Bigfoot
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The Bigfoot is a large, probably mythical creature said to inhabit the wilderness of the US Pacific Northwest and southwestern Canada. An alternative name is Sasquatch, which is derived from a Northwest Coast Native American term.
Many claims of eyewitness sightings have been made, and both home movies and photographs said to be of Bigfoot exist, although they are of poor quality. Many are also fakes. Ray Wallace claims to have produced copious amounts of such material from 1958 onward. He eventually admitted to a continuous prank that went wildly beyond his control. Wallace's family published many of the details following his death in 2002.
Most of the areas where the Bigfoot has been reported are close to known habitats of bears, notably including the Grizzly Bear. Grizzly bears are large and furry, and occasionally stand up on their hind legs, prompting the suggestion that many of the "Bigfoot" sightings were in fact bears. Some reports, however, originate with people familiar with bears, who claim that what they saw was not a bear. At least one film (the Patterson-Gimlin film) shows something that is definitely not a bear, and this film was for a long time taken to be the strongest evidence for Bigfoot. However, it was filmed under the advice of Ray Wallace (see above), who claimed that this, too was a fake�that the filmmakers believed it to be real, but that the creature seen is a friend of Wallace's in costume.
It has been claimed that the creator of the costume seen in the Patterson-Gimlin film was none other than the special effects legend, John Chambers. Chambers was an aquaintance of Ray Wallace and Bob Gimlin at the time of the filming and was the designer of the costumes seen in many of the original Planet of the Apes films. Chambers died in 2001, never having admitted an involvement in the hoax. Indeed, he stated at one point that such a suit was beyond his abilities. There have recently been others who have actually claimed responsibility for the suit, but none has offered any real proof.
Reports of large, bipedal hominid-like creatures from the remote wilderness exist from well before any of the hoaxers were born, however�including one from President Theodore Roosevelt. Unknown large primates have been reported in wilderness regions on every habitable continent except Antarctica. One of the more famous is the Yeti (or Abominable Snowman) of the Himalayas. Enthusiasts go so far as to theorize that at least some of these reports could be of present-day specimens of the giant ape Gigantopithecus.
The hypothesis that sasquatch might be a late surviving representative of the Gigantopithicus seems unlikely. Studies of the nearly nonexistant fossil remains of Gigantopithicus seem to indicate that it was a cousin to the genus Pongo, the Orangutans, having descended from the same sivapithecine line. As the likelihood that these modern animals would be descended from a bipedal animal does not seem plausible or probable to scientists, the current consensus view is that Gigantopithecus was a quadruped, walking on all fours like an Orangutan or Gorilla, not as a biped as is said of Bigfoot.�
Nor does the fossil record provide any support for the theory: there is ample fossil evidence in North America of prehistoric species of bear, cougar, moose, and even mammoth. Yet, aside from clearly human remains, there is no evidence of a prehistoric hominid.
Some Cryptozoologists have attempted to place Bigfoot into a taxonomic scientific classification. Grover Krantz suggested Giganthropus, a revival (or recycling) of the original name for Gigantopithecus. He seems to have made some connection between Bigfoot and Meganthropus, a beast that lived one and a half million years ago or so known from specimens in Java. Meganthropus seem to be an archaic form of Homo, but it exact place in the Homo line is not known.
Footnotes
- The method of locomotion for Gigantopithicus is not entirely certain, as no pelvis or leg bone has been found, the only remains of Gigantopithicus discovered are teeth and mandible. A minority opinion championed by Grover Krantz holds that the mandible shape and structure suggests bipedal locomotion. The only fossil evidence of Gigantopithecus we have, the mandible and teeth, are U-shaped, forming a parabolic arc as in bipedal humans, rather than V-shaped like the great apes. A clear fossil record of the transition between the v and u-shaped jaws exists in the australopithecines, the hominid genus preceding our own, all of which were bipedal. This would suggest that a parabolic jaw line has a positive adaptive impact on a bipedal animal. A fossil specimen of a Gigantopithecus pelvis and leg bones, or a cranium with an intact foramen magnum -- the hole that the spinal column attaches through -- would be necessary to conclusively resolve the debate. Modern writers have suggested knuckle-walking as the Gigantopithecus preferred method of locomotion, but have no more fossil evidence for the requisite skeletal adaptations for knuckle-walking than they do for bipedalism; less even. As knuckle-walking is an adaptation that appears in Africa after Sivapithecus branched off from the African ape line, this is a leap that should not have been made.
