By Steve Ulvi
Journal contributor
As a kid in California, my imagination was deeply stirred by National Geographic; the La Brea Tar Pits, skulls from Oldavai Gorge and something called the Abominable Snowman. Oh, yes the photos of equatorial women au natural. Today, according to some, an undocumented bipedal primate continues to exist in the Pacific Northwest. The mantra of the faithful is that science can’t prove that they don’t exist, so therefor they might! A cryptozoid!
Beyond lots of crude chainsaw carvings, fictional books and ludicrous “reality TV shows” the Bigfoot myth is slightly more plausible and does predate other common codswallop; alien abductions, the Bermuda Triangle and people who spontaneously combust. In my 71 years of nature-curiosity, science has undergone an immense expansion of elegant technology that unveils mysteries in life. Microscopic shreds of DNA in dirt and genomes demystify biotic relationships. For 200,000 years Homo sapiens struggled with daunting, inexplicable mysteries and sought creative explanation (the birth of high priests, shamans and charlatans) to ritualistically ease fears. There were countless things, both real and imagined, to fear in the primordial forests and plains.
Gigantopithecus blacki is a real dead-end twig of a many-branched, primate evolutionary tree, from which Bigfoot arose they say. Teeth and jaw parts found in Asia, where this hulking ape existed then went extinct about 100,000 years ago. Evidence clearly shows that they were eaters of bamboo and fruit and certainly quadrupedal. The cooling of the Pleistocene probably shrank the streamy jungle and they were simply too big to succeed. Believers who think enough to postulate Bigfoot origins, say Gigantopithecus made the many thousand-mile trek all the way across the cold, dry Bering Land Bridge (as warm jungle herbivores) well before advanced human groups did some 14,000 years ago.
Retreating ice allowed forest encroachment with great cave bears, saber tooth cats, dire wolf packs and eventually cunning atlatl-equipped humans who fearlessly hunted megafauna. Fast forward about 10,000 years. The brutal conquest of explorers, fur traders, gold seekers, settlers, Christian zealots, botanists, mappers, museum collectors, the US Army and fur trappers penetrated every part of the NW but never come up with a shred of physical evidence. The often-brutal decimation of tribes in this multi-decade conquest indicates that a large hairy walking ape would have been given no quarter. Intrepid, gritty and adventurous scientists would have recorded local tales and found evidence if there was any.
Today? No road kills, no skulls or large bones by drowning death, no hunter kills (this alone is astounding), no sightings by aerial radio-tracking biologists, no satellite images or widely used trail camera photos. A slight smear of blood or bodily fluid, a hair, dried turd or bone shard is all that is needed for conclusive DNA evidence. Even a clear cell photo. Zilch, nada, nothing despite the instant notoriety and riches that would reward a person who discovers tangible evidence of Bigfoot.
Such common myths, faith-based and otherwise, promote fuzzy thinking and a troubling denial of reality.
