CLASSICS (Bonus Episode): Dr. Jeff Meldrum!

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. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Bigfoot and Beyond. If you liked what you heard, please rate and review us on iTunes, subscribe to Bigfoot and Beyond wherever you get your podcasts, and follow us on Facebook and

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