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International Bigfoot Symposium
DaytonCIM writes "Yup, that's right the creature that took on Steve Austin (no, not the drunk and bloated pro wrastler, but the REAL Six Million Dollar Man) has legions who gather to debate and discuss his furriness. The International Bigfoot Symposium is going on right now.
SFGate also has a nice article on the grand meeting."
Well, the only one I ever read. My parents had it when I was a toddler, but I think it's as relevant today as it was in the 1960's.
On the Track of Unknown Animals by Bernard Heuvelmans.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Ceren Ercen. Not sure if she's AVAILABLE, per se, but she IS sexy and she IS female. And she's a nerd.
There are actually lots of female nerds; we're just not Sports Illustrated models (though some of us are cute). And, of course, most of us are taken...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
You're missing the point. It's not up to the skeptic to "disprove" anything. The burden of proof is on those who claim these things exist.
It's people like you who would say something like "I can fly, you know. All I have to do is flap my arms, and I can fly. Now, disprove it!"
Wrong. You've really got your debating principles screwed up. In any debate, the burden of proof is placed on the affirmative team.
The affirmative team (in this case, the person who claims he can fly by flapping his wings) is obligated to provide evidence for his claim. It is then up to the opposite team (in this case, the skeptic) to debunk the claims, one at a time.
A true skeptic never claims "they do not exist", but instead provides examples of why it's highly probable they don't exist. The skeptic should always be ready to accept proof, but the proof that is presented is often full of holes and logicall fallacies.
it's true that Bigfoot fans don't restrict themselves to evidence, but scientists do. Tom Swift's budget for his "search" is a drop in the bucket when compared to REAL (even NSF-based) grantee's budgets over years, for say, looking for new species in the Antarctic.
...the list can go on.
New species are found quite often, and many of those species start with anecdotal evidence, not skeletal remains happened upon by accident.
some cryptozoological successes:
-Acionyx rex, a giant cheetah, in 1873
-Tratratratra, a giant lemur, in the 1800s
-Chacoan peccary
-Vu Quang ox, an ox with antelope antlers, 1993
Just google 'cryptozoology' and 'new species' and you'll see the same. The people researching new species are scientists, indeed, but like I said before, the ones who involve themselves in pursuits that have had hoaxes in the media run the risk of losing credibility. But that has nothing to do with whether the animal exists or not.
The theory that scientists propose strongly support the idea of a native North American ape is the real and accepted evidence of the giant ape 'Gigantopithecus blacki', which once flourished in Asia, made its way to North America, and this is the main theory that the scientists, yes, _real_ scientists, have been going on.
In the same time period, Homo Sapiens crossed the land bridge from Asia, as did thousands of other species. Many primate anthropologists agree that is very possible that the Gigantopithecus made it to North America, and some say that it's almost unlikely that they *didn't* make it here.
p.s.
this is a digression, but:
about the scientific method having basis in faith, I suggest you read something excellent on the subject, "Galileo's Mistake"...the gist is that the scientific method assumes that once a hypothesis is reproducible, by other scientists, many times, is that it is "enough" to prove that the hypothesis will be true forever (i.e. become "law"). That requires, by definition, faith, and further underscores that science provides, however more or less accurate, a model, and only a model, of reality. Most subatomic physicists and cosmologists will also agree that faith plays quite a large role in their respective fields.
Is that the one where Maggy is rescured by a buch of Bears who decide to stop their carnivore ways and go on the path of the pacifier?
Even if Gigantopithecus did make it to North America, what exactly does that prove? It's mainly of interest to paleontologists. I would like to see more convincing proof that Gigantopithy even existed and that he really was a biped and very very big. How about at least a femur or a even a skull?
We would all love to find evidence that such a creature was still around, but despite quite a few dedicated expeditions in Nepal and the US, there hasn't been even the slightest bit of real evidence.
The most convincing account I have ever read of these creatures was from Slavomir Rawicz's tale: The Long Walk. He recounts a somewhat close and extended meeting with two yetis who were just "shuffling around" for a while while high up in the Himalayas. The fact that it's recounted merely as a small piece of a much larger tale makes it more convincing than the normal eyewitness accounts. He was with a couple of other people at the time, but no one has ever been able to trace their whereabouts.
Obviously the most damning argument of their non-existence is that, after all these years, a viable breeding population with animals of that size would certainly have been noticed. They would be at the top of the food chain anywhere in North America and, if anything, their numbers should be growing.
There is of course always the possibility that there really were a few of these giant apes left early in this century but that they have since become truly extinct due to a lack of numbers.
An analogy could be made to the Tasmanian wolf in Australia, but that animal was well known up until it was hunted to extinction.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Remains of a 10 to 12 foot tall primate have been discovered in Asia. Gigantopithecus supposedly lived up until 100,000 years ago. Maybe this is where the myth of bigfoot and the yeti came from?
If gigantopithecus was around up until 100,000 years, then both Homo erectus (2 mya - 60,000) and Gigantopithecus were contemporary to each other, in the same region. Anatomically modern humans would have been living toward the end of Gigantopithecus' reign, although probably not in the same region.
Finding large mammals previously unknown to science
This information is from a paper by Ronald H. Pine (1994), "New mammals not so seldom", Nature 368: 593.
There have been 16 new, large mammals described since 1937, 6 cetaceans and 10 artiodacyls. These comprise (with year of publication, not discovery):
2 porpoises (1956, 1958)
4 beaked whales (1937, 1958, 1963, 1991)
1 wild pig (1987)
1 peccary (1975) - the Chacoan peccary, described from bones in prehistoric middens but discovered as a living animal in the Chaco region of South America in 1975
4 deer (1959, 1981, 1982, 1990)
1 gazelle (1985)
1 wild sheep (1963)
1 wild ox (1937) - the kouprey, found in Vietnamese jungles
1 bovid (1993) - the Vu Quang bovid
4629 mammalian species of all sizes have been described as existing in recent times, of which 742 have been described since 1930. The most recently described British mammal would have to be the results of splitting the pipistrelle bat into two species in 1996, partly as a result of DNA analysis. New species of mammal have been described at the following rates:
160 in the 1930's
70 in the 1940's
100 in the 1950's
90 in the 1960's
110 in the 1970's
160 in the 1980's
46 in the 1990's (to early 1994)