Now, when what are your putting? I got a screen going on here, something just because my dog. Something killed your dog? My dog. We're flying through the or over the trade. I don't know how it did it, okay, damn, and I'm really confused. All as I saw was my dog coming over the fence, and they did when you hit the girl. I didn't see any car and all I saw was my dog coming over the fence. Damn. Why what are you're putting? We got someone
or something crawling around out here. Did you see what it was? It was standing up. I'm out here looking through the window now and I don't see anything. I don't want to go outside. Jesus, point you rey, hello, get the body out here? What point on the out there? It's thought of a bitch about sick Foot nine. I don't know he's out there yet. The booking right out o. This next article, written by Meg Walter, features doctor Jeff Meldrom and his ongoing research into the ever
elusive Sasquatch. I've always been Sasquatch curious. I try to err on the side of believing stories of unexplained sightings and bumps in the night, and as far as Bigfoot is concerned. If Narls are real and giant squid, why not a few big hairy creatures wandering the woods of the Pacific Northwest. I can't prove their existence, but I like living in a sasquatch positive paradigm.
So when the opportunity to interview one of the foremost sasquatch researchers presented itself, I hopped in the car and drove three hours to Pocatello to meet Professor Jeffrey Meldrom at Idaho State University. When I knocked on his office door, I expected an eccentric doctor Emmett Brown tie. Instead, I found a soft spoken man standing in a nondescript lab, A bonafide scientist. Belgrim ended up being one of the most serious academic people I've ever had the pleasure of meeting.
He spent two hours using a lot of words I later had to google to explain the scientific research supporting the existence of Bigfoot, an existence on which I am now sold. Meldrum's reluctant fascination with Bigfoot began in the fifth grade. His classmates were buzzing over footage captured by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin in northern California. Patterson and Gimlin filmed a large, fur covered ape like creature standing on two legs. Beldrom convinced his dad to take him to the Spokane Coliseum
where Patterson was presenting his documentary and answering questions from the audience. Meldrum left the screening with a copy of Patterson's book, Two Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist. The next year, Meldrom and his sixth grade peers were studying primates. His long suffering teacher asked the class to list some examples of primates,
and assassy, eleven year old, suggested Bigfoot. Instead of dismissing the comment, she engaged with the students and suggested someone right to report on the creature. Belgrium's hand shot up immediately, and he marched to the library to start the research that would eventually transform his career. Today, Mildrium is a professor
of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University. According to his biographical sketch, his research encompasses questions of vertebrate evolutionary morphology, generally primate locomotor adaptations, more particularly and the emergence of modern human bipedalism. Beldrium honed his research skills as he received a bachelor's degree in zoology from Brigham Young University, followed by a master's in zoology, then a doctorate in anatomical sciences from State University of New
York. He topped it off with the postdoctoral visiting Assistant professor position at Duke University Medical Center, a teaching position at Northwestern University Medical Center in Chicago, and finally he landed at Idaho State University, just close enough to the Pacific northwest to investigate a subject area where other scholars fear to tread. During Meldrum's study of paleoprimatology, he came across a few obscure references to giant South American
monkeys. He contacted Richard Greenwall, the director of the International Cryptozoology Society, to find out more. Breenwall invited him to California to evaluate some video footage of a large ape like creature. I undertook that project as an exercise in exposing the zipper. He was convinced a costume man in an ape suit was trapesing through the woods, fooling all the eager believers. But the more I dug into it, the more intriguing it becan. A friend Meldron made in
the Sasquatch searching circuit invited him to southeast Washington. It was there he saw Sasquatch footprints for the first time. His friend led him to a dirt road along the side of which were impeccable footprints, too large to be human, too human to be animal. Given his expertise, he's seen a good number of fossilized footprints and written extensive papers on various footprints from around the globe. His specific experience is matched only by a dozen or so other academics in the
entire world. And these Sasquatch footprints looked as real as any he'd ever seen. The prints were what Meldrom calls animated tracks with pressure ridges, tension cracks, and proof of movement and the toes. Beldrom wondered how his friend had managed to fake such convincing footprints. He photographed and cast the prints, and then, when he ultimately gave up trying to find the zipper, decided a sasquatch had indeed walked along the road the night before. Beldrim tells me the
hair on his arm stands up every time he tells the story. At that moment in his career, Meldrom had a choice to make. He had watched one of his predecessors, Grover Prantz, who had pursued the search for sasquatch, received ridicule and harassment. Pranz's promotion to full professor was delayed by decades. As Meldrom explains it, there was actually this little moment where this angel sits on my shoulder and says, do you really want to go down this
path? And the devil on the other shoulder says, how could you not Beldron now has over three hundred sasquatch footprint casts in his Pocatello lab, or more specifically, footprint casts from Sasquatch YETI and other relic cominoids. When I looked perplexed by the mention of multiple species of ape like giants, Mildron reaches for an activity book made for children, which unfortunately is probably entirely appropriate from
my intellectual understanding of the subject matter. He points to a comparative chart with corresponding footprints. There's Sasquatch YETI, Neanderthal, and the orange pendeck, small furry creatures said to inhabit the mountains of Indonesia. Beldron's focuses on the sasquatch found in North America. He believes they could live in areas where there is
sufficient cover and habitat to support them. These happen to be the areas where black bears can be found not only in the Pacific Northwest, but also in the inter Mountain West and down in Utah, Idaho and the Rocky Mountains. But he also believes they could be in the mountain ranges that surround the Colorado Plateau, the Boreal forests in Canada, the Great Lakes region, and down through Appalachia. Credible sasquatch sightings have been reported from all of these areas.
When he says credible, Mildron means reports made under good conditions are by credible witnesses, often corroborated with footprints, hair scatter, other signs of a large animal. According to Mildron, there had been a couple thousand credible reports. Sightings are rare, he explains because sasquatches are few in number. He estimates
there is one sasquatch for every one hundred black bears. Sasquatches are also solitary creatures, and Mildron believes a single male in habits and defends about one thousand square miles. I ask him what he believes is the most credible sasquatch sighting, and he tells me about his friend Julie Davis. She hiked the entire Continental Divide Trail through Colorado, accompanied only by her pet goats and dogs. While she was bushwhacking to reach a remote lake, her dogs hackles raised,
eyeing the tree line. She was prepared to encounter bears, but saw nothing. Thinking little of it, Davis set up camp. Later, the dogs began reacting to something, and again she assumed a bear was nearby. She scrambled to grab her bear spray and get the dogs safely in the tent. Crawling out from under the rain fly, Davis found her goats peering over the tarp. Following their line of sight, she saw just fifteen feet away and
ate and a half foot tall sasquatch. She described the sasquatch's appearance to Meldrum as a big, hairy linebacker with bulging muscles. Davis, whose account was first published in the Denver Post in two thousand and three, said, The sasquatch looked at her, then at the goats, and then back at her. Then they had a sort of subliminal connection, and the sasquatches demeanor softened.
Then a second, smaller sasquatch peeked out from behind the first. The two sasquatches turned and walked away, the larger in the front and the smaller behind. They glided gracefully toward the tree line, and just before they were out of sight, the larger sasquatch turn cocked his head back and let out a high pitch whistle. Meldrum himself has only had hints of sidings. The closest he's come was in Alberta, Canada, when he was using night vision
binoculars in very low ambient light. Something approached the camp, breaking brush and making the characteristic whistling vocalizations along the way. Although it was difficult to see exact detail through the grainy night vision lens, Noldrum could make out large swinging
arms attack matched to a large body smoothly stomping through the area. The creature walked off into the forest, where Mildron and his team later found large footprints The sasquatch had also taken the bait the team had set out the day before. Apples impaled on a tree branch that were now missing, with giant footprints leading up to and away from the tree. So is sasquatch human or animal? I ask, hoping to hear some weird, maybe slightly upsetting stories.
In response, Mildron doesn't disappoint He tells me about the almost, a creature that's said to inhabit the Altai Mountains of western Mongolia. They are rumored to wear clothing and trade with townspeople, in other words, more human than ape. Reports of the Sasquatchignetti, however, feel more akin to early sightings of the Lowland guerrilla, he says, a creature not officially discovered until the nineteen
hundreds. But then there are some strange anecdotes that don't quite align with either classification, like a story from World War Two about a Russian surgeon called in to examine a prison or captured during the war. The soldiers assumed their prisoner had been surgically altered. He was covered in hair, had a heavy brow and low slung head with a barrel chest. When the surgeon saw him, he proclaimed he was in fact not human and should be released into the wild.
Belgium reminds me that some of our oldest Western literary traditions feature half man half creatures, perhaps suggesting the idea of some kind of missing link think Beowulf or spider Man. Finally, because I just can't wait any longer, I asked the obvious question. This came from the Bible a Bigfoot. If anyone is qualified to verify or debunk this lore, it's this Latter day Saint expert,
an academic who has spent the last thirty years researching sasquatch. Meldrum laughs the myth as he explains, it tells a tale of the Latter day Saint apostle David W. Patton walking alongside big Foot for forty five minutes. Given the rate of human walks, he says, and the rate sasquatch walks and reported sightings, the chances of Patton keeping up with the creature for so long as very unlikely. Plus the published story was a second hand account told fifty
years after the alleged inciment. Bigfoot is probably not Kane curse to walk the earth for eternity. The king question is not the only quandary Meldrum gets from his fellow Latter day Saints and other Christians. He says, he gets pushed back from some who think the existence of sasquatch undermines their faith, to which
Mildron asks, do you feel threatened by a gorilla? He adds, it's a biological species, not some paranormal phenomenon, which is bad news for me, a weirdo who roots for confirmation of paranormal phenomena, but perhaps good news for the more serious sasquatch believers among us. He also gets pushback from fellow academics. As the Angel on his shoulder so many years ago predicted he would skeptics say the science starts when you have a body. Meldrom wholly disagrees the
science starts when you have a question. The science is the process of discovery, not the result of discovery. Show me an adam, show me a string, show me a black hole. Explaining that so much of science is the study of phenomena for which there is no body. It's an ongoing process and we're at a going in that path to discovery that has been followed by many others before us. Meldrum leads me to his adjacent lab, littered with
sasquatch pairphernalia. There's a cutout of Patty on the far wall, looking menacingly over her shoulder. He shows me a few footprint casts, pointing out the ridges and pressure points and the varying toe positions. Then he pulls out a giant circular cast with a raised center and two craters on either side. Meldrom giggles and says, sasquatch posterior. It's exactly the kind of thing I had
hoped to see when I made the cross state journey to his office. It was also the first time in our two hours together when I felt I could meet Meldrum on his intellectual level, or perhaps he was willing to stoop to mine. In the end, this very serious and very academic man made me more of a believer than any eccentric ever could This article, written by Victoria gil science correspondent for BBC News, made me ask the question, could this
chest beating behavior explain some of the noises that often accompany sasquatch encounters. Email Brian at pair normal World Productions dot com and share your opinion on this or any of the articles I've shared in this episode. Wild chimpanzees have their own signature drumming style, according to scientists. Researchers who followed and studied chimps in the yugend And rainforest found that the animals drum out messages to one another entree
roots. The scientists say that the signature rhythms allow them to send information over long distances, revealing who is where and what they are doing. The findings are published in the journal Animal Behavior. Doctor Katherine Hobatter from the University of Saint Andrew's explained that the wild apes use huge tree roots as a large wooden surface to drum on with their hands and feet. If you hit the roots really hard, it resonates and makes this big, deep, booming sound that
travels through the forest. She told BBC Radio fours Inside Science program. We could often recognize who was drumming when we heard them. It was a fantastic way to find the different chimpanzees we were looking for. Each male chimpanzee,
the scientists found uses a distinct pattern of beats. They combine it with with long distance vocalizations call panhoots, and different animals drum at different points in their call leave researcher on this study, PhD student Vesta Alutery from the University of Vienna, described how some individuals have a more regular rhythm like rock and blues
drummers, while some have more variable rhythms like jazz. I was surprised that I was able to recognize who was drumming after just a few weeks in the forest. But their drumming rhythms are so distinctive that it's easy to pick up on them. Vizaluterie described one young male chimp that researchers have named Tristan as the John Bonham of the forest. He makes these very long drumming bouts with lots of beats, and you can tell them from far away, so you
can just tell it's Tristan drumming. The animals also appeared only to use their signature rhythm when they were traveling. The researchers speculate that a chimp chooses whether or not to give his identity away if you're showing off to a group around you. If you're displaying, you might not necessarily want the big alpha male who's around the corner to know who you are, said doctor Hobader. She added that Understanding chimp's drum in this way could solve a long standing communication puzzle.
Wild chimpanzees greet each other when they meet, but they don't seem to say goodbye when they split off in the forest. But chimps might not need to say goodbye because they are effectively able to keep in touch while they're away. These long distance signals give the chimps away to check in with one another. It might help us to understand one of these things that we thought was a real difference between chimps and humans, and help us to understand why that
difference might have come about. Researchers have sequenced and analyzed the genome of a hominin from Red Deer Cave, located in southwest China, which was previously reported possessing mosaic features of modern and archaic common ends. The results indicate that the individual from Red Deer Cave is an anatomically modern human who exhibits genetic continuity to current populations and is linked deeply to the East Asian ancestry that contributed to first
Americans. In nineteen eighty nine, a team of Chinese archaeologists unearthed the remains of at least three individuals and Red Deer Cave or Malodong in China's jung And province. Carbon dating showed that the fossils were from about fourteen thousand years ago, a period of time when modern humans had migrated to many parts of the world. Among the fossils was a hominin skull cap with mosaic features of modern and archaic common ends. The shape of the skull resembled that of Neanderthals,
and its brain appeared to be smaller than that of modern humans. As a result, some anthropologists had thought the skull probably belonged to an unknown archaic human species that lived until fairly recently, or to a hybrid population of archaic and modern humans. Ancient DNA technique is a really powerful tool, said doctor BEng Sue, a researcher at the Cunnaming Institute of Zoology. It tells us quite definitively that the Red Deer Cave people were modern humans instead of an archaic species
such as Neanderthals or denisov Ends, despite their unusual morphological features. In the new study, doctor Sue and colleagues successfully extracted and sequenced ancient DNA from the Red Deer cave skull and compared it to that of people from around the world. They found that the fossil belonged to an individual that was linked deeply to
the East Asian ancestry of Native Americans. Combined with previous research data, this finding led the team to propose that some of the Southern East Asia people had traveled north along the coastline of present day eastern China through Japan and reached Siberia tens of thousands of years ago. They then crossed the Bearing Straight between the continents of Asia and North America and became the first people to arrive in the
New World. Genomic sequencing shows that the hominin belonged to an extinct maternal lineage of a group of modern humans whose surviving are now found in East Asia, the Indochina Peninsula, and Southeast Asia Islands. The finding also shows that during that time, hominin's living in southern East Asia had rich genetic and morphologic diversity, the degree of which is greater than that in Northern East Asia during the
same period. It suggests that early humans who first arrived in Eastern Asia had initially settled in the south before some of them moved to the north. The Trecula's footprints, potentially left by tetrapods, exhibit hominin like features and date back to the Late Miocene. They were discovered near the village of Trekilos in Western Crete, specifically in the chaine of Prefecture west of Kissimo's. The footprints are
believed to have been made by a bipedal hominin or an unidentified primate. The layer of rock in which the footprints were found as approximately five point seven million years old, making these footprints around two million years older than the earliest known hominin footprints. Subsequent research suggests that the footprints could be over six million years old. This discovery has led researchers to consider the possibility of hominin evolution occurring
outside of Africa, challenging the prevailing theory. Gerard Jurlinski of the Polish Research Institute in Warsaw, first discovered the tracks in two thousand two during a visit to Trekilos. He documented the footprints for future investigation as he had no plans to stay in the area. In twenty twelve, Gjerlinski obtained permission from the Greek government to conduct research in the area and returned to Trekilos with a team
of researchers to examine the footprints in detail. The team used techniques such as laser scanning and three imaging to study the footprints, comparing them to those of apes, bears, and humans. The age of the footprints was determined by examining the underlying sedimentary rock bed and fourmenipra. The study notes that the coastal rocks at Trichillos are part of the Platano's basin and consist of a series of
shallow marine Late Miocene carbonates and silos eclastics. The sedimentary rocks were formed around five point six million years ago during the Messenian salinity crisis. The researchers also found fourmen and for a dating back to eight point five million years ago. Based on these findings, the researchers estimated the footprints to be around five point
seven million years old. In twenty twenty one, a study use cyclostratigraphic data based on magnetic susceptibility to suggest that the Trichillos footprints are approximately six million years old, three hundred and fifty thousand years older than previously estimated. This places the Trecillo's footprints in the same time frame as the oroorin two genensus fossils found in Kenya. The measurements of the footprints range from three point seven to eight
point eight inches in length and indicated a southwest direction. These footprints displayed clear pressure indexes that resembled the plantigrade structure of modern Homo sapiens. The researchers also observed five digits in the imprints, classifying the track maker as pentadactyle and lacking claws. Since there was no evidence of four limbs, it was determined that
the track maker was bipedal. Further examination through three D printing and laser scanning revealed additional impressions, including a ball region, a pulling up motion of the foot, a HALLOCKX, and potential gaps between the first and other digit impressions. However, poorly preserved prints did not exhibit these gaps. The lateral digit
impressions gradually decreased in size, resulting in a strongly asymmetrical digital region. The HALLOCKX impression had a narrow neck and a bulbous asymmetrical distal path, indicating indexonic tracks. Worphometric analysis demonstrated that these footprints had distinct outlines, differentiating them from
modern non hominin primates and resembling those of hominins. Although these foot were younger than fossil records of hominins found in Chad dating back around seven million years, their discovery challenges the prevailing theory that early hominins were exclusively present in Africa. The morphology of the prints suggests that the track maker could be a basal member
of the Homanini clade. However, as creedies geographically distant from the known range of prehominans, there is a possibility that these footprints represent a previously unknown Late Miocene primate that independently evolved human like foot anatomy. When attempting to publish their study, Julinski and his team faced harsh criticism due to their findings contradicting the
widely accepted theory of early hominins evolving solely in Africa. The triculous footprints potentially represent an early hominin or primate species that developed hominin like feet outside of Africa. This raises the possibility of convergent evolution, where unrelated species adapt similar traits. However, substantial evidence is required to support this interpretation. Some doubts were even raised regarding whether these tracks were footprints at all, leading rejections from numerous
scientific journals when the studies findings were submitted for publication. During their attempts to publish their research on the footprints, the researchers faced aggressive responses, criticism, and rejection from reviewers and editors. They felt that the peer review process was not genuine and that there was an effort to silence them. After facing multiple rejections, the study was eventually published in the journal Proceedings of the Geologists Association.
Shortly after the publication, eight prints were stolen from the rock. It was later discovered that a high school teacher was responsible for the theft, and he was arrested by the authorities in Crete. The stolen prints were eventually found in his house. Some experts, like David Begun and Robin Crompton, have expressed skepticism about the footprints belonging to a human ancestor. They believed that while the footprints indicate a bipetal organism, they may not necessarily be human ancestors,
but could be made by a member of the grade eighth clade. They argue that multiple fossilized footprints need to be found and analyzed to accurately determine the species. Beldrum and Sarmiento, who studied the Trachillo's prints, disagreed with Jurlinski's claim that the prints were made by a primate or even a vertebrate. They argued that Jurlinski did not provide objective criteria for identifying the prince as primate prints and
that the prints lacked consistent and repetitive details. They also criticized the lack of exploration of alternative agents that could have produced the prints and the failure to address missing data and comparisons of non homologous print outlines. Beldrum and Sarmiento concluded that there was insufficient evidence to support the claim that the prints were made by an animal, with bilateral symmetry suggesting that they could have been made by non vertebrate
life forms are non organic agents. William jan Zacharas and Lucas Learns have conducted a new analysis of the footprints, suggesting that they originated approximately three million years ago. However, they raise an intriguing question regarding the nature of these footprints. Were they created by hominids or are they simply natural formations resembling footprints. The researchers argued that the shallow marine environment in which these footprints were found would
have posed significant challenges for hominins or bipedal primates to traverse. They proposed that if these creatures did indeed cross this terrain, the wave action would likely have erased any evidence of their presence. The only possibility for the preservation of these footprints would be if they were made at the high tide line during a period of low sea level coinciding with one of the glacial periods that occurred every forty
one thousand years during that time. Furthermore, the researchers highlight the geological history of Crete. They explained that Crete has been an island since the Late Tortonian. To the south lies the deep Levantine Basin, while the marine South Aegean Basin is situated to the north. The basin formed due to the extension of the Aegean lethosphere, reaching a depth of approximately a thousand meters north of Crete.
Based on reconstructions of the Aegean lithosphere by Van Hens, Virgin and Schmidt, it is evident that at one point Crete was separated from mainland Greece and Turkey by vast stretches of deep water spanning at least one hundred kilometers. This finding is supported by the discovery of deep marine set months on the islands of Cather located between Crete and the Peloponnese, as well as Carpathos, situated between
Crete and Turkey. These findings strongly suggest that these islands could not have served as stepping stones for bipedal dispersal, nor could they have been part of any land bridges connecting Crete to the mainland. In conclusion, Zacharas and learns reevaluation of the footprint's age and their analysis of the geological context surrounding Crete raise intriguing
questions about their origin. The researchers proposed that if these footprints were indeed created by hominants, they must have been made under specific conditions during a low sea level stand at the climax of a glacial period. Additionally, the geological evidence supports the notion that Crete has been an isolated island for a significant period, making it unlikely that it played a role in the dispersal of bipedal creatures. Hi remember