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Friday 22 July 2022

Zoological Journalist - Richard Freeman, Considers the Question: Is Bigfoot A Man, Another Ape, An Unknown species of Bear, or All of the Above?

...And we're back!

During my long hiatus from updating this blog, I have become increasingly fascinated by accounts of the Himalayan Yeti and North American Sasquatch, often called Bigfoot because of the large humanlike footprints of these mystery animals or 'wild men' leave in the forests of North America, and the wild, remote mountains of Asia. 

Roger Patterson with Bigfoot print cast from 1967

  Yeti footprint taken by Himalayan mountaineer Eric Shipton in 1951


Yeti footprint taken by Himalayan mountaineer Steve Berry in 2016
(Lost Kingdom of the Yeti, 2018)


Although the name 'Bigfoot' was not coined by newspapers until the 1950s, the phenomenon of an ape-like wild man living in the forests and mountains had been recorded in the storytelling cultures of different Himalayan peoples and Native American tribes for centuries. How could it be possible that two almost identical legends could develop independently from one another, separated by vast oceans in complete isolation, with a traceable lineage that extends over centuries? 

Further, if there are no native ape species in America; how is it possible then that Native Americans seem to have appeared to have known what an ape looked like before contact with European-American settlers? 

At the very least this would suggest that something resembling an ape must have been known to the ancestors of modern Native Americans. Could this be a race memory from the time before the Native Americans arrived on the American continent, presumably from Asia where the Yeti dwells? 


After combing YouTube for every documentary I could find, and joining Kindle Unlimited to read up on what Arthur C. Clarke called in his popular 1970s series Mysterious  World, "The Missing Apemen", I had more questions than answers.


Back in 2009, I had the privilege of asking Zoological Journalist, Richard Freeman, a few questions about his Cryptozoology research into mystery animals not yet accepted to exist by the scientific establishment. This was Freeman's response when I asked him about the Yeti:
The yeti, possibly a surviving form of the giant ape Gigantopithecus blacki that lived in China and India 500,000 years ago. Hair has been analysed in the UK, USA and China. The results were the same: unknown primate.
The full Q&A text interview can still be found HERE. Over a decade on, I decided to get back in touch with Richard Freeman to see if he had any thoughts on some of the questions I had. It would take a book for anyone to answer all of my questions, so in our email correspondence we focused on the following topics for discussion:
Is Bigfoot an ape more closely related to known apes? Or is it an offshoot of earlier forms of humans that survived into modern times? Is it a bear, an ape, a man, or three different creatures including all of these?

What are the similarities and differences between the footprints found in Asia and North America? 
The Patterson-Gimlin film. What is the best evidence it is real?

The famous Yeti scalp that was was found to be a fake. Is it possible it could be a form of clothing worn by real Yetis? 
Below is Richard Freeman's full, informative and thoughtful reply to my questions.

Richard Freeman























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Orang Pendek drawing from the documentary The X Creatures
(BBC/Discovery, 1998)


There is more than one type of mystery primate around the world. Some of these, like the Orang pendek, seem to be undiscovered species of ape. Others like the Almasty seem to be relic hominins - relations of the ancestors of man. The long and short of it is that we do not know for sure until we get a type specimen. 

We found hair near Orang pendek tracks in Sumatra. These were analyzed by Lars Thomas, an expert in animal hair based at Copenhagen University. He concluded that they were similar too but distinct from the Sumatran orangutan. Lars concluded that there is a large, unknown species of primate on Sumatra. I think this is the fourth extant species of orangutan. 

Startling new evidence for the Yeti has emerged recently. TV vet and naturalist Mark Evens, formally a Yeti skeptic, took an expedition into the mountains of Bhutan to make a documentary called Lost Kingdom of the Yeti. Water was taken from a pool in the mountains where the Yeti had been reported. From this environmental DNA was taken. Known as eDNA for short, this consists of traces of DNA an organism leaves in the environment. It is a relatively new development and could prove an invaluable tool for cryptozoology as the techniques for extracting traces of eDNA improve. Back in the lab the eDNA from the water was tested and several known species were discovered but there was also anomalous DNA. It came from a primate that shared 99% of its DNA with humans. Chimps share 98%. Whatever left that eDNA at the drinking hole was something unknown to science and closely related to man.

Dr Eva Bellmaine and Mark Evans discuss eDNA testing (Lost Kingdom of the Yeti, 2018)


I contacted Dr Eva Bellmaine, the French geneticist involved in the project. She confirmed the details and said that the samples were being held by a French company called Spygen. I contacted Spygen in order to see if we could conduct further tests. Spygen said that they were not the legal owners of the sample and later claimed it had been destroyed.



Some have suggested that it is nothing more than a bear. Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner claimed in his 2000 book My Search for The Yeti that the creature was nothing more than a brown bear. This is curious as on previous occasions he had claimed to have seen the Yeti and described it as a primate-type animal.

I once interviewed the actor Brian Blessed, a renowned explorer, and mountaineer himself, for a long-defunct and not very good magazine called Quest. Blessed, who is a friend of Messner, said that he had told him of his encounter with a Yeti. Blessed said that Messner had walked around some rocks and came "face to face" with the creature. He said it was not a bear, was 7 feet tall, man-like, and stood erect.

There are other occasions when Messner’s descriptions sound precious little like a bear. Julian Champkin of the Daily Mail wrote on August 16th, 1997, that Messner has:
…encountered the Yeti; and not once, but four times, once close enough to touch it. More importantly, he claims to have photographs of the creature, including a mother Yeti tending her child, and a Yeti skeleton.

 

Needless to say, none of his pictures have been forthcoming. Messner goes on to be quoted in the newspaper article to claim:
“...I searched for a week, 12 hours a day, in an area with no trees,” he says. “I didn't expect to find one so soon. First, we saw a mother with her child. I could only take a photograph from the back. The child had bright red fur, the older animal's fur was black. She was over two meters tall, with dark hair, just like the legend. When they saw us they disappeared.”
Two days later, he claimed to have come across and filmed a sleeping Yeti. The film is just as noticeable as the photos by its absence.

In an article relating to the BBC’s Natural World documentary on the Yeti, Messner describes seeing one from a range of 30 meters in Southern Tibet. The article says Messner is sure it is some kind of primate. He describes it in the article thus:
It was bigger than me, quite hairy and strong, dark brown-black hair falling over his eyes. He stood on two legs and immediately I thought he corresponds to the descriptions I heard from Sherpas and Tibetans.
So why did Messner write a book trying to explain away the Yeti as a bear when this transparently was not the creature he claimed to have seen? Was it because of fear of ridicule? And what became of the photos and film? Was Messner trying to take the focus away from these or make them seem less important by saying the yeti was just a bear? Could this be because the film and photos did not exist?

Sherpas become angry when Westerners say that the Yeti is just a bear, and quite rightly. The animal they pick repeatedly as looking most like the yeti is the gorilla but walking on two legs rather than four. The Yeti has a flat, ape-like face. The Yeti walks almost constantly on two legs. The Yeti can manipulate things with its hands and hence must have opposable thumbs. It is said to sometimes hurl large rocks and swing clubs. Bears have none of the above features. The Yeti is clearly some kind of primate, most likely a great ape. Until he delivers the goods, I’m inclined to dismiss Messner’s claims.



The term ‘Yeti’ is applied to three different creatures. The Dzu-teh is a hulking biped eight to ten feet tall with dark hair. It leaves massive, manlike footprints. 

The Mi-teh is more man-sized and moves both bipedally and on all fours. It has reddish hair and leaves tracks that have a divergent big toe. 

The smallest type, around four feet tall is known as the Teh-lma and has light brown to yellowish hair. The creatures have many regional names and are reported from the Himalayas, Tibet, China, Malaysia, and India.

The Dzu-teh seems identical to the North American Sasquatch. It may have crossed over the land bridge between Asia and North America during the ice age. The prime candidate for this larger kind is a massive ape from the fossil record known as Gigantopithecus blacki. This creature is known only from its massive fossil teeth and jaws. The fossil teeth were first found in a Chinese apothecary shop in 1935 by Dutch paleontologist Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald. They were being sold as 'dragon's teeth'. Koenigswald recognized them as the molars of a titanic ape. Post-cranial remains have never been found but extrapolating from the size of the teeth and jaws Gigantopithecus may have stood ten feet tall and weighed 1300lb. The flaring of the lower jaws made Grover Krantz and Jeff Meldrum conclude that the neck extended directly under the creature's head meaning that it walked upright on two legs.

Pitting and wear patterns on the teeth of Gigantopithecus suggest a fibrous diet similar to that of the giant panda. The creature probably fed on bamboo, but fossil seeds found lodged between the teeth prove that it also fed on fruit. Gigantopithecus fossils have been found in China, Vietnam, and India. It was a hugely successful primate species existing for over two million years before becoming extinct 100,000 years ago due to climate change. However, some think that the animal simply retreated into the mountain forests and still exists today.




Another theory holds that the Yeti is some huge relic hominin.

The Yeti is not white. Its hair ranges from reddish to brown to black. In all my years of research, I have only come across two reports that give the Yeti white hair. The confusion comes from a mistranslation of one of the beast's many names, Metoh-kangmi, Sino-Tibetan for 'abominable man of the rocks'. It was mistranslated as 'abominable man of the snows. This is where we get the western term ‘Abominable Snowman’ from. It is also where the false idea of a white, snow-dwelling beast comes from. Above the snowline, there is little for a large primate to eat. The lush forests in the lower valleys make much more sense for a Yeti habitat. The term ‘Yeti’ is Tibetan for 'rock beast'.

The witnesses I spoke to in the Garo Hills in Northern India described the Yeti, known there as 'Mande barung', described it as ten feet tall and looking like a huge, upright gorilla.

The wild men of the former USSR, Mongolia, and Central Asia sound much more man-like than the hulking Yetis of Tibet, the Himalayas, and north India. The Russians took them so seriously that they even had an official Snowman Commission to investigate the creatures. At the time it was thought that they may be a relic form of Neanderthal. Since then, however, we have discovered that Neanderthals looked very much like us. It has been said that if you washed and shaved a Neanderthal and put him in modern clothes, he could walk down the street in any major city without raising anybody's eyebrows. Sure, he may look somewhat ugly by our standards, but he would clearly be human. Neanderthals used fire, made sophisticated tools and clothes, and may have even had a concept of religion and an afterlife. They sometimes buried their dead with grave goods. This is clearly not what we are dealing with here.

It is more likely that the wild men reported today are an offshoot of a much more primitive species of hominin. In recent years both fossil, sub-fossil and genetic evidence has unearthed many new species of human relatives. We know that Neanderthals interbred with modern humans. The genomes of all non-African people contain 1.5-4 % Neanderthal DNA.

In March of 2010, a tiny fragment of finger bone was found in the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains. The bone was so well preserved that the whole genome was intact within it. It turned out to be from a new species of archaic human that have since been named the Denisovans. Only fragments of this species have been discovered - the finger bone, a toe bone, and two teeth - so the appearance of the Denisovans is unknown. However, they interbred with both Neanderthals and modern humans. Between 4 and 6% of the genome of Melanesians (people from New Guinea and the surrounding islands) is inherited from the Denisovans.

Some hominins are suggested not by any fossil remains but by genetic markers on populations of modern man. As well as Denisovan DNA Melanesians appear to have inherited DNA from another hominin currently unknown from the fossil record. Yet another unknown archaic hominin appears to have left genetic material in the populations of sub-Saharan Africans.

In 2003, some sub-fossil remains were found in the Liang Bua cave on the island of Flores in Indonesia. The remains were of a tiny species of hominin that were named Homo floresiensis. The remains were dated to around 50,000 years ago. The creatures would have stood no more than three feet, seven inches tall. The remains were found with stone tools and weapons as well as evidence of fire making. They seemed to have hunted giant rodents and pygmy elephants that lived on the island.

Homo floresiensis was thought to be a dwarf island form of Homo Erectus, the hominin that was the ancestor of not only modern humans but Neanderthals, Denisovians, Homo heidelbergensis, and Homo antecessor. More recent examination of the remains however showed that they were more closely related to Homo habilis a more primitive hominin that has never been recorded outside of Africa and died out some 1,5 million years ago. So, Homo floresiensis not only half a world away from where it should have been but also nearly one and a half million years out of time. It also begs the question “what else is out there?”

TV Naturalist Mark Evens compared with the height of Homo floresiensis (Yeti: Myth, Man or Beast, 2016)

More recently, two, as yet un-named species of hominin dating to only ten thousand years ago (an eye blink in evolutionary terms) have been unearthed at Red Deer Cave in southwest China. They seem also to have affinities to Homo habilis. It seems that Homo habilis may have had its own lineage outside of Africa alongside Homo erectus.

As for the Patterson-Gimlin film, I will share my own thoughts, looking at the film through the eyes of a natural historian.

Firstly, the creature is a female, with visible breasts. If you were going to fake a film of bigfoot by using a tall man in an ape suit, where in the equation would you think of adding large hairy breasts? Such an artifact would make the costume more expensive and harder to create. In known ape species, the females have fairly flat breasts. Human females have rounded breasts as a counterbalance to the large buttocks. Humans are bipeds and walk upright. The gluteal muscles keep the body level when the legs are lifted. Human female pelvic girdles are broad in order to accommodate the birth canal. Hence the buttocks of human females are larger and more rounded than males. Great apes are knuckle walkers and move on all fours, ergo they lack developed buttock muscles and the pendulous breasts that counterbalance them. A hypothetical upright walking female ape would have rounded buttocks and breasts. The creature in the Patterson-Gimlin film possesses both of these. 

Secondly, the creature turns its head sideways and the viewer can clearly see a thick brow ridge and a forehead that slopes away at an angle to make a cone-shaped head somewhat like that of a gorilla. Fossil hominins display this same acutely sloping forehead above a thick brow ridge. The human forehead rises up directly above the brow. If the creature in the film was a man in a suit his human head would not fit into a mask with such a sloping forehead, there simply would not be enough room unless the mask was very oversized like some kind of carnival headpiece which it is clearly not.



Thirdly, the limb and body proportions of the creature are non-human. The torso is longer than a human's and the hip proportionately lower. The arms are 10% longer than a human's. The upper legs are longer than a human’s and the lower part is shorter. Even if you could make such a convincing costume, you could not get a human to fit into it. The arm and leg joints cannot be made to line up. Muscles can clearly be seen moving under the hair. In short, the subject in the film is not a man in a costume. 
 
And then we have the footprints. Jimmy Chillcutt a crime scene investigator and latent fingerprint examiner from the Conroe, Texas Police Department has taken fingerprints of many primates in zoos. He has examined many of the sasquatch print casts in the collection of Jeff Meldrum. He has found dermal ridges that lay parallel to the edge of the feet. 

The ridge flow pattern and the texture was completely different from anything I've ever seen. It certainly wasn't human, and of no known primate that I've examined. The print ridges flowed lengthwise along the foot, unlike human prints, which flow across. The texture of the ridges was about twice the thickness of a human, which indicated that this animal has a real thick skin.

The Yeti scalp from Nepal was an artifact made from the skin of a serow, a type of wild goat. However, it is thought that the monks used it in rituals where they dressed up as the Yeti. 
Khumjung's famous Yeti scalp (The X Creatures, 1998)



There are no reports of yeti wearing clothes. Their thick fur would give them ample protection and they are forest dwellers and not creatures of the eternal snows of the mountain peaks.

The sasquatch has on rare occasions been seen wearing human clothes. It seems they had stolen the clothes and put them on for amusement. Known apes and monkeys have been recorded as doing this. The Russian Almasty is said to sometimes do the same thing.


Big thanks to Richard Freeman for doing this!

Please visit his Amazon Author Page where you can find all of his books.

Visit The Centre for Fortean Zoology to find out more about Richard Freeman's Cryptozoology work: cfz.org.uk

Adam Davies (Monster Quest) answers some questions about the similarities 
between the Himalayan Yeti and North American Bigfoot.

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