mythusmage
Scholar
- Joined
- Feb 12, 2003
- Messages
- 56
Or, How Yowies, Yetis, and Psychokenesis are Equivalent Phenomenon.
Earth actually has one supercontinent, and two island continents. The fact the single supercontinent is coverd in part by water has led us to view it as four separate continents: Africa, Eurasia, North America, and South America. The two island continents are Australia and Antarctica. Keep all this in mind, because it plays a part in the following essay.
On Ape Men as Bete Noirs of Scientists and Cyrptozoologists.
There is said to be an ape-man roaming the forests of Queensland in northern Australia. People have claimed to see it. Some claim to have found tracks. It is called the yowie. The putative presence of the yowie on Australia has a big problem, it’s a line named after a fellow by the name of Russel Wallace (no relation to the politician, comedian, or sasquatch hoaxter). West of that line the fauna is southeast Eurasian, east of it the fauna becomes Australian. How did the yowie get over that line when other large fauna did not? Such as, say, the orangutan?
The lack of hair samples, photographs, or stool samples is telling, but the lack of a way to get to Australia from Eurasia is even more telling. Before you can move to a new location you have to have a way of getting there. When it comes to Australia Homo sapiens did. Homo erectus, as far as we know, didn’t. Nor, I suspect, did any “ape-man” contemporaneous with H. sapiens and erectus.
This pretty much rules out the yowie as a real creature. If it does turn out to exist the next goal would be to learn how the species got to Australia. A problem that would lead to literally tons of scientific papers.
With the yowie out of the way we now proceed to your favorite and mine, the sasquatch. Unlike the yowie there is a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing to the existance of a large bipedal ape in North America. Let me put it this way, if the sasquatch were a murder suspect, he’d’ve been executed years ago. But science insists on a smoking gun. In this case, a body or parts of a body. For my part I would have to agree. For no other reason, it would make a definitive identification a lot easier. According to the studies done on hair and stool samples, it cannot be placed in any known primate group. Which would appear to eliminate any connection to known hominids and the great apes. Including Giganthropithecus blacki.
The connection to G. blacki was a wild guess. Based on what I’ve seen in the way of G. blacki reconstructions, and the only two sasquatch’s shown clearly in film and video footage (one each), I’d have to say that the two are only distantly related. About as distantly as Man and gorilla.
So what might the sasquatch be descended from? And yetis and almas for that matter.
-Australopithecus robustus-. Same body plan, same cranial crest…
“Cranial crest?” I can hear some of you ask. The next time you get to see the Patterson film pay attention to the top of the head. Some sasquatch hunters have identified that as a knot of tangled hair. But it looks more to me like the skull crest you find on the gorilla. An anchor for a set of heavy jaw muscles. So here we have a bipedal ape with a cranial crest and a clumsy walk. What’s the last known higher primate that fit the description? A. Robustus. We now return you to your regular essay…
So how the heck did it get to North America?
It walked. When the sea level gets low enough Beringia becomes dry land, and animals can cross. It’s happened before, and it’ll happen again.
At a time when the climate was more salubrious than now stray A. robustus wandered out of Africa into central Eurasia. At the time India had yet to collide with Eurasia, and so the mountains that resulted from that had yet to appear. Which meant that Central Eurasia was a land of rolling hills warm air from the Indian Ocean could penetrate up to the Arctic Ocean. A warmer, wetter, flatter land than now.
So A. robustus moved in and thrived.
“What a minute. Who do you know this happened? Nobody’s found anything like A. robustus in Eurasia.”
Nobody’s looked for it.
Here’s a dirty little secret of Science; we don’t know our own world as well as some think we do. New species are found all the time. Most are rather small, but every once in a while we find something large. The bottle-nosed whale is a recent find, and it seems everytime somebody shakes a tree in Brazil a dozen new species of insect pop up. Given the available resources, both for exploration and discovery, and for the recording of new discoveries, we can’t know the Earth as well as we’d like. So lots of stuff remains unknown. Including any A. robustus fossils that might be lying around in Eurasia, or the fossils of any possible descendents of A. robustus.
Why haven’t we found those fossils? Bad luck for one thing. For another, nobody’s had any reason to go looking for such. A. robustus lived in East Africa, and there is no evidence the species ever moved out of the area.
Much as there was no evidence that Australopithecus as a genus ever moved out of East Africa, until a skull was found in the Republic of Tchad. By accident. Now people are looking for more samples of the “Southern Ape of Tchad” plus any other species of Australopithecus that might have left remains.
Now why do I postulate the presence of A. robustus or A. robustus descendents in Central Eurasia? The sasquatch, the alma, the orang pendak, and the yeti. In order for even one of them to exist its ancestors had to come from somewhere, and there is no evidence of a non-human bipedal ape in ancient times other than Australopithecus. Some claim the sasquatch is descended from a South American ape, but there is no evidence of such. Nor is there any evidence that the ancestor of the orangutan produced a line of bipedal apes. So following the principle of parsimony, I’m going with A. robustus as the sasquatch’s (and the yeti’s and the alma’s and the orang pendak’s) ancestor. I might be wrong, but that will have to wait for additional evidence.
Which leads us to the matter of psychokinesis, the ability to move physical objects without touching them. Levitation can be considered a variation on this. It also leads us to two groups, one of scientists, the other of anti-scientists (if somebody coined the term before I did, they can have the credit for it) who place yowies, sasquatches, and psychokinesis in the same classification. For scientists it’s the “if the other side believes in it, it must be fake” classification. For anti-scientists it’s the “if the other side doesn’t believe in it, it must be real” classification. Which falls under the heading not of bad science, but of “science so atrocious the practitioner should be whacked upside the head and forced to write 10,000 times, ‘I will stop abusing my brain in such an outrageous manner.’”
To be really cruel about it, it’s the same sort of reasoning you get from creationists and Holocaust deniers. “◊◊◊◊ the facts, it contradicts my beliefs.”
So you get anti-scientists proclaiming the reality of psychokinesis despite all the evidence against it, and scientists denying the existance of the sasquatch despite all the evidence for it.
My point? The scientific method applies to all subjects. When somebody says that psychokinesis doesn’t exist he’s most likely right because the matter has been scientifically investigated. But when somebody says that the sasquatch doesn’t exist, he’s most likely wrong because the sasquatch has not been scientifically investigated.
To put it another way, nobody’s gone and looked.
Some have declared the footprints, hair, and feces faked,but I have yet to hear of any of that group actually testing the evidence themselves. The reasoning appears to be, “There aint no such thing as the sasquatch, therefor any evidence pointing to its existence must be faked.” A blatant example of false reasoning.
Before you can declare something false with any degree of assurance, you must give it a thorough examination. Whether it be a claim of paranormal ability, or a claim of an unknown animal. The good news is, once the examination has been made you can be fairly sure of your conclusions. The bad news is, it takes time and money. It’s much easier, and cheaper, to state authoritatively, “it can’t be” than it is to go and actually find out.
Unfortunately, such a course of action leaves one open to possible correction in the future. Whereas investigating the matter leads, at best, to conclusive evidence you were right in the first place or, at worst, to conclusive evidence you were wrong. I don’t know about you, but when it’s possible to settle a matter by the simple expedient of a hands-on investigation, I’d rather the matter get investigated.
In other words, if you want to prove to me that the sasquatch does not exist, in spite of all the evidence gathered pointing to its existance, you need to go and look. Test the evidence gathered, and do so honestly. Make an honest assesment and give an honest report, even if it contradicts what you had thought before. That is good science.
Stating that something must be or can’t be because it fits your personal world view is wrong. Plain and simple. Even when that something contradicts what you know to be true. When there is evidence pointing to the existence of an item, that evidence deserves an honest investigation. An explanation, and not an explaining away. Don’t tell us that those feces are bogus, tell us why they are bogus, and be prepared to defend your conclusion.
Science is not only for those things we have acknowledged as true or false, but for those things we still have questions about. Doing it any other way gives a lie to science, and to the things we have learned through science.
I have doubts about psychokinesis because it involves a phenomenon that has yet to be proven to exist. I have doubts about the yowie both because (as far as I know) no physical evidence other than possible tracks have been found, and there is no way that I can see of it reaching Australia in the first place. I have accepted the existence of the sasquatch because there is hair and fecal evidence along with the tracks, and there is a way by which the animal’s ancestors could have reached North America. And because no one, as yet, has done a damn thing to prove that the evidence points to something else, or that all the evidence is fake.
To all those who claim the sasquatch is imaginary; James Randi and friends have set up ways by which claims of paranormal abilities can be tested. Can you do no less? Is the very possibility that a manlike ape might be living in North America so frightening you can’t bring yourselves to investigate? Would the existence of the sasquatch overthrow everything you’ve learned? Randi don’t appear to think so of paranormal abilities. If there are telepaths out there, then there are telepaths out there. You learn to deal with it. How could a new species of primate be any different?
So you have your choice, you can either sit there and insist you can’t be wrong, or you can find out once and for all. No more cries of “It can’t exist!”, go out and prove it. How do you do that? You go and you look. The evidence points to the existence of a bipedal ape in North America, you claim it does not. It is up to you to prove that claim, any claim that contradicts the evidence. Provide evidence that you are right instead of empty rhetoric. Show me that the pro sasquatch evidence is faked or has led investigators to false conclusions. Show me the phony, instead of wasting my time with unsubstantiated claims of mis-identification or falsification.
In other words, start acting like scientists, instead of nervous nellies afraid that reality will come unglued because you were wrong about a subject.
The shame lies not in being wrong, but in insisting you must be right despite the evidence against you.
Earth actually has one supercontinent, and two island continents. The fact the single supercontinent is coverd in part by water has led us to view it as four separate continents: Africa, Eurasia, North America, and South America. The two island continents are Australia and Antarctica. Keep all this in mind, because it plays a part in the following essay.
On Ape Men as Bete Noirs of Scientists and Cyrptozoologists.
There is said to be an ape-man roaming the forests of Queensland in northern Australia. People have claimed to see it. Some claim to have found tracks. It is called the yowie. The putative presence of the yowie on Australia has a big problem, it’s a line named after a fellow by the name of Russel Wallace (no relation to the politician, comedian, or sasquatch hoaxter). West of that line the fauna is southeast Eurasian, east of it the fauna becomes Australian. How did the yowie get over that line when other large fauna did not? Such as, say, the orangutan?
The lack of hair samples, photographs, or stool samples is telling, but the lack of a way to get to Australia from Eurasia is even more telling. Before you can move to a new location you have to have a way of getting there. When it comes to Australia Homo sapiens did. Homo erectus, as far as we know, didn’t. Nor, I suspect, did any “ape-man” contemporaneous with H. sapiens and erectus.
This pretty much rules out the yowie as a real creature. If it does turn out to exist the next goal would be to learn how the species got to Australia. A problem that would lead to literally tons of scientific papers.
With the yowie out of the way we now proceed to your favorite and mine, the sasquatch. Unlike the yowie there is a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing to the existance of a large bipedal ape in North America. Let me put it this way, if the sasquatch were a murder suspect, he’d’ve been executed years ago. But science insists on a smoking gun. In this case, a body or parts of a body. For my part I would have to agree. For no other reason, it would make a definitive identification a lot easier. According to the studies done on hair and stool samples, it cannot be placed in any known primate group. Which would appear to eliminate any connection to known hominids and the great apes. Including Giganthropithecus blacki.
The connection to G. blacki was a wild guess. Based on what I’ve seen in the way of G. blacki reconstructions, and the only two sasquatch’s shown clearly in film and video footage (one each), I’d have to say that the two are only distantly related. About as distantly as Man and gorilla.
So what might the sasquatch be descended from? And yetis and almas for that matter.
-Australopithecus robustus-. Same body plan, same cranial crest…
“Cranial crest?” I can hear some of you ask. The next time you get to see the Patterson film pay attention to the top of the head. Some sasquatch hunters have identified that as a knot of tangled hair. But it looks more to me like the skull crest you find on the gorilla. An anchor for a set of heavy jaw muscles. So here we have a bipedal ape with a cranial crest and a clumsy walk. What’s the last known higher primate that fit the description? A. Robustus. We now return you to your regular essay…
So how the heck did it get to North America?
It walked. When the sea level gets low enough Beringia becomes dry land, and animals can cross. It’s happened before, and it’ll happen again.
At a time when the climate was more salubrious than now stray A. robustus wandered out of Africa into central Eurasia. At the time India had yet to collide with Eurasia, and so the mountains that resulted from that had yet to appear. Which meant that Central Eurasia was a land of rolling hills warm air from the Indian Ocean could penetrate up to the Arctic Ocean. A warmer, wetter, flatter land than now.
So A. robustus moved in and thrived.
“What a minute. Who do you know this happened? Nobody’s found anything like A. robustus in Eurasia.”
Nobody’s looked for it.
Here’s a dirty little secret of Science; we don’t know our own world as well as some think we do. New species are found all the time. Most are rather small, but every once in a while we find something large. The bottle-nosed whale is a recent find, and it seems everytime somebody shakes a tree in Brazil a dozen new species of insect pop up. Given the available resources, both for exploration and discovery, and for the recording of new discoveries, we can’t know the Earth as well as we’d like. So lots of stuff remains unknown. Including any A. robustus fossils that might be lying around in Eurasia, or the fossils of any possible descendents of A. robustus.
Why haven’t we found those fossils? Bad luck for one thing. For another, nobody’s had any reason to go looking for such. A. robustus lived in East Africa, and there is no evidence the species ever moved out of the area.
Much as there was no evidence that Australopithecus as a genus ever moved out of East Africa, until a skull was found in the Republic of Tchad. By accident. Now people are looking for more samples of the “Southern Ape of Tchad” plus any other species of Australopithecus that might have left remains.
Now why do I postulate the presence of A. robustus or A. robustus descendents in Central Eurasia? The sasquatch, the alma, the orang pendak, and the yeti. In order for even one of them to exist its ancestors had to come from somewhere, and there is no evidence of a non-human bipedal ape in ancient times other than Australopithecus. Some claim the sasquatch is descended from a South American ape, but there is no evidence of such. Nor is there any evidence that the ancestor of the orangutan produced a line of bipedal apes. So following the principle of parsimony, I’m going with A. robustus as the sasquatch’s (and the yeti’s and the alma’s and the orang pendak’s) ancestor. I might be wrong, but that will have to wait for additional evidence.
Which leads us to the matter of psychokinesis, the ability to move physical objects without touching them. Levitation can be considered a variation on this. It also leads us to two groups, one of scientists, the other of anti-scientists (if somebody coined the term before I did, they can have the credit for it) who place yowies, sasquatches, and psychokinesis in the same classification. For scientists it’s the “if the other side believes in it, it must be fake” classification. For anti-scientists it’s the “if the other side doesn’t believe in it, it must be real” classification. Which falls under the heading not of bad science, but of “science so atrocious the practitioner should be whacked upside the head and forced to write 10,000 times, ‘I will stop abusing my brain in such an outrageous manner.’”
To be really cruel about it, it’s the same sort of reasoning you get from creationists and Holocaust deniers. “◊◊◊◊ the facts, it contradicts my beliefs.”
So you get anti-scientists proclaiming the reality of psychokinesis despite all the evidence against it, and scientists denying the existance of the sasquatch despite all the evidence for it.
My point? The scientific method applies to all subjects. When somebody says that psychokinesis doesn’t exist he’s most likely right because the matter has been scientifically investigated. But when somebody says that the sasquatch doesn’t exist, he’s most likely wrong because the sasquatch has not been scientifically investigated.
To put it another way, nobody’s gone and looked.
Some have declared the footprints, hair, and feces faked,but I have yet to hear of any of that group actually testing the evidence themselves. The reasoning appears to be, “There aint no such thing as the sasquatch, therefor any evidence pointing to its existence must be faked.” A blatant example of false reasoning.
Before you can declare something false with any degree of assurance, you must give it a thorough examination. Whether it be a claim of paranormal ability, or a claim of an unknown animal. The good news is, once the examination has been made you can be fairly sure of your conclusions. The bad news is, it takes time and money. It’s much easier, and cheaper, to state authoritatively, “it can’t be” than it is to go and actually find out.
Unfortunately, such a course of action leaves one open to possible correction in the future. Whereas investigating the matter leads, at best, to conclusive evidence you were right in the first place or, at worst, to conclusive evidence you were wrong. I don’t know about you, but when it’s possible to settle a matter by the simple expedient of a hands-on investigation, I’d rather the matter get investigated.
In other words, if you want to prove to me that the sasquatch does not exist, in spite of all the evidence gathered pointing to its existance, you need to go and look. Test the evidence gathered, and do so honestly. Make an honest assesment and give an honest report, even if it contradicts what you had thought before. That is good science.
Stating that something must be or can’t be because it fits your personal world view is wrong. Plain and simple. Even when that something contradicts what you know to be true. When there is evidence pointing to the existence of an item, that evidence deserves an honest investigation. An explanation, and not an explaining away. Don’t tell us that those feces are bogus, tell us why they are bogus, and be prepared to defend your conclusion.
Science is not only for those things we have acknowledged as true or false, but for those things we still have questions about. Doing it any other way gives a lie to science, and to the things we have learned through science.
I have doubts about psychokinesis because it involves a phenomenon that has yet to be proven to exist. I have doubts about the yowie both because (as far as I know) no physical evidence other than possible tracks have been found, and there is no way that I can see of it reaching Australia in the first place. I have accepted the existence of the sasquatch because there is hair and fecal evidence along with the tracks, and there is a way by which the animal’s ancestors could have reached North America. And because no one, as yet, has done a damn thing to prove that the evidence points to something else, or that all the evidence is fake.
To all those who claim the sasquatch is imaginary; James Randi and friends have set up ways by which claims of paranormal abilities can be tested. Can you do no less? Is the very possibility that a manlike ape might be living in North America so frightening you can’t bring yourselves to investigate? Would the existence of the sasquatch overthrow everything you’ve learned? Randi don’t appear to think so of paranormal abilities. If there are telepaths out there, then there are telepaths out there. You learn to deal with it. How could a new species of primate be any different?
So you have your choice, you can either sit there and insist you can’t be wrong, or you can find out once and for all. No more cries of “It can’t exist!”, go out and prove it. How do you do that? You go and you look. The evidence points to the existence of a bipedal ape in North America, you claim it does not. It is up to you to prove that claim, any claim that contradicts the evidence. Provide evidence that you are right instead of empty rhetoric. Show me that the pro sasquatch evidence is faked or has led investigators to false conclusions. Show me the phony, instead of wasting my time with unsubstantiated claims of mis-identification or falsification.
In other words, start acting like scientists, instead of nervous nellies afraid that reality will come unglued because you were wrong about a subject.
The shame lies not in being wrong, but in insisting you must be right despite the evidence against you.
)