse tarsal pressure mid tarsal pressure ridge that was exactly like the Patterson
Gimblin film side, you know. And then and then finally turning all the
tip miss casts on their side so you could see they did almost all have
a pressure ridge expressed to one or another. And the variation in length that
Grover tried to kind of rationalize was simply variation in the depth of imprint of
the heel that the forefoot from the pressure ridge indicator to the toe tips was
identical in every single footprint, you know. I mean just things like that
that are so subtle and yet so profound in their implication. Yeah, they
are the best evidence that these things are real. Absolutely, But people want
me to say, oh, it's the Patterson Gimlin film, look at it,
it's real, or the foot look at this one footprint. You can't.
I mean, it's like looking at one piece of a jigsaw puzzle and
saying those kittens playing in the art are very cute. Well, exactly,
and they fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. That's what's interesting is it's so
interconnected, you know. So you can trace some of these these anatomies through
the Patterson Gimblin film, through this footprint example, through another one over here,
and then oh, here's a pathology. Here's the Osburg cripplefoot you know,
which has a cloud of of of suspicion hanging over it because of ivan
marks, et cetera, et cetera. But yet I can sit with a
room full of pediatrists and orthopedists and talk shop with them, and they're all
fascinated by it and absolutely comfortable with the anatomy and the and the pathology,
even more subtly, the pathology that they're observing. You know, it's just
one thing after another, and they're and they're all linked together in this cohesive,
coherent theory of explanation, of explanation. It's just ah, yeah,
it's it's it's amazing. It gets me charged up to you. Wish you
could convey, you know, distill this down into a little pill that someone
could take and suddenly comprehend everything that you've gleaned over, you know, three
decades of preoccupation with this topic. Yeah, it's not so simple. Unfortunately.
Well, well, Jeff, we've said, Bob, are you still
there? By the way, maybe maybe fell asleep. I'm most likely technological
problems. He is somewhere in He cut out a couple of times. So
yeah, well Jeff, it looks like Bobo's still on the call, but
for some reason we're not reading his audio right now. So I'm going to
take this opportunity and just to thank you on behalf of Bobo and myself for
coming on and spending so much time with us. Really do appreciate it.
It's always enlightening. I love conversations with you because I was I'm a learner.
You know. I was a teacher for a living, which means I'm
a learner basically, and I just love to learn stuff. And there's I
can't think of one conversation we've ever had right and walk away knowing a bit
more than before. So thank you so much. Oh it's been my pleasure.
It's always stimulating, reciprocally stimulating. Well, all right, Jeff,
thank you so much again. And I'm sorry everybody out there can't hear Bobo,
but so I'll just do this. Hey, Boba, that was great,
right, yeah, dude, it really was. All right, cool,
take us home, bobes, all right, everybody, keep it Squatchy.
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