Montegriffo wrote:Speaker to Animals wrote:Penner wrote:
Because they are scary as shit. But honestly, do you actually believe in Bigfoot or just have some weird fixation? What is your story- did you once see one or what?
I never saw anything like that. I think if you just look at it objectively, these things had to exist due to the fact that totally separate cultures across two continents describe them and the descriptions asre relatively similar. I don't know if they still exist, though I suspect they could.
The way I see it, it's not really one thing any more than homo sapiens we all recognize as such are one thing. Whites have up to five percent Neanderthal DNA. Asians and Native Americans have a similar percentage of Denosovian DNA. Even amongst us, humanity is more like a spectrum. At one time, the Earth was more like Middle Earth in that there were lots of different kinds of humans living near each other. We mixed it up.
What we call sasquatch is just the outer edge of that spectrum. There's probably a lot of different kinds of DNA in them, with them having some small to moderate amount of homo sapiens DNA. The ones that look like Patty have less, but the ones that people describe as looking like a giant Neanderthal probably have quite a lot of human DNA. Natives often spoke of them kidnapping women, and it would make sense that they interbreed with us.
This mixing is alluded to in a lot of different religious traditions. In the Old Testament, God flooded the Earth to kill the offspring of humans and the offspring of Cain. Recall that there first were Cain and Abel and Cain, having killed off his brother, was banished by God to live in the field. We are the offspring of the third line which is referred to as Seth. Later, the descendents of Seth bred with the descendents of Cain to create the giants (Nephalim). Consider the possibility that the three brothers are metaphors for at least three different lines of humanity since the fall.
Maybe there is some truth in the story when you realize it's collected from very old tales passed down since the stone age, and written in a way to relate to the people of the bronze age.
Sumerians had stories of the giants too.
By that twisted logic fire breathing dragons and the Loch Ness monster must exist too.
Nope. Not, really.
There is nothing consistent about dragons from culture to culture.
You have two definitive positions (generally) and one truly arguable position of ignorance:
(1) These creatures never existed.
(2) These creatures at least existed in the past.
(3) We don't know.
To believe (1) as you apparently do, you'd have to accept the assumptions that completely different groups of humans, all across North America and Asia, described the same creature. Truly, it's always the same thing: a tall hairy man who walks upright but is wild like an animal. They describe the same conical head shape. They describe the same elusive and sometimes aggressive behavior. You will have to come to believe that Native Americans on the Eastern Seaboard invented stories about a very tall, hairy man who lives in the forest, is elusive but curious, and if you fuck with him he gets dangerous. Then you have to have to come to believe that Native Americans in British Columbia, with ZERO contact to the Algonquins described a very tall, hairy man who lives in the forest, is elusive but curious, and if you fuck with him get gets dangerous. You have to believe that the Sherpas of Asia independently arrived at their own mythical stories of a very tall, hairy man who lives in the forest, is elusive but curious, and if you fuck with him get gets dangerous. You have to also come to believe that all of these people independently described the same behaviors, such as the propensity to throw rocks at people and on to houses when they want people gone. Then you have to convince yourself that, even though none of these people were actually describing a legendary creature (and they had lots of those that differed from culture to culture) but, rather, an actual creature that lives in the wilderness, that they are wrong and they really are describing a mythical creature, even though they know the difference.
To believe (2), you need only make one defensible assumption: that all of these cultures describe the same animal because they all experienced the same animal. To wit: if Native Americans all described some particular kind of bird, you wouldn't hesitate to assume they must have all seen a now extinct bird species since they all describe the same animal and there was no real contact between the different groups in order to exchange such stories.
(3) Three is the most defensible position since it makes zero assumptions.
So those of you who take position (1) have to make countless assumptions that really are not even very likely when you add them all up. People who take position (2) need only make one assumption, and that assumption is at least supported by accounts from completely disconnected cultures spanning two very large continents. People who take position (3) make no assumptions at all, and therefore most defensible, but they don't make any claims whatsoever.
As far a your claim that this would imply dragons exist, well no.. There is no consistent description of a dragon across several continents. There exist mythical stories of legendary creatures we all later collected into the same category (dragons), but they don't share really anything at all in common other than being big. Loch Ness monster is based on accounts in one area. When we are talking about big foot, or whatever you want to call those things, we are talking about consistent reports spanning a vast territory on two continents. You can't seriously sit there and tell me that the probability that cultures on two continents
independently describe the exact same mythical animal is somehow more probable than there having once existed something like this and all these cultures are describing something they experienced in the past.
As for how it's possible, I already pointed out the obvious. What you call humans are not even one thing. Caucasians are part Neanderthal. Asians are part Denosovians. Africans interbred with some unknown hominid species. There's probably even more genetics in there from other hominid species that we have not yet identified. There really isn't one human species any longer. We are hybrids. All of us. It's more like a spectrum with several archaic species being sources for our genetics, and one of those being the dominant source (archaic homo sapiens). At one time in the paleolithic, there had to have been people who were fifty percent Neanderthal and fifty percent achaic homo sapiens. Do you think they would look anything like the rest us today? Of course not. Eventually, the percentage of Neanderthal DNA decreased quite a lot, and we get modern Caucasoids. If this happened to our ancestors, it's not unreasonable to assume that it also happened in the other direction; that there was interbreeding with some other hominid species, but the result of that interbreeding came in the form of a race of humans that are predominantly some other hominid species, and only partly homo sapiens.
As to whether I think they still exist.. I have no idea. I kind of doubt it, but I do believe they existed in our historical past. If you go back to 18th and 19th century reports, especially news articles in the 1800s, you will find reports of sasquatch, only they are often labeled as "wild man" and other such names. In the early 20th century, the news articles were "escaped gorillas", even though there were very few gorillas in captivity in that time (they were just discovered), and not really an missing reports to connect to the sightings. Furthermore, if you read the escaped gorilla articles, you will find they describe what we call today a big foot or a sasquatch. But do they exist today? I don't know, man. It seems far-fetched that they could still be out there in the wilderness south of the Canadian border without us being able to video tape them at least from drones or something like that. I think if they still exist, you need to go way up into Canada to look for them.
This isn't to say the ethno argument is "proof". What I *am* saying is that there exist FAR more reasons to believe these things existed in the not so distant past than to believe that they never existed. Indeed, we KNOW there were similar creatures in the past due to interbreeding between different hominid species that resulted in the three broad racial groups we see today.
