Bigfoot Potpourri

Bigfoot Brain Dump

This page is a collection of information varying in degrees of relevance to bigfoot. It doesn't fit neatly anywhere else, but it belongs somewhere because information is light, revealing a bigfoot silhouette.

Bipedalism

COMPARATIVE ANATOMY FROM AUSTRALOPITHECUS TO GORILLAS
Why are we the only two-legged creature to develop an exclusively upright gait? What did it mean to the development of the human species?

Watch the Lecture Series

CARTA brings you foremost experts to explore the many facets of these questions in this fascinating series - starting with presentations from Steven Churchill, Jeremy DeSilva and Matt Tocheri that compare different aspects of hominid anatomy and their relation to bipedalism.

Before Bigfoot was Bigfoot

Bigfoot encounters have been reported since before the name Bigfoot existed. In fact, they've been reported since before Gorillas were believed to exist. Lowland gorillas were first described as a species in 1847 but the mountain gorilla was not discovered by the scientific community until 50 years later when Friedrich Robert von Beringe shot two of them on the slopes of Mt Sabinyo.

Mid 1800's sketch of alleged gorilla.

1866 sketch of gorilla.

17 October 1902. Mountain gorilla, killed by Robert von Beringe (© Andreas von Beringe)

OLD NEWSPAPER REPORTS

Click on a thumbnail to read the article.

The Cincinnati Daily Star (Cincinnati, Ohio) · Thu, Oct 30, 1879 · Page 3

The Cincinnati Enquirer (Cincinnati, Ohio) · Mon, Jun 28, 1886 · Page 1

The Cincinnati Enquirer (Cincinnati, Ohio) · Fri, Sep 14, 1888 · Page 4

The Cincinnati Enquirer (Cincinnati, Ohio) · Sun, Jan 14, 1894 · Page 1

The Cincinnati Enquirer (Cincinnati, Ohio) · Sun, May 30, 1897 · Page 17

The Indianapolis News (Indianapolis, Indiana) · Tue, Dec 25, 1906 · Page 8

Xenia Daily Gazette (Xenia, Ohio) · Thu, Oct 10, 1935 · Page 4

Gigantopithecus

Bigfoot researchers have suggested that an uncatalogued descendant of Gigantopithecus is the source of the Bigfoot phenomenon. Of the existing fossil record, Gigantopithecus is the only candidate fossil that approximates the size of the reported anecdotal observations.

Gigantopithecus is known only by four mandibles and about 1,000 teeth. Three of the four mandibles, known as Gigantopithecus blacki, are 300,000 to 400,000 years and are from the Kwangsi Province of southern China. The fourth mandible is approximately 6.3 million years old. It is smaller than the three Chinese mandibles and is believed to be an older species of the same genus. The Gigantopithecus teeth were discovered in Liucheng, Kwangsi, Wuming, Bama, Daxin, and Jianshi of southern China.

Anthropologists believe Gigantopithecus became extinct mid- Pleistocene, at the latest between 200,000 and 400,000 years ago.

[source: J. Glickman, Diplomate, American College of Forensic Examiners]

Sculpture by Ramon López, a biological modelmaker & wildlife artist www.quagga.cat

South America

THEODORE MORDE AND THE "LOST CITY OF ANCIENT AMERICA'S MONKEY GOD” In 1939, adventurer Theodore Morde claimed to have found a "City of the Monkey God" but died before returning to the region for further exploration.

Illustration by Virgil Finlay for The American Weekly.

"Theodore Morde also related a story about a monkey who had stolen three women with whom it bred, resulting in half-monkey half-human children. He claimed, “The native name for monkey is Urus, which translates literally into ‘sons of the hairy men.’ Their fathers, or fore-fathers, are the Ulaks, half-man and half-spirit, who lived on the ground, walked upright and had the appearance of great hairy ape-men."

THE HUMAN-LIKE "NONDESCRIPT." AN APE-MAN FROM THE EARLY 1800'S English naturalist Edward Bancroft wrote about them in 1769. He mentioned the creature that All the natives called “Wild Man” and it is clear that they were not “Apes.”

From the Waterton Gallery at Wakefield Museum

These Wild Men were about 5 feet tall, they walked in an upright position and had “…human form. Thinly covered with short black hair.” the Indians “greatly dread them and instantly flee as son a soon as they're discovered.” They share some features with the Trauco hominid found in Patagonia.
Source: Patagonian Monsters - ©2009-2011 Austin Whittall

Ghost Populations and Ancient DNA

An extinct population in Northern Eurasia interbred with both the ancestors of Europeans and a Siberian group that later migrated to the Americas. Such groups are sometimes referred to as ghost populations because they're only identified by the echoes they leave in genomes — not by bones or ancient DNA. [source]

Photo Credit: Field guide to Pleistocene hookups, detail. John Hawks CC-BY-NC-ND

"It is interesting to see the jockeying among geneticists for new results, but you start to notice how they are describing models that don’t describe any archaeological reality!" - JohnHawks.net

Kostenki14 – Ancient Siberian DNA

The modern human ancestors of contemporary Eurasians are believed to have left Africa about 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, but how these earliest Eurasians contributed to the modern European gene pool remains unclear.

Ancient samples share some heritage with today’s indigenous American populations. Source: dna-explained.com

Original Skull Image Credit: Peter the Great Museum Reconstruction by David Schlosser

Ancient and Modern Europeans have surprising genetic connection — a third population — referred to by many as a “ghost population” because no one knew who they were. The new population was termed Ancient North Eurasian, or ANE. [source: livescience.com]

Patty

Illustrative attempts to see how the Patterson-Gimlin Film Subject might really look. These are not legitimate enhancements. But I think they're interesting.

Paranthropus Boisei

We don’t know everything about our early ancestors—but we keep learning more! Paleoanthropologists are constantly in the field, excavating new areas, using groundbreaking technology, and continually filling in some of the gaps about our understanding of human evolution. This is Paranthropus Boisei. Year of Discovery: 1959

Paleoanthropologists actually found the first fossils belonging to P. boisei in 1955, but it wasn’t until Mary Leakey’s 1959 discovery of the ‘Zinj’ skull (OH 5) that scientists knew what they had found was a new species.

There are still unanswered questions about P. boisei that may be answered with future discoveries. Questions like: What, specifically, did P. boisei eat? Probably Tiger Nuts.