“Bigfoot is an ape!”
“Bigfoot is a human!”
Photo © 2009 Lisa A. Shiel
In Bigfoot research, these two competing statements get tossed around like water balloons. And, as in a water balloon fight, in the end everybody gets soaked but nobody has much to show for the battle. The problem is, the folks on both sides of the ape-vs-human debate like to inflate the evidence for their pet theory, yet in reality neither argument has enough substance to hold up under scrutiny.
Now anybody who’s read any of my books may be asking a question at this point. “Hey Lisa,” my readers might say, “don’t you pitch balloons for the Bigfoot-is-human team?”
First of all, no.
Second of all, no.
Let me explain. I offer two negative responses to this question because, though the person asking the question may not realize it, the query raises two issues masquerading as one. First, the question assumes that I throw verbal water balloons—i.e., statements that rely on inflated evidence that lacks substance. Second, the question reveals a basic misunderstanding of my ideas about Bigfoot. I do not think Bigfoot is a human. I like the theory that Bigfoot may be a type of hominid—but not Homo sapiens.
The biggest pitfall in the ape-vs-human debate centers on a misunderstanding of the word human. What is a human? Some of the folks in the Bigfoot-is-human camp actually mean that they think Bigfoot is a human being, but others clearly suffer from an ignorance of what the term human really means. Who can blame them? Even scientists can’t decide what is a human and what is not. When we see a headline that declares “3-million-year-old human remains discovered” or “new member of human family found,” it’s easy to get confused. Even reading the articles may not clear up matters. Scientists often toss around the word human with all the caprice of children playing catch.
While researching my books, I’ve delved deep into this issue. What have I found? Well, I needed a whole chapter in The Evolution Conspiracy to explain it, so I’ll have to encapsulate the issue here. A human is a primate that walks upright as its standard mode of locomotion and exhibits advanced language and reasoning capabilities. We speak, we write, we create sophisticated artwork, and we invent complex technology. The nonhuman hominids, those allegedly extinct species whose fossils inhabit museums, seem to have walked upright. They seem to have used sophisticated stone tools. Any artwork found at ancient sites, however, is attributable to members of our species, Homo sapiens. The available evidence tells us that nonhuman hominids never made computers or even compound bows.
Does this make them less intelligent than humans? No. The fact is, the available evidence tells us very little about their mental abilities. However, the evidence does suggest they lacked the key traits that make us human. Even species crammed into the same genus as humans, such as Homo erectus, seem less like humans than like Bigfoot. (Scientists assign hominid species to the genus Homo rather arbitrarily, for reasons too complex to get into here.)
What’s the point? A hominid is not necessarily a human. So when I say Bigfoot might be a hominid, I’m not saying it’s a human.
What about the idea Bigfoot might be a feral tribe of humans? Whenever I hear this idea, I can’t help but chuckle. Proponents of this notion have apparently taken their cues, whether on purpose or unwittingly, from the newspaper stories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Articles about sightings of “wild men” (aka Bigfoot) often dismissed hairy, bipedal creatures as escaped lunatics gone feral. The escaped lunatic hypothesis represents one of the earliest efforts at debunking the Bigfoot phenomenon.
The issue boils down to this—the available evidence for Bigfoot is inconclusive and too malleable to fill our balloons with anything but water. Perhaps instead of arguing over whether Bigfoot is an ape or a human, we should spend the time figuring out what those terms actually mean and what the evidence actually illustrates.
