Probably the most significant aspect of Bigfoot footprints, however, has to do with the dermal ridges—or “fingerprints”—that have been discovered on many cast footprints. The late Grover Krantz initially discovered dermals in tracks cast in Washington State in 1982 and published the first paper on Sasquatch dermatoglyphics in 1983, in the journal Cryptozoology. Since 1995, however, Jeff Meldrum, associate professor of anatomy at Idaho State University, and a specialist in primate feet, has taken the lead on this significant issue. When Krantz and Meldrum began noticing dermal ridges, something others had never really looked for in footprints or casts, they both felt that they had found a sure proof that the prints being left were from a real, albeit, unknown, primate. Furthermore, when Meldrum began a massive project to collect and examine old prints, he found, to his astonishment, dermals on them too. When I and others showed Meldrum cast prints from the 1960s, he quickly spotted the telltale dermals, those distinctive loops and skin folds on these casts. How could hoaxers have known to include dermal ridges on their fake feet so long before the experts thought about looking for them?
Then in 1999, a Texas police fingerprint expert, Jimmy Chilcutt, heard Meldrum talking about dermal ridges in a television documentary and called him soon afterward. Before long Chilcutt was on his way to Idaho to look over Meldrum’s casts. With his knowledge Chilcutt was convinced he could debunk Bigfoot, once and for all. “If there is a Sasquatch,” he told a reporter for the Houston Chronicle in February 2000, “only a handful of people in the world know the difference between a primate and a human print.”
When the skeptical Chilcutt began studying the Meldrum collection, he examined a cast Meldrum had shown on TV and quickly determined it to be a fake (although the prints may have been contaminated by the routine practice of “fixing up” tracks for casting). On this cast, Chilcutt determined that the toe prints were actually human fingerprints. Meldrum then allowed Chilcutt the freedom to authenticate or dispute the rest of his collection of about one hundred castings of alleged Bigfoot footprints.
“What I actually found surprised even me,” Chilcutt told the Chronicle. He had discovered the print ridges on the bottoms of five castings—which were taken at different times and locations—flowed lengthwise along the foot, unlike human prints, which exist from side to side.
“No way do human footprints do that—never, ever. The skeptic in me had to believe that [all of the prints were from] the same species of animal,” Chilcutt said. “I believe that this is an animal in the Pacific Northwest that we have never documented.”
Besides footprints, other types of physical data have come our way. Hair and fecal samples have been collected since the Pacific Northwest Expedition at the very beginning of the modern Bigfoot era. But the analysis of hair samples has surprised and frustrated scientists trying to figure out what animals these come from. George Agogino, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico, was given the task by millionaire Tom Slick, of either analyzing or finding other experts to analyze the hair and fecal samples from those early excursions in California and British Columbia. John Green has written that some hair and fecal matter from those early 1960s efforts have “never been positively identified.” In 1991, when I interviewed Agogino, he confirmed that some of the stool samples were found to contain “parasites we could not identify.” This is significant, as parasites are keyed to their hosts, and if you have parasites that are unknown, then the animal from which it came is likely to be unknown as well. The problem with the results and findings from the Slick years, of course, is that the material has disappeared, most probably destroyed or archived in a Slick institute warehouse. As in the scene from the end of The Raiders of the Lost Ark, Slick’s wish to stay out of the limelight caused most of his expedition’s findings to be lost forever.
The situation in the ensuing years has not improved. During the late 1990s, thanks to Court TV, the O. J. Simpson trial, and other forms of criminal publicity, DNA analysis has been regarded as the dramatic final answer needed to settle the question of Bigfoot. Find a hair sample with a root attached, and shazzam, a DNA analysis can be done. But applying the technique to Bigfoot identification is not enough. A “reference sample” must be available for a matching analysis, and needless to say, there is no “type Bigfoot” available, by which to compare samples. It’s a kind of catch-22. You can’t identify it as belonging to Bigfoot unless you have identified it as belonging to a Bigfoot in the first place.
Late in 1995, Paul Fuerst, a molecular geneticist at Ohio State University, and a graduate student, Jamie Austin, attempted to analyze some hairs said to be from a Bigfoot. They employed a DNA testing procedure being developed by the FBI for analysis of hair strands that lack the roots normally needed for identification. Walla Walla, Washington, resident Wes Sumerlin, former game warden Bill Laughery, and veteran Bigfoot hunter Paul Freeman had found the hairs in two clumps in the Blue Mountains of southeastern Washington State in August 1995. In November of that year, the Ohio scientists told the Associated Press that they would compare the hairs to those of humans and chimpanzees and expected to announce their results by the end of the month.
Instead, in March of 1998, the third member of the analytical team, W. Henner Fahrenbach of the Primate Center in Oregon, announced to researchers through email messages sent worldwide (and published as an “Interim Statement” on the BFRO Web site), that the Ohio-Oregon group had decided to withhold submission of their analyses. They found that the hair without roots was not an acceptable enough sample for them to obtain the results they needed to determine the phylogenetic affiliation of the creature. Fahrenbach was not deterred by the setback and called for tissue samples to be obtained. Of course, Fahrenbach’s statements on the inability to obtain firm DNA evidence was hailed by skeptics as yet more “proof” that Bigfoot does not exist. But such a brush-off is narrow-minded. It completely disregards the difficulties in working with material from an unknown species, even if some misidentifications and pranks do not get into the mix.
Second Question
For years, a debate has been raging among amateur and professional Bigfooters, academic hominologists, and cryptozoologists over the question: Is Bigfoot a human or an ape?
When people speak of “apes,” what are they talking about? Of course, the image most people have is of a tailless, hairy creature that reminds them of something between a monkey and a man. More formally, of course, apes are any of the various large, tailless Old World primates, including the bonobo, chimpanzee, gorilla, gibbon, siamang, and orangutan. The “highest” forms of mammals, by human definition obviously, are the primates. Within the order of Primates, the “very highest” primates are the species of animals we call great apes and humans.
Sorting through how one group of “great apes” is organized (by humans, please note again) might give us some insights into where Sasquatch and humans fit into the picture. Let us examine, as an example, the great apes in Africa, the bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas. Even among these apes, there is more diversity than is often acknowledged. First we have the bonobo or pygmy chimpanzee (Pan paniscus), which inhabits the dense rain forests south of the Zaire (or Congo) River as opposed to the populations of common chimpanzees who live north of the river, suggesting that breeding isolation encouraged by that geographical boundary led to the different species.
There are various subspecies or types of common chimpanzee, including these three: the Western African chimp (Pan troglodytes verus), the Central African chimp (Pan troglodytes troglodytes), and the Eastern African chimp (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii). These are the routinely classified three subspecies of common chimps, which are recognized based on their genetic similarity and their location in Africa. Additionally, primatologists now recognize a new fourth subspecies, Pan troglodytes vellerosus, from Nigeria, according to the June 2000 Bulletin of the American Society of Primatologists.
That year the society also divided the gorillas, previously considered a single species, into tw
o species and five subspecies. The eastern gorilla (Gorilla beringei) includes the mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei beringei) of the Virunga volcanoes area of Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the yet unnamed, but distinct, population of Uganda’s Bwindi Forest, and the eastern lowland gorilla (Gorilla beringei graueri). Western Africa is home to at least two additional subspecies, the western lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) and the Cross River gorilla (Gorilla gorilla diehli). However, some recent attempts at further classification have considered the mountain and eastern gorillas as separate species.
Obviously, the changes in primatology are impacting the way people look at apes, Bigfoot, and humans. When the great primatologist John Napier wrote his book Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality, in 1972, his view of where the great apes and humans grouped, in relationship to Bigfoot, reflected the analyses of his times. In 1985, Napier and his colleague wife would author The Natural History of the Primates, which was used in graduate primatology and anthropology courses for years. In that book, John and Prue Napier had an extremely simple view of where humans and the great apes were to be located: apes and men were not really closely related.
DNA findings and other new studies have caused a shift in anthropology. A remarkable realization has occurred within primatology since Napier’s day, to wit that humans are closer to some forms of great apes than those apes are to each other. Among primatologists, this was expressed by noting that the family Hominidae contained the subfamily Ponginae and subfamily Homininae, according to Colin Groves in 1997. The evolving classification system finally led to a radical reorganization of the lesser and greater apes by Wayne State University zoologist Dr. Morris Goodman in 1999. This reorganization acknowledges the extremely close relationship between humans and apes—essentially that humans are nothing more than hairless chimpanzees. This idea has been popularized in such books as The Naked Ape and The Third Chimpanzee.
The amorphous “ape versus human” distinction was brought into sharp focus with a highly ballyhooed, recent fossil find. In July 2002, French scientist Michel Brunet proclaimed that his team had found man’s oldest ancestor, a 7-million-year-old fossil skull he christened Sahelanthropus tchadensis. But the media storm that began with the July publication in Nature of this fossil’s formal description was still in full force when Brigitte Senut of the Natural History Museum in Paris (one of the discoverers of Orrorin tugenensis, “Millennium Man”) stepped forward. She declared, in no uncertain terms, to the Observer’s Paris correspondent, “This is the skull of a female gorilla.” Her colleague Michael Pickford described the creature’s distinctive canines as being typical “of a large female monkey.”
An angry Brunet quickly held a news conference at his University of Poitiers. Waving a copy of Nature, with the skull of Sahelanthropus on its cover, he exclaimed, “Here you see the baptismal certificate of this hominid. If one or two people somewhere disagree with me, that is their problem. But one cannot confuse this with a gorilla.”
If knowledgeable scientists cannot even agree on a fossil they hold in their hands, how could we possibly expect a consensus on a creature such as Bigfoot?
Yet an answer lies close at hand. The explorer Roy Chapman Andrews once wrote, “Man is an ape with possibilities.” Zoologist Morris Goodman more recently noted, “Genetically, humans are only slighted remodeled apes.” We are apes, in other words. It is a simple statement that carries with it all the baggage of soul, intelligence, and religion. But, of course, there is nothing to say that we are not apes who have merely created a world of differences between the chimpanzees and ourselves. After all, we have.
So how does Bigfoot fit into the mix? The discovery may be taken in more calmly than we think.
“If it turns out to be an ape,” Jeff Meldrum told Outside in 2002, “it’s not going to overturn our ideas about human evolution or even primate evolution. In fact, it’ll confirm what some of us suspect, which is that descendants of Mioceneperiod apes populate every northern continent.”
They are apes, as surely as we are. Whether Bigfoot ultimately turns out to be more of a hominid (humanlike) than a hominoid (apemanlike) being remains to be seen, based upon a closer physical examination of the animal.
Third Question
And therein lies the dilemma that forms the third most important question regarding Bigfoot: Should we shoot one if given the opportunity?
Shooting an ape is easier to think about than plugging a human with a .22. Should the Bigfoot hunters kill one to provide the physical evidence to prove it exists? That question is the source of much controversy within the ranks of Bigfooters. While the gun-toting Grover Krantz and John Green have argued yes, the peaceful Russian Dmitri Bayanov and George Haas have said absolutely not. To kill or not to kill?
If the prey is determined to be an “ape”—which most read as “nonhuman animal”—then it would not be murder, so the argument goes, to kill it and throw it at the feet of science. Or to make a million dollars off it.
But things are no longer as simple as they were in the 1800s, or even the 1950s. Hunting for the mountain gorilla, the giant panda, and many other animals that had yet to be discovered meant going out and shooting them. Today’s technology makes such arguments a thing of the past, however. In the twenty-first century, Bigfoot will hopefully be captured, studied, given some rights, and released. Biological sampling, videotaping, and electronic tracking will accomplish what killing and mounting the animals once did.
We all live a life of contradictions. I am firmly convinced that Bigfoot is an ape, but I also believe there is absolutely no justification in hunting it to kill it, as there would have been one hundred years ago, to prove it exists. Bigfoot is a cousin ape, more familiar to us than the chimps perhaps, but the hairy ape to our naked ape. What it means is that through convergence evolution, another ape has changed, like us, into an upright being, but one that has retained its hairy origins.
Seeking Bigfoot is extremely important, and finding them will change us all forever, for we shall never look at humans in the same way again. What Bigfoot “is” probably does not matter for its future. In the end, how we understand Bigfoot and what it has become to us will determine much about how we think of ourselves. We stand at the edge of the forest together. What we discover about each other may surprise us both.
APPENDIX A
Twenty Best Places to See Bigfoot
You’ll have a better chance of seeing a Bigfoot or finding a footprint in one of the following “hot spots” than anywhere else in North America. The sightings are so routine near some communities that many recognize their good fortune through road signs, memorials, statues, museums, and gift shops.
1. Bluff Creek, California Bluff Creek is the mecca of the Bigfoot field, the birthplace of the first “Bigfoot” track finds and the site of the filming of the Patterson-Gimlin footage, made famous by the familiar Frame 352 of a female Bigfoot. Visit the nearby Bigfoot wing of the Willow Creek-China Flats Museum in Willow Creek (take 299 east from 101 at Arcata). It houses Bob Titmus’s entire Bigfoot cast collection and other great Bigfoot exhibits. A twenty-three-foot-tall Bigfoot statue by Gordon Burns stands outside the museum, the eight-foot-tall, life-size Bigfoot sculpture by Jim McClarin is nearby, with yet another statue at The Legends of Bigfoot Museum at Garberville, also in Humboldt County. Willow Creek’s annual Bigfoot Daze celebration occurs on the Labor Day weekend and features speakers and family activities.
2. Fouke, Arkansas The real-life encounters with the Fouke Monster and the filming of the famed Boggy Creek movies occurred near this village. Shop for Bigfoot souvenirs at the local Monster Mart. An annual Boggy Creek Festival is held every April, complete with books to buy, casts to view, and Bigfooters to meet.
3. Ape Canyon-Ape Caves-Mt. St. Helens-Skamania County, Washington Here is where the “apes” attacked in 1924 and where their relatives continue to be seen today. Signage memorializes the event in the Ape Caves area. The county serves
as a gateway into the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, site of the Skookum cast find. Due to a high level of activity, Skamania is the only county in the nation where it is against the law to kill a Bigfoot. The annual Carson Bigfoot Daze is usually held in August with Bigfoot lectures, statues, exhibits, and family fun. To the east, along the Spirit Lake Highway, in Kid Valley, there’s a Bigfoot statue near a tourist shop. Drive farther north, and find a Bigfoot Crossing sign on the Mt. Baker Highway.
4. Oregon Caves National Monument, Grants Pass, Oregon Grants Pass has a rich history of Bigfoot encounters. A local service group, the Oregon Cavemen, was established in 1922 and then erected a giant figure of a prehistoric “caveman” at the Interstate 5 exit to Grants Pass. Since the Bigfoot sighting in 2000 at Oregon Caves, local shops have been selling Bigfoot memorabilia. Hillsboro, Oregon, holds an annual International Bigfoot Society conference.
5. Mt. Shasta-Trinity Alps, California The Trinity Alps are also steeped in Native and modern Bigfoot lore. The Sisson Museum, southwest of Mount Shasta city, has Bigfoot exhibits and souvenirs.
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