Like what?

My statement was probably overly strong, but the point is that chimeric legendary creatures are fairly rare. There's obviously tons of supernatural powers in North American Native mythology - shapeshifting, spirits, etc. But most creatures or spirits are man-like or animal-like or abstract (the wind, the dawn, etc.) Sometimes giant or otherwise unnatural, but rarely chimeric like winged horses, lions with man heads, etc.

A great example is Lakota mythology. Everything is spirit or ethereal or is represented by a known animal - eagles, frogs, beavers, bison, etc. The only abnormal ones are usually human - having two faces, for instance.

This runs directly opposed to a lot of Eurasian Mythologies that are full of fantastical creatures like the Manticore, the Chimera, Dragons, Qilin, Phoenix, Simurgh, etc. etc.

It would be very, very odd that 90%+ of the spirits, gods, etc. of native american tribes are represented by known animals except for ones that strongly represent Sasquatches.

The only other example I can think of off the top of my head are 'horned serpents' - snakes that have horns growing out of their head. And most of those, iirc, are tribes that were closer in proximity to Mesoamerican tribes which did have a lot of fictional creatures in their pantheon.

Lastly, I'm not an expert in Native American folklore and there are a lot of various tribes on the continent. Could definitely be some legends I'm not aware of. But I have heard the same argument before by people more knowledgeable than me, especially about tribes that traditionally inhabited places that are now strongly associated with 'bigfoot'.

Kathy Strain, an anthropologist, has a great book about the wealth of Native American legends that strongly tie into the Bigfoot legend.

The people who investigated the claim back in 1924(ish) stated that it was a hoax. We know that. We know back when this occurred it was thought to have been "boy scouts" messing with the miners.

We know that Beck's son trotted the story back out the same year the PGF came out.

There are claims of thrown rocks, pine cones, tree branches. But can you be sure that later claims of such behavior are from "innocent" sources (the sources of the later claims had not read/heard/watched stories of previous claims)? I don't think we can make any such assumption.

As noted in the last link I included for you, the tribes from which the sasquatch legend has been appropriated thought of/think of sasquatch as another tribe (a tribe of giant people who play tricks on and steal from them). They did not and do not see sasquatch as a ape, that came with the Roe story and that story only came out when Harrison, British Columbia was trying drum up interest in the area during the centennial celebration of British Columbia back in 1957. The town of Harrison wanted $600 from the B.C. government to fund a "sasquatch hunt" as a publicity stunt. John Green was the owner of a small paper in a nearby town and he noted that the "hunt" was a big success and that the story had been picked up internationally. It was into that "environment" that William Roe went with his claims of apes.

I'm basically paraphrasing the bigfoot chapter of the book "Abominable Science", which does an excellent job of documenting the origins of the sasquatch story. If you haven't picked it up I strongly suggest it. It provides excellent context of what was happening around the various claims of sightings of sasquatch and the yeti. The yeti chapter is another amazing read, turns out bigfoot expedition funder, Tom Slick, might have been involved in espionage for the u.s.!

Here's the link. I have the kindle edition and I'm not sure I can "lend" it to you but if you are interested I'll be happy to check and see.

https://www.amazon.com/Abominable-Science-Origins-Nessie-Cryptids/dp/023115321X/ref=sr_1_1?s=hi&ie=UTF8&qid=1492706315&sr=8-1&keywords=abominable+science

I know exactly what story you are talking about.

It was in one of my old bigfoot books I had when I was a kid. I'm not sure which one but I think it might have been this one, or this one
If not, both books are a great read.

My copies of both books were pretty old when I got them. I may still have the first book around somewhere but I know for sure the second fell apart.


I also remember some good bits of the story and if you wanna PM me, we may figure out enough to find it on google.

Get this book. It’s the best scientifically based book on the subject, written by Dr. Jeff Meldrum, a Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology at Idaho State. He’s a super knowledgeable guy and it’s an awesome academically based study of the subject.

https://www.amazon.com/Sasquatch-Legend-Science-Jeff-Meldrum/dp/0765312174

Hey, sorry bud - got caught up with my own thread that blew up like crazy, lol!

Here's one of the best books I've ever found on the subject:

https://www.amazon.com/Bigfoot-Casebook-updated-Sightings-Encounters/dp/0937663107/ref=pd_sim_14_1?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0937663107&pd_rd_r=C9CZ3E27RBZ9K0A277TV&pd_rd_w=1tVU2&pd_rd_wg=MC9Yi&psc=1&refRID=C9CZ3E27RBZ9K0A277TV

And here are two that are absolutely phenomenal, from an angle not looked at deeply enough:

Tribal Bigfoot:

https://www.amazon.com/Tribal-Bigfoot-2017-B-W/dp/0888390211

The Hoopa Project:

https://www.amazon.com/Hoopa-Project-Bigfoot-Encounters-California/dp/0888396538/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0888396538&pd_rd_r=15W306TEPXSV05M8P25M&pd_rd_w=TvoTp&pd_rd_wg=qM2yW&psc=1&refRID=15W306TEPXSV05M8P25M

One of the things that Patterson and Gimlin did that almost none of the current crop of researchers do is that they went out on horses, not on foot or in vehicles. It has been supposed that since they were on animals, that allowed them to get closer to Patty than they would otherwise been able to.

u/MrsBoombastic98 - You might be interested in When Roger Met Patty by William Munns. He was a Hollywood special effects and costume specialist who wrote about his detailed analysis of the costume in consideration about the techniques that were available at the time.

His conclusion was that there was no way for it to have been faked with any of the technology available to Hollywood costume makers at the time and for decades after. It really is a worthwhile read if you want to consider the challenges a hoaxer would have faced back then.

https://www.amazon.com/Raincoast-Sasquatch-Southeast-Northwest-Washington/dp/0888395086

Raincoast Sasquatch

https://www.amazon.com/Make-Prayers-Raven-Koyukon-Northern/dp/0226571637/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1493324972&sr=1-1&keywords=make+prayers+to+the+raven

Make Prayers to the Raven

The 2nd link is an ethnographic study done on the Koyukon natives in Northern Alaska. The author spent a year living with them.

Granted, 'bigfoot' is only covered in a small portion of the pages, probably like 10 pages in a 275 page book, but the information in those 10 pages has been some of the most convincing anecdotal evidence I've come across yet.

We must bring our brethren and sisteren up to speed. (I know that that is not a word, but it is very cromulent to the point at hand.)

https://www.amazon.com/Exaltation-Larks-Ultimate-James-Lipton/dp/0140170960


An "exaltation of larks"? Yes! And a "leap of leopards," a "parliament of owls," an "ostentation of peacocks," a "smack of jellyfish," and a "murder of crows"! For those who have ever wondered if the familiar "pride of lions" and "gaggle of geese" were only the tip of a linguistic iceberg, James Lipton has provided the definitive answer: here are hundreds of equally pithy, and often poetic, terms unearthed by Mr. Lipton in the Books of Venery that were the constant study of anyone who aspired to the title of gentleman in the fifteenth century. When Mr. Lipton's painstaking research revealed that five hundred years ago the terms of venery had already been turned into the Game of Venery, he embarked on an odyssey that has given us a "slouch of models," a "shrivel of critics," an "unction of undertakers," a "blur of Impressionists," a "score of bachelors," and a "pocket of quarterbacks." This ultimate edition of An Exaltation of Larks is Mr. Lipton's brilliant answer to the assault on language and literacy in the last decades of the twentieth century. In it you will find more than 1,100 resurrected or newly minted contributions to that most endangered of all species, our language, in a setting of 250 witty, beautiful, and remarkably apt engravings.

You're still misunderstanding evolution. Biologists don't consider animals in terms of "inferior" or "superior".

As for the laws of physics, organ systems require energy, and an organism has a total energy budget to run its systems based on the total energy it can consume. Brains are metabolically expensive, so evolving a large brain requires lots of energy. This energy cannot just come from eating more, however, because there is a practical threshold to how much energy an animal can actually extract from the environment: the more food an animal eats, the more energy it has to spend digesting that food; at a certain level it hits a plateau, and this plateau is below the level of energy it takes to run a human brain. Humans got around this by externalizing part of our digestive process, by cooking and processing food: instead of using our own energy to digest our food, we use external energy sources to digest part of it for us. This allowed us to reduce the energy budget of our digestive systems and divert that energy into running a brain larger than physically sustainable under natural conditions. Brain size in human ancestors was only moderately larger than chimpanzees before Homo erectus, but by the time controlled use of fire was habitual human brain size had doubled. Controlled use of fire is not an accepted or commonly reported bigfoot behaviour, and it is not consistent with them being so elusive since smoke would make them easier to find; without some mechanism to break this energy plateau it is not possible for bigfoots to feed an exceptionally expensive brain like humans have.

A seminal paper on the bioenergetics of brain evolution was Aiello and Wheeler's (1995)Expensive Tissue Hypothesis, which described the unique relationship between human brain and gut size, and Richard Wrangham has bud part of his career on the relationship between controlled use of fire and human brain evolution, including his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human

Manlike Monsters on Trial will run you $80. Looks like a valuable addition to the library, though.

Podcast sources#

1. http://podbay.fm/show/257243172/e/1229569525?autostart=1 - direct link
   
2. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/lets-talk-bigfoot!/id257243172?mt=2
   
   

   Related#
   

   
   

3. The Hoopa Project
   
4. http://www.nabigfootsearch.com/
   
5. David Paulides (02-19-13) Missing 411 & Bigfoot DNA
   
6. Sasquatch genome project
   (a) The DNA Study In A Nutshell
   (b) Sasquatch Genome Project Press Conference - October 1, 2013
   (c) Coast to Coast AM - Dr Melba Ketchum - source
   (d) How the Bigfoot field has discouraged serious scientific inquiry
   (e) David Paulides talking about the reception of the paper (Coast to Coast, March 17, 2013)
   (f) Melba saying it was "angel" DNA
   (g) The Ketchum DNA Study - One Year Later - by Christopher Noël
   
7. Giants, Cannibals & Monsters: Bigfoot in Native Culture written by Kathy Moskowitz Strain, one of the interviewers of the podcast.
   (a) Author info - "Kathy Moskowitz Strain received her B.A. in Anthropology (1990) and M.A. in Behavioral Science (emphasis Anthropology; 1994) from California State University, Bakersfield. She is currently the Forest Heritage Resource and Tribal Relations Programs Manager for the Stanislaus National Forest. Kathy has been a professional archaeologist/anthropologist for 20 years, and conducting research and fieldwork on 'Hairy Man' for nearly as long."
   (b) Where to buy: Amazon, Hancock House (publisher)
   (c) Endorsement by David Paulides:
   "[can you point us to a definitive source for the Native American myths you discussed earlier in the thread?]
   Yes; Giants, Cannibals and Monsters, by Kathy Strain.
   She is an archeologist for the Department of the Interior and a good friend.
   She spent years developing the book, its good!"
   
   

   About the people interviewed#
   

   
   

8. Harvey Pratt
   (a) https://harveypratt.com/
   (b) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Pratt
   
9. David Paulides
   (a) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Paulides
   (b) https://twitter.com/canammissing
   

The Patterson-Gimlin footage is by no means debunked, if anything, it is some of the strongest evidence for BF's existence! Have you seen the muscle movement analysis videos on it? You can see the muscle in her thigh flex as she walks.

Another good book on Sasquatch is: Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science, by Prof. Jeff Meldrum. http://www.amazon.com/Sasquatch-Legend-Science-Jeff-Meldrum/dp/0765312166

Yes!
Check out Cathy Strain's book.
Giants, Cannibals, & Monsters.

She is an anthropologist and works for the National Park Service, liaising with Native American tribes.

You should read this before so thoroughly dismissing the PGF: http://www.amazon.com/When-Roger-Patty-William-Munns/dp/1500534021/

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002GKC3XY/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

https://www.amazon.com/Sasquatch-Among-John-Willison-Green/dp/0888391234


https://www.amazon.com/Sasquatch-Legend-Science-Jeff-Meldrum/dp/0765312174/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=BA978N1HSCA95QSMZZ4D

The ShadowKiller a Bigfoot thriller that is pretty much a SyFy B movie. Pretty good for what it is but it has some sex scenes and graphic violence.

Here's a possible reference for you. Not an endorsement or a rejection, just saying it's out there. Take it for what it's worth.