everybody tonight we're debating whether or not there is evidence for Bigfoot and we're starting right now with Erica our guest Gutsick Gibbon as she's known on YouTube. Thanks so much for being here Erica. Erica the floor is all yours. Okay this is this is awesome. I am so excited to be here. I might for those of you who maybe don't know because it's been a little bit of a hot minute since I've actually been here on modern day debate. My name is Erica I go by Gutsick Gibbon on YouTube. My background is I got my BSA in pre-professional animal science. I was on like that pre vet path and then I did a huge pivot and ended up doing my MRes in primatology. So primate biology, behavior, and conservation. I also picked up a minor in biology and a minor in anthropology so I'm very very excited to talk about Bigfoot today because Bigfoot is or says we know a hominoid a proposed hominoid and I before I share my screen you know I guess while I'm sharing my screen I suppose I should say I am actually going to classify myself as a Bigfoot agnostic for today's conversation because I think that that properly characterizes kind of where I'm at and how we should sort of assess things like Bigfoot things that we don't know very much about that have kind of support for it and in either direction. So can you guys see this? Is this all good? Okay let me see if I can figure out how to how to do the whole deal. I might just have to keep it I might just have to keep it through this little deal unless someone oh present okay it's right there. Okay much better. So Bigfoot did a big Bigfoot debate Erica that's me Gutsick Gibbon. So what's Bigfoot? Bigfoot is a colloquial word for some kind of currently undiscovered hominoid. Now Bigfoot the colloquial usage tends to refer to the North American cryptid but cryptic hominoids are pretty characteristic of most cultures a lot of cultures tend to have these wild men archetypes and they range from being you know some hairy dude living out in the woods to being something that can truly be interpreted as this kind of eight-ish hominoid. So as a hominoid Bigfoot tends to be characterized by a large size obligately bipedal locomotions walking on two feet, thick hair, a sagittal crest in both sexes and potentially facial hair but it depends on who you ask. So what's the big question? Well the big question is we've got thousands of Bigfoot reports throughout the years and dozens of proposed videos of such animals so is there a large and unknown hominoid lumbering across several continents or in the case of tonight North America and I'm gonna kind of start with my big issues to convert me from being a Bigfoot agnostic. So of course there's the obvious that the lack of a body or conclusive video footage. Now I use conclusive there very loosely because I'm sure we're going to be talking about the Patterson-Gimlin film which is in my opinion some of the best evidence in favor of this cryptic North American hominoid. Then there's a lack of fossil record in North America and along these proposed migratory or movement paths across the Bering Strait and things that need for work from areas like Europe during the Miocene. Another one that I tend to think about when I'm assessing this kind of thing is metabolic challenges for these large North American hominids and how they're going to meet these challenges without detection. So what I mean by that is Bigfoot's big. Bigfoot is proposed to be big. He's or she they are large hominids that require massive, massive caloric intake in order to maintain these large body sizes. And in the case of large animals they tend to have to consistently eat food if they're even remotely herbivorous even on the wars tend to have to spend a lot of their time browsing and doing things of that nature. Although I know Bigfoot is proposed to be an on the war which is very interesting. And then that kind of touches on the last thing which is evidence that exists that is occasionally contradictory. So an example that I'm sure we'll talk about later is like in the Patterson-Gimlin film Patty the subject of the film she has these large pendulous breasts but she also has a sagittal breast which is typically a male trait in extant hominoids. So and I think we'll touch on that a bit in a minute. So here's another thing. Cryptid hominoids have been found before. I think that's something that isn't appreciated very often. When we propose that there's a new animal we tend to forget that there's been periods of time when most animals were new to most people. And a great example of that is the most recent in my opinion sort of large hominid that has been discovered which is the biliate. This is a subgroup of panthroglodides swine berthii that was actually discovered in the Congo after decades of being this mythic lion-filling chimp. And it was found by rigorous expedition the Congo rainforest which is just an enormous tract of land using own location and DNA testing revealed that the biliate wasn't actually chimpanzee albeit a relatively unique population. It's got its own sort of novelties to it primarily in its behavior which is very bizarre in how it interacts with humans and how different populations of this subspecies interact with humans. But the point is that to me the biliate represents something of a double-edged sword if you're going to be kind of a big foot proponent which is that you've got this hominid of the subspecies of panthroglodides living in perhaps one of the most remote areas in the world. And we did still find it and we found several of them. They are social living so it's a bit easier but I would imagine at least from what I've read about proposed Sasquatch and the like they do have an element of sociality to them despite being you know typically on par with orangs orangutans in their solitary behavior. They still do tend to group occasionally. Now I'm sure I'm sure that Dr. Meldermis seen this one before the genetic analysis of samples attributed to Yeti Bigfoot and other enormous primates and none of them came back at least in North America. I am aware that there are some issues with this study but I think that it is notable to bring it up simply because the North American specimens tended to be of known families even getting down to the species level. None of them were popping back his order primates which I think is is worth bringing up. And the same thing was found sort of in this 2017 paper in the Himalayas when they were looking more specifically at Yeti's and they came back as ursids but interestingly enough a very interesting or very strange kind of not necessarily hybridization but we're getting very ancient DNA back from some bears that perhaps are no longer even in the area. So what's the best evidence for Bigfoot Sasquatch in my opinion well it's going to be your trace evidence so this is going to be primarily trackways and things like that. And for those of you don't know Dramatoglyphs are essentially like the ridges of your finger of your fingers the ridges of your fingerprints but you know they exist on your feet and toes as well. And some of these trackways are proposed to show Dramatoglyphs and Dr. Meldrum I'm sure will will bring up some of the some of that I'd love to discuss in. And then there's videos primarily in my opinion the Patterson Gimlin film it's the classic it's the famous one and it must be said that that film has never been conclusively debunked as it were. That is just the case of the matter. Now there are things that we can nitpick about it as I'm sure I'm probably going to do in this conversation but that being said it hasn't been conclusively tossed out the window so I think that that's worth mentioning as well. And then of course there's eyewitness accounts and while a single eyewitness account holds no weight really when we're talking about a cryptid because there are so many different factors at play that could account for it there is a large number of Bigfoot sightings and that's something that I think is worth addressing as well. So Patterson Gimlin film it's fascinating in my opinion there are some problems with it there's the situation surrounding the filming that can be considered by some as being suspicious although from what I've looked into it it does tend to rely on circumstantial evidence you've got Robert Catterson he's showing up in this location on a creek and he is actively looking for a comedy trackways that's why he was there he and Gimlin were there now they weren't actually suspecting at least as as the accounts go to see a a hominid but they were looking for trackways and people tend to point to that and say okay that's really suspicious but in their favor you know they had heard reports that Bluff Creek had these trackways so they went to go check them out there as one would if you're looking for you know a creature that's making the tracks you go to a place where the tracks for last scene but there's some interesting bits where you know Patterson Gimlin you know if we see it let's not shoot it which you know unless we absolutely have to which some people interpret as being like I've hired a guy in a suit don't shoot him or else or you know he'll sue us so there's a lot of weird things there there's the issue where the local trackway hoaxer claims to have sent Patterson that way it depends on how much weight you put on individual accounts but for me as far as the situation surrounding it I don't consider it as much worth looking into as the actual subject of the film which is Patty now Patty's got a sagittal crest that's the crest that runs along the top of the skull and it's particularly important for analysts that spend a lot of time browsing and chewing their food um these are usually heavy duty herbivores and um Patty's got a big one they're they tend to be only for males as well I mean females didn't have small ones in most gorilla populations but this is a big you know a dimorphic trait in our existing prominence we sometimes see them in females not very often and she's also got large pendulous breasts which don't tend to mesh together with me as someone who you know looks at a lot of primates I tend to see satiric crest I think male and then I see you know breasts especially the kind that Patty's sporting which is quite well endowed for for you know a hominid um unless perhaps she's lacking which I've heard uh Dr. Meldrum proposed before and I'm interested to see oh Patty also has very lowly defined blutes in the picture which conflicts in my opinion with some other sets watch trace evidence so in this next picture here uh this is actually from uh Dr. Meldrum I believe and he has outlined in this picture sort of the difference between low you know the the the kinds of costumes that folks are putting out around that time you planted the gates came out three years after the Patterson Gimlin film dead and uh frankly the costumes are pathetic in comparison the Patterson Gimlin film subject if it's a hoax is an excellent excellent hoax but that picture that second picture of Patty there kind of caught my eye because in and I've got this from uh Dr. Meldrum's book here there are some trace evidence of these glutes here on the left a buttocks imprint found that's been associated with Sasquatch tracks and I saw that and I was like it's quite strange this is very well defined and not so much in the Patterson Gimlin film so I thought to me that kind of I'd like to discuss that with uh with Jeffrey here because I thought that was kind of interesting um another thing that I think is kind of strange and I also got these from Dr. Meldrum's book is I feel as in my this is my untrained eye speaking so I hope we can discuss this a little bit that there isn't a solid consistent foot form you know they tend to be relatively flat footed that's true but they have they seem to have these different topographies a lot of these track ways that we're pulling up from you know these these proposed critters so I'd like to kind of discuss that uh whether or not in Dr. Meldrum's experience does this fall within a normal range of variability or not um so I think that that would be quite interesting so from my point uh what is your best support for your opinion and and why have we not found trace evidence for such an animal because for me the thing that I really want to dig into is this proposed morphology for the animal the proposed behavior for the animal including how it's going to meet these metabolic needs uh as well as what's the deal with the fossil record um typically when you've got megafauna like this they tend to leave some kind of trace for themselves even in areas that are just dreadfully poor for preservation we at least find teeth the same is true for uh Jaggedy-Pithecines that we find over in in uh China and Southeast Asia and we recently found a I believe it was a gibbon radius it may have been it may have been a humerus of an arm bone from a gibbon and ancient pieces of gibbon there uh very small very unimposing but we did find it so I'm interested to talk about uh kind of like why we're not finding the falses for these critters I recognize that the Pissiff Northwest man that's not conducive to fossilization but they had to get there somehow and I'm thinking that that since it likely descended from from Dr. Meldrum's point of view from a highly social animal they're they're traveling in groups right so so I'm kind of taking this the strategy that I'm kind of going to take in this in this conversation is again it's going to be one of a of a big foot agnostic I want to pick your brain on this I want to see kind of what kind of kind of model we can make uh to to I want you to win me over because the thing is there is a primatologist out there who doesn't want big foot to be real that would be incredible that would be earth shattering that would be remarkable this this animal would depending on whether it descended from a parentheses or gigantic I guess potentially be our closest living relative on the planet uh so I want to be convinced I'm dying to be convinced and uh and that's I think where I'm going to end it thanks very much Erica for that opening statement and what we're going to do is switch it over to Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum for his opening as well want to let you know first folks if this is your first time here modern day debate is a neutral platform hosting debates on science religion and politics and we have many more juicy debates coming up in the future so be sure to hit that subscribe button right now as well as that notification button so that you don't miss out on any of those upcoming debates and thanks so much Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum for being with us again it's a pleasure to have you the floor is all yours well thank you again for the invitation to be here in the opportunity to to have an intelligent conversation it's uh it's it's always a welcome uh opportunity I uh I must admit I don't have as as thoroughly prepared about opening statement to make I just simply wanted to couch our embarking on this conversation with some general statements and I think you've set the stage Erica wonderfully for that but it my experience in in having conversations about the proposition and the supporting evidence uh for the possible existence of such a relic hominoid I found that it's it's really imperative for uh someone who is serious about investigating this to to appreciate not only the scientific context in which in which it's to be placed and you've done a great job of framing a number of parameters of that but also the historical backdrop as well understanding the timing of reactions of of other academics and their statements pro and con against what was known at that particular time and as we talk about the Patterson Gimlin film I think this will become extremely evident and I'll cite some examples of of some things that are said and and often repeated which at the time you you might be able to justify however even now with with 2020 hindsight is kind of hard to imagine that some of our predecessors in anthropology would actually make such inane statements but but they did and and some of that I really believe was prejudiced by the overarching backdrop of the prevailing paradigm that influenced anthropology dramatically in the 1960s and that was the single species hypothesis which predisposed the mindset away from agnosticism to an overt prejudice against the proposition that there were other than human or hominin a single hominin species lineage leading to us that was the basis of the single species hypothesis and so that that is very important as I listen to your presentation too it reminds me that that it also is important that that there is is clarity not only on the nature of the data but the interpretation of the data as I think as we address some of the perceived contradictions that you enumerated Erica that that you'll see that that the apparent contradiction stemmed from what I see as a misapprehension or misinterpretation of of evidence for example just just to illustrate one of those and we'll come back to to others you repeatedly referred to the presence of a sagittal crest and that's gotten a lot of a lot of discussion in the literature the starting point I think that's important to make is is that it's not definitive that there is a sagittal crest on the cream of that film subject if indeed that is a flesh and blood creature there are some frames that give the impression that what you're seeing is actually the movement of hair a shock of hair atop the head there's no question that there's very little frontal eminence there that goes straight from the brow back to a high point in a bregma that's very posteriorly placed but as to the development of a sagittal I mean even with observations of a living gorilla what you see as far as the shape of the head of the gorilla is is defined very little by the presence of a sagittal crest and much more so by the top knot of fatty tissue fibrous fatty tissue that sits atop the male gorilla's head the crest itself is is completely obscured by the presence of the massive temporalis muscle and fascia that that that cover it you know your comment about male versus female and I didn't mean I guess we should maybe we should hold up on this until we embark into the actual exchange and maybe take some of your things in a more systematic way or if you'd like to finish this one one point and then you can respond but the you know it it has been demonstrated repeatedly by myself and others my colleague guest of Bonsar Miento who's has extensive experience with gorillas in the field and in the museum gorilla skeletons that there are numerous examples not numerous maybe I shouldn't say numerous there are multiple examples of female gorillas that do sport a sagittal crest and it while there is sexual dimorphism or it has always been attributed to sexual dimorphism the presence of the arch or the ridge is is a biomechanical feature it is it provides attachment as I alluded to attachment to the to the for the temporalis muscle in the situation where the cranial vault surface area is insufficient to provide that alone in chimpanzees the relative size of the muscles to the cranial volume is sufficient that there is a very limited or no sagittal crest at all that feature is not just gender or is not necessarily gender related but size related and so in a in an organism that is the dimensions of a Sasquatch but has the cranial capacity proportionate to that of other great apes remember surface area only only increases to the square of linear dimensions whereas the volume or in this case the mass of the temporalis muscle will increase to the cube of those linear dimensions you're going to be obligated to have a extra flange of bone in a larger animal whether it happens to be a male or a female so in either event the one being that there actually is no apparent sagittal crest I think there is I do I do actually believe there is given I mean just given the the masticatory apparatus that's evident in the Patterson Gillan film there has to be big a big set of of muscles at least the size you know of something like a even perhaps more so in at least the anterior temporalis more akin to a parentheses as we've suggested in which case the sagittal crest of the of the parentheses isn't that similar to that of a gorilla it's more anteriorly placed because the emphasis is on the anterior fibers of the temporalis for posterior loading of the dentition as opposed to posterior emphasis of the temporalis for anterior loading of the prognathic gorilla which does more processing with the anterior dentition anyway but my so my point is simply some of the statements that you made I would take a little bit of exception to or qualify and and those may actually clear up some of the apparent contradictions that you're citing between the different types of evidence so with that said and with the notion of of a historical backdrop and a theoretical contextual framework within what is known about Sasquatch I'm sorry what is known about about hominoids generally in order to discuss the plausibility I think we're long past we're long past the point where anyone can intelligently and from an informed position say it's impossible for there to be such a thing as Sasquatch or or or an almas even or a ring pendek or a yeti um we're past that and and anyone honestly quite bluntly anyone academic or non-academic who says they can't as was said to me by an anthropologist they can't exist therefore they don't exist and it doesn't matter what evidence you think you have is has no basis for their argument they are simply uh wearing their ignorance on their shirt sleeve basically so possibility is there the question then is what's the possibility I'm sorry the plausibility or probability that such a creature exists and that that then opens the door to some of your questions you know what about the missing evidence we've got this we do have evidence I mean I the uh introduction to our conversation was a a little bit misworded perhaps is there's no question that there's evidence of Sasquatch the question is what is the quality of the evidence is it persuases or compelling as to the existence of Sasquatch so so we have evidence on one hand we have uh missing evidence and and uh sometimes not necessarily the agnostics but the skeptics especially those with the capital s have their favorite piece of missing evidence and you know i'm constantly confronted with with that lack of evidence you know why don't you have this why don't you have this and you know it was so funny one time uh I was confronted by uh it was actually a department chair where I was invited the university I was invited to speak at and hosted by an anthropology department but um he had asked that question during the q and a uh the uh uh very reasonable question where are the bodies where where's the physical evidence he was actually a forensic anthropologist and so in his mind you know and as you've alluded to in a couple of your points everything leaves a trace you know as an archaeologist that you're you're interested in that trace evidence that what's left behind what's the signature of the of the activities and and the presence of of your subject matter and so he really wanted to know where was the body you couldn't understand that and I gave him an answer uh I I think it's a reasonable answer it's uh you know in trying to address the absence of evidence it may come across as an apologists answer but um but it's it's a reasonable one and uh so over dinner when we had the opportunity I asked him I said well were you satisfied with that answer no I wasn't and uh and I said well I find it interesting that that sometimes people who adopt a very skeptical position they do so on the basis of their favorite missing piece of evidence to the total distraction and ignoring of all the other evidence that is seems to be that does exist the existing evidence that is that that seems to be affirmative or suggestive at the very least he said he said what do you what do you mean by that what kind of evidence you're talking about I said weren't you sitting in through my seminar and I said for me the footprint evidence his response was well I'm not an expert in footprints well don't you think that I'm uh you know deserving of the deference to my expertise as I would be different to your expertise in forensic anthropology or archaeology so the tone of the conversation changed just a little bit so I'm looking forward to our conversation in a very positive tone absolutely we are thrilled to have you here both of you and want to let you know folks our guests are linked in the description and that includes if you're listening to modern day debate via podcast because we do have a podcast for modern day debate in which we put all of the debates and want to let you know folks in the episode description box below the podcast you can find our links for our guests there as well and we encourage you to check on those and also one last friendly reminder as I'd say 99 percent 99.9 percent of you do a phenomenal job and we appreciate it so much that you guys attack the arguments instead of the person that's what we like and so we appreciate that and we want to continue to encourage that and so with that we will kick it over to Erica and Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum for this open discussion yes I said it before I'll say it again I'm super excited for this and like I want to make it very clear I've said this to others and I want to make it clear for everyone who's maybe watching if there was ever anyone more qualified to talk about task watch specifically it's Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum here I mean he he specializes in like common and foot morphology and locomotion things of that nature and and that due respect I agree is is 100 percent earned so I I want to defer to you as I should I think for me it's you know I want to treat this as this as an opportunity for me to kind of like like I said earlier like like pick your brain a little bit and I know we kind of talked about in in our email exchange or the I guess the planning of this debate the kinds of things that we were planning on discussing what is sufficient to to kind of what kind of evidence is sufficient I suppose the Patterson-Gimlin film and trace evidence like like footprints and I think kind of when you were when we were kind of stopping going a little bit on on the Patterson-Gimlin film I think that's a good place to start for for the two of us because in my opinion and I don't know if you would agree but as far as like visual evidence like that that is the the holy grail right this is this is the main one everyone's seen it and I was very impressed in my preparation for this conversation that it really hasn't been conclusively debunked now that being said not being conclusively debunked in my opinion is also not sufficient to say that it is an overwhelming support for the existence of a relic commented in North America and I think the reason is because in my reading about it there's a lot of things that we don't know for sure about the Patterson-Gimlin film like with 100% certainty things like the frame rate and like the the whole timeline about getting it developed things of that nature that I think would if we could only have access to it like the original footage as well get it into our hands that that would change a lot that would give us a lot more information that would be really helpful but I kind of want to ask you so so you're at the opinion that that that Patty the subject of the Patterson-Gimlin film is a female, yes? I am. So I've read like Napier's comments on the Patterson-Gimlin film and Napier curiously enough and correct me if I'm wrong he's a primatologist and he also kind of discussed how he was like he is a acceptor-believer however you want to put it he is in favor of the hypothesis that there are a lot of American hominids but he doesn't buy the Patterson-Gimlin film which I think is very interesting and let's say that he kind of touches on as a support against it is the gate of Patty she walks in a very masculine fashion right and in your book you kind of discuss how okay this is to be expected if we're dealing with you know a relatively small-brained hominid there was very little sexual dimorphism kind of in the movement of our Myosin apes and things of that nature in all likelihood nor is there very much difference in chimps but I saw that and I wanted to ask you a question because to my understanding the evolution of bipedality lends itself to a horrible conundrum for females of a species especially primates because you've got to keep that birth canal you know narrow enough to stay in a future biped or to become an efficient biped but it's also going to be wide enough to give birth so how do you support because I see Patty I see that she's got a masculine gate or I mean I'm not an expert on that but I've pulled that she's got a masculine gate see that and then I think to myself okay to me that's got to lend itself a little bit at least to kind of support against because if she is a female would she not have a feminine gate considering she's got that bull shaped pelvis and that sort of saunter that we tend to associate with wider hips tell her I mean you touched on the key point right there in your last utterance there wider hips why would she have wider hips unless it was constrained by an enlargement of the birth canal to accommodate a large brained baby without that constraint the hips the interacetabular or distance between the hip joints is going to be comparable between a male or a female there's no enlargement that's what gives that wider interacetabular distance is what gives the the sway to the female pelvis when walking there's a greater a cantilever kind of a principle going on there as weight is balanced over or or vaulted over the support limb if when the when the swing limb is elevated the tendency is for the pelvis to drop to that side paralysis of the glutes on this side produces what's called the trendelberg syndrome or sign where with each step the the pelvis tends to drop and so the patient will throw their arm you know if you've ever seen a chimpan the chimpanzee walk like they're walking on a tightrope well they do that because they don't have the rearrangement of the medial or the gluteus medius and gluteus minimus around to the lateral side so that now they're abductors of the hip rather than extensors as the gluteus maximus remains so in short I mean this you know that that's one of the statements that's an embarrassment to the discipline quite honestly that the only one that supersedes that is the fact is the one was made by oh shucks now I just went blank on his name but he was a expert on primate skin and he thought it was it was laughable that here she was presented as a female with the breasts but yet those breasts were covered with hair and everyone knows that all primates are essentially devoid of hair over the over the breasts wrong you know at least not the primatologists of this generation don't make such assertions and and if anyone has any doubts you know a simple experiment you can do is just step out ladies step out of the shower on a cold into a cold room and check for the distribution of goosebumps over your your body and if there's a goosebumps that's a hair follicle with an erector pili muscle attached to it no matter how fine how how ephemeral that hair is it is the muscle is still present and if you have goosebumps over your breast you have latent hair follicles present as well and they're responsive to androgens females with hormonal imbalances can experience the not proliferation but the expression of coarser hair in a male pattern distribution and so anyway that that the remark about the the female to male walk is also misses the point entirely do you pose though kind of a question on that because from from my understanding the the nature of this adaption to bipedality does have to do with the the architecture of the pelvis so the reason why you know for instance chimps and gorillas when they I suppose and gorillas when they stand up and they've got that bow-legged stances they're kind of shambling along and like you said it's like you're on a tightrope is is in part because of that pelvic architecture that was one of the first things to change when we start to see this adaption bipedality in in the Australopithecines and depending on who you talk to our fifth dish ramadas and even it's really aureopithecus and some of those myosin apes depending on who you talk to because they're still kind of up in the air but I'm thinking that that like I guess help me out on the understanding on what that pulvis architecture would look like that simultaneously lends itself to this kind of awkward masculine gait for both sexes that at the same time makes this animal such an efficient biped because that when you see this thing move across when you see her she's moving across the frame she's movement you know she's covering that right she's in I would think if anyone would agree these guys are good at walking on two feet if they do indeed wander the Pacific Park West Did I hear you correctly were you saying that that male males walk awkwardly? Oh no no no no no sorry no no what I was what I was seeing is the difference between there's like right you can tell the difference between males and females how they distribute their weight when they move like I would can't and my question is even though that distant like I I guess what I was saying is that you noted that the way that Patty kind of holds herself but it is masculine not a problem because it's quite similar to like their pelvic architectures I guess what I'm asking is how it's going to lend itself to a more awkward gate that we see in Patty a more masculine gate and then at the same time lend itself to efficient vitality Well the obviously the principal rearrangement of the pelvis or elaboration I mean this is first of all let me back up there's a common misconception and it stems from the the idea that we evolved from a chimpanzee like ancestor Right and true it it is in many respects more chimpanzee like than it is modern human life but when it comes to the pelvis the the pelvis of of the African apes and to a lesser degree the the Asian apes the orangutan has has derived tremendously in in a direction towards a very specialized brachiation type of movement arm hanging movement and and with that has come a shortening of the lumbar spine and a elongation of these very forwardly directed iliac blades and so the human on the other hand has them as you described a more bowl like bowl like in that the iliac blades have curved around they're very short and they're curved around anteriorly which brings the as I mentioned the lesser gluteals into a position to function as glutes I'm sorry as abductors the lesser gluteals as abductors which is the principle bipedal adaptation so that we don't have to swing our body mass back and forth balancing over each leg these muscles even you can you can test this as you walk down to just take a step put your hand on your hip and you'll feel the lesser gluteals flex as you swing that leg the leg of that side forward or opposite the opposite leg the contralateral leg the support limb those muscles fire to keep the pelvis from dropping on the swing side right and that is what you know therefore then we don't have to incorporate a shift of center of mass above the waist and we can use our arms to swing and employ the moment of inertia created by the swinging arm in a very effective way okay so if I understand this correctly and I'm trying to steal man kind of what we just went through here so the idea is essentially that the hominids the yeah hominids I guess I should say that the hominids that both extant humans and and other extant gradients can be descended from had this much less derived pelvis between the two of us like it wasn't it wasn't more chimp like it was almost the mosaic between what we see now and we've got in chimp's so that kind of leads me to my next question because in anthropology I'm not sure you know I'm preaching to the choir here yeah there's there's the question right now with the myosin hominids hominids again sorry hominid whether or not humans who I'm using as our template for the trackway to buy pedality whether or not they evolved from kind of a suspensory ancestor with that up and down posture or from a knuckle walking quadruped right my question for you is because I've if in your book it seems that you very strongly allude to this gigantic epithecist ancestry for sasquatch so how do you suppose we're getting that that bipedality from from something like gigantic epithecist how do you make that movement because at least from the little we understand or do you suppose gigantic epithecist wasn't a quadruped I don't assume that it was a quadruped and I don't think anyone is justified in assuming that it's a quadruped even though that's the default position that many resort to because they assume but and again it's it's an assumption they assume that bipedalism is a strictly synapomorphic character unique to the hominony you know the or hominidae I guess you whichever the hominins that that defines the clades to it the clade to which we belong in our and our immediate ancestors since the divergence from an ancestor but as you've alluded to by enumerating some of these other myosin apes like aureopithecus and artypithecus which almost certainly in my mind was not a special case that was a hominin there's very little justification for that in my opinion but and then recently there was another duzin duzinensis no not duzinensis denuvius denuvius was a another species recently described and was attributed with very very likely with an at least an orthograde posture if not capable of bipedal locomotion so the point being is and this was kind of where I was driving with this by emphasizing the fact that we did not evolve from a chimpanzee ancestor evolved from a chimp like but one that if you focus on the pelvis had a much more generalized pelvis you look at artypithecus and the problem with that is artypithecus pelvis was smashed into a bazillion pieces and you know they reconstructed it but they kind of reconstructed it to the to you know to the dimensions and shape that they were anticipating and it's not a reproducible method in my opinion but nevertheless the point being that that a number of these myosin apes had pelvis that would require much less modification to become australopithecine like and eventually human like then if you started off with something that looked and walked like a chimpanzee so gigantopithecus it's assumed because it's not a hominin you know it's it's a the most recent analysis that actually compared DNA attributed uh placed it most closely to asian apes you know the orangutan well bear in mind the orangutan isn't representative of all asian apes it's one surviving species and a highly specialized example so placing gigantopithecus amongst the asian apes we should we shouldn't fall pray to the temptation to say well it was just a big orangutan but but it probably had as did so many of the myosin apes have rearrangement of the of the shoulder girdle the pectoral girdle for overhead arm hanging or climbing postures and and positional behaviors there were probably some like shevapithecus for example that's what's going to bring up yeah if post cranium seems to be much more quadrupedal almost more monkey like and the big difference between apes and monkeys is apes or monkeys rather are cursorial they're cursorial quadrupeds whether they're terrestrial like baboons or semi terrestrial or whether there are arboreal quadrupeds but yet they have gone through a period of evolution where their skeleton has been remodeled to more resemble your dog or cat than say a spider monkey and so that means their thorax is compressed the the shoulder blades are vertical to align with and extend the the motions of the humerus in in contrast to apes which tend to be more brachyators they have the flattened chest I mean the the reason we have a chest that looks more like a chimp than it looks like a baboon is that we are capable of doing things that a baboon can't do in on the jungle gym you know at recess we are playground is a perfect testament to our legacy of tree climbing and so now take that one of the arguments for the highly modified form of quadrupedalism found in chimps and gorillas and when they are on the ground and aren't rolling like a ball orangutans is that the arrangement of the shoulder joint is such that when we come down on all fours now start at the shoulder our shoulder blade now is on the back of the rib cage you know slight angle but it meets the humerus like this not like this bones tolerate compression really well but they don't tolerate sheer and those same kinds of modifications of the elbow and the wrist that allow for that full extension and twisting of the wrist such that when we go down to do push-ups you know why do some people buy these little hand grips to put on the floor to do push-ups well the same reason when I do push-ups I do them on the backs of my knuckles so I can keep my wrist straight because when I put my hand like that man it really hurts here across the capitate and the I'm not the capitate but the scaphoid and the lunate there so imagine all of those constraints to to going down to all fours that might have predisposed some of these hominin ancestors to an who which were already rather upright from their climbing in the trees when they came to the ground it was made more sense to just stay on their hind limbs now if you amplify those shortcomings of the skeleton in an animal that weighs in excess of a thousand pounds you know when they come to the ground what are what are the odds if it turns out that that gigantopithecus went through a suspensory or a climbing phase as so many myosin apes did but then as it gained this tremendous size you know it doesn't make any sense to go up in the trees yeah especially I can't support it so it's on the ground so at the very least you've got a 50-50 chance of either walking on two legs or walking on four what I have just described in my opinion tips the scale towards the direction of bipedalism and independent evolution of bipedalism but nevertheless an argument that can be made that you know I expect that when they come out of that one of those Vietnamese caves with a gigantopithecus femur it's going to look like a hominid wouldn't that be incredible I hope we find one I hope we get one because I've been dying for more gigantopithecus you know it just it drives me nuts and I love I love hellebatants but it drives me nuts that we're finding little hellebaties you know remains before we're finding anything from this gigantic right the hominids from Southeast Asia but I that leads me to ask because you know and I'm dreadfully curious the pressures are very trackable climatically speaking that that led many of the Miocene apes and then of course many of the of the kind of Sedanus dwellers of small woodland forests in the Eastern African Wrath what drove them down from the trees as it were so so to my understanding part of the reason why and you know I I have looked into this a bit because we see this really weird thing in Southeast Asia for maybe because we don't know I'm sure you know this already but where we see these two weird adaptations with the hellebatants the Gibbons and the our members of Pongo did the and gigantopithecus and the gigantopithecus the scenes get really big and the Gibbons get very small and it's almost at least what I've seen it's been proposed that you've got kind of like a like a climatic shift in resources so how do you suppose that that tracks for driving these these animals to a bipedal stance in these rainforests because that seems really counterintuitive to me well if if there was and I'm not I'm not 100% yet confident or or a conclusive about what the range of gigantopithecus is is in Asia and Eastern Asia our fossil record you're right that we have found them but we've just barely found traces of gigantopithecus we've got you know for for a million and a half years of tenure two jaws and a few thousand isolate teeth and the critical thing is we only have those because porcupines took them into the caves dragged those bits into the caves and and chewed them up and see that may be that may be the limiting factor it's just the the the spurious jaw that a porcupine can manage to drag a gigantic femur of a big ape like that maybe too big for a porcupine to get into a to drag up the hill into the cave who knows because then when you go north of the of the Yellow River there are representatives of that same community but there are there are no gigantopithecus teeth are fossils found in any of the limestone caves which are present there it seems that there's this formula you have to have a limestone cave and you have to have gigantopithecus and you have to have a porcupine to concentrate the fossils without the concentrator the the gigantopithecus don't frequent the caves they're not inhabitants of the caves and so their fossils are never they're never going to be produced north there but if they were if there if there was an a movement of this population with the forests and and with fragmentation perhaps it's the exposure to climatic changes in the northern latitudes that's selected for increased body size just as as I mean they were not they were not let's dispel that and then miss Nova they were not bamboo specialists they weren't restricted to bamboo forests yes there's evidence of phytoliths but you read that pay for it's about pitting too they're about pitting itself well but yeah pitting that's that caused by the by the phytoliths in in a some grass if you read that original paper by Shahan there were four teeth only two of them had the phytoliths and he didn't identify two species the grasses the phytoliths came from just assumed they must be bamboo they were eating bamboo because that because this panda bear model and so but if you you know if you if you look at the studies that have been done both surface wear micro wear but more recently a stable isotope analysis of the teeth have clearly shown that their diet was Catholic it was they were generalized omnivores they were not bamboo specialists so all of those all of those musings and modeling and so forth about both their distribution and their behavior are are on very very clay feed so if I say I I want to I'll just push back on you a little bit there because I would propose that not being able to isolate a specific diet to a specific grass sage or bamboo what makes you suppose that that that leads to omnivoring though the the the stable isotope analysis oh right okay most most similar but even before that Daiglin and and Grine did a much more thorough paper looking at micro wear analysis and did it very extensive comparative and and came to the conclusion that the the wear patterns were most similar to chimpanzees that they were eating you know not even an herbivore like a good well a gorilla isn't a strict herbivore they do when it's present they do take fruits and they'll even do you know invertebrate protein when it's possible but anyway but but there was no support for a highly specialized diet I mean whatever their diet was it was clearly coarse and and required a lot of mastication as evidenced by the very thick molar enamel and the greatly reduced canines yeah allow for that amplified phase two that side to side grinding of the of the chewing cycle and so that you know in that respect functionally it's very convergent with the adaptations of the parentheses right yeah hyper-thick enamel molarized premolars reduced canines megadonti yeah big monsters right so but then with two parentheses and of course it varies on population certainly because they're totally I'm not say with bonobos all pennants you know you've got opportunistic and even intentional omnivory from from the likes of like you said small invertebrates or frogs to be active hunting of a dieter or colobus monkeys right but it still makes up a very small portion of their diet and I'm thinking to myself if we're talking about something like gigantic thickets or a sasquatch for that matter which is being these very very large animals very similar to the recent or I guess it's not that recent but but the work that's been done on yander tall like caloric intake because they they weren't as tall as us but they probably were a bit more robust in their body size and they yeah they required enormous caloric intake which is why when they would go and hunt they would specifically take the organs and the you know very high high calorie yields from the animals that they killed so I that leads kind of to my next question which is whether it's which I guess a pithecus or with the sasquatch how are we meeting these metabolic needs in such a way that we're still not stumbling across these guys because the likes of you mentioned in your book rhino pithecus Roxannella the the so monkeys you know they maintain their diets in these morally climates by going in and pulling back tree bark and eating leech and and like and stuff like that but I'm I'm not seeing that as working for a critter the size of the sasquatch well um a couple of things one we you know I don't want to on the basis of comparing the possible diet of primates that are in subtropical to tropical environments to one that is hypothetically in a temperate environment right and and we don't know what we don't know what their you know their behavior is during the winter whether hibernation is part of their adaptation or whether estivation or dozing you're like a bear that'd be super neat yeah but and especially in light of of some of the recent publications that not only in the human genome project elucidated some of our genetic hardware that that suggests that we have homologous genes to which in humans apparently has been suggested control circadian rhythms that are homologous to genes that moderate hibernating behaviors in in other mammals and then the recent paper about Neanderthals and I'm trying to I'm grasping here but there was a paper that on the basis of it was something to do with the bone remodeling that suggested that they had annual periods or daily periods of not daily but seasonal periods of inactivity of reduced activity and reduced metabolic activity that suggested the authors to the authors that perhaps Neanderthals were hibernating or at least estivating for extensive periods of time which is really interesting I mean it's always the I always rebuff the retort that that you know primates don't hibernate well it only takes one mutation I mean or at least one one adaptation in a species you know look at look at vertebrates or carnivores take the order carnivores how many carnivores hibernate one you know so if you're going to generalize and if you didn't know about bears and you're going to generalize from all existing carnivores and say well they don't hibernate it's impossible to conceive of a of a carnivore that hibernates well then you would rule out the existence of bears before the fact likewise you know I mean it's that's the problem so especially when there's all this suggestive evidence I agree I agree on that point I don't think that like like rarity certainly does not guess impossibility and I would even propose and you mentioned this in your book as well you know we've got some structure ions that hibernate that's right during the crisis I wouldn't yeah I wouldn't put that out of the realm of possibility but I would push back with with rhino-pithecus Roxannella and with Japanese patex in the Patex of Muscata because they live in these environments that I would at least suppose on the on the pressure end of things right kind of push them towards that sort of prime them rather for that kind of adaptation sure and and so to me although to your point I would imagine that it would be much more difficult for a larger animal like I think no but then we see a lot of small animals members of like rodents et cetera that that also engage in like hibernation cell activity so I don't know I think I'd have to put a pin in that yeah I would I would have to put a pin in that because that seems to me just though but I wouldn't go so far as to say that's impossible so what do you think they're consuming well pretty much uh everything I mean there's that is edible now you've got the and I have to defer I don't have the expertise I work closely with an ethnobotanist who knows these things inside and out and and he's working I've he's done several very interesting presentations on this subject and I've been pushing him to get it written up so that I can study it more intimately myself but for example he shows this one slide you can't read it because it's so exhaustive the length of all of the species that that grizzly bears are known to eat all the plant species and it's it's amazing the diversity and then he's he has reviewed the the plant families that are represented in say gorilla diets and and many of those have vickers or have comparable species here and and those could be added he then also lists all of the plants that humans typically utilize for edibles indigenous populations have historically used and and still continue in some instances you know so when you consider a bear is able to make a living yes they do hibernate but that requires that they actually take in and consume much more by way of total calories in preparation for that period of inactivity a great ape you know one of the arguments that has been made against the possible existence of Sasquatch is that you've already got a large omnivore right bears are present already so how would you partition that niche well omnivore is a pretty broad brush stroke but if you look at the alternate origins of these two large omnivores bears derived from a canid like or carnivore ad ancestor with a with a simple gut and carnaceous and the the the dentition and the jaw structure of of a carnivore the bear has widened out those teeth a bit it has certainly elaborated the small intestine however not so much the the large intestine on the other hand you've got if bigfoot exists it's almost certainly derived from some form of of ape or early hominin which is basically a bipedal ape so it's probably derived from a frugivore folivore ancestor maybe some protein as you as we talked about but it has a much more capacious gut especially the large intestine because the great apes are sent are largely large intestine hind gut fermenters in order to detoxify and digest this full liverist diet well if sasquatch is derived from that it has then the ability to consume to masticate you know the jaws of that you see on patty or the jaws of either a gigantipithecus derivative or a paranthropine derivative are going to be able to process foods that really are not available to a bear from the from the mechanical land but then add to that also the the gut physiology many primates are capable of detoxifying digesting and detoxifying secondary compounds that make many plants unpalatable to other animals and have a slow gut passage time which you know patty's big she doesn't have a huge pot belly that's evident but her torso is as thick front to back all the way down you know I think it's that more bull like pelvis you don't get the appearance of a big pot belly suspended from this rather flat horizontal pelvis you know iliac blades so I think she's got a very capacious gut and capable of the gut passage time and so forth of the large folivore and that opens up I mentioned say that opens up a whole list of things that bears that need yeah I would agree with you I personally I don't really have an issue with with you know too large omnivores kind of coexisting in the same area there's there's plenty of things in the Pacific Northwest to exploit uh depending on which armor where you are the thing that I would mainly point out with that is that when it comes to organisms that's like primates for example in this case that spend a lot of time eating which something of patty size would have to spend a lot of time doing even if you count for like uh even focused on nivery because like guy you're feeling this massive body and anytime you're including arm and for instance bears spend a whole lot of time foraging and hunting like that's just what they and then they fall asleep for half the year so so what I'm thinking is that in the case of gorillas when you know they're there are folks who who work out on these at these field sites and they spend uh they're they're dedicated trappers and one of the ways that makes it very easy for them to find gorillas as opposed to chimpanzees is when they forge they leave massive traces of themselves partially because they're social and it's a big group of them sitting in an area stripping vegetation and chowing down all the time but I'm thinking to myself even if we're dealing with something solitary if you've got this small population of of Sasquatch living in the Pacific Northwest and they're spending an awful lot of time eating and foraging and exploiting especially I would even posit because they're exploiting so many different resources and resources that are not being exploited by bears and thus cannot be easily attributable to bears I'm thinking would you not think that by now we someone would have stumbled across perhaps someone even dedicated to to the idea of sussing out what's going on with with Sasquatch and thoughts themselves okay I've got this plant and something big who's been eating it or I've got this carcass and something big who's been eating it and forensically speaking it's not matching up with the usual suspects of our of our ursins right or even some smaller immigrants well what do you make of that well I for one as you point out unless someone is is out there to literally suss what Sasquatch is doing there there aren't people looking for such sign and and it's it's not that easy to recognize in in the types of habitats these that I'm familiar with you know even when you have a you have a herd of elk going through an area yeah you can find the twigs that have been nipped and so forth and occasionally you can find where bears have ripped open stumps and you can you can certainly see by the the claw marks that it's a bear but but you know that even that sign from an from animals that are much more numerous is is pretty ephemeral and and and and you know unless you're a real trained observer you're not going to and there just aren't people out there looking for that sign and your average amateur enthusiast isn't isn't certainly isn't qualified even even someone like myself doesn't I don't I wouldn't profess to have the experience have not spent the time when I'm out there I'm looking for trace evidence and in the form of tracks whenever I can and those other things you know you watch for them but and and then I and and we just add to that it's it's that moving needle in a haystack the I get the impression from the distribution of of track finds and sightings you know in given geographical regions that and and they're in frequency that these animals are probably moving as you say foraging and they can be foraging constantly but they're moving their their resources tend to be rather dispersed and so they don't leave dense concentrations of sign I mean a gorilla can sit down for the day and pretty much sitting forage without moving just what he can gather within arms length and when he's done he's he and all his cohorts in the in the in the troop have essentially mowed down or crushed down by their presence the vegetation and you know I would wager you have you have perhaps glossed over it just a little bit because my my understanding from reading the the various narratives and so forth you know if you know where those grill is where yesterday it's pretty easy to find out where they are today that's true too well and you've got dedicated folks who go out there I mean I feel field researchers they go to sleep with the private their side and then they make their way back to the to base camp and then they get up before they're awake and then they travel back out and pick up with them at the site so I would agree I would agree with that I I guess I'm more thinking from the perspective of like it because it because if it's me if I'm out there and I'm looking kind of for support I'm thinking to myself if this is a true generalist which it sounds like it's got to be to be level yeah yeah I'm looking at every you know turned over log or whatever or you know and I'm seeing to myself okay which can I see signs of scraping nails or you know specific dentition that are knocking and things of that nature and and god wouldn't it be amazing you find the nod teeth and you get some saliva and boom like you've got your you've got your DNA which would be superb yeah I would we would hope right exactly and that kind of leads me to my my next question I'm sort of peppering you questions I know oh that's good this is a good opportunity for me to kind of the get your perspective on things so has anyone done and I'm sure you know this is why I'm asking like an EDNA study out there and for those of you who don't know out in the audience just let everyone know so the way the way an EDNA since environmental DNA and it's basically you take a bunch of water samples soil samples et cetera and then you scan the series vast series of samples for trace DNA of local critters because as animals ourselves we leave our skin cells all over the place and most animals do the same thing and so you tend to get a decent ish idea about what's lurking around in the area it's our gut we did we did a preliminary associated with these ground nests that were found in the Olympic Peninsula that were attributed or potentially attributable to Sasquatch they were discovered by a timber cruiser who was marking out timber on on private timber land an area behind a gate but and yet miles down the road into the area and then miles from the road he was out traveling cross country marking out sections for logging and stumbled on this site it's an interesting story of itself but to make a long story short for EDNA I had the opportunity to go and take core samples from the center of these nests they were submitted to Todd Dissotel one of the only molecular anthropologists who will interact with us on this subject for DNA analysis he did a rather cursory study looking at cytochromoxidase 2 I think he was the gene he was looking at on the mitochondria but he only did a short segment he didn't do very much and he said that it was well he had a whole litany of forest creatures that you would expect that to be in that area and human and that was the only primate represented was human and I pressed him on on how confident it was he because I mean if we're talking again if we're talking about something that say a paranthropine derivative we're talking about something that could be one percent or half of one percent different than us genetically and so I said have you looked at enough sequence he said well this particular stretch that I looked at when you compared humans and Neanderthals Neanderthals differ by three substitutions so it should be able to pick up something that is more distantly related to us than Neanderthals and I said well but that's Neanderthal evolution that you're making a big assumption based on a small sample that the creature in question would also differ from us in at least those substitutions if not more it may differ from us somewhere else in the genome by a lot more but happened to be identical to us on those well he and I discussed this with a number of other other geneticists and they all concur they said because you know what happens is if we do test that saliva or we do test that hair and do get DNA invariably so far it comes back as human and the conclusion is well it's either contamination from handling the sample or you've just misidentified a human sample human hair or human human source but the third possibility that has to be chased down all the way is if this animal is that closely related to us potentially it's going to take a lot of DNA to be confident that you're not simply writing it off prematurely you know it's like you know for the person that it's not familiar with these techniques and so forth just imagine you have an Advent's calendar and with a bunch of little doors you know leading up to Christmas with a little sweet behind each one and but instead we're going to have segments of DNA and say instead of 24 doors we've got a thousand well if this creature is one tenth of one percent different than us then that means only 10 doors in that out of that thousand are going to hold information that will discriminate between the two species but if you finance a study that opens up only 10 doors out of those thousand what are the odds that by chance you get one of the you know one that has the golden ticket in it you're thinking we're just not covering enough right yeah we're not covering enough well by chance I was just going to say right my pushback on that I guess would be like you know humans in intertolls the general number they for rounds is 97 point or sorry 99.7 percent across you know for coding base pairs which is you know it's it's very similar but we're also 98.8 percent panin so it's you know that that 23 percent here is a decent bit of weight I mean yeah potentially yeah we are different species from intertolls and you know there's a there's a deal with genetics where small genetic differences may make for larger morphologic changes just depending so but I'm thinking to myself from from your perspective right it's like I would almost at that point rule out a gigantic epithecist ancestor because that's so far removed like to me that almost seemed like you really want to pull back on gigantic epithecist and go more for parenthepist even then I would be like all right you know we're talking about what a potential common ancestor with maybe an alcholicousine maybe a bit earlier um or oran or something like that I don't even think we've got that not that I think it's just kind of sister group it's kind of over there right so so I'm thinking like and while while I think you're I would I would hesitantly say you're right you definitely want sequence more stuff to be sure and preliminary there is always the chance that you're you know dealing with even a sampling error like it could be you want to go out there and get more samples I don't know and that's very far outside of of my field but that being said I would think that if it's going to register in the end or call difference it would register a Sasquatch difference you would think you would think but but on the basis of I mean he only sequenced about 700 nucleotides is all I mean that's just that's that's not enough in my from one location I would even argue that that that's certainly not enough to rule it out but the Sasquatch deniers are fighting an uphill battle here because precluding something is not as easy as providing support for something or definitively precluding something I would say so in any case in any case the the anticipatory story here is that as I was you know fretting over this third possibility the phone rings and it's it's a geneticist who happens to be on vacation up in Yellowstone and he's a he's a a new actually visiting professor or postdoc at UC Davis okay and he pardon yeah and and he was in the neighborhood so he said hey I've always been a big fan fascinated with the with the question he said I'm passing through can I stop in and visit and I said well of course if you'll let me pick your brain and so he was another geneticist who concurred oh yeah you should be doing the entire mitochondrial genome and at least at least a dozen nuclear genes to boot to be confident and he said you should talk to my professor he said I I studied in New Zealand I'm from New Zealand he said my professor Neil Gemmel and paused as if I should recognize that well I'm not great with names but it turns out he goes Neil Gemmel he's he was the lead investigator in the multinational study of the Loch Ness waters oh wow the EDNA study yeah I know that's one I know the one with the eels exactly and I go oh this is perfect I said do you think would you put him put me in contact with him he says oh absolutely I'll introduce you and so this was a year and a half ago pre-covid and so Neil and I started going back and forth dialogue in and he he got intrigued and is eager to undertake a project if I can come up with the lion's share of the funding for it and but then COVID hit yeah so everything got put on the back burner that's how I know so over the winter or over the over the summer and this coming winter we're putting our heads together and we're we're crafting a proposal to do a more extensive study of those nest sites for one but also in other areas I mean doing I want to do some water sampling too in areas where there have been recent reports and be poised you know everyone keeps telling me have you checked the you know your your plaster cast or could back to DNA in the soil or attached to the the plaster well I think it's a it's a a stretch that anything has survived the handling and so forth to avoid contamination especially given our previous discussion right but fresh footprints you know scoop up that soil and do do analysis on that so so that I really do think I'm really happy you brought that up because I see that as the future direction you know going out and hoping that you find tracks or hoping that you bump into a sasquatch or you know the idea that anyone's going to shoot one with a tranquilizer I think is just is not is untenable but finding their trace it's still a very rare and elusive animal but yet if you can get into areas that have a history that have you know contemporary sightings and be ready to jump on it and then have the methodologies in place to collect samples I think I think that that would be amazing and in part of the it's especially cool that it's the guy who did the the nest oh yeah a little extra hook you know yeah well and that's really cool too because it's if memory serves and I actually and I lived in the UK for nine months prior to COVID from for my M res and I took that opportunity to visit the Loch Ness and in Dharma oh which was really fun and we went to the museum and I was actually surprised by how cynical the museum was but I I really did enjoy it and one of the things that they mentioned you know about that EDNA study with the eels is that you know most people there didn't even know there were eels in the lock you know oh really know that they existed in the lock so the the fact that they were catching was on the EDNA for something that most folks had just never even seen I think that bodes really well for you know using it as a potential study for right in blistering or um eliminating certain lines of evidence or support for for Sasquatch I think that would probably tell you a lot but you're gonna get said I think you're also dealing with a much like you know bigger area too that it's like you you're you're sweeping a lot of space there and you kind of just got to hope that you know something assuming that the Sasquatch is only doing them an organism is that it's passing through there sure that's right which I think it has to has to be focused you can't there's just no way I mean this is the challenge you know I tell students too I can't go out in the field and systematically collect evidence for against Sasquatch other than the absence of it but you know it's your chances of it's not like you can just do a transect through the forest and and see if you bump into a Sasquatch it just doesn't work and and that's well you know there are methodologies for studying rare and elusive species that use other alternate techniques but even those I mean they're animals like you know wolverines or martins or fishers you know that that are probably still more numerous than Sasquatch I would wager but at least in some areas not always but anyway yeah it's it'll have to be a fairly focused study but so do you think that and this is what kind of alluding to one of my questions because like for me it's my big two is that I'm not really as concerned with the with the lack of a body or things of that nature I think there are a lot of organisms that are very difficult to find and and certainly you can't you know absence of evidence is not evidence of absence I suppose is how the saying goes right but I do you know I put my my butt there but I do find the the the fossil support the paleoepropologic stuff on that pathway because I need suggested in in the book and in prayer conversations you know there's this potential crossing the land bridge right from Europe or Asia we're at one of these locations I mean rafting for an organism this big might be a little difficult so it's like you know making making it over via a land bridge I'm thinking that given how organisms of this size tend to move why is it that you know because I'm I guess I'm imagining that this range is be a bit more expansive and then you know shrinking as human encroachment occurs and things like that so why why do you suppose we you know with all the dinosaur dig sites and and paleo are paleontology paleontology that occurs in the United States why do you suppose we've we've not run into some perhaps a remain I guess right right exactly well you know obviously fossilization is extremely capricious and and you know the the conditions need to be conducive we we discussed a little bit about the the porcupine bias of the gigantipithecus fossil record right I mean you know here here is an ape that had a tenure of existence in east Asia for 1.5 million years and yet we have to show for that two jaws and a few thousand isolated teeth which isn't much at all and and nothing else I mean not a single other postcranial bone it's just it's just hard to imagine otherwise but and you pointed out and in your introduction we recently or it was recently discovered the first fossil of a of a gibbon at least a radius and but if we had had this conversation just a couple years ago we'd be saying well there gee there are no fossils of gibbons yep so there's always discoveries discovery is an ongoing process and especially technology okay so so give me give me that so likewise with you on that top right so so so what is sasquatch I mean is it is it a gigantipithecus extent or is it something else is you know we we would never have thought that there was a late australia epithecine early habeline in southeast Asia until a few years ago yeah and so that tells us that there is a huge gap in our understanding of the dispersal of those species from I mean the source presumably is africa and I I think that's a really good point I I want to add something I guess to that to that yep case I suppose because you're right I mean we're looking at places like flores um and um um would I forget loosen loosen I believe for looseness looseness and yeah yeah um you know these early members of homo you know if we want to put them in homo which I know some folks are like we got some this stuff going on here and and I would agree with that and I think that it's a great point that it's like okay you know we've got habeline's and also epithecine's chilling out um mining their own business in africa and then we've got them showing up in flores and we don't find them along the way perhaps because we're not looking for them in those locations right I would suppose though the only read the only pushback I would give on that is that unlike those areas that kind of dot that line up through kind of the Middle East and through southeast Asia and then down you know through um through those the kind of southeast Asia peninsula off into the islands out there I think that we tend to give we've developed areas of the United States along the pathway from like say the Bering Strait or some form of those lines that would be more conducive to fossilization because we've just got the absolute pleasure of having so many different kinds of biomes here in the States and in Canada and North America so I guess I'm thinking you know it's almost like we have been looking and the areas that would fossilize them either by sheer bad luck or because there wasn't one aren't fossilized we're finding the remains there do you suppose maybe it was just because because my immediate pushback on myself is like okay well maybe they weren't there for very long like what are your thoughts on the range upon arriving in North America right well well we know that there were periods of time that where the land bridge was contiguous forest forested habitat so the forested habitats are not themselves going to be good conducive environments for fossilization and then of course there was more land exposed with the lowering of the sea level which now is inundated and so that's probably eliminated some other potential sources I mean the most likely place to find remains would be in my mind in limestone caves and along the western coastline and it happens that there is someone Tim Heaton is a at the South Dakota School of Minds I think I'm getting that right still whose specialty is excavating Pleistocene deposits in in limestone caves in southeastern Alaska and he's excavated dozens of these caves now you know all the way down to the bedrock and so he's sampling hundreds of thousands of years and yet in all those excavations he's got just a handful of bare fossils right you know he's saying you know tens of thousands of bears have come and gone come and gone but that's the representation we have I posed this question to him first of all I said you know have you ever come upon anything that even remotely resembled a primate and he said no no we haven't but and I said assuming for just a moment for the sake of argument that there's a very real possibility that Sasquatch exists would it surprise you that you haven't found fossils and he said oh no not at all he said the preservation in these caves is so biased and so particular to and particular in some instances to filter in and so forth but also in some cases quite serendipitous that it doesn't surprise me in the least that we haven't especially something that may have only been in on the continent for a few tens if not hundreds of thousands of years so I think they're fairly recent I think they're yeah I think they're potentially fairly recent interlopers now what does that say for for Asia if they've been had a longer tenure there perhaps as suggested by or I mean their presence there is I think very real I mean the the slam dunk evidence for me was when I was able to examine these footprint casts from Shandia and they showed the you know the remarkable pressure ridge absolutely comparable to the to the examples here especially the one from from the Patterson Gimlin film site that's a perfect lead-in because I want to ask you about the trackways because that's like that's your bread and butter that's the your area of expertise and like I I totally defer to you to you on that and one thing side note I want I'm sorry I totally interrupted you no that's all right that's all right made the point I just got excited because I was like ah yes I really want to ask you it's a green in your book and I I have a black and white coffee so I it was difficult for me to make out like the the proposed dramatic lifts the ridges and I felt some of them quite compelling I was looking at some of them I was like this is very interesting this is this is quite strange I don't have a ready explanation for it mm-hmm you know doesn't mean fast watch but at the same time I was like I don't I don't know what to make of this and then some of them I was kind of like I I don't know you know not my field this is your area so if you propose them I'm sure that you know what you're talking about but to me they almost looked like mud cracks or or you know drying agents or or things like that a little more cross-sectiony looking ones that were they had the less borals and more of the crosshatch almost sure sure well that that what's in the book needs to be revised a little bit because some things became apparent after the book was published there are some examples and we had our suspicions but but it became as we did some more experimentation it became very very evident I had observed a phenomenon we were doing some experiments with the transfer of dermatoglyphics to very fine substrates we were actually trying to determine if indeed you could transfer poor details the pores on the ridges to these very fine substrates and so we were experimenting with talcum powder and flour and lus from from the soils around here which are very similar to those in southeastern Washington which also has a very high lus content that makes it's just so extremely fine and yes we could transfer that kind of detail but in the process we found as we were doing some of our experiments when you would pour plaster especially if it was about ready to kick it was just about ready to set up if you poured it into this very dry substrate like the lus it would suck that just enough moisture out to cause it to kick and then it's just like if you've ever made pancakes on a hot griddle pouring the batter and it it fries it cooks and then it overflows as you're pouring and that cooks and then the next and you get these alternating bands like hot magma almost or while lus yes and that was I think happening in some of the examples that were taken in Northern California on a hot dusty logging road there was the super imposition of dramatic glyphics or of dramatic glyphic like features that were merely artifacts of using hot water to mix the plaster which they cautioning not to do but they you know it was just water was sitting out in their water jug that's all they had to work with and then they were pouring that into this pulverized logging road dust that was sucking it out and causing this this alternating banding pattern which was not real dramatic glyphics in contrast the one that the example that I drew attention to in the book that had which Grover had referred to it as wrinkle foot because it had this very course dramatic glyphics very extensive distribution not just peripheralized as in these others from California and in this case it was under cold conditions saturated soils but the same lust but now very clayy because it's wet and Officer Jimmy Chilka the latent fingerprint examiner who came to my lab and examined these things was especially impressed with these because there was clear evidence of the healed scars that had interrupted the the ridge pattern caused kind of a herring bone like taking a thread on a on a corduroy fabric and pulling on it it pull it causes the this disruption in the in the pattern he showed those we took some latex peels of those features and Jimmy had just finished a recertification workshop on specialized on focusing on scars as identifying characteristics in dramatic glyphics took him back to his instructor and showed him these and he said oh yeah he said that textbook scar tissue and those are real dramatic glyphics not knowing where they came from but then he told him and he and he was all the more intrigued rather than put off by it so so there was some qualification in in that and there was a an investigator who was it now I can't think of his name he went by the moniker the tube online but I'm embarrassed now that I can't remember his name but anyway he had drawn some attention and did some experiments and showed how you could create artifacts and and he was right I mean he was right as it pertain to that particular example set of examples but we've had repeated examples that show clearly show dramatic glyphics and I think it's a real feature and and to be expected it's just extremely rare because you have to have precisely the right conditions to transfer the dramatic glyphics to the print it has to survive long enough for someone to discover it and then someone that has the wherewithal to pour pour the plaster I mean if it's a dry dusty print you pour plaster in that it's pretty much going to obliterate it unless you consolidate it with a like a lacquer hairspray or something and so you know in all my 300 plus footprint cast there's only maybe a dozen that have even a trace of dramatic glyphics in them right and and you you mentioned it briefly I want to make sure I would understanding you correctly is is there a way to get dramatic glyphics without it act like could they be an artifact of something else well you know there's been a lot of debate about that if you go into some of the old texts you know they look at examples like wave pattern submarine wave patterns in the sand I mean because it's it's not exactly clear what dictates there's a certain genetic element but then there are those who say that there's also a nature element that the conditions in utero actually cause the coalescence of the little papillae that form around the sweat pores that coalesce into the the linear patterns and so you know when Chilcut was first visiting with me and talking he said there are characteristics you know ending loop or ending lines included lines loops whirls you know and so forth that determine that there are the criteria by which he determines real print patterns and he thought he could identify some of those characteristics in the what what we now think are artifactual features so it's not as black and white clear cut an argument to be made and so you know the dermatoglyphics are one aspect one interesting feature that may hold some interesting insights they're restricted in their distribution and patterns to the point that they're not extremely informative about populations or about you know other aspects but but when they're present they're on footprints that display gross anatomy that is absolutely compelling and even if the dermatoglyphics were gone that you know like the wrinkle foot it's almost a distraction because then people quibble over whether they're legitimate or not or are artifactual or real or factual and the anatomy of the footprints itself is so compelling right yeah by looking at the dermatoglyphics you almost missed the plot right yeah that actually leads me to a question that I want to ask I alluded to this kind of in my presentation because you know when I was looking at some of the pictures in the book I know similarities between a lot of footprints of course you know you've always got this inline helix that's in line with the rest of the toes right and and typically they're you know within I you had a great chart in there that was like we've got this nice normal distribution of general sizes and dimensions of some of these feet but I kind of wanted to ask you because you alluded to this in the text that a lot of these guys in your experience from the cast that you've made they appear to be to be very flat footed yes is that and I don't know very much about foot morphology does that lend itself to the terrain that these guys are living in well terrain and the body size I mean the the longitudinal large is a fairly recent innovation in human evolution the our immediate predecessor homohydral burgansus does have evidence I had the privilege of examining the most complete fossil foot skeletons of a non neanderthal hominin non human non neanderthal hominin namely homohydral burgansus the specimen laishu specimen in China and it clearly has an arch but it's a low arch in a very broad robust foot compared to ours much much more akin to neanderthals I mean I think we and neanderthals inherited an arched foot from that common ancestor but we have then further modified the foot to a very grassile skeleton with a much more accentuated longitudinal arch and a shortening of the calcaneus so the input to output ratio is is a speed lever system rather than a power lever and we have shortened our toes even more by comparison to neanderthals a neanderthal foot has some distinctions I mean not just the robustness of the skeleton but their toes are a little bit longer on average and their heel is noticeably longer on average the heel bone so anyway back to your point the Sasquatch has never evolved an arch and given its massive size it would not be advisable to concentrate plant or pressure beneath those points between beneath the heel and the ball of the foot so they have they distribute weight out over the entire foot Grover Kranz actually did a really nice breakdown in his where he tried to see are the compressive forces per unit area of the sole of the Sasquatch foot comparable to those of human you know in other words are they functionally comparable and and there's there's some you know it's not as straightforward as that I mean how do you account then for the arch do you take a a footprint with just the contact surface of the human which is what I think he did you know eliminating the parts of the sole that were not in contact with with the substrate but one thing he didn't include and for that he accounted for the great breadth of the foot and I think I discussed that thoroughly in the book to where data has been collected of breadth to length ratios and when you plot that against you know humans and Sasquatch they're they're two separate clouds all together yeah you do group uniquely I remember that as well I remember and so that that's interesting in and of itself I mean as as a distinguishing characteristic I think lens credibility to the sample the other thing that that Grover didn't bring up though is the behavioral aspect as well how an animal that massive can tolerate those kind of compressive forces on the foot and it's through the compliant gate you mentioned how you were impressed with how this how Patty moves so fluidly and smoothly across that screen was because she's she's walking as if we would walk with flexed hips and knees and and ankles and so you don't see this head bobbing as she's walking across well that's what they call in biomechanic literature the Groucho walk kind of predates some of our younger listeners but Groucho marks you know his trademark with his with his little cigar or big cigar up here he would bend way down and he would walk with very flexed legs and so by doing that it it reduces ground reaction forces by as much as 20 percent so if you've already got a flat wide foot you don't have a heel strike and a toe off instead you walk with the foot tending to land rather flatly so you immediately distribute weight over the entire surface instead of concentrating under the heel and and concentrating at a peak when we push off through our toes you combine that with a very compliant gate as well and you can reduce those ground reaction forces down to where they're tolerable to the tissues now the Sasquatch also I think has a substantial sole pad with fatty tissue not extreme but it's bigger than ours and that's evidenced by a number of examples but one in particular one footprint example where it stepped on a stone and it its sole pad was able to accommodate that projecting stone to a remarkable degree didn't just push it down into the ground right right right right do you because I've got this is kind of like my working around kind of what I was thinking when I was when I was reading but I thought it was quite interesting like I really found that that distribution that normal distribution graph fascinating because my question was when I was you know you see in these pictures they float around of the Sasquatch feet right and they tend to be when you see them out of context amongst the nothing just put it into Google images and see them there's just an astounding variety right you can just pull off off the cuff right not not to the ones necessarily that you find in your text which I would absolutely say share more than what you would find just upon like a again a cursor in Google search but my question I guess would be and I kind of thinking as I go here you've got this topography of a book right that's that falls within a certain range to give you that normal distribution curve do you think could you entertain the idea I guess that the reason that that would be is because people have this cultural idea of what Bigfoot is and then they've got this idea of a range of feet that are actually feasible to to hoax as it were or in your opinion is it just too well done the the consistency I suppose right well if if we're talking about this the length this the size dimensions first then I would expect if there was a preponderance of hoaxes they would tend to be people who as you said would expect a Bigfoot to be at least this big you know a big foot right so it would be a skewed distribution right you know skewed away from those with with a 16 17 inch range yeah instead we get that that bell curve that that suggests a biological population with a distribution of size across across that population if we're talking about shape form topography then then yeah I mean the same thing occurred to me my my cursory experience gave me the impression that everyone looked kind of unique and no two were the same and I thought to myself well if these are real if there's a real population out there it's must be very rare in order you know for it to be as elusive and and to be seen so infrequently if they are as rare as I suspect they must be then if tracks are found in a given area over a period of time it should be one of a few individuals we should see repeat appearances right recognize individual members of that right okay I understand right I actually think you mentioned that in the book to the three prints kind of in quick succession that are supposed to be from the same individual yeah and I so I started looking for examples of that you know even patty you know people argued that she was never seen before since I mean meaning her footprints were never seen before since but those people were not taking into account differences in substrate your footprint when you walk on a hard pan logging road with a thin layer of dust are going to look different than when you walk on a fine grain sandbar over dry or slightly moistened by the by the periodic range of the time that day sand and if you take those into account I mean if you just line say you line up the imprints and line up the deepest point on the tips of the toe or the pads of the toes the deepest point across the distal end of the foot the central point of the of the heel if you line up the tracks like that then ignoring the slight variations due to expansion or or lack of expansion of the soft tissues they line up and I showed dozens of examples of tracks that were 15 40 14 15 inches long that that could easily be Patty's footprints from that region prior to an afterward you you present one thing in the book that maybe one more question from Eureka and okay sorry go to Q and I listen I I know Dr. Malcolm's going to get so many questions to from the from the audience I know most of the questions are going to be from and that happened last time so I suspect I'm going to use that opportunity to actually use the restroom if that's okay but I want to ask one question before we go before we end I guess on a formal discussion because you have one example in your book of this idea of you know you talk about the the classic bare hind limb it's got this kind of vaguely human-esque shape hominid-esque shape and you have this one picture of a a bare hind limb that kind of had the or front limb that then had the hind paw kind of step on the front half and it gives a purpose to this yeah over right and you register register yes that's the word do you think how many do you think could actually be attributed to that kind of process not very many is that quite rare or no yeah not not very many because you know and as I discuss in the book and as I illustrate in my field guide and so forth there are there are a very distinctive characteristics that that whether it's the the hind paw overstepping the paw paw or vice versa or just coming up close to the fore paw depending on the speed there are features that that stand out that that distinguish those and so I've not encountered a lot of examples where those have been mistaken most people are observant enough that they all the difference kick up on that and take until the difference these are the difference for males as well quite frequently well right and that's not a full proof some some people will swear oh if there aren't if there aren't claws then it can't be a bear well that's not true they're I'll show you examples and people can people can educate themselves you know the the marvel of the internet you can google bear tracks and create your own photographic archive of example after example and start to as you and develop that search image and see the distinguishing characteristics you can read the things that I've written there are you know lots of sources of such information it's not and I don't want I hate to diminish it because there is a certain knack but it's not rocket science you know with just a little bit of training I do workshops and by the time these people come out of these hour workshops they can tell the difference between a bear track and a and a human track and a big foot track you know right right so and cool they're pretty straightforward cool okay that was a blast James is it cool if I use the restroom while he because I know the first questions let me that's right I'll be right back want to remind you folks that our guests are linked in the description we highly encourage you to check out their links as we appreciate our guests very very much and so this one coming in from Chris Gammon thanks so much said for both that's funny that was the only one that actually said for both so we'll we'll jump back to that one we've got from Rory Borkman thanks for your kind words it says thanks so much for hosting these debates it's our pleasure and folks we we pay the forward we pay the thank you forward to our guests as we really they're the lifeblood of the channel we appreciate them and so again they're linked below thanks Rory Harry White says question for all three of you wow that's okay that's funny but we'll wait until Erica gets back Cigafredo Serabia thank you for your question for Dr. Meldrum says if and sometimes these are a little bit challenging Cigafredo likes to keep me on my toes I think it's they're saying if Hominid's branched away to make room for Bigfoot where is Bigfoot's Yeti cousin where is your cutoff for evidence where Bigfoot's not subjected I yeah I don't know if I can ferret out the sensible question from that with all due respect I don't know what he means by I mean we're talking about a bushy very bushy Hominoid tree and many of those branches the majority of them have with the exception of if we include the you know the great apes and lesser apes the radiation of gibbons and sea amongst and the orangs and the chimps and gorillas on the Hominid side presumably all other branches have gone extinct but the question is have they I mean we have more and more evidence accumulating very recent persistence of a number of these species like Homo floresiensis and Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals and even Homo erectus in Southeast Asia I mean the dates kind of the the opinions seem to vacillate but there have been opinions as recently as as 25,000 years ago regardless if whether it's 25 or 75 they just dredged up a job which was attributed to Homo erectus off the coast of Taiwan and dated it to about 10,000 years ago so between 10 and 30,000 years ago there were a half a dozen different Hominid species alive in East Asia why in the face of so much interesting evidence suggesting there might be something still persistent some relic Hominids would we eliminate that possibility when that was the rule rather than the exception throughout all of the history of Hominid evolution so on that one now as far as Yeti and you know as I suggested these are are separate branches and there are different arguments to be made for or against each of those different types of relic Hominid the you know honestly the Yeti argument on the basis of footprints is turns out to be extremely limited I did an in-depth review of the footprint evidence attributed to the Yeti and boiled it down after eliminating the totally indeterminate unintelligible sublimated blobs there was a large number of bears there's obviously a lot of conflation in the lore and in the legend and fact about between bears and Yeti bears and Hominids that is involving Yeti it boiled down to two examples of potential Hominid well two maybe three one is the Shipton footprint which has its quirks and maybe anomalous which is unfortunate because it you know but then there's the which should be the poster child the iconic footprint for the Yeti is the McNeely Cronin expedition documentation of what looked like chimpanzee footprints in the snow and and then there was another book a more obscure example by a man named Hutchison a journalist travel journalist who witnessed what he thought were Yeti footprints and they bear a remarkable resemblance to the McNeely prints and in fact I've been encouraging him to write up some of his his experiences for more recent consumption more current consumption anyway the point is there's he mentioned Yeti in there somewhere I don't know if I addressed his question or not you got it and it actually relates to another question which is a fun one thank you Luke Stevens for your question ask big fan thanks by the way for your kind word it says big fan of the channel appreciate it and they said question Dr. Meldrum so we we did get to hear your thoughts on the Yeti but they asked do you believe in other cryptozoological creatures such as the Loch Ness Monster or Megalodon in modern oceans or Chupacabra yeah well I I do harbor an interest in cryptozoology I am reluctant to allocate the study of Sasquatch to cryptozoology I don't approach it as a cryptozoologist I approach it as an anthropologist cryptozoology unfortunately has always struggled for legitimacy and and unfortunately many of the cryptids are very skeptical or dubious in nature the Chupacabra for example again my area is footprints and so at one time the documentary crew came to the lab with a in their opinion a bona fide Chupacabra footprint and so anticipating based on the cursory description I was given I lined up on the bench top the footprint casts of wolves and a couple of domestic large domestic dogs and coyotes and bobcats and Puma and outcomes there their cast and it was very canine looking and so you know we just kind of moved the track up and down the scale I almost felt like going ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding. But it was a domestic dog. In fact, it was identical. It was like a clone of my example, which was just a dog print that I cast up on the hillside where the people walk their dogs in. This one ran through the mud and it dried in a very pristine footprint, and so it was a great comparative example for my collection. And this could have been its twin sibling. It was so similar. So, you know, there's just you've got to go with the evidence and, you know, qualified objective evaluation of the eyewitness testimony. And unfortunately, there's a lot of the popular cryptids that don't hold up under scrutiny very well. Gotcha. That's interesting. And another somewhat related question. This is for both of you. Actually, this one, Harry White, thanks for your questions. So for all three of you, UFOs, what's going on? I don't know if they're meeting the most recent videos being released. I haven't, I'm actually a little bit behind, so I haven't really seen them. I really honestly have no idea on this question. So I'll, short and sweet, I'll kick it over to you. Erica, I guess we can start with, and then we'll kick it over to Dr. Meldrum. Yeah, there's a couple of weird things on this world that we live on that I just, I feel so out of my depth to even comment on. I mean, I see some of the stuff that they put out there of these, you know, crafts or whatever, that looks like a balloon.  And I find it particularly compelling when large groups of people simply say that, like, we saw something weird and we don't know what it is, and isn't that what an unidentified flying object is? So I give that one UFOs, a hearty, I have no idea what's going on there. And I will leave that to the folks that have even a clue of how, you know, aerodynamics and non-ballistic slash ballistic motion works. So I'm just going to leave that one to them. It is interesting that the Pentagon was talking about it recently, though. That is kind of funny. I'm not sure what to make of that. Right. Well, and the report is due out here in a couple of weeks. If not, I don't know what the date in June, but sometime in June, the report is supposed to be released. And those supposedly in the know keep saying that their sources are telling them this is going to be a real serious announcement and that there are, the official term is not UFO, it's UP, UAP. Yeah. Unknown aerial phenomenon. Well, it's very funny to me.  And I think that this applies to the Bigfoot stuff, too. It's very easy to see a bad example and write every example off as something similar. But I think it's important whether or not UFOs and Sasquatch both do or don't exist. It's important to appreciate everything in and of itself and then also with the preponderance of everything that you've got. And I do find it very interesting that at least here in the United States, the government keeps doing this thing where they're like, UFOs are fake. We're not doing anything with them. And then 10 years later, they had some project where they were looking into them. And then you're kind of just like, hey, why then? If there's nothing going on? I mean, it could be as simple as some other countries got way cooler toys than we do. But who knows? Yeah, it is. I would just add that regardless of the outcome, it won't necessarily draw a line connecting two dots between Sasquatch and UFOs. And that's been suggested by many repeatedly over the years. And I've never seen anything to substantiate that kind of connection any more than the bear that you see in your backyard. When you happen to see a UFO, does it didn't come from the UFO? I've seen some bonkers stuff out there about that. As someone who's also involved in anthropology and primatology, like engaging with this idea that they're undiscovered animals in this world of ours, which they're most certainly are, what those animals look like is to be determined. But that's a completely different story than Sasquatch is an interdimensional being man. And he took me up in his ship, dude. It was awesome. It's just like, those are two different.  And I tried to be open-minded. And I have accepted invitations to come out to areas where such phenomenon are supposedly transpiring only to be unfortunately disappointed. I pressed one gentleman who was just adamant that he had witnessed orbs and did witness them repeatedly. And I said, well, have you ever snapped pictures of them? Oh, yes. Well, can you send me your best example? So he did. He sent me a scan of one of his photos. It was a night shot with a flash camera through the pollen that was coming down. Each of these reflective pieces of pollen was an orb. And I've experienced that myself. I was in Colorado when the ponderosa pines were just pollen was blowing everywhere. And when you go out of the trailer to go out to your tent and you turn on your headlight, you couldn't see. It was like a whiteout because all you could see was this illuminated pollen blowing around. And if that's what people are equating with orbs, you know, back to, you know, what are the data? Are we really talking about the same thing? And in many cases we're not. Oh, yeah. Yep. That's funny. And this one coming in for both. Chris Gammon, thanks for your question said, seems to me such a large animal with enough population to continue propagating would leave easily discoverable evidence of their existence. This has probably been kind of covered on and off throughout. But if you want to add anything, we'll give you a chance. I'll add something. You know, the notion of minimal, minimal viable population or minimum viable population is often brought up.  But if you do a little research, even just Google minimum viable population and see what Wikipedia has to say, there's a pretty interesting little entry. And it acknowledges that that's a concept that's really nebulous. And the only way to really mean that the concern there is as to what constitutes a minimum viable population is what's the genetic load? What because if you have in breeding, then you have a tendency for deleterious recessive alleles to combine and crop up, right? So the more presence of deleterious mutations in a population, the the larger the gene pool needs to be to avoid those those homozygous recessives from from cropping up. If and so the only way to know then what is the minimum viable population for species is to do extensive genetic testing, which which isn't done except in rare occasions to your to your credit there to one of one of my colleagues from my Amherst program or colleague now, I suppose, she came and spoke at our program, she works with the Heinen Gibbon populations, the island of Heinen, and there's 30 odd individuals left of that entire species. They are they've done some work genetically and because there's two very small but genetically distinct populations, they might just be able to bring this species back. It's it's it's iffy, but I mean 30 individuals, that's that's pretty small and maybe not inbreeding issues of course and they're going to be extremely vulnerable to disease and you know, unless unless we intervene, I guess genetically or whatever, but viable populations that's that I mean that that is a variable game to play. Right and so I was going to add to that example of yours, mountain gorillas went down through a bottleneck where there were less than 200 and they are on the rebound now. There's just under a thousand and they have been genetically studied and it and it resulted in a paper that described that some species have adapted to bottlenecks and fluctuations in population numbers and and their their gene pool is pretty darn clean. You know it may be that your Gibbons rebound and then over time they will accumulate variation that naturally occurs without any genetic intervention but but but natural selection has actually produced these populations. So if you go to that Wikipedia entry, what they give is kind of a rule of thumb for vertebrate species, what a broad category huh, vertebrate species a thousand individuals is probably a minimum rule of thumb. Well if we've got you know 3000, 2000 in North America, that far exceeds the minimum viable population rule of thumb and so I don't think you can resort to that argument to say there would have to be enough that they would naturally leave sign that you're just going to stumble upon.  I've only seen black bear in the wild one well and I'll exclude sightings in the National Park but only twice in all the time I've spent in the field. I found tracks, I found some sign you know scratch marks foraging signs but I've only seen a black bear twice. So you know I think we overestimate our ability to keep our finger on the pulse of every species that's out there. Super interesting, thanks so much and then this one coming in from Stigia Fraterus Rabia for Erika says what limitations in evolutionary theory conclude hominids were the exclusive choice for the modern human while discriminating against bigfoot. I don't know if I understand that but maybe you do. I don't think I claim that there were any. I mean the idea that your anatomically modern humans descend from hominids is supported by just about every line of evidence that you can have. I mean you've got biogeographic support for this you know out of Africa, Ethiopia-ish location, of course the genetic similarity of humans to the rest of the great apes and very specifically to chimpanzees who themselves have this nice biogeographic support for hominids that's right around the east African red brand around that location and that's kind of why the question of bigfoot is very interesting to me because I I've always thought that that it seems very parentheses in nature can use a sister group to the Australopithecines and this organism differs from the Australopithecines in that it's got these huge megadont molars and nutcrack in the man. Oh he's got these these molars that are four times the size of an adult human and yet they are physically um the shorter the worst smaller quote-unquote than your average anatomically modern Hossapians which is really interesting because these guys just spent all their time you know grinding these teeth of theirs as they as they ate hard food stuffs and um and they had these big beautiful sagittal press on the tops of their heads and and were probably just passing orthognathic weird looking faces in comparison to the Australopithecines they're just highly specialized and you know to me I always thought that it seemed in I guess like a like a natural um a natural link sort of if you will but I can I can entertain um gigantipithecus as well I think it's just harder because of our preconceptions as uh folks in primatology and anthropology because gigantipithecus is so typically depicted as this massive quadrupole orang um which is almost a little bit funny I get to to Petri Eldridge's credit it is a little bit funny because you know orangutans are arboreal these guys aren't like hanging around knuckle walking over time uh they're they're poor little backfeeder you know inward turn because they're so suspensory adapted right um but yeah I mean it's also quite a bit easier to draw the lineage with humans because humans there are a ton of us there's so much to work with with humans as far as what that lineage looks like and um and and how we make those connections. Gotcha thanks and this one we'll read these two together because somebody sent in an answer a possible answer to the question before the question came in so the question is this Barmanji thank you for your question said oh no sorry Amy Newman thank you for your question said after show on this topic at my channel and folks want to let you know after shows are linked in the description as well as the question is for Dr. Meldrum why do bigfoots seem both massive and stealthy doesn't that mixture seem almost doesn't seem almost like an oxymoron to be massive and stealthy and then someone else said actual socialist trash love that name says uh in Doctor Who Peter Capaldi in the episode listen wonders about an animal that has adapted perfectly to stealth could this be bigfoot in other words this kind of radical adaptation in the the stealth direction but anyway I thank you for that actual socialist trash and the question again from Amy is uh kind of seems Amy suggests maybe strange that it could be both so huge and yet stealthy well actually not that's not incongruous at all and and there are many examples you can point to uh the forest elephant you talk to people who have been out and observed the forest elephant you can be 15 feet away from the elephant in that dense forest and not see it not know where exactly where it's at you can hear it maybe but uh there's a good book uh Garrett Patterson has just written an excellent book about elephants a sort of a relic population of elephants in South Africa and he also mentions their traditions about a relic hominoid in Africa one of the few you know it may be a relic australopithecine who knows but stories about it but but it illustrates you know his efforts to track these elephants elephants we're talking about and their illusivity I mean basically the only way they keep track of them is when they they cross the roads and they can identify them by the diameter of their footprints or any distinguishing marks or scars on the footprints um you know yeah two two two your credit on that one and you know I'm I'm the skeptic side of this but my skepticism from Bigfoot mostly comes from like the things we discussed earlier fossil record but how and stuff like that but as to that point about big things being sneaky I've been around a couple of wild primates one was chimpanzees and they are they can sneak up on you very easily and you really don't want you really don't want to you really don't really get snuck up by a gem but but almost in in a more interesting fashion was when I was doing fieldwork in Thailand uh we we were out in the middle of nowhere checking camera game traps in this forest and almost instantly we we looked up and you could look all around and anywhere you looked essentially there was a pigtail macaque these it was a colony of about 90 of them and they they came almost dead like almost silently like you almost noticed them because you sat up and you were like wait a second and then you know you can see him in the brush these guys aren't small and the cats seem to be pretty big the males can are intimidating they're large animals and just as quickly as they came they they bailed out they were just passing through and they were kind of like what are these weird you know animals doing in our in our zone where a french primatologist was there studying them and she was like oh you saw them and we were like yeah we we saw them out there and she was like I'm trying to find them all day um even big animals that live in massive groups can be kind of sneaky I mean I don't I I think that there's reasons to be skeptical that I don't know that big things can't be sneaky if you want to be one of them right super interesting and thank you for your question now Barron Von G appreciate it said all I'm going to say is if Bigfoot was here wouldn't we at least find its teeth in particular and if we haven't I they're kind of worried is is there I'm new to like fossilization or maybe this would be not fossilization but preservation of just remains teeth are they special in that they usually are they well preserved usually compared to everything else enamel yeah enamel makes them particularly robust oh right so you know they're already they're already half fossilized the amount of material to be replaced by mineralization is much smaller so and you know they they can survive being bounced around in a stream or buried in in the sediments of a cave or whatever that's super interesting well you know and it goes back we've discussed this quite a bit there the the capriciousness the serendipity of fossilization is is often underappreciated because we we hear so many discoveries of of of fossils but it's it's a fraction of not only the the number the individuals of a species but a fraction of the species I mean there there have been estimates studies done comparing modern communities of various taxa with their their paleo communities as represented in the fossil record and if we can use the modern diversity as kind of a gauge for what we might expect to be you know by approximation in these paleo environments there was one study done by bob martin on you know directed to primates but he used other examples of other vertebrates and they estimated that the primate fossil record right now only samples about eight percent of the taxonomic diversity that actually existed in the past eight percent I mean even you know when you talk about hominin diversity if if obviously when we're comparing monkeys to hominins the natural history variables might be sufficient to say well that's that's far too conservative or liberal an estimate even if you doubled it or tripled it or quadrupled it we've still only measuring 32 percent one third of the actual diversity of hominins that were out there and and you know yet remain yet to be discovered it's it's especially it kind of to that point um I mean most of the excellently preserved hominins that we have uh and hominids and hominoids that we have I mean really you can go all the way back to all of the great primate preservatives that we have our our excellent luck uh you know your your mh1 and mh2 also I think is sediba you know you've got nice preservation there but by by sheer chance almost the same with some of our hominins that tend to fall into you know big pits and then work it out by predators into caves or in the case of aureopithecus you know we've got the coal miner uh you know it's it's again fallen into some pit and then and then preserve there um I think it's it's notable that we get massive communities of primates that live in enormous groups of the likes of mandrelas sphinx or um uh mandrelas lucophaeus or the likes of our argoboons or macaques living huge groups and it's not like you're walking around where they live in your funny teeth all over the place um that being said that being said I put a huge asterisk on there because my skepticism work comes from a place of like okay but we do know uh that that when a large animal lives in a place especially that's still living we do tend to pick up traces of it um in in the case like in more tangible ways I would almost suppose and and for me it's it's always going to be like the fact that we do have all of these hominins in these locations that don't I mean they're better of course than than the United States as far as your preservation goes but even in like the the myosin Europe we're still finding critters turning up a lot of decent you know sphinophithecus um things of that nature even like luthbagpithecus like getting over into more tropical areas and so my what I'm dying for is like where's our where's our sasquatch where is it our one excellently preserved this poor fella fell into a pit you know when right after the Bering Strait and here it is that would be superb that would that would be I would point out notably too that many of these species that we have the the taxon is represented by a single individual or just a couple of individuals and so you know uh every once in a while uh a new fossil is discovered I mean the the pace of discovery has continued almost unabated and so uh it may just be a matter of time when when I hope you're right I hope so too you know I really do because I again I would love it I really would yeah thank you and then this one combining these two throw the dwarf of the house thanks for your question said I never jumped the fence so much on a subject and Ned said do you think that Bigfoot is intelligent enough to be making the choice to keep away from humankind for its own safety could it be that it is actively hiding well well most most wild that that's the definition of wild animals isn't it you don't have to have uh hominin level intelligence to to uh whether by conscious choice or instinct avoid human interaction um you know that's that's what the the art of hunting is all about these big bucks that have racks that suggest that they've survived dozens of hunting seasons how do you think they do that they it's not just dumb luck they intentionally avoid the you know they they seem to know when the hunting season begins and they avoid every area I read this story one time this guy actually observed this he wasn't a hunter but he was a keen observer of nature and there was this little grove of trees in in the center of a highway turnabout and he said every fall this buck would disappear into that grove of trees only to reemerge about four weeks later when the hunting season was over he never got shot you know never got so I don't think you have to invoke extraordinary intelligence to explain behaviors that are typical of of just about every form of wildlife interesting and then folks want to remind you uh or I should say let you know for the first time if you happen to send a super sticker or a joke or anything like that in a super chat about my feet or anything like that I would read it in the post credit scene so I I just want to respect the the time of our guests so I promise I'll read those but as uh in terms of sticking to the serious questions so that we can get our guests out here at a decent time I'm going to go to the next one Farron Salas says is it presumed that Bigfoot's laryngeal nerve takes the same absurd path through the body like in humans or giraffes thank you to the debaters and James thanks Farron you guys know about this laryngeal path yeah it's the recurrent laryngeal nerve which is a branch of the vagus nerve and it takes a route that in you know in fish it crosses one of the brachial arches which in us become is the aorta and so it it as the heart has dropped into the thorax it's drawn with it this nerve so it takes a this circuitous route instead of going from the base of the skull to the intrinsic muscles of the laryngeal it drops clear down around the aorta and back up um uh what's his name uh uh terrible with names tonight the famous evolutionist actually recreated a demonstration that was first done by Darwin where they dissected a giraffe to demonstrate the even more ridiculous path folded by this nerve up and down the entire length of the of the giraffe given the fact it's it's just that it's a classic like dunk on uh folks who like to bring a bad design right it's a young earth creationist slash id dunk which I might have brought that upon us because I I debate so many creationists yeah Richard Dawkins that was who I was trying to yeah Richard yeah if you google Richard Dawkins and recurrent laryngeal nerve there's a great little video clip that shows this dissection but I would just say since we have that arrangement since since all vertebrates do and and every grade eight that I know of has that then it it stands to reason that that would be the arrangement in Bigfoot as well interesting if it doesn't maybe it did come from a UFO yeah that would that would be a great be your great proof for that like proof of the of the interdimensional um Sasquatch Traveler no laryngeal nerve no just just speak communicate by telepathy right super interesting and then endo xd thanks for your question said thoughts on Bigfoot videos are they convincing and I know this did come up a bit but I well I'll give you a chance to respond go ahead if you want to add anything other than what was already said well we we concentrated on the Patterson Gimlin film which is head and shoulders above anything else there are a few other ones there in my book I talk a little bit about the Freeman footage and Memorial Day and the Memorial Day which is a different one um the Freeman footage is quite compelling and for a number of reasons but there I mean there's a a long litany of various videos clips usually just short short little snippets nowhere near the the 60 seconds of you know the whole 60 seconds of the Patterson Gimlin film uh there used to be a website a Facebook page I mean um I don't know if it's there anymore it was called Facebook find Bigfoot and the uh he I mean to his credit he would he he would invite this submission and evaluate them and he would develop a set of criteria by which he sort of ranked their potential credibility or uh