CLASSICS (Bonus Episode): Dr. Jeff Meldrum!

(00:02):
Big Food and Beyond with Cliff andBubo. These guys are your favorites,
so like to say subscribe and readit five star and me grgeous question today
listening watching RENEM always keep its watchingand now you're hosts Cliff Berrickman and James

(00:29):
Bubo Fay. All right, soeverybody listening, please welcome doctor Jeff Melgerum
from Idaho State University, professor ofanatomy and I think physiology, but he's
definitely in the anthropology department. Butgod, if you don't know who Jeff
is, I don't know why you'relistening to this. So doctor Meldrum,
thank you so much for coming onthe podcast and sparing an hour or so
of your time today. Oh youbet, I'm honored. Thank you for

(00:51):
the invitation. Thank you, Jeff. Yeah, we really really appreciate it.
And of course, Jeff, youdo 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 youknow your academic work put you on the
map, and that's an entirely differentthing. Well thanks, Yeah, it's

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all perspectives have some douthor I thinkso well now, Doctor Meldrim. We
were talking before we started the recordingthat you've actually been catching up on the
Finding Bigfoot episodes, Like what possessedyou to do that? Well, I
had, I had some time onmy hands, and I just you know,
wanted to be able to see what'sbeen done. That's the thing.

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I mean, I had a senseof of what you all were up to,
but had only only watched I thinkhe 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 questionsabout maybe a particular region that has caught

(01:55):
my attention or or you know,some encounter, some account or report has
h has emerged, I've gone backand looked at some of your experiences and
and uh, you know a littleabout the geography, the town hall meetings,
it all. It all just helpsme to put myself, you know,

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in the in the environment, inthe in the picture a little bit.
And it's been really fun to knowyou guys better from from the perspective
of your activities and and approaches tothe evidence. It's been a fun ketchup
and some novel ideas other attractive sasquatchtoo. I know I watched that episode.

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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, weknow that, but like, who's going
to watch you know, Cliff sittingin the tree stand for four hours silently.
That's lame, that's bad TV been. I work for their animals,

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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 youknow, smarter than the average bear.
As Yogi would say, I thinkthere is an element of curiosity and interest
in in our activities and the sitesand smells of campsites or cabins and backyard

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barbecues. I think I think allthose elements have the potential. Uh you
know, if you're in the rightplace at the right time, or if
the sasquatch is in the right placeat the right time, two to poke
his nose or hit her nose intouh, into our business. That's that's
one way make it interesting when Itheir survival needs like calorie intake, and

(03:43):
they have you know, a suitableplace to stay, I mean once they
you know, if they if they'rein a really rich abundant food sources,
they can fill up a day's worsethan four or five hours. Like what
else are gonna be the rest ofthe If there's some interesting thing and they're
gonna they want to see what's goingon in their territory, they'll come.
They'll come, They'll into something likethat, like some weird attraction. Yeah.
And that's a really good point too, Bobo, And one that maybe

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turn on its head for a minuteis for your listeners to think about when
they you know, I have peoplewho come and lay claim to a sasquatch,
you know, poking around, harassingthem or disturbing them, depending on
their frame of mind, all nightlong and complaining about they're not getting any
sleep because these things are coming aroundevery night all night long. Well,

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if you stop and think about it, that just doesn't make sense if it
was a real flesh and blood animalthat like you point out has needs.
It has to meet those daily caloricrequirements. It has to stay warm,
it can't be exposed to the elements, you know, indefinitely, and so
forth. And I think people needto think about that when they're evaluating what

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they're interpreting as a squatch activity.To borrow a phrase, uh and uh,
that's important. So I think that'san important point. Yeah. And
you know, one of the biggestthings that stands out to me with all
the witness interviews in the nine yearsof finding Bigfoot, in my ongoing Bigfoot
little world that I live in here, is that people I speak to have

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a tremendous amount of not all byany 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 reallydifficult 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 withwith investigators and and I will repeatedly point

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out now, is that an observation? Did you do you have documentation of
that statement? Or are you imposingan interpretation on your experience, you know,
putting you know, projecting yourself intothe supposed mind of the sasquatch whenever,
and this is you know, quiteif all our cards are on the
table. This is one of thecriticisms that's often leveled not only Finding Bigfoot,

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but at other documentaries out there.Documentary series is when assertative statements are
made by the cast members that sesquatchlike this, or sesquatch do that,
or as if. Even my wifethe other night, who was indulging me
in watching a few of these shows, she goes, how could they possibly

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know that? Why do they saythings like that? Because I know that's
exactly right, but sometimes people don'teven realize it. I mean, I
was in the in the pickup truckdriving with this fellow and he was going
on relating some of these past experiencesand 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 fromobservation into speculation or you know, or

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into interpretation. Boy, you know, my head just kept popping up there,
like I very often feel like raisinga finger when people do that,
but it's probably not the same fingeryou would choose. I was going to
specify it was an index finger.Yeah, it might have made that.
It might have made the point witha little more force if I had used
another digit. That's the natural humancondition is to I mean, that's what

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a human naturally does is see Ifrom You're going to see it from your
perspective. Everyone has a point ofview from your past experiences, your education.
And that's where the science has reallycome in is because science, that's
what they did is is cut offyour 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. Wewe just like you say, we naturally

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sort of connect the dots and fillin the gaps, and you know,
our brains do this. I justwas 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 nerveenters the back of the eyeball and

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there are no photoreceptive cells in thatspot. 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 inthe other. But you can do this
fun little experiment to show how yourbrain is so wired in order to fill
in the missing information. And youprobably have seen these little tests where there's

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a black dot and little X,and you cover one eye and then you
move that You move the image closerand 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 ofcross hatching. But when the black dot
disappears, there's not just a cloudthere, there's cross hatching. The cross

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hatching pattern is perfectly complete. Soyour brain sees what the information is surrounding
the missing data, and it fillsin perfectly well with with that information what
it expects must be in that missingspace. And so we do that with
other things too, with stories,and so it's it's all too easy for

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a witness to take these very tenuous, you know, bits of observation and
weave them together into a tapestry andthen 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,

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and I always add on even ifit's not there. Yeah, Yeah,
because if you're looking for something andyou expect to find it, or you
expect bigfoots in your backyard, oryou expect big whatever, they're going to
be there, whether they are ornot. 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'rekind of a mythological species as well,

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you know, like these storytellings andhow the stories relate to our regular life.
You know that that's our foundation essentiallyas a species. And I guess
it's pretty hard to shake, evenin our so called enlightened era, I
guess sure, even and even inscience. 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

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notoriety based on her research about howanthropologists tell stories, how they create these
these epic, these hero epics intheir portrayal of the evolution of humanity,
and you know, forging out fromthe protection of the forest into the into

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the dangerous planes where there are theselarge predators, and so forth and so
forth, and so even even whenwe try to impose discipline of scientific methodology
to our approach, we still canfall prey to that tendency to try to

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craft and narrative that makes sense.I mean, I quite honestly a lot
of the paranormal if I can getmyself in trouble here with half your audience
and yep. So I think that'swhat leads to some of the acceptance of
paranormal explanations is people find their inabilityto explain in normal terms their experiences and

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so giving up on that, theyresort to extraordinary claims or paranormal explanations.
You know, if I can't findwhere 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 whathappens. Is the only explanation for you
know, disregard the fact that I'mnot a good tracker and I can't follow

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a track way to save my life, you know. But I'll come with
I'll believe that the sasquatch just poofedinto it into an orb of light and
floated away. You know. Buton the on the other side of the
flip of that coin, I guessthe other side of that coin is that
we can actually mine the folklore ofthe past to hopefully find some information about
Sasquatches. And that brings to mindanother finding Bigfoot episode. I don't know

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if you watched I think it wasin Utah. When we were there,
we visited doctor Lynn McNeil I believeher name, was a professional folklorist,
you know, PhD and folklore andall that jazz at the university there,
and on our day off, shebasically allowed me access to their folklore files
and they had files on bigfoot stuff, is that right? Yeah? Yeah,

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And I went to the library andpaid 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 bigfootstuff as well as a Native and indigenous
stories. But yeah, so thatkind of gives us another end for some
sort of research about the real situationas well. So those state Utah state,

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Okay, yeah, no, thatI agree and I and I you
know, those elements are certainly veryimportant and they're and they're part of the
human experience, so they are ofvalue there. There even have been some
field zoologists who have recognized the utilityof relying upon or resorting to rather maybe

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not relying upon, but using asa starting off point the folklore, the
stories about the wildlife in a givenregion that the indigenous people talk about,
and oftentimes their ability to discriminate andidentify species, even down to very fine
distinctions, is often remarkably accurate.I mean a lot of good field biologists.

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The first thing they'll do is they'llgo to a village when they're when
they're exploring for new species or tryingto find out what the endemic species are,
and who do you interview? Youinterview the best hunter, the one
that brings in the most, youknow, the most successfully brings in the
game, or or brings in rareand exotic animals, and you go through
the litany of what they're familiar with, and it's it's a very useful tool.

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So it's not the folklore and indigenousknowledge is not something to be to
be treated lightly. Stay tuned formore Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bogo
will be right back after these messages. Yeah, people throw out the baby

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with the bath where you know theytalked to me and said, well,
Kittie Kyte pulled down the moon andcreated this. You know, they're like
kin of these people think that kitepulled down the moon out of the sky,
you know, because they throw everythingout with it, you know.
But yeah, you look at thewhole total of what they say, like
whistling in the dog are, youknow, knocking our things that we can
observe today, They're they're right onright absolutely. I think one of one

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of the interesting little tidbits that Igleaned from John Bendernagel's book was he drew
attention to the fact that while manyof the names given to Bigfoot or Sasquatch
by the indigenous people are translate toyou know, the hairy man or the
wild man of the woods, alot of them actually point to natural behaviors,

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you know, the eaters of cockles, and you know, other terms
that describe aspects of their their naturalhistory. You know, here in Idaho,
one of the Shoshone references is theeater of children, which is a
theme that's pervasive through many different tribalgroups throughout the Pacific Northwest and in the

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Mountain West. And so you know, perhaps based on real incidents somewhere in
in the mists of time, wecertainly know there's precedent amongst the living great
apes for that very behavior, snatchingof human children or toddlers and consuming them.
And so it's not I don't thinkit's a just so story. It's

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actually probably has a based on agrain of truth of a real experience that
then became you know, since giventhe fact that it was such a traumatic
experience, became a central theme inidentifying these beings. It could be pretty
rare, but it just the factit could happen seven hundred years ago,
it could happen seven years ago,and back before they had TV in Western

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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 characteristicYeah, because that's a pretty distinctive though,
right exactly. Yeah, it couldbe rare. Let's hope it's rare.
Yeah, well, you know whatit sounds like, and you probably

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have thoughts on this. But likeeverything 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 ofstill in the same spot. Like I
was digging through my files a littlea few months ago and I ran across
that essay and I think it wasWarren Thompson from the Bay Area Group.
I think it was Warren Thompson,or it might have been Archie Buffy.

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I think it was Warren. Andhe 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 onso far from here. And I think
that was written in seventy one orseventy two, So like, what do
you think the state of bigfooting istoday? And then is that a good
thing or a bad thing? Ordo we have a direction? Or are

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we just like treading water? Well, yes, it feels that way sometimes
that we are just kind of treadingwater. And I know that's been kind
of weighing on me lately, especiallyI guess as I get closer to that
horizon of retirement and so forth,and and wondering what what what legacy?

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What mark have I left? Andand and what will be the trajectory thereafter?
But you know, I I've hadthat same experience. I wrote a
similar kind of essay with Richard Greenwellwhen we put together a state of the
science of Sasquatch. It ended upnot getting published. It turns out there

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was a curmudgeon on their scientific advisoryboard 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 itif we want. But anyway it was,
it did not get published. Butreflecting back on the things included there,

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You're right, there are a lotof fundamental aspects. Well even It's
funny is the next book that I'mworking on is actually the more it takes
shape and as I as I formulateand flesh out the things that I want
to accomplish, in some ways,I realized in some ways I was redoing

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what Ivan Sanderson did when he didhis global survey of subhuman creatures primates around
the world. And it's interesting howso many of the things that he concluded
seemed to have been borne out bythe accumulating data that we have. I

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guess what I'm hoping that we areaccomplishing as this goes along, So we're
not just treading water, not justdoing the same old, same old.
But as a scientist, I'm tryingto lay some more credible foundational works and

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trying to orchestrate others undertaking such things, you know, so that things like
more incisive evaluation of the Patterson Gilllanfilm, for example. I mean,
it's interesting how as time has goneforward we have increasing these sophisticated methods of

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addressing what is in that film,and as well as a broader scientific context
from which to interpret what's in thefilm. But you know my work with
the Footprints, there are still lingeringthings that really need to be kind of
codified and formulated and archived in sucha way that they're accessible to researchers down

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the pike. But as far asnew 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 ifthey're born out in the future or not.
But I think that the two prongs. One is in the field utilizing

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the ever increasingly improved drone technologies andthermal imaging, and we see that.
I mean, light ar is stillanother opportunity. There's little snippets of that
that show up on some of thedocumentaries, but I think light ar has
an opportunity to provide some further insightsand in combination with that kind of aerial

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survey, helping to focus at usingGIS 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, thepotential are expanding, probably geometrically, and

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there's a couple of aspects, acouple of challenges. I think that that
addresses. One is we have thisdead end, not dead end, but
we have this roadblock to previous DNAattempts analysis attempts which usually focus on hair,

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and the lack of a cellular adultin that hair makes it very challenging
to get DNA. That's further complicatedby 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 asDNA sequence could be very very small.

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I mean, we could be talkingless than one percent. I recently kind
of pulled out of the air alittle analogy to help people to visualize what
this means. Imagine, and wehad an advance calendar. Everyone knows what
an advance calendar is. A littlepanel with windows or doorways that open up
in the twenty four days leading upto Christmas, with a little goodie behind

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each door, and the kids wouldanxiously wait for the next day when they
could open and take that little pieceof chocolate or a little goodi or small
toy or something. Well, imagineyou had an advance calendar that had one
hundred windows instead of twenty four Andwell, let's let's break it down even
a little better than that. I'dsay a thousand windows. So a thousand

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windows, and if each of thosewindows represents a percentage of difference, and
certainly that's not you know, thedifference is not homogeneously scattered throughout the genome.
It can be in clusters and soforth, or comprise distinctive gene markers

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that are localized particular points in thegenome. But the point is, well,
you've got this advance calendar and there'sonly 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, becausethat's all the funding, and that's all

(24:18):
the time your research your molecular biologistis willing to devote to it. And
so what are the odds that theten little doorways you open up stumble upon
one of those ten out of athousand windows that will have useful information.

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Yeah, and if you don't findthat, 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 itwas a gigantic ptification off that line,
like if it's not one less thanone percent like we think it's in the

(25:03):
homo line, what percent, likewould it be like you you do well,
then it would fall if it's Ifwe're correct in our current opinion consensus
opinion that Gigantopithecus was most closely relatedof the living apes today was most closely
related to the orangutan, as wassuggested by some DNA research recently. Now,

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that doesn't mean it's really really closeto the orangutan compared to gorillas and
chimps. It means it's just it'sjust somewhere on that side of the fence.
Since the orangutan diverted lot lineage divergedfrom the hominoid trunk, and so
it would therefore be bracketed somewhere inthat range of distinction. So like for

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chimps, values you'll see reported dependingon which part of the genome is being
examined anywhere from you know, ninetyfour percent to ninety eight percent identical to
humans. And so I think giganticbitic is you know, we could be
talking a percentage or two or threemore distinctive than if it was say a

(26:12):
paranthropist or some some offshoot of arobust australopithecy of some sort, at which
I think is another viable hypothesis tobe to be considered. So I guess
my question is if it was gigantoline, we would know that already. Not
necessarily, No, I don't thinkso, because again the studies that have

(26:37):
been done. I mean, forexample, I I did. I pulled
some soil samples from the nest sitesup to the Olympic Peninsula that the Olympic
Project has been examining, and thosewere examined by Todd Disstel at NYU,

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and basically he looked at one portionof a gene in the mitochondrial genome and
he chose that one because it's agood one to differentiate the species of mammals,
and it works fine, he pointedout. When I queried, he

(27:17):
pointed out that it identifies or distinguishesbetween humans and Neanderthals. There are like
three markers in that stretch that separateNeanderthals from humans. So you would think
if sasquatch is less related to usthan a Neanderthal, that it should pick

(27:40):
up differences there. But the problemwith that is the point that I made
earlier is that these differences aren't justscattered regularly throughout the genome, and even
the comparison between you know, whenyou use Neanderthals as a benchmark, Neanderthals

(28:02):
and humans have evolved one way andare differing ways, resulting in the three
markers that he's talking about. Thethree substitutions not even really markers, but
I can call the markers, butsingle nucleotide substitutions. Who's to say that
a sasquatch would have had those andmore? You know, it could have

(28:26):
evolved in ways that didn't affect thatstretch of DNA that was being compared between
humans and Neanderthals. So there's anassumption made there, and I've brought this
up. This is kind of aninteresting that I brought this up with numerous
geneticists that I've come in contact with, asking this question. Is the question

(28:49):
being are we doing enough? Imean, is there is there confidence?
Are we justified in confidently including thatthe studies that have been done so far,
which usually produce one of two conclusions. Either when human DNA quote unquote

(29:11):
human DNA is identified, it's assumedtherefore that the witnesses have handled it and
contaminated it in such a way thatwe're picking up their DNA, or that
it's simply a misidentified human hair that'sbeen shed, you know, it's just
cast about in the environment, orone of the investigators picked up their own

(29:32):
hair or whatever, you know.But the third option that is not really
raised is that we haven't sequenced enoughto differentiate between what appears to be human
and what actually is human. Andso these geneticists have uniformedly said, oh,

(29:53):
you're absolutely right. If I weredoing it, they say, I
would sequence the entire mitochondri genome andat 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 anda lot more work, and a lot
more funding and time. And that'sbeen the problem. Is the funding not

(30:17):
necessarily an insurmountable problem, but toget 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 twoyears 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, rightthat did the DNA study at Lockness and
all that about the eels. Hesaid it would be four hundred and fifty

(30:40):
thousand dollars correct to do you,well, somewhere in that range. He
said, two hundred to four hundredthousand dollars for a multi year project basically,
and to do it, he wouldwant to have a post stock and
maybe a couple of gradual students devotedto the project. Because he's pulled in
so many different directions you couldn't devotehis attention singly to this one project.

(31:03):
And exactly he was one of thegeneticists. 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 gotthe dampers put on them when COVID
hit, and so the past yearit's sort of stalled, and he's very

(31:26):
eager to come over to assist withsample collection and so forth, and so
until travel restrictions are lifted and it'smore feasible for him to do that ad
vice versa than We're still in thevery formative stages of those conversations. But

(31:52):
I think that's the way, that'sthe way to go. I mean,
it tackles two things. One,it tackles the issue that we've been discussing
right here. But then even moreimportantly perhaps is the fact that we're looking
for the proverbial moving needle in ahaystack, and given the rarity of these
creatures, it's just you know,finding the sample, collecting the tissue is

(32:19):
very challenging. And if we canemploy a technique that takes a much broader
approach to collecting DNA from the environmentinstead of from directly from the donor,
then it ups the odds of winningthe lottery. Stay tuned for more Bigfoot

(32:43):
and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo willbe right back after these messages. One
of the other challenges I think isthat the thing that's kind of missing from
a lot of eyewitness accounts or youknow, bigfoots make this structure, bigfoot
broke this tree, bigfoot business,or that is a one to one correlation

(33:04):
between an actual sasquatch and the thingyou'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 goodbet, I guess. The other which
brings up my thought of how viableis it to collect the soil from underneath
footprints or perhaps the soil on footprintsthat you have to clean off later,

(33:27):
like from the cast. How viablea 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 anyenvironmental DNA sample that's taken. And with

(33:52):
the hope with the caveat, youknow that that you know the assumption that
there is some sasquat contribution, andyou're right, the nests we think based
on the circumstantial evidence and and andsome of the associative evidence that they were
made by sasquatch, but we don'tknow for certain, And so not finding

(34:15):
sasquatch DNA in that doesn't rule outthe existence of sasquatch, but it just
it may cast out on them asbeing the source of these nests. But
yes, collecting samples from under footprintsis another way to up the odds.

(34:37):
You know, I don't have agood 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 oilsand secretions and so forth that are potentially
could transfer to the soil surface.And you know, I always have this

(35:00):
vision of any any animal walking alongand having its appendages literally just kind of
melting away into the soil as itleaves 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'sshed left behind. Otherwise we would just

(35:21):
kind of whiddle away, wouldn't wedisappear? So it's going to be a
real trace. And although you knowthey're there, there certainly is precedent and
there was that example. I waslooking for it actually in between watching episodes
of Finding Big. But I wastrying to find that episode where the researcher
collected the or the documentary not theepisode the documentary where the researcher collected the

(35:46):
snow under the Yetti footprint and identifiedsome 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 turnedout to be bear And you know,

(36:07):
I've identified that researcher, but didthe DNA on that. I'm always my
my know, my ears always prickup 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. Theretribution. Jeff, if you get someone,

(36:32):
say half a million dollars, andyou're talking about one thousand windows like
the advent calendar, like with athousand slots, how many windows would you
be able to open with Like Isay, you gave half million dollars in
these geneticis Well, according to doctorGamble, that's that's what he'd need to
conduct thousand well staffed, Yeah,to open all thousand, Yeah, to

(36:54):
conduct a well staffed study that wouldallow him to examine. And I would
assume, you know, in theconversations I've had with him, I'm assuming
that that that's his intent is todo as much sequencing as is necessary.
But you wouldn't know it's to damagesample or not get no sample until he

(37:17):
got so far into it, right, So you could burn up a bunch
of your capital, Yeah, youcould, and then may have to drop
back ten yards and hunt and gathersome additional samples and turn your attention to
those. I mean, I'm surehe would that his research design would not

(37:37):
be focused on a single sample.I'm sure it would involve the collection of
mini samples. I mean, justlike they did with Locke Nest. They
filtered water from probably hundreds, ifnot thousands of locations at various depths in
the lake in order to make avery thorough survey of the of the water

(38:01):
in the lake. So it wasn'tjust you know, one sample, one
one test tube that many many timesrepeated. Didn't you guys get didn't you
you thought your best bet was somelike real remote mountain lake and the rockies
like. I don't know if itwas a John Manchinski that got it or
somebody I thought you thought your bestchance for these samples you got some Mason

(38:23):
jars or something from up and uphigh ward. No one goes was that
it? Well, no, wehadn't to talk much beyond. I mean,
I think the study would would dowell to start with things like the
nests that have been found in theOlympic project, you know, and if
if another set of very fresh nestscould be found, I think that would

(38:44):
be an ideal place. Or asyou 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 fromthose footprints beneath those footprints and collect
that, uh, then that wouldbe another ideal situation. I think.

(39:09):
You know, some of the areour previously tried methods like double sided tape,
you know, industrial strength double sidedtape, and the hair snags that
John Minzinski designed and and other youknow there are, uh, there are
tried and true if you will,hair collecting techniques for wildlife studies and and

(39:32):
those can be perhaps modified so asto lessen the chance of interaction with common
wildlife, and you know, choosingthe proper height or the proper types of
baits or or whatever in order topotentially engage a sasquatch preferentially over you know,
over a bear, a porcupine,or a marmot or something you mentioned

(39:58):
earlier on the drag Atipithecus that waspublished not too long ago, putting them
directly in liners at least closely relatedto Shevapithecus and therefore orangtans later. And
that was a study of the proteins, if I remember correctly, proteonics is
that the right word? Since wedo have a small sampling or small set
of hairs that have been attributed tosasquatches or at least great apes collected in

(40:22):
North America of some sort, couldthat same technology of studying the proteins be
applied to the hair and get someidea of the lineage there. Well,
that's an interesting proposition I really hadn'tthought about. And if the keratin and
the hair would lend itself to thatkind of analysis, and if there are

(40:45):
sufficient distinctions in the structure of keratinin hair between mammal species, that those
differentiations could be made, and honestly, off the top of my head,
I'm not sure sure. Another approachwith hair that has been discussed I've discussed

(41:06):
with people who are involved in thistype of research is a stable isotope analysis,
where stable isotopes of various molecules areare deposited in the hair and produce
a very distinctive signature based on theparticularly the diet of the organism growing that

(41:31):
hair. And that while this isnot a precise science in the sense that,
well, the science is precise,but the identifications are not precise,
but that the correlations are not preciseand so and but baselines and generalizations can

(41:52):
be made about various taxonomic groups basedon the signature of the stable isotopes,
and those technologies are getting more andmore accessible. And so I've had people
who do that kind of research whohave expressed interest in and willingness to maybe

(42:12):
try their hand at that so wecould determine that, you know, these
alleged sasquatch hairs have a have astable isotope signature that is quite distinct from
humans in that region and from bearsand you know, the gross morphology of
the hair is such that there aren'tvery many potential candidates for producing that hair.

(42:42):
I mean, when you have ahair that's three to four inches long,
four to five inches long, thathas all primate characteristics rather than the
features of the long guard hair ofa mammal like a bear or an elk
or a fox or coyote. Youknow, there aren't many animals that mammals
that would produce a hair of thosedimensions and those configurations. So you're only

(43:08):
you immediately, just by the processof elimination on the basis of the morphology,
narrow it down to just three orfour candidates in my mind, in
my book. You know, there'ssome people say, oh, you've got
to test, You've got to makesure, you know, but I mean,
you know, we can rule outall the little tiny rodents that have

(43:28):
hair that's only a quarter of aninch long and much finer than any hair
from a potential sasquatch. Do youhave 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 morefoot casts. I mean, it's got
to be a factor in twenty toone. How many how many hair how

(43:49):
many hairstyles are you aware of thatyou think are legitimate? You know,
I don't have a precise count foryou, But before doctor Fahrenbach retired,
he felt like he had somewhere betweena dozen and two dozen samples that in
his book met the quote gold standardwhich he arrived at, and that was
basically, you know, they looklike human, they have parallel sides,

(44:14):
they're about sixty five microns in diameter, they lack a cellular medulla, they
have a wear pattern, there's notaper to the tip. They have some
very distinctive combination of pigment granules andlozenges. They show a range of variation

(44:34):
between proportions of view melanin and falemilanin. So you get all the color
phases from almost white through beige andbuckskin to reddish brown and then dark brown
and black almost mahogany black with areddish hint to it. So, yeah,

(44:55):
somewhere between twelve and twenty four inthat rain, and I've identified additional
ones that when we really had topush 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 theknowledge now to definitively say gold standard if

(45:20):
you have enough to judge yourself nowwithout 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 anumber of samples, and of course not
all of them actually, you know, it runs about one in ten are

(45:45):
of interest and one in ten matchthe gold standard. So I wouldn't say
definitively it's always a it's a bitof an art form. I mean,
it's still anatomy and you put themunder the microscope and there are features,
but there's but the art, theart and the skill comes into play because

(46:08):
of the variation of the appearance ofhair on a single individual depending on where
it's collected, you know, Imean with a human their head hair or
body hair, pubic hair, youknow, or eyelashes or eyebrows, and
that's about it. But you knowon your dog, the hair on its

(46:28):
back, the hair on its belly, that you know, all those they
have different appearances and different pigmentation andbanding patterns and so forth, and and
but you know, it's it's prettystraightforward. If it's a fur bearing mammal,
which again the candidates that are onthe proper scale to potentially be suspected

(46:54):
or attributed to a sasquad, theyhave fur, not just hair. And
that distinction refers to the differentiation ofthe outer guard hairs, the longer,
coarser hairs, which provide mechanical protectionbasically that's their principal function, So they're

(47:15):
longer, stiffer courser. The underfuris the insulative layer. So those hairs
are very fine, the kind ofkinky sometimes to create that sort of pufft
appearance rather than laying down flat.And those are very very different. But

(47:36):
when someone sends a sample of atuft 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 stickanother microscope and point out all the distinctions
between the two types and from atypical primate hair that yeah, but when

(48:00):
you I mean, yeah, theimage is pretty distinctive. And when you've
got a sample that matches the goldstandard and these things. That's what's crazy
about it. Is so compellingly crazyabout it, I guess, is that
here are samples that are collected byindependent investigators that are from various geographical regions

(48:28):
across the map, and yet theyall look like they came off the same
critter. They all have the exactsame morphology. And that's really quite compelling.
I mean, that's what kind ofset us down this road. When
I first met and conferred with doctorFahrenbach, we both were kind of puzzling
over this situation with the hair,and there were various reports that had been

(48:51):
disseminated. Invariably, the reliable reportscame 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, becausethe way you identify hair is to compare
it to a known standard. Well, if there is no known standard for

(49:14):
sasquatch, then what you end upwith this enigmatic hair. It doesn't match
anything else, but you have nostandard to match it to, so it's
indeterminate. Well, we thought,if these hairs, if there is a
population of hairs out there, asample of hairs that all defy attribution to

(49:36):
any commonly known wildlife out there,there must be some common denominators that discriminated
that set it apart. So westarted backtracking. We actually contacted some of
the sources of these reports and askedfor more detailed descriptions of their samples.
Low and behold, there were youknow, they had these same characteristics that

(49:57):
I already rattled off, and acrossthe 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 ofcharacters. And sure enough they did,
and that sort of became the goldstandard, as Hannah referred to it,

(50:20):
So everything else he would find,you know, that became our default standard,
even though we didn't have, youknow, claims to the contrary,
any examples of hairs physically pulled outof a sasquatch and unidentified as such with
which to compare it. So I'mpretty confident, I mean no hair,

(50:43):
Like I said, anatomy is anatomy, and we have hairs that defy attribution
to any form of wildlife. Howcan ignore that? I don't understand if
something like other hair like hair specialists, zoologists, whatever, if you show
them this, what, how dothey just dismiss it? Well, it
boils down to the fact that,and this is why Hender was always a

(51:07):
little bit reluctant to go out onthe 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. Imean some of them consistently. The sasquatch
hair is about the same coarseness asaverage human head hair. Now, obviously

(51:30):
there's variation there. You know,some people have very stick, stiff,
wooly hair, coarse hair, somehave very fine hair. Some humans even
have an acellular medula. Usually it'sit's individuals that are kind of toehead that
are very pale blonde and have veryfine hair because that central core, that

(51:53):
modula lends some further rigidity to thehair 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 humanhairs, even though they've never been cut.

(52:14):
They show no evidence of having beencut. You know, they're grown
to length essentially with a worn blunttip, 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 woulddisplay those. So so it boils back

(52:35):
down to the way. The finalarbiter that one would rely on then is
what DNA to make the final conclusivedetermination. And and that one factor of
the acellular medula made it very problematicto get DNA from the shaft. Stay

(52:57):
tuned for more Bigfoot and beyond withCliff and Bogo. We'll be right back
after these messages. Well, youknow, there's another avenue that I don't
think has been explored that I thinkshows a lot of promise. And it
wasn't my idea of any means.A gentleman came into the museum here and

(53:19):
he's a veterinarian, and he said, this has been tried, and it
turns out it works. I'm studyingthe 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 testthem somehow, and you can tell what
they've been feeding on. Has anythinglike that ever been tried to your knowledge,

(53:39):
Oh, sure, there have beenbeen 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 themass collection of of the mosquitoes in regions
where there's bigfoot activity or reports.You know, it's again it's it's a

(54:02):
shot in the dark given the rarity. I mean, what are the odds
that you catch the a dozen orso mosquitoes that have bitten the few sasquatch
they're in that geographical area. Butthat's that's a way to do it,
and there are methodologies that have beendeveloped. You know, you put dry

(54:24):
ice in the trap and it attractsthe mosquitos and they're caught in the trap,
and then you just sample them intotal and mass and try to determine
if there's any blood elements that canbe identified or DNA from those blood I
mean from that blood. So yeah, that's that's one way to do it.

(54:45):
I think that would be more straightforwardthan trying to find ticks. And
yeah, and they want to goget like stripped down, run naked through
the brush. Yeah, like,yeah, I have a feeling that's something
that I'd be roped into. Comeon, Cliff, you like Bigfoot do
this. I do it because becausethe ticks don't feed. I mean,
once they've fed. My understanding isonce they have that blood meal, then

(55:07):
they go off and they lay theireggs basically and don't diet. Yeah,
it's just like their annual plants orsomething, right, right, And so
I don't know what the chance Imean. And you know, the mosquitoes
are quite ephemeral as well, soI don't it's uh, you know,
you have to have your your siteslined up pretty precisely in order to hit

(55:29):
the bullseye. It's uh, it'syou know, just to contemplate it.
It's almost overwhelming to think about theodds of success. But like I said
earlier, I think that's the directionunless 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 physicallybe able to do the kind of remote

(55:53):
field research. And I've done somuch of it with you know limit.
As much as I enjoy it withlimited 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 everyonetake a year off. Squatch. You

(56:16):
can take all that money you spendon 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, andcertainly will appeal. I mean once I
have some benefactors who have been verygenerous in supporting other research initiatives. But

(56:37):
yeah, I would like to seesort of a grassroots participation by those who
are interested at some point. Butwe'll wait until we get a very solid
research design and commitments and so forthunderway. I'm hoping to do some smaller
scale preliminary is this summer things ofyou know that the timetable on vaccinations and

(57:05):
travel restrictions and everything, I thinkis moved up sufficiently to be able to
do that, just to just togo through the I mean, if nothing
else, just to go through themotions. But who knows. You may
get lucky on the first sample ortwo and something that produces something, but
that would be great. Well,then the other samples just go to reproducing

(57:27):
that same thing, which is theeffect of science. Of course, that
a lot of people overlook. Youknow, I thought about bringing ladders out
in the woods and got up andchecking 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'trealize how persistent hair is in the environment.

(57:47):
So there have been numerous cases wherea potentially credible, an authentic encounter
or observation was made and then asample of was found nearby and it was
again connecting those dots or back tothe storytelling, and so it was taken
in and analyzed. You know,one that comes to mind because it actually

(58:12):
resulted in a published paper, wasup in the Yukon when there was a
sighting and then they found some tuftof hair on a barbed wire fence I
think it was, and took itinto the fishing game and they, to
their credit, looked at it andsent it into the lab and had it
analyzed and it came back as muskoxor something like that, and of course

(58:35):
then that got published. If ithad come back as an indeterminate primate,
I can guarantee you it wouldn't havebeen 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 rarelygets mentioned. But see that's what's
so unfortunate too about that situation then, is is it biases the perception with

(59:01):
the negativity. In other words,it's just like my My biggest criticism of
doctor Syke's published study was that allof his samples, you know, when
I when I visited with him beforethe project was underway, and I offered
to help screen samples, to focushis attention on those gold standard samples,

(59:27):
I mean to really try, becausehe thought he, you know, could
overcome the challenge of the lack ofa cellular medula and glean some DNA from
the shafts using his techniques. SoI was very eager, you know,
to focus his attention because he waslimited in the resources. Again, he
only had enough money to open tendoors, you know, and but instead

(59:52):
he insisted, oh no, no, we can't impose any preconceptions, you
know, we have to we haveto look at everything. I said,
well, you throw open the barndoors, 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 hegot DNA from every single sample. That's

(01:00:13):
just not conceivable. That's just notconceivable. And there were samples that were
submitted that apparently were not acknowledged inthe study. So my fear is,
and you know, I hate todisparage or say something negative, but my

(01:00:34):
concern was that there were samples thatdidn'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 thatevery sample you receive turns out to be
something else. Every single sample wasattributable to a commonly known form of wildlife.

(01:00:59):
That's very different than if the resultwas we had thirty samples and twenty
four of them were attributable to otherforms of wildlife because I threw the barn
door open. But there were thesesix that we couldn't even get DNA from.
And isn't it interesting those six alsolooked very similar to the gold standard

(01:01:20):
doctor Mildrim has described repeatedly. Now, wouldn't that be a different result than
the first? Yeah? Much morepromising. Yeah, I mean that leaves
your open that one of those samplesyou have might actually have come or one
of those six samples might have actuallycome from a sasquad. Did you sub
be the samples at sex examine thatyou thought were good? Yes, that
weren't collected by me personally, butcame through me, and they weren't They

(01:01:46):
weren't acknowledged in the paper. SoI think you're talking theoretically, So that
did happen? Oh no, Iwas not talking theoretically. No. No.
What I described is what happened andwhat didn't happen. You know,
what I described is what happen.There were myself included. There were people
who said, but I don't seemy sample. I sent him three samples

(01:02:07):
and I don't see them mentioned here. You know, he may have gotten
far more than he could possibly processand 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 animalsright away. You know we know

(01:02:29):
that. I mean, if sasquatchexists, it is a primate. Anyone
who can tests that just doesn't understandbiology or you know, it's just that's
simple. I mean, we've gotto be able to say some things based
on eyewitnessing counts, accounts, andthe anatomy of the foot, you know,
unless some strange creature has emerged fromthe ether that has a primate foot

(01:02:55):
and a non primate physiology anatomy otherwiseanyway, So I mean we I think
we're perfectly justified and safe in makingthe 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 thannot, most similar to other large bodied

(01:03:22):
horminoid primates. So and none ofthem are fur bearing. Even the mountain
gorilla that gets up into freezing temperaturesat times, it still has hair.
It's denser, it's much denser thanits sibling species down in the tropical lower

(01:03:42):
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. Butbut no, that was real. I
was not. I wasn't just theorizing, you know, what if scenario,

(01:04:04):
that's what actually happened. It soundslike 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 somelittle piece of the bit of a sasquatch,
whether it's DNA or hair or something, seems to be the direction that

(01:04:26):
amateur researchers like myself should be focusedon. Would you agree with that?
Right? Oh, definitely, yeah, if we could, you know,
And and I've thought a lot aboutthat too, you know, in addressing
the question of where's the bones,you know, I end up with this
kind of con not convoluted, buta lengthy laundry list of factors involved in

(01:04:49):
the disposition of remains once an animaldies, you know, the science of
taponomy. And so the question iswhere would you find remains? You know,
of the one point five million yearsin which Giganopithecus had a tenure in

(01:05:10):
Eastern Asia, where did we findthe the fossils in limestone caves? Right?
And we only found those because porcupinesdragged them in there. So you
know, for all that all thattime and all those dead Giganopithecus, we've
got two jaws and a few thousandisolated teeth, and only in those areas

(01:05:33):
where porcupines live south of the YellowRiver in China. I've thought, I've
often thought about that and thought,well, gee, maybe, Well,
first of all, sasquatch may haveonly been in North America for a few
hundreds of thousands of years, notmillions of years. Perhaps not. I
mean, we don't know, wehave no way. Annoying, but I'm
or even less really right less,Yeah, of course, I mean tens

(01:05:56):
of thousands of exactly exactly. Itcould very well. So the chances of
finding remains, fossilized remains are veryslim, really, But where would we
find them? Probably in limestone caves. So I've often and I've asked.
I talked to some cavers, andthere are some who mentioned, you know,

(01:06:18):
finding bones of various mammals and soforth in caves that they've explored.
But to reach out to societies orclubs, cavers clubs and see if anybody
has any stories. You know,there's kind of a cultish kind of secrecy

(01:06:40):
about their favorite caves. They don'twant 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. Butif you could win over the confidence of
some cavers. I have reached outto some in the region here and nothing

(01:07:01):
has come forward. No one hasany interesting experience to share of stumbling on
a jar or a tooth or agiant eyebone in a cave deposit. But
that would be that would be theplace to look. I think, yeah,
be ideal because whether people like itor not, a dead one is

(01:07:23):
the path to discovery, right ofcourse. 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 addressingthe question how many sasquats are out there,
and anyway, without without going intothat, I don't think there are

(01:07:43):
very many. You know, herein the state of Idaho, there's a
lot of wilderness area. We havetwo thirds of the state is roadless wilderness
area, and in the entire stateof Idaho, I would put the number
somewhere between probably around three hundhundred comparedto the thirty five thousand black bear that
live in Idaho. Black bear onlylive to be about twenty years old before

(01:08:06):
they die, and sasquatch may asa large bodied eight may live you know,
fifty years at least twice that ofBlack Bear. Of those three hundred,
how many are in their golden years? So what would be the mortality
rate of sasquatch on an annual basisin just a state of Idaho? And

(01:08:28):
then what are the odds that thesasquatch that dies is somewhere where a backpacker
a hiker, you know, inthese vast wilderness areas is going to find
it. If it even is leftsomewhere, then it might be found.
As a large animal with no naturalpredators, et cetera. You know,
they secrete themselves off into some nookor cranny, and even if they're exposed,

(01:08:53):
they're going to quickly be deconstructed anddecomposed and parted off by the gnaars
and the chewers and scavengers and andpretty soon there just isn't anything left.
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyondwith Cliff and Bogo. We'll be right
back after these messages. You know, we have a display here in the

(01:09:21):
in the museum on where the bonesare, and I was fortunate enough to
get two photographs donated to the museumto use in the display, and each
of those photographs shows an elk eatingaway at a bone, and even the
seasoned hunters who come in here areblown away by that those photographs. I
had no idea. Yeah there's anelk like there you go, and deer

(01:09:42):
do it too, and yeah,and of course squirrels and porcupines, and
you know that those that have theteeth ever growing in sizors, I mean,
there's another motivation for them. Butcalcium is at a real premium in
spe particularly in what coniffers for environments, and so that the recycling of the

(01:10:03):
skeleton is prompt and thorough. That'slike with the you know, with Gigantopithecus.
The only remains we have are thethe fact that they have teeth with
hyper thick enamel on these crowns andthese very heavy, heavy jaws that the
thickest parts are not are those thatsurvived, and only two of them so

(01:10:27):
far, I mean, we've onlydiscovered two, but it shows that a
very few number of them of thejaw elements have survived to be discovered in
these caves, and there's been alot of harvesting in those caves. The
people who you know, excavate thatlimestone really go to town, and of
course they find anything interesting, theyhold on to it for trade, for

(01:10:51):
various purposes. Ye feed their familymostly right. Krans mentioned in his recreation
of the gigan Epithagus skull based onthe jaw that the jaws showed divergence that
was really big. I think evensaid maybe even unmatched at that point.
Is that still true? Like,do you think that that the divergence of

(01:11:13):
the Gigano jaw does lean towards orindicating 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 lookvery careful at his argument my understanding of
it, I mean you, you, Bipedalism has not, to my understanding,

(01:11:35):
influenced the span, the absolute spanbetween the jaw joints, between the
temporal men deep joints. But whathe was trying to draw attention to was
the angle that was subtended by thebodies of the jaw, and and that
angle was more acute in say agorilla, but more obtuse, more open,

(01:12:02):
in other words, in Gigantipithecus.Therefore, that indicated that there was
room for the neck in between thebodies 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

(01:12:26):
could resolve this just by going overhere to the benchtop and measuring, but
the absolute breadth of the cranial basethe distance between those two jaw joints versus
that angle. Now the angle isgoing to change simply because the face of
Gigantipithecus was flatter. Probably we don'tknow for certain because we don't have a

(01:12:49):
skull. But if the megadontia,if the hypertrophy of the teeth and the
thick molar hyper thick molaring enamel isconvergent with the condition in the robust australopithecenes
like paranthropists and Astrolopithecus robustus in SouthAfrica, then it stands to reason that

(01:13:12):
Gigantipithecus was loading the posterior teeth andhad a flatter face. Now, the
anterior teeth, it had shorter canines. They didn't have the huge projecting canines
of a gorilla. Say, butthe incisors are kind of spatulate, they're
kind of shoveled and you know,the central incisors are large compared to the

(01:13:34):
lateral which is more like an orangutanthan say a chimper gorilla, but they're
not greatly reduced in size as inthe robust astrolopithecenes, where they really emphasized
the posterior enticition in combination with thiskind of dished out face, these jutting
cheekbones and so forth. So thepoint is the short version of that is,

(01:14:00):
Gigantipithegus and robust Australopithesenes seemed to haveconverged on diets that had similar mechanical
properties that selected for these robust jawsand 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 wherestable isotope analysis comes in. The stable

(01:14:23):
isotope analysis of these two species showthat they had a very distinctive diet.
The diets may had tough, hardobjects in common, but the nature of
those food stuffs was quite distinctive.Different habitat types and so forth, the
different plant communities. So back nowcircle way background. Sorry, I didn't
need to go down that paths sofar. If you shorten the face,

(01:14:46):
the angle between the two halves ofthe jaws becomes more of tupes and gives
the appearance of opening up for theaccommodation of a neck that comes out under
on the head. Now one ofthe distinctions, if we can rely for
a minute on the PG film,Patty has a forward lean of about five

(01:15:10):
degrees, her trapezius attached on theback of her skull, about halfway between
the very high attachment and a gorillawith a foram and magnum way behind the
skull versus a human which is tuckeddown underneath, and the muscles likewise are
very small and tucked in underneath.Head balances much more easily because of our

(01:15:31):
smaller face and big globular brain case. If you look at robust Austrolopithecus,
it's more towards the human condition byfar than the gorilla, but it still
is not quite there. It doesn'thave that huge enlargement of the cranial cavity,
and so the forame and magnum appearsto be a little bit further back,

(01:15:57):
but not as far as in agorilla. Muscles are still quite substantial
that attach on the base of itsskull, but don't attach nearly as high.
Doesn't have that big flat plane ofmuscle attachment, that nucleplane that's distinctive
with the gorilla. So was so? In other words, back to your
original question, was Grover's analogy washis Was his theory about bipedal posture and

(01:16:25):
gigantophithic is justified? Well, Idon't know if it really is in that
sense. Now see I come atit as a locomotive anatomist, and one
of the reasons for bipedalism. Oneof the mechanical factors in any theory about

(01:16:48):
the evolution of bipedalism is that yourstarting point is a large bodied hormonoid that
has a pectoral girdle, the upperlimb bones that are rearranged in such a
way that they're adapted for suspending fromsupports, hanging under branches, and or

(01:17:10):
climbing with the arms up overhead,climbing up through branches or up tree trunks.
Our chest is flatter, our shoulderblade is back. Our glenoid the
shoulder socket faces outward. If youlook at a grill or chimp, it
faces slightly upward. The problem withthat arrangement is when you come to the
ground and assuming a quadrupedal posture.Now, the shoulder blade, if you

(01:17:35):
can imagine, it's horizontal and thehumorous the armbone is vertical, so the
shoulder meets at an angle, ata ninety degree angle almost well, joints
don't like that. That produces sheerforces pushing one bone past another, and

(01:17:55):
so all dedicated quadrupeds like your dog, look at where it's shoulder blade is.
It's vertical on the side of aof a narrowly compressed chest, and
it's aligned with the shoulder or withthe armbone. So now that joint is
experiencing compression. The bones are pressingtogether, and they prefer that mechanically.

(01:18:16):
Plus there's other you know, youcould we could bring in the elbow and
the wrist. You know, alot of people have trouble. I mean,
the reason the reason they sell thesethese gadgets that have hand grips on
a base to do push ups,you know, on the floor, is
because a lot of people if youput your hands on the floor, it
causes pain in your wrist because yourwrist is not designed to be flexed like

(01:18:42):
that. And then have compressive forceapplied through it. You know, when
I do push ups, I dothem on the backs of my knuckles so
that my wrist is lined up withmy 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 theground is going to modify the way
it moves around. Now, agrade eight that has tremendously evolved in the

(01:19:08):
direction of arm hanging, arm swinginglike a gorilla, so that its arms
are almost twice as long as itslegs, it's already at this funny angle
when it comes down. It's notlike a true quadruped, and weight is
actually actively retracted back onto the hindlimbs. They carry more weight on their
It doesn't look like it, butthey're actually If you haven't walked across a

(01:19:30):
force plate, it shows their hindlimbs are supporting more weight than their fore
limbs. They avoid the stresses ontheir 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 youwere a great big eight getting even bigger
than a gorilla, like a Gigantopithecus. First of all, it's dangerous to

(01:19:55):
be climbing up in trees. It'sjust like the big male gorillas rarely go
up. They do, we've discoveredfor 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 oras a result of the injuries occurred,
and so you're going to spend moretime on the ground. In other words,

(01:20:16):
if you're on the ground, there'sonly two options open to you.
You either walk on all fours oryou 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 thethings I just discussed are going to be
amplified with increasing body weight, andso a gigant a proto proto sasquatch,

(01:20:45):
is going to tend to walk uprightmore 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 muchless like the living great apes, especially

(01:21:14):
the chimp and the gorilla, itwas much less like those and and so
the the selection pressures to reshape thatinto 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 shehas she has a dish shaped pelvis,

(01:21:36):
but she's got a pretty tall ilium. It's not as shortened as it is
in humans. And so, Imean, there's there's indications of that.
So there you go, there's there'sthe short answer. Next time we have
have you on, we'll just we'lllast for the long answer, and Bob

(01:21:56):
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 ina documentary, I could never give an
answer like that. And yet andyet the answer involves a lot of background
contextual information to really understand what thesignificance of it is. Yeah. Absolutely,

(01:22:23):
you know, sasquatch isn't designed forour sound bite culture unfortunately, and
I think that's part of the reasonpeople think it's ridiculous. Still exactly exactly,
and those that take the time toeducate themselves and really ask the question
and listen to the answers and discussthem. I mean, like when we
were talking about the Patterson Gimblin film. I mean she shows that non human

(01:22:45):
bipedal adaptations, as you what mightexpect for something that has evolved, perhaps
convergently, nature repeatedly produces similar resultsthrough convergent evolution. There's a news item
last month, if I'm interrupted verybriefly, that I think evolution has led
to crabs I think five or sixtimes independently, you know, because because

(01:23:08):
crabs happen to be. The shapeand 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 meit's such a testament of evolution. I
when I when I deal with studentswho are reluctant to at least entertain the

(01:23:31):
notion that the life you know,evolved through discent with modification, you know,
I throw out just example after exampleafter example of convergent evolution, like
the classic one with all the marsupialmammals in Australia and the placental mammals of
of the ne Arctic, and youhave you know these convergent well they fill

(01:23:53):
each niche in remarkably similar ways,but they they both started for very different
starting points of these little rat likecreatures, you know, that radiated out
to fill all these niches, andso so bipedalism could have evolved independently in
a large bodied eight in Asia,in parallel to the australopith scenes that are

(01:24:16):
already epithosenes. I mean, there'salready now evolution of multiple examples of bipedal
like behaviors in various Miocene primates fromOreopithecus. The latest was this D.
Nuvius was a very interesting about aanobo sized ape that had elongated lower limbs

(01:24:40):
and a pelvis that was more humanlike than chimpanzee like. And it so
it shows that that the change fromthat to us. You know, people
always, even academics sometimes tried toconnect the dots between extant chimpanzees and modern
humans and that evolution was intermediate betweenthat. Well that's not the case.

(01:25:03):
Evolution started for both those species startedfrom a starting point a creature that had
some features that were much more chimpanzeelike, but others as particularly the pelvis
and other things that were much lessderived than the modern chimpanzees. And you
know, if there was a hominoidspecies in Asia that especially if it began

(01:25:28):
to or was isolated in a moretemperate climate where resources were on the ground
rather than up in the trees,and it was utilizing fish, say,
and as a protein source, andcarbohydrates 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 thisin very rational, reasonable ways. But

(01:25:57):
anyway, I'm starting to ramble.Yeah, well you say ramble, but
I think I know I can speakfor myself. I'm eating it up and
I'm sure a lot of our audiencesas well, because I don't think that
you get because we do live ina sound bite culture and people do go
to I mean, Finding Bigfoot isan 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'sTV, you know, and we

(01:26:19):
Bobo and I and Bobo will grumbleabout it much longer length than I would
the stuff they cut out was greatas well. And you can't get the
quick, easy answer you and soyou say rambling, but I personally appreciate
it. People come into the shopand say, well, what would be
the one piece of evidence? Whenthey say, this just doesn't work like

(01:26:42):
that, man, it's how everythingfits together. And then I give them
an eight minute like what. Istart rambling for eight minutes and they eventually
get it and kind of get theidea. 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 eightminutes exactly. I'm starting to massage my
jaws and getting into it right.But you know, Cliff, one of

(01:27:05):
my favorite stories to tell is whenyou were here after before you went off
on your solo, and after thatlittle 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 outwhen you had the two footprints side by

(01:27:25):
side, one cast by Paul Freemanand one by West Summerlin, and we
began to discuss. You posed thequestion are these the same individuals? And
we started talking. I was makingcomments 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 anarch, And then you know, it
was you asking the question of methat put me, you know, put

(01:27:49):
my feet to the fire and madethe 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 ofthe forefoot was still perfectly in alignment.
It was simply the angle of theheel segment that differed between the two.

(01:28:10):
And illustrate it beautifully, the actionof pronation and supernation, which is
expressed to a bit greater degree inthe sasquatch foot than the human because of
the greater mobility of the transverse tarsaljoint. And I'm sitting here, you
know, you talked about a smokinggun if one person, if person pressed
you for one example, I mean, that's one that I would throw out

(01:28:32):
there, because boom. You know, no way that a hoaxer is going
to incorporate the subtleties of detail thatclearly demonstrate to someone like you or I
who have spent a lot of timelooking at footprints to recognize the commonalities between
the two that distinctive distal pad onthat gigantic big toe and the distinctive angle

(01:28:59):
of the little toe flaring out tothe side. But then to recognize or
to be able to incorporate appropriately thesignature of a superinated versus a pronated foot,
a very flat foot versus one that'sarched up a little bit, and
the expression of that angle of theheel inflecting at exactly the proportional point of

(01:29:25):
the mid tarsal joints, as asRenee to Hindon would say, it boggles
the mind to even think to eventhink that that could happen, you know.
And then you add other things likegoing to China and seeing these footprints
with a transverse tarsal pressure mid tarsalpressure ridge that was exactly like the Patterson

(01:29:46):
Gimblin film side, you know.And then and then finally turning all the
tip miss casts on their side soyou could see they did almost all have
a pressure ridge expressed to one oranother. And the variation in length that
Grover tried to kind of rationalize wassimply variation in the depth of imprint of

(01:30:11):
the heel that the forefoot from thepressure ridge indicator to the toe tips was
identical in every single footprint, youknow. I mean just things like that
that are so subtle and yet soprofound in their implication. Yeah, they
are the best evidence that these thingsare real. Absolutely, But people want
me to say, oh, it'sthe Patterson Gimlin film, look at it,

(01:30:33):
it's real, or the foot lookat this one footprint. You can't.
I mean, it's like looking atone piece of a jigsaw puzzle and
saying those kittens playing in the artare very cute. Well, exactly,
and they fit together like a jigsawpuzzle. That's what's interesting is it's so
interconnected, you know. So youcan trace some of these these anatomies through
the Patterson Gimblin film, through thisfootprint example, through another one over here,

(01:30:57):
and then oh, here's a pathology. Here's the Osburg cripplefoot you know,
which has a cloud of of ofsuspicion hanging over it because of ivan
marks, et cetera, et cetera. But yet I can sit with a
room full of pediatrists and orthopedists andtalk shop with them, and they're all
fascinated by it and absolutely comfortable withthe anatomy and the and the pathology,

(01:31:19):
even more subtly, the pathology thatthey're observing. You know, it's just
one thing after another, and they'reand 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 getsme charged up to you. Wish you

(01:31:41):
could convey, you know, distillthis down into a little pill that someone
could take and suddenly comprehend everything thatyou've gleaned over, you know, three
decades of preoccupation with this topic.Yeah, it's not so simple. Unfortunately.
Well, well, Jeff, we'vesaid, Bob, are you still
there? By the way, maybemaybe fell asleep. I'm most likely technological

(01:32:03):
problems. He is somewhere in Hecut out a couple of times. So
yeah, well Jeff, it lookslike Bobo's still on the call, but
for some reason we're not reading hisaudio right now. So I'm going to
take this opportunity and just to thankyou on behalf of Bobo and myself for
coming on and spending so much timewith us. Really do appreciate it.

(01:32:24):
It's always enlightening. I love conversationswith you because I was I'm a learner.
You know. I was a teacherfor a living, which means I'm
a learner basically, and I justlove to learn stuff. And there's I
can't think of one conversation we've everhad right and walk away knowing a bit
more than before. So thank youso much. Oh it's been my pleasure.
It's always stimulating, reciprocally stimulating.Well, all right, Jeff,

(01:32:44):
thank you so much again. AndI'm sorry everybody out there can't hear Bobo,
but so I'll just do this.Hey, Boba, that was great,
right, yeah, dude, itreally was. All right, cool,
take us home, bobes, allright, everybody, keep it Squatchy.
Thanks for listening to this week's episodeof Bigfoot and Beyond. If you

(01:33:05):
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