Speaker 1: Big Food and Beyond.
Speaker 2: With Cliff and Bobo. These guys are your favorites, so
light share, subscribe and rage it five star sho me.
Speaker 1: Brighteous on us today and listening, oh watching lim always
keep it squatching and now you're hosts Cliff Berrickman and
James Bobo Fay. I made a Squatchy discovery randomly the
other night, what is that sitting on the couch looking
for some free content and opened the two B app
and it had the recommended for you and there was
this big image of Bobo and this show called Bobo's
Bigfoot Encounters of the Fourth Kind. And my first thought
I was like, oh man, is this Did somebody make
another one of those AI things about Bobo? And then
I saw there were like multiple episodes and it was
Bobo with some guests including our number one most popular
app episode guests Sarah from the Terrifying Night in the
Marble Mountains. So I think our listeners would love to
see though, so I'll make sure to put the link
to the tow B listing for that is you're only
on to be.
Speaker 2: I don't know, I didn't.
Speaker 1: Look elsewhere, but to Be's free, you know, and it's
I think you can watch it in browser, but you
can definitely watch it on their free app on like
mobile devices or smart TVs, so that's probably the easiest.
Speaker 2: Way for people to do it.
Speaker 1: But I will I'll link those. There were three episodes
when I looked, but obviously it was partial to the
one with Sarah because that's one of my favorite Sasquat
stories that I've ever heard ever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what is Bobo doing in this thing?
Speaker 3: It's one of those documents I was working on. There's
the ones that we were really close to being finished,
like the short just interview was that we did with
Pete where he did the drawings, like we interview the
witness and he'd do a sketch under their direction. I see,
I filmed it like four or five years ago.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's gonna say, I don't remember you taking time
off to film anything recently. Only have you those years ago.
Speaker 3: I just the production coming was like, yeah, we just
got to put it out. So they just you know
the kind of AI b rolls stuff and all that,
and they did. They did.
Speaker 1: They did c G I.
Speaker 3: Whatever you know, AI like you know, like showing them
like the squatch running and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: MM hmmm mm hmm. Well that's cool. I didn't even
catch window that at all, except for when Matt texted
us about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's that's the first I heard about it.
Speaker 2: In that awesome first you heard about it, You're in it.
Speaker 3: I was executive producer. I was, I was a co
executive producer.
Speaker 2: Well, I hope that was a bump and pay or
you get royalties or something. It's the opposite. It's exactly
the opposite. I say, Oh geez, all right, I.
Speaker 1: Think more episodes coming besides those three. It was like
one with the Sam Kitchen who we had on this
podcast too.
Speaker 3: I think they all three more witnesses on here. Jesse
was the ex marine up in the Sierra Nevadas. Then Sam,
yeah he was Lake Shasta or Shasta link whatever, and
then the ever adorable Sarah.
Speaker 2: Oh very good.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I'll put that link in the show notes
because I know people would love to see it, and
we do get emails all the time from those years
ago when you were in the process of making those
and talking about him. People always like, hey, was listening
to old episodes, Where can I watch this? So we
finally have an answer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm gonna do when I get somebody, I'm gonna
redo him, like just an extra little bit like make him,
you know, way better, because it kind of he has
that same at the production company. He has that same
kind of like cheesy like guitar music and like that.
I know.
Speaker 2: So that's you know, like.
Speaker 3: Dramatic and like that like run round around like guitar music,
like kind of rock music like r A w K
m U z a K, but rock it's just like
horrible guitar like and some guys shrieking, and.
Speaker 2: So we all start our musical careers is horrible music
with people shrieking.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but anyways, Yeah, so I mean they're they're cool.
I mean it's cool too, like especially if you if
you like because those are those are basically three are
maybe our three favorite witnesses that people commented on. So
and then you know, the viewers the listeners in this podcast,
and you know they could be happy to hear you know,
it's always cool like when you see the witness you
can get a you can get like you know, you
get the film for me, you see that you can
look them in the eye and all that. And then
what was craaty about Sarah is that she was so
like not like she had no self consciousness about like
sounding weird or looking weird, like doing what she heard
like like there making the sasquatch.
Speaker 1: She like she really tried, you.
Speaker 3: Know, all the people like I can't do I'm even
gonna try. She like did it like she would do it.
So it's cool like hearing her to do it nice.
Speaker 2: Well that that'd be kind of neat. It wasn't at
the location right.
Speaker 3: No, No, we're just at our house, okay, very good.
And then then we went to Jesse's and it was
dude one hundred and ten, one hundred and twelve that day,
and like when we started filming, it was like one
hundred and six. We had to turn off all the
accen in his house because it was so loud you
could like you just know you could film so like
the fans on it was kind of the lighting. We
had issues with the lighting, like we couldn't get I
can't remember was maybe some of his outlets didn't work
or something, and we yeah, it was it was we
overloaded one circuit and blah blah, like the lighting is
kind of funky on his but everyone was still one
Pete Travers's sketch artists, you know, depiction of what they saw,
and they all said, that's exactly what I saw, you know,
they all all three of them said it seemed the
face seemed pretty human. Sarah's was the most gorilla like
what the other guys said. It was like, you know,
they looks like a person.
Speaker 2: M She saw it at night too, didn't she.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it was a full moon and there was
and they were on like a marble. It was all marble,
so it was like white marbles just like reflecting like crazy.
Speaker 2: Okay, so she probably did have a pretty good view
at it then.
Speaker 3: Huh yeah, and she could see this scole in the eyes.
Oh okay, she was like thirty feet from minute or
something there you go.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's just like a moonscape, you know, which is
like reflective, all reflecting all that light. There's another great
story I wish I could find the guy that's from
the Desolation Wilderness where a guy was camping and you know,
long story short. I'll put a link in the show
notes to this report because it's it's a great one,
but similar kind of thing that he was sleeping out
in the open on one of those open rock slabs
and bright moonlit night, and one of the things came
very close to him and he saw it very well.
Speaker 2: That's like an older report, that's like the early two thousands.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And what was really interesting is the guy who
published that report, I think it was Bill Brewer, but
I could be wrong about that, joined bigfoot forums for
a while back in the day and went back to
the spot with the witness and took pictures of everything
where the guy's tent was, where he pulled his sleeping
bag out and slept on that rock. At one point
in the encounter, the thing was coming around and it
got kind of close to where there was this big
kind of silvery dead snag near the tree line, and
the guy thought it was a bear that was being aggressive,
and so he put a few rounds in that snag
and the thing only ran away like thirty or fifty
feet and then stopped. And he was like, oh, that's
kind of weird, Like if it was a bear, it
should have just kept running until you don't hear it anymore,
and made him a little nervous. But the investigator like
stood in the spot where the guy was and had,
you know, a tape measure at the guy's arm height,
and like, sure enough there were the bullet holes, you know,
the rounds still in that snag. Like everything was as
the guy described it in his report. It was really
cool to see all those images and for pigeons. I
will post all those because back in the day when
I would scour all that stuff, if I saw anything
I liked that I found an inustry, I'd just save
it all. So I've got all those on a hard drive.
You know, it's not online anymore, so you probably couldn't
find him archived or anything, but I still have them.
So if you wanted to see some cool picks to
go along with that report, I will post them for
the pige And of.
Speaker 2: Course the pigeons are our members. Want to be a
member of Bigfoot and Beyond, you can just go to
that link that Matt pru Will put in the show
notes and you get this episode every single week with
zero commercials, and you get a bonus episode every single
week with zero commercials, and you get these pictures and
the extra deals and cool stuff. So maybe you want
to be maybe you want to be a pigeon one
of our members. It's not from the fan of heart,
though it's for the stronger heart. Yes, well, all right,
should we hop in today's episode? We're doing a topical
one today, So we have a number every We do
this every couple months or something like that. Bobo and
I and Matt. If we read something that we think
might have something to do with sasquatches in some sort
of tangential way that we kind of think is cool,
we'll submit it to Matt. Prue will curate a number
of these articles for us, and we just kind of
go through them and talk about them and their implications
for Bigfoot in general. So that's what we're doing today.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 2: Why don't we start with I mean, we have the
email right in front of us, the nutcracker Man on
top from Nutcracker Man, and I love that nutcracker Man,
its course, is another name for a paranthropist BOISEI. Because
they have such big old teeth, they figured they must
be chewing nuts. Another very very fiber scenes and of
course I'll write about some of that. But why don't
we do that one? I think it was actually originally
published in Spanish.
Speaker 1: I think it is, so I am in the midst
of clicking the translate button. So it will translate to English.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of the great paleo anthropological stuff that's
being done nowadays actually is in Spanish. I think that's
kind of cool. And of course, nowadays with all sorts
of web tools, it's easy to read that sort of
thing in English or your language of choice, whatever it
may be. It seeing the boy, then I Espanol, you
can always translate it. Okay, Well, this article is kind
of summarized here, Like there's a new study out there
that was in the twenty twenty six, so it's actually
brand new, and it describes the most complete body skeleton
of Homo erectus. I'm sorry, Homo habilists, Homo habilists found
so far now, Homo habitlists. In my opinion, it's pretty
interesting because it's the first hom It's not the first hominin,
but it's the first. It's the earliest specimen. I guess
said has given our genus in our same genus Homo.
Before Homo habilists, they were all australopithesceenes. But you know
how species are. They're kind of squishy, you know, and
it doesn't like it's not like you turn a page
and suddenly you're dealing with the new species. You know,
they kind of fade out and a new one fades
in through interbreeding and all that sort of stuff. And
that's a little bit about what this article talks about.
A mostly complete body skeleton post cranial skeleton isn't is
a big deal because we throw around, you know, hominin
names kind of a lot, Homo habilists and australopithesenes and
you know, paranthropists and homoerectus and all these sort of things,
but it kind of gives a false impression of the
fossil record that it's quite rigorous, but it's not at all.
The fossil record is very spotty, very very spotty, because
before this largely kind of semi kind of complete body
skeleton of Homorectus, we had very very fragmentary fossils, so
we didn't understand it it's body structure very well at all.
But this particular fossil that turned up in Kenya, and
it's about from a little over two million years ago, right,
so it's a long time ago. But we have arms,
we have shoulders, we have clavicles and pelvis and as
well as other bones and the paleoanthropologists that unearthed this
thing are pretty confident that they all come from the
same individual, which is even better because you know, if
there's a like some sort of an accident, like a
drowned like mass drounding, like a cave fills with water
or something, or a pit opens up or something like that,
then if a bunch of these things die together, then
you have a mismatch of bones and whatever else. You
just don't know what you're looking at. But they're relatively sure,
relatively confident, I guess that all of these particular fossils
come from the same single individual, which is cool, you know,
because it would be a big difference if you had
like like six or eight or ten of these things
dying together and some of their bones were fossilized. But
what if you have a you know, an arm bone
from a twenty year old and a pelvis from an
eleven year old, you know, and they would give you
some weird data in that way. But in this case,
we're pretty sure they have one individual, which is nice.
And of course I guess the big takeaways is that
this particular Homo habilists that we're talking about here, it
has kind of a mix of traits, which is what
we would expect with our general knowledge of human evolution
at this point. There are some similarities with Homorectus and
later human beings, but they also this this fossil has
retained primitive features that are closer to off Strollopithesenes, which
of course was the genus that came before Homo habilists.
So this kind of like mosaic, a mixture of traits
of more modern humans and more primitive humans. Like Physically speaking,
it suggests that Homo habilists was not fully adapted to
the modern body plan yet, which makes sense because it
took a while to get here right, and one of
their big takeaways is that they still retained kind of
a lot of tree climbing abilities based on the fossils
that they have, so that would probably indicate like longer arms,
curved fingers like the modern day apes like orangutans for
example of notably curved finger and toebones. Basically, what we're
looking at is that we have a snapshot of a
particular time and human evolution with this singular Homo habilists
fossil collection, and what we're seeing is that the snapshot
echoes things from the past and foreshadows things in the future.
So relationships between all these existing human species is a
lot more complex, I think than what it used to
be thought as. So basically the point is it's not
a linear progression. It's a big, bushy sort of thing.
And this, this sort of a branching process that doctor
Meldrim was always talking about before he passed. The human
evolution is not a linear progression or like a tree
at all. It's like a bush that goes out in
all sorts of differcise. And think about those.
Speaker 3: Make that up? Did he come up with that saying?
Did he get it from somewhere?
Speaker 2: Did he make what up? This thesh the bush? Well,
I don't know if he made it up. I don't
think he. I think that general, the general understanding of
paleoanthropology has changed. I don't think he actually made it up,
because pale anthropologists have been observing this for a while
and they're they're noting, and actually more so all the time,
because you'll notice that a lot of the articles that
I can tribut to these kinds of episodes that we're
in right now are exactly about this. Just strengthening the
argument for the idea of a relic hominoid of some
sort still being around, because again, back in the day,
the singular single species hypothesis that only one species can
occupy an ecological niche at a time seems to be
falling away. That component of the under of our understanding
of evolution in general seems to be falling away. Which
is why evolution, of course is a theory, because we
are still refining it. It's obviously there. It is a
true thing that actually happens and happened, but we're kind
of tweaking it as we get more and more information.
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and
Bogo will be right back after these messages.
Speaker 1: I thought it was really interesting that not only was
the powers and obviously the lower limbs sort of trending
more towards, you know, modern examples of Homo, while the
trunk and the limbs were more primitive and more like Australopithecus,
but also the skull and the teeth were more modern
as well. So it's a strange patchwork, you know, It's
not just like a dividing line, like everything above the
wasst is primitive and below the waist is more modern.
It's the trunk and the limbs tended to be much
more like the archaic hominins, but the skull and teeth
and the lower limbs and pelvis were modern, which is
pretty interesting.
Speaker 2: Well, when you think about the main adaptations, or some
of the main adaptations that actually makes a homohabilis a
homo habilist versus an australopithesenes, because they're very similar in
a lot of ways. But some of the main adaptations
are habitual tool use, you know, essentially at the end
of the day, and those tools might have been used
for softening food, you know. I mean everybody thinks about
like stone tools for you know, cutting meat and stuff
like that, but it might also been used for softening
food like Bobo tell us about Abaloni's. If you don't
soften them with the tool, you're.
Speaker 3: Not eating it. Yeah, pound it for like ten to
fifteen minutes, just to take it out and take like
a like a bat or something or a tea bye
four and just smack the hell out of it until
it loosens up, like several minutes.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, it'd be and of course later on I
believe it's later on at least when humans or our
genus at least Homo utilized fire, that would take a
lot of the pressure off of our chewing apparatus, you know,
like it would soften up the food and do a
variety of things. But and Homo is generally thought that
Homo rectus was the first one of us to actually
kind of get and control and use fire and all
that sort of stuff. But Homo habilists. They were called
habitalists because that that's another name for like handyman in
a way, you know, like that that's one of the
earlier names for them, like the handyman, because they were
amongst the earliest hominins to be directly associated with a
variety of tools that were made. And you have to
kind of wonder, well, what were they using those tools for.
Maybe some of it was used for chewing, which might
explain the eventual modernizing of the cranium perhaps while they
still retained more archaic traits for locomotion based on their needs, you.
Speaker 3: Know, talking about teeth and jaws and stuff. Humans didn't
until we went on this new like post industrial diet.
Like if you look at the fossils of old teeth,
there wasn't like a bunch of snaggle tooths. It was
they had straight, like you know, healthy teeth, like their
mouth wasn't overcrowd like now and they're saying that the
human like holmost savings with two generations of you on
this soft food diet are jaws aren't strong like they're
they're narrow, short like there's crowds the teeth. That's where
we have all these people like crazy looking like I did.
I was like a chainsaw when I was young. But
if you ate, like you know, chewing on bones, get
the marrow out, eating like nuts, eating stuff raw like
that's not soft, then you don't have crooked teeth. You
get straight teeth.
Speaker 2: I did not know that. Yeah, a wealth of information. Yeah,
so that's basically the gist of that article. There is
once again, it's not a black and white this or
that and suddenly sort of situation when it comes to
differentiation in various species. I think is kind of the
gist of it. That the almost like this particular homo
habilist was like an intermediary form in a way, but
clearly a homo habilist at the same time, showing some
characteristics of earlier and some characteristics of later species. And
it's not so cut and dry, shall we say, when
one species starts and one species ends because of them
sharing various traits and the overlap and how evolution works.
And it's a very very messy affair. I mean, we've
had millions of years to get it done. Time kind
of sorts things out, of course, but it's a very
very messy affair. I think it's the takeaway on this one.
Speaker 1: I see, Yeah, thank you for sending that article because
I wasn't aware of that find And also which again,
like when you first sent it, I didn't find like
an English language version of it, so maybe there's updates
since then, where maybe there's more images or something like that.
So I'll look for a newer reporting on that and
include it in the show notes. But either way, if
I don't find one, I'll have that original link in
the show notes.
Speaker 2: Very good. Yeah, of course has plugged that into your
favorite translator and you can read all about our ancient relatives.
You can read about it in Elvin. If you wish,
oh exactly exactly, you can write it in Elvin or
it'll probably write it for you at this point, so
you go the next one sounds good.
Speaker 3: How DNA and dirt is shaking up the study of
human origins. So doctoral student at Uncity of copenha Hagen
back in two thousand. He was a student. He got
inspired by looking at a dog taking a dump on
the grass at the school. And the job's contained DNA,
he thought, and perhaps even after rain washes him away,
some gena might remain. If it does stick around. The
genetic material of a longden analystment also persist in the environment,
so he could learn something about those creatures without getting
access to prices museum specimens. He got ridiculed at the time,
and as one fresh percent, I've never heard anything as
stupid as this. He recalled his hunch for fruit. In
two thousand and three paper and Science, he showed that
plant ammal DNA can be recovered from a Siberian promofrost
core that stretched back four hundred thousand years. That's insane.
Even in the warmer temperatures of a New Zealand a
New Zealand cave. They identify DNA from extinct that moas
like those emu, like birds. Those giant mos are like
ten twelve feet tall, like an ostrich kind of almost
in six hundred year old seddents. They found that now
is the first time researchers had used sediment alone to
identify long dead's complex organisms, and then two decades on
the city of ancient DNA from sediments is maturedly one
of the most exciting tools for studying in the past.
State of researchers interest in soil DNA it serves nearly
ten years ago when scientists from human DNA can also
be isolated from ancient sediments. Laboratories that once focused on
the structing chine material from precious fossils were not turning
their attention to dirt. All. If your archaeologists too are
re examining soil collected decades ago, teenas discovered more about
the past using this modern technology. They got some snippets
of DNA from two million year old Parma frost back
in twenty twenty two and the northern typ of Greenland,
so all they've got so far. Yeah, there's a lot
of information in those in those sediments sedations, there's a
lot of micro that microclues what's going on that sedient layers. Yeah,
it's really it's really an inflectionible study of human ancient humans.
It shows how our own species, as well as the
Anerthols and the serious Denisovans, like how we lived.
Speaker 2: I thought that Dennis Ovens.
Speaker 3: And the others got recombined.
Speaker 2: They don't know about recombining, but I know that they
discovered the denis Sovans by taking soil samples from a
cave that they thought Theanderthals were using. And whether or
not they're using I'm not sure that that answer was
found or not, but they found this new Actually no,
they found no. They I'm sorry, I was incredient. The
Denisovans were discovered by that fingerbone. But later on, later
on they sampled the dirt from a cave that they
thought in the Interthals were using, and it turns out
that the Denizobin DNA was found in the soil itself,
if I remember correctly.
Speaker 1: Yes, and so once you have that sequence, you can
find traces of it. In fact, I just I pulled
up my email because I heard a podcast. God, this
was several years ago, and I was emailing someone about
it who had asked a question. So let me pull
it up and I'll just read it to you, because
I quoted the podcast specifically so an archaeologist to a
guy named David Meltzer was a guest on a podcast
I was listening to, and so he was discussing e
DNA studies and he made this statement, he said, quote
in your genome, there are three point two billion base pairs.
Mind you, DNA has been recovered from sites upwards of
two million years old. It's terribly degraded, but that actually
makes it identifiable as ancient DNA. Ancient DNA in general
is no more than about one hundred letters long. If
you see a string of DNA letters that are thousands
and thousands of letters long, you know that somebody in
the lab sneezed and contaminated your sample. But if it's
anywhere you know fifty letters plus or minus, that's ancient DNA.
What you have to do, and this is a very
analytically challenging thing, is you've got to take all those
little fragments of DNA and figure out what is the
sequence here, and then map that sequence to a reference genome,
which will tell you it's a mammoth, it's a bison,
or it's something else. So a lot of the work
that's done in ancient environmental DNA involves compiling reference sequences
so that when you're doing the shotgun work looking at
all the DNA fragments within a sample of sediment, you
can match it up with whatever might have been out
on that landscape. So yeah, it sounds like, you know,
if we were looking for sasquatch DNA without having a
reference sample, that would be tricky. And the other thing
that that really brought to mind to me is people say, well,
they're looking for ancient DNA all the time, why haven't
they found a sasquatch And it's like, well, if there
are not ancient you know, if there's places, Now let's
say that sasquatch is inhabited in North America where they're
searching for ancient DNA like looking for step bison or
mammoths like this podcast mentioned. First of all, if it
was anything longer than that, you know, plus or minus
fifty to one hundred letter range, it's not even looked
at with extensive testing because it's just assumed, well, that's
not ancient, and even if it were sequenced, it's there's
not a reference genome. And so even if it is
something like the descendant of Gigantipithecus or something like which
would be about ninety seven percent analogous to us. Or
if it's something like paranthropists or a robust Australia pitheceene
that would be even closer, that'd be indistinguishable. So I
think the EDNA stuff and like DNA in the dirt
will be really useful someday. But we got to have
that specimen first, you know, in order to then identify
populations both modern and ancient in soil samples.
Speaker 2: Basically, Yeah, it goes back to Darby's explanation to me
about the difficulties in what we're trying to do with
the DNA sampling that we're doing with them. It's like,
here's a you know, a one hundred letter word combination
on the internet. Go find it so we'll get tell
me some of the words in it. I can't well
tell me some of the give me a clues. I
can't go find it. So well, that's next. So impossible,
is yeah, pretty much. But once you know a couple
of these things, once you get I guess, what did
you call them? A reference DNA?
Speaker 1: Is that what you called it? Yes, if you had
like a fully sequenced genome on file, then when you
find those bits and pieces, you know, fifty to one
hundred letters at a time, you can cross reference them
with the reference DNA that's already on file from a
fully sequenced genome.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, and when we get that, then we can look
at the samples that I've been collecting and start getting
information out of those because we have the target. All
of a sudden, we have we have the thing we're
actually aiming for, instead of just shooting off into the
dark and trying to find it, which is why I'm
helping Rvey so much. Say hey, I'm happy to help
you in any way it possibly can, under the condition
that after you do this, after you prove the species,
I get to continue playing and learning, and it's contributing
and doing everything I can to help the species. So
that's what we're shooting for at this point. So I
do think that EDNA is going to be absolutely essential
in studying sasquatches. I don't see any other way around it.
Because they're so rare, they move probably pretty quick through
the environment. They're so just on top of their situation.
Where they know other people are around, they leave the area,
and even if you're close to them, they hide so
well they're just next to impossible to see. But they
can't hide the skin cells that slough off their foot
as they walk across the landscape. They can't hide that
sort of stuff. You just have to be able to
find it.
Speaker 1: I never thought about it until I read this article
that Bobo sent about how much older DNA that you
would find in something like permafrost would be because it'd
be so well preserved. Because we always think about, oh,
you could maybe find DNA if something that's like ten
thousand years old, or cup maybe twenty thousand years old
in soil. But that thing both mention like four hundred
thousand years old. It's like, well, that's so perfectly preserved.
That makes sense, Like that's pretty remarkable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I keep hoping a sasquatch is going to turn
up in one of those situations, you know, like the
rhinos or the wolves and stuff that they find in
prima frost. And of course, now if they start looking
around for DNA and that stuff, that broadens the landscape
a bit more for a potential discovery of that caliber.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I did think that was a great article,
and like I said, it brought that quote from David
Meltzer to mind about the promise and the challenges that
currently sort of beset us.
Speaker 2: Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo.
Will be right back after these messages.
Speaker 1: Should we move on to another one of your articles there, Cliff?
Speaker 2: Oh, sure, let's do the one of the eyes there
from Forbes magazine. There. Yeah, So basically this is the
article comes from Forbes magazine and it's about eyes, and
it's particularly specifically the sclera, which is the white part
of our eyes. You know, So humans have a white sclera.
We all know that we can see each other all
the time, and so why do we have a white sclare?
Because the other ape species don't really they have a
variety of colors, but it's generally dark or pigmented, generally
brown or a dark brown sort of thing, although they
I have seen photographs of I think chimpanzees with a
yellowish sort of brown. And so there's a variety of colors,
just like you would expect through genetic variation, just like
our hair color is a little bit different, but generally speaking,
it's a darker color in other ape species but not humans,
not the human ape. So why is ours white? Okay? Well,
it's probably a communication tool of some sort, some sort
of social communication tool. And you think about hanging out
with your family, or your friends or loved ones in general,
or even people you don't know. Think about how much
communication happens with just looking at one another and using
your eyes. You don't have to use your mouth or
even your hands, just by using your eyes. Think about
all the different things you can communicate to one another.
Speaker 3: When you're driving your car, like one of those blocked
out like little hondas pulls up like you know, like
to the like they're going to pull out, like in
front of you or something, and that's all the windows
are blacked out like sun protector, and you can't see
like that the person's looking at ut so you just
have no idea what they're doing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess that's an interesting take on that.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, but having some sort of eye contact sure helps
that situation, right. Yeah, So humans have a high contrast
eyes is what this I think this article referred to
them as a white scile era and a colored iris
and a dark pupil high contrast. That way, you can
tell what direction you're looking, you know, and also think
about this in the context of direct eye contact in mammals,
it's pretty threatening. You know, whether you're staring down a
mountain lion or an aggressive human being, you know that
direct eye contact is pretty threatening. That's another way to
communicate through your eyes. And of course, if you're staring
somebody down, if you're like giving them that cold dog
stair sort of thing and their eyes are darting back
and forth, what does that communicate? Well, it looks for
an escape route or unsure themselves or something like that. Right,
So anyway, they think that our human species here have
developed the high contrast eye, the white sclera for some
sort of communication tool, right, because most of the primates
have a dark sclera, making what direction they're looking hard
to figure out, like where is this same looking at?
But you can see that pretty clearly with human beings.
So that makes the human gaze, the human eye contact,
very visible and trackable. So human eyes evolve to support
social interaction and cooperation. See that's the thing with humans,
Like we're a pretty weak species and we're l I mean,
I forget what percentile we're at. I think we're like
the ninetieth percentile or something as far as how large
we are on a planetary level, you know, of all
the other animals that were related to either closely or distantly.
We're a big animal, but we're not very impressive for
the science. Very Yeah, we pretty kind of kind of are, right,
but we're not that strong. We're not really that fast.
I mean, we're smart, and really the only reason we survived,
I think is our social interaction. And this the eye
structure might help us with that, right, because being able
to see where someone else is looking, well, that helps
with shared attention, you know, like what you're doing that,
I'm going to look at it over there too. Communication
and also group coordination. You know, I don't know this
because you know, I'm not a soldier by any means,
but I imagine that soldiers and like you know, special ops
and all that sort of stuff probably communicate an awful
lot with just their eyes if they can see each
other in that sort of way. She can do this
with other things, with other and in other situations too,
like maybe you're not supposed to speak at a certain time,
like that, you can communicate with your you know, your
partner or whatever through where your eyes are looking. Right. So, anyway,
the studies were none and that's what this article is about,
comparing humans and apes, and they found that humans, and
they did this with infants and stuff too, So who
haven't really been socially influenced very heavily, because you know,
babies are new. They haven't had like twenty years of
figuring things out yet in our in our cultural environment,
in our fish tank. You know, that is dictated by culture.
So they found that humans follow eye directions right, which
makes sense, but apes rely more on their head position,
their head movement to figure out where to look. So
that suggests at least that humans evolved to use these
subtle cues with their eyes, with our eyes, and that
I think is a pretty strong argument as far as
like the social interaction and the communication right. And of
course our eyes are very visible, you know, they're out front,
they're high contrasts as I mentioned either, and so eyes
being a communication for communication tool for us. While that
helps build trust and cooperation between individuals of the troop
or tribe or group or whatever you want to call us,
it also enables social behaviors that are probably more complex
than other animals. And it helps us with nonverbal communication,
which is huge, huge I used to I did so
I took some classes and training training classes in that
stress when I was a teacher. When I was an
elementary school teacher, I literally took classes in workshops in
nonverbal communication to help not only present information, but also
for specifically classroom management, you know, keeping the classroom under
control and kind of going with the flow that you
have set forth, you know. And really non verbal communication,
I think is at least fifty percent of what I
did as a teacher, you know, for controlling the class
and conveying information and working in large groups, and fifty
percent verbal fifty percent nonverbal. And I think that's true
of all human interactions, you know, because think about how
many times maybe a text message you sent was misconstrued
versus if you would have said that in person to
the person, they would have never been been out of
shape about it, right. I think that's probably happened to
all of us at some point.
Speaker 1: And you hear it all the time when people say, oh,
I know that guy was telling the truth. I looked
him in the eyes, you know, and they they're sort
of inferring that because the eyes weren't darting around and
the attention wasn't flitting, that that conveys some degree of honesty.
And yeah, I mean not only in the cooperative sense,
but you know, imagine if if I came up to you,
you know, somewhere, and I was trying to make conversation,
you noticed that I kept looking down at your wallet
and I kept looking down at your You're like, oh,
this guy's waiting for an opportunity to steal my wallet
and way or something like that. And so yeah, it's
it's crucial to understand, like what is it that you
are paying attention to in this moment. And I think
as evidenced here, like you said, it's so crucial that
there's no variation in that across our whole species. Like
everyone has bright white squares, you know, pretty much unless
you have some damage or pathology or something, which means
that all of our ancestors that didn't either didn't survive
or at least they didn't mate, they didn't pass on
their genes, like none of them, you know what I mean.
So that's pretty remarkable.
Speaker 2: Driver well, yeah, and it also you can also tell, yeah,
as you said, you trustworthiness and that sort of thing.
By looking somebody in the eye, you get a general
sense of that you'll and I mentioned earlier, you get
a sense of the their level of aggression, right, But
there's also another aspect here. You can actually tell a
little bit about the health of a person. But you know,
if they have like a yellowish sort of Johndey sort
of eye, will say, well, I don't know if you're
to mate with that person or not. Right, that's we're
just not up, you know that kind of thing. So
I sell a lot basically, So let's style this back
into sasquatches for a minute. That this is one of
the questions that I ask close witnesses often almost every time,
if not every time. Did you see the whites of
the eye or was it just all brown or whatever?
And generally speaking, most witnesses and I don't have numbers
for this, but you know, after speaking to people for decades,
most people don't report a sclera a white scolera, although
a few have a few have. Do either of you
have any information like what's your That's that's my general
impression of witnesses that are seeing sasquatches up close, that
most don't report a sclera. And I can't figure out
if that, although a couple do. So I'm I'm willing
to think that the lack of sclera in these close
encounters is probably more to do with the size of
the iris than it is a lack of a white sclera,
because I have a couple reports where the sasquatch would
seem frightened and looked around left and right with its eyes,
and people have noticed a white sclera. So what do
you guys think are there? Do do you think these
things have a white sclera or a pigmented sclera? And
if they if a witness doesn't see a sclere, is
that just because of the large iris, which would suggest
a huge pupillary opening which aids them with night vision.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I've heard very few people describe seeing
a sclera. There's a difference between people saying like, no,
I didn't notice that, versus like, yes, I saw the
whole eye and no, there was no sclera. You know,
those are two different sort of propositions, but very few
people tend to report that. And I would just assume, again,
if we're looking at the continuum of apes, given that
we are sort of the outlier with such a high contrast,
large visible sclera, I would assume sasquatches would not have
as high a contrast, as large as visible a sclera,
given that we're the outlier, and you would just assume,
you know, whether you'd call that statistically or whatever, but
that you just be more likely that they would be
more akin to the other apes than just the sole
outlier being in the same way that like, well, we're
the only extant ape with very little to no body hair,
not a covering of hair like other apes have. So
if you're a betting person, you go, well, if there
was a new ape, it would probably be covered in hair.
You know, it would probably be this, It would probably
not have a high contrast, white, very visible sclera. So
to me it would make sense.
Speaker 2: So what would be the implications of that to their behavior?
In your opinion, they don't live in large social groups
where they're interacting in close proximity and where shared attention
or paying attention is crucial to their survival a for
cooperation or b to protect against each other, because that's
the other thing is like, so much of needing to
know where someone's attention is is for self preservation. It's
not all going to be cooperation because there's a lot
of intra specific competition within humans and who knows how
long it's been the case, but yeah, are our number
one predator is other humans. You know, it's not necessarily
just reptiles and big cats and bears and things like
that anymore, although certainly in certain parts of the world
they still get a hold of people. But by and large,
like the thing we have to be the most wary
and afraid of is other people. And so I think
sasquatches would be devoid of those pressures a from each
other and then be the living in large social groups
and needing to cooperate, and especially if they're fairly active
at night, as seems to be evidenced by the report,
So like, how well are you going to see your
you know, your buddy or your enemies sclare as you know,
thirty yards apart in the dark, Probably not too well.
So I don't think I just don't think they'd be
driven by the same pressure. So if you were reverse
engineering that, if you did have a sasquatch eye and
it didn't seem to have that, you would assume, Okay, well,
they lack those social interactions and those needs therefore those pressures,
and that's why they don't have those adaptations. It's a
very different social lifestyle. But then there are those few
reports that do indicate they have a white scolera, which
could be very, very useful for them to silently communicate
that at some distance. I've talked to quite a few
pople have seen the scole there.
Speaker 1: I mean, Sarah is one of them.
Speaker 3: I mean, gosh, you else we've had whatness on the show,
So they saw the scolera. I think didn't Jack and
Kentucky see the scolerot how many the kids started up
in the cap of the truck and it leaned over?
Speaker 2: I don't remember. I have heard plenty of reports of
people describing them as having human like eyes, and you
wouldn't think that would be true if they didn't have
a sclera, right, like a white sclera, right. Yeah. But
then again, like if they didn't have a scolera, because
you know, like where do your eyes go when you
first meet somebody or you see somebody from a distance,
It wouldn't that be interesting if actually, if they had
a pigmented scolera. And part of the reason they evolve
that is to remain hidden better because if there's a
f the brush or whatever, and if you don't see
the whites of the eyes. Maybe that draws less attention
because the way we evolved to gravitate our vision to
that particular location.
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally, Yeah, I agree with that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, of course, we have zero information as far as
I know about I can't imagine that we have any
information at least about the the situation with the scolera
and extinct hominins like Neanderthals like, we have no idea
what their scola is. Of course, we can guess based
on studies like this that they probably had a white
scolera because they would also be very dependent on social
interactions and that sort of thing. But wonder, you'd have
to wonder how far back that scolero white scolera goes.
But maybe I don't. Maybe there's a gene or something
that could be identified. And as technology gets better, and
like our previous story, we get better DNA samples from
dirts and all that sort of stuff, maybe we can
find out if Homo erectus, for example, had a white
scolare just by their DNA. Maybe there's a way to
tell there. I just have no idea. I'm just that
well educated and that sort of stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Either it's too many people are.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know. We got to remember that science
is still in its infancy right now. For as awesome
as we think we are, we're ridiculously unsophisticated compared to
where we're going to be in two hundred years if
we survived that long that is. Yeah, stay tuned for
more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bogo. We'll be
right back after these messages.
Speaker 1: All right, So as you go to the next one,
what would be a fuone want to do? Did you
guys see that article that was sent along by a
listener again named Robert Goodwin about the one of the
patches that one of the astronauts Artemis mission is going
to wear it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, why why don't you lay that one on us?
And actually I made it one of my Patreon posts
from a museum for this weekend.
Speaker 3: Jeremy has in Space Agency.
Speaker 1: Leave it to the Canadians to do something cool when
leaving the Sasquatch. But yeah, there was a this Canadian astronaut,
Jeremy Hansen his mission patch for the Artemist two mission,
which is designed with a number of like indigenous representations
of various characters. I think he kind of related to
they had personal meaning and significance to him in mind.
Ye are all represented on the patch, but one of
them is the sasquatch, So that that's a pretty cool
thing to see on like a NASA mission patch for sure.
Speaker 2: Uh, probably the first time Bigfoot's gone to space.
Speaker 3: They're right on UFOs all the time.
Speaker 2: Cliff, Oh, you're right. I'm so sorry. Yeah, I'm so ignorant.
Speaker 1: Yes, So, so the patch was designed by Do you
guys know how to pronounce this? I don't want to
butcher it.
Speaker 2: The tribal we have to butcher stuff all the time. Man,
it's your turn, is it?
Speaker 1: Abe? A missionaby? And we apologize if we're getting that wrong.
I haven't heard it spoken out loud time, just guessing
the phonetics based already an artist named Henry Gammond several
animals to represent different values. The buffalo for respect, the
ego for love, the bear for courage, the sasquatch for honesty,
the beaver for wisdom, wolf for humility, and the turtle
for truth. The astronaut Hanson said that the imagery reflects
lessons he learned from indigenous elders and knowledge keepers. It
serves as a reminder of how he wants to conduct
himself on the mission. So I think that's great. That
was so cool to see. I wonder if those will
be available, because I know a lot of times, you know,
you could buy like replica mission patches.
Speaker 2: Oh, I hope they are. I'll definitely get one for
the museum if that's the case. Yeah, I want to do.
Speaker 3: You know, I was thinking to say thing, I got
to get one of those.
Speaker 2: I love the fact that they have the Sasquatch And
it's ironic in some ways at representing truth, right, because
I think back to our good friend Thomas Steinberg, very
respected researcher, very down to earth. If that guy says it,
you can pretty much take it to the bank every
single time. Right, pretty great guy. And I think he
when he was on our podcast, and you know, back
in that one of the earlier episodes. I think it's
been a long time, but he says, yeah, basically, the
one rule of Bigfoot is always tell the truth. And
if you do that, you're gonna be okay. You're gonna
be okay. But instead of taking guesses at things, and
you can say I think this and be very very wrong,
but if you say it is this and you're wrong,
you start losing credibility, you know. And I love the
fact that the sasquatch on the patch represents truth because
it's something to remember. I think, you know, just always
tell the truth and Bigfoot to the best of your ability,
and you'll probably be just fine, you know, because everything
gets murky when people start lying and hoaxing and exaggerating
and doing all that sort of stuff. So I just
loved the symbolism involved in this particular patch.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and especially the fact that it represents sort of
like an ethical stance rather than just like, oh, hey,
here's a mythological character or you know, this is like
you don't have people treat it like oh, it's just
a fantasy motif or theme versus like, no, this is
deeply rooted as a as an ethical mode of being,
so to speak, and so it's got more depth than
just like a piece of pop culture.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, take a look to see if these patches
are going to be sold. Yes, at least some versions
are going to be sold. Canadian Museum Shop is selling
an embroidered version of his patch right now. Awesome, all right,
I'm gonna go ahead and get one of these for
the museum.
Speaker 1: Would you go to the Moon if given the opportunity.
Speaker 2: Nah, I'm busy here, man, I don't have time for that.
It was easy and wasn't a direct threat to my life.
Speaker 1: Sure, dude, Either of you guys have any events public
things coming up by the time this airs.
Speaker 2: Oh, not by the well, I've got something on Thursday,
but this is that's going to be already over with
by the time this airs. But we do have I
do have the Ohio Bigfoot Conference coming up. That's the
first weekend in May. I know that. That's kind of cool.
Sorry sold out.
Speaker 1: Well, if you did not get tickets to the Ohio
Bigfoot Conference and you're in the Southeast, I will be
speaking at the Smoky Mountain Bigfoot Festival that same weekend
on Saturday, made the second in Townshend, Tennessee. Right there
the smoke. He's just over the ridge north of Cade's Cove.
So I'll put a link to that in the show
notes if anyone's around and wants to come hang out.
Speaker 2: Is that the big festival one? That is?
Speaker 1: I was there with you in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2: That's what I thought. That was a lot of fun.
I enjoyed that one.
Speaker 1: Absolutely I met you introduced me to timber Chet there,
so that was super cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, he's getting a lot of traction out there
in the political world too. And that's also where I
finally met face to face sack Squatch. Yep, you know
that guy.
Speaker 1: Indeed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, super nice guys. I missed that. He's actually tours around.
He came to Portland maybe six or eight months ago
and I missed him. But I mean, I'm sure he'll
be back at some point. Yeah, he was a really
really nice guy. Man. That was a lot of fun.
I could see doing a gig with that guy, you know,
like doing a dresses a Sasquatch and me playing backup
the guitar like in a like some sort of like
you know, lounge situation. That would be fun, totally cool.
So if you're listening out there, mister sack Squatch, hit
me up, man, we'll do a gig. It'll be cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's got to be he's got to be a listener.
It would only be right. But maybe he'll be there
this time. I don't know if he does that festival
every year or not. But it was a lot of fun.
I'm really looking forward to It's always great to be
back in the Smokey's there in that area. So if
you're not already going to the OBC and you're in
and around the southeast, come on out to the Smoking
mountin Bigfoot Festival. Be a lot of fun.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And then, of course, looking ahead, I think the
weekend of the fourteenth of June, I'm gonna be doing
what is it, the Great America Bigfoot something or other
out there in Florida.
Speaker 1: Oh, the Great Florida Bigfoot Conference.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there you go. That sounds about right. I don't know.
I just show up to these things. I don't know
what they're called.
Speaker 1: That's a fun one too. I did that one in
twenty twenty four. It was a blast.
Speaker 2: That should be a pretty good one.
Speaker 1: I guess now that they've announced it, I can start
promoting it a bit since it is a ways off.
But I'm sure it takes time to plan such things.
But I will be speaking on the Alaska Bigfoot Cruise
this year, so I'll put that link in the show
notes as well. That's in September, so there's plenty of
time to plan. But I don't know how many slots
or tickets they have for that exactly. So if you
are interested in going, now is probably the time to
start putting plans together and looking into getting those tickets.
But that's going to be a lot of fun that
people liked it, You're going.
Speaker 2: To come back like twenty five pounds over what you
aint now, Matt.
Speaker 1: No, I've done that cruise before, but you know, we've
done a few, and they always have like stellar gyms,
and I hit the gym every day, so I and
I get tons of steps on those giant boats, so
I make sure to balance out the egregious food intake
with playing.
Speaker 3: In the gym barely. Huh.
Speaker 2: No, dude, the.
Speaker 1: Last we did this awesome Hawaii cruise at the end
of twenty twenty four that went to all the islands,
and dude, I went in there every day and I
was almost always the only person in that gym.
Speaker 2: That's what I heard. Who'd have thought, well, should we
get out of here and go jump in the member
section for the pigeons.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks for joining us again this week. Hit like
hit share if you got a story or a question, Yeah,
hit us up. If you've had an encounter sasquatch, we'd
love to hear about it. So it's like a one paragraph,
a little description and until next week, y'all keep it squatchy.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Bigfoot and Beyond.
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