“Oh yes. We’ve seen monkeys without tails. They walk upright and they’re about six foot tall.”
Yeah, just a little hunter joke. Kinda like the “orange hatted deer” that we get in the US.
Of course, they probably still have stories handed down about when they actually did still hunt the tailless monkeys…
Historically the “foot” was a part of many local systems of units, so why not?
It just wasn’t the “foot” per the 1959 International Yard and Pound Agreement as used in the US, probably.
Now that you bring that up, I’m wondering how many cases of tarring and feathering might be attributed to monster sightings in the past?
You know we always hear that. With further poking it tends not to be true. Most places associated with Cryptids are heavily trafficked by enthusiasts, and their documentaries and research trips tend to use the same local interpreters and guides as everyone else. Abominable Science does a fair bit of work in tracing this, particularly when it comes to Mokele-mbembe and other “Congo Dinosaurs” well loved by creationists.
What tends to happen is the ideas are introduced from outside. White folks show up asking questions about something, interpret some local stuff as what they want to hear. Then the next guys end up “finding” a bunch of locals who heard about it from the first guy. Once it’s a thing it’s good business to be the guide or interpreter that takes people to hear what they want to hear.
“Investigators” tend to not take no for answer, assuming locals are “secretive” or protective of the creature when they get a no. Pressing until they get any kind of response they can massage into their pet theory.
For Ecuador no one would need knowledge of Bigfoot.
The local thing is de Loys’ Ape. A giant, tailless, bipedal spider monkey “discovered” in the region in the 20’s. It’s widely considered a settled hoax, produced by propping up a normal sized spider monkey corpse and photographing it out of context. de Loys is considered a huckster.
People have been headed down to that region for almost a century to look for “proof” of this thing. I worked for a reality TV show that sent a crew to Ecuador to look into it. Though don’t think that segment aired, it didn’t produce any footage worth using.
The story pre-dates Bigfoot (by a lot), and doesn’t closely resemble it. Being more of a 19th century “missing link” hoax, and an attempt to compete with discoveries of chimps, gorillas and other Old World Apes.
I’ve heard some criticisms of de Loys and his associates claiming they were working from a racist model of human evolution, where different races evolved in place from different species. With the “discovery” meant to provide a different set of apes for Indigenous Americans to come from.
I haven’t poked that with a stick yet. But the claim has been used that way by others, and it’s pretty typical of these things.
Um, be a little careful there. She’s amazing in many ways and did amazing science in her day, but she’s also pretty problematic lately. It came out over the years that her research methods were less than rigorous and she corrupted a lot of her own data. She was caught using feeding stations, trapping chimpanzees and observing them in captivity, all against her claimed goal of pure unadulterated observation of them in the wild. Her book Seeds of Hope was also revealed to be largely plagiarized, in addition to taking a highly pseudoscientific view of GMOs.
I point all this out only because the topic is Big Foot, which is absolutely not real. It’s pure pseudoscience. The photos that propagate the myth have all been shown to be fake. The notion that there could be a huge primate species that nobody has caught a photo of at this point is just silly. There’s no tracks, no droppings, no evidence of breeding pairs, there’s absolutely no reason to believe it exists.
You say good science shouldn’t rule anything out, but in this case, you’re making Bertrand’s Teapot argument. Should we spend resources to prove there isn’t a teapot orbiting Mars? I’ve got some drink college kids here who swear they saw it and we shouldn’t rule anything out! No, of course not. You have to have some evidence for a phenomenon and a base level of plausibility to bother investigating it.
Jane Goodall has drifted further and further into pseudoscience in her career, and on this she is just wrong. The reasonable scientific consensus is that Big Foot is not real and she should know better. She has absolutely been a net positive in the world and I’m really glad she’s done all the work she has done. But like many single scientists (who are people), she has big blind spots. This is why we trust the consensus of science, not any one researcher.
Yeah, that’s the kicker and qualifier for everything I said above. There’s definitely a point where speculation is just masturbation and not worth pursuing.
My deference to Goodall has less to do with her methods (of which I was unaware were manipulated), and more to do with the fact that in any event, she knows far more than me on the subject. But I’m sure Robert Kennedy Jr “knows” more than I do about vaccines; it’s just that he’s cherry-picked among data to support his predetermined conclusion. It wouldn’t shock me if this were the case with Goodall, though it would be disappointing to say the least.
That being said, we do have direct evidence of cryptids that, until even a few decades ago, were thought to dwell entirely in the realm of mythology. I personally don’t think Bigfoot exists for the very reasons you stipulate, but also know that there is a lot yet to be discovered. Fun enough for an internet comment or two. 
While Goodall likely knows far more about the subject of African great apes and Anthropology than you do.
That’s no guarantee she knows more about Bigfoot than you do. Frankly the fact that she supposedly heard that detail and connected it to Bigfoot rather than de Loys shows a lack of familiarity with Cryptozoology. Jane Goodall is 87. And Bigfoot was much more of a “I’m not going to say it doesn’t exist” thing in the 70’s than it is today. It could be as simple as Jane Goodall hasn’t paid much attention to the idea of Bigfoot at all in 40 years.
Could you name one?
While we have plenty of newly discovered species, and some rediscoveries of species once thought extinct. Not one of them was ever thought of as a cryptid, or found via cryptozoology and it’s methods.
I’m also not really aware of any Cryptid that has ever generated much in the way of solid evidence. To the point where the lack of evidence despite all the looking has become major bit of evidence against most of them.
Gonna need a citation on that one. 
I haven’t seen any non-debunked evidence. The skeptical/rationalist community has been all over Big Foot for decades.
Granted, a lot of these are genetic cousins to known species and I wouldn’t say that many of them were as famous as, say the giant squid, but taking the general definition of cryptid as a species that had been claimed to exist, but never definitively proven, there are loads of them. Sure, not as exciting as Bigfoot for the most part, but cryptids nonetheless.
I was just reading that, after reading the thread updates here.
I was reading it because it was the first search hit. lol
She may well know more about nonhuman primate behavior than anyone else on the planet. I don’t think that necessarily gives her any special insight into the possible existence of Sasquatch though.
If a breeding population of nonhuman apes made it to the Americas then they haven’t just been doing an amazing job hiding evidence of their existence from casual observers. They’ve also been doing an amazing job hiding all evidence of their ancestors from the known fossil record.
Scientists believe we have a reasonable working understanding of how all known ape species evolved and how they migrated to their current habitats. If we found a new ape species in the Americas then it would mean a lot of gaps in our current knowledge. Like “where the hell have you been hiding for the last ten million years?” kinds of gaps.
But we do have those gaps.
To be clear, I’m not at all a believer in sasquatch (can’t believe I actually wrote that), I’m just saying that when it comes to my opinion vs someone who literally lived with great apes, I’m the lesser authority.
They do say every time evolutionary biology fills a gap between two species it creates two more.
However the gap between “great apes evolving in Africa 13 million years ago” and “population of hairy bipedal apes walking around the Americas” would still make for an unusually broad one. That’s a lot of as-yet-undiscovered fossils.
There’s pretty few examples of creatures which went missing from the fossil record, and were later discovered. Seems to be mostly deep sea creatures, which is less accessible by a lot than (say) the PNW where all the bigfeets be seen.
Not just missing from fossil record, but really no bones or carcasses or scat which could be used to prove the existence of a giant ape roaming the Americas.
That’s moving the goalposts on the definition of cryptozoology though. Those animals were found by science, not crackpots on the internet looking at fake blurry photos from the 1970s.
Sure, we regularly discover species we didn’t know existed. Claiming all those as victories for “cryptozoology”, especially citing a site with an even worse popup ad problem than BoingBoing, is a bit of a stretch.
Thus disproving evolution!
So this is exactly what I’m talking about in terms of none of them were termed cryptids or came from cryptozoology.
The list there is basically a partial list of species discovered since some arbitrary point in time. For the “giants” category they seem to have gone with 1900, for everything else they seem to have cut it ~1990. They seem to have accidentally included one claimed cryptid with “devil bird”.
These are not “cryptids” they are things we discovered that they have back labeled as cryptids. Many of them discovered before the word was coined (1983), or before the field existed (30s, named in the 40s or 50s).
Really important is that not one of those discoveries explained any of the creatures proposed by Cryptozoologists. Nothing got marked “solved” in their ledger on basis of these discoveries.
And we can run with the giant squid to see how even the closest matches here don’t work. Giant squid were first described by Aristotle and Pliny the Elder. They were infrequently seen, but pretty much known to exist for a really long time. Beached corpses were found and recorded since the middle ages. Sucker marks, scars and other markings on sperm whales are known as far back as whaling was able to target them. With beaks found in their digestive tracts as well. And in washed up ambergris, before we knew ambergris was basically whale poops.
Basically from the establishment of modern science those corpses were dissected, described, and examined. The other evidence examined and quantified. The species/genus was named in the 1850’s, we have photos of finds from the 1870s. And quality documentation of live sightings around that time as well.
The story with the giant squid is not that we suddenly proved something long rumored. Not that mythological sailor’s stories and unexplained sightings were proven true. It is about documenting, defining, and examining something in tandem with developing how we do that.
That doesn’t particularly resemble Sasquatch or Loch Ness does it? Particularly in terms of the millennia long string of washed up remains.
The term cryptid is defined that broadly precisely to allow this. But the usage doesn’t match.
As would the gap around “another species of hominid has been walking around all this time”. The thrust in Cryptozoology waves a bit back and forth between how human like it supposedly is.
It isn’t just lack of fossils. It’s the dating of when those groups split off from others from the fossils we do have, something that’s backed up increasingly by DNA and molecular research.
Part and parcel of good ole Squatch is that while it was originally a PNW thing. As a proposed single creature, in a fairly obvious hoax. Since at least the 80’s they get seen or claimed to exist everywhere. Part of the sort of back dated creation of a history for the thing with the “Sasquatch” name and supposed “Native stories”. Is all drawn from Canada. Still in the PNW, but pretty damn far from the sections of Oregon and Washington usually considered ground zero for our hairy friend.
New Jersey and Florida are both major centers for Bigfoot sightings these days.
No, that’s not my intent at all. From my first post, I have only been referring to scientists and researchers and the pursuit of fact. I couldn’t give a fig for the greater “cryptozoology” community or whatever.
Exactly. But we’re venturing into semantics around the use of the term cryptids and I have zero interest in propping up feeble fantasies, but the fact remains that despite various accounts, the science-based zoological community didn’t recognize many of these creatures, even though they were named in antiquity, until fairly recent validations. I’m not a believer in or defender of fantasists, all I’m saying is that there have been a number of recently-confirmed sightings of animals that were at some point thought to be mythology.
The science-based zoological community are the ones that found them, defined them, named them.
That’s like saying Americans didn’t recognize the existence of the Beatles before their music was ever released here.
It is very much a semantic argument. Because a lot of the claim rests on pointing at things before the modern era, before their was a science-based zoological community, and saying “see science denied it”.
Again can you name one?
Most of what’s in the list you provided are things we more stumbled across. Some are things we teased out through taxonomy, categorizing known things basically.
Almost none of these had any real presence in actual folklore or mythology. Even outside that list, there aren’t really a lot of examples that even run close. None at all in modern times.
To the extent that the whole local stories lead to “discovery” thing exists. Its much more a dynamic of when in the modern era westerners turned up, heard about it and wrote it down.
With the giant squid. There doesn’t seem to have ever been a point that even pre-science educated people broadly denied it’s existence or claimed it was impossible. Neither did it have any folklore in the traditional sense around it, or a place in any myth system. It was accepted that very big squid were a thing, and people documented them, looked for them, studied them.
It’s just that the frame work around how we did these things was very, very different before the 18th and 19th centuries. Pretty much once we had our modern frame work. Our modern academics firmly established the giant squid in and through them.
This take comes directly out of cryptozoology. Primarily from Ivan T Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans who created and named cryptozoology. Both were primarily interested in sea monsters, and they liked to point at the then already known and named giant squid to bolster their ideas around big giant things hiding in the oceans. Framing it through “science didn’t believe that either!” frame that doesn’t seem to have ever been the case.
Do I know if Sasquatch exists or not? No. I am agnostic on it. But I do think it is prudent to be humble in the face of what we do not know or may have missed. For instance, no one thought there could possibly be a large, completely undiscovered land animal like this, until it happened. Unknown unknowns, as they say…
https://www.savethesaola.org/what-is-a-saola/
“In 1992, a joint team of Vietnamese government and WWF biologists conducted a general wildlife and biodiversity survey of Vu Quang Nature Reserve (now a national park), on Vietnam’s border with central Laos. In the course of the survey, a member of the team encountered a pair of unusual horns in the house of a local hunter – unlike the horns of any animal then known from Southeast Asia. The team eventually found and examined more sets of horns (some clearly from recent kills), and the full skin one of the animals, and realized they belonged to a previously unknown (to science) and highly distinctive species of large mammal. In 1993, the team announced their extraordinary discovery in the journal Nature, in an article entitled “A new species of living bovid from Vietnam”. Shortly afterwards, Saola’s occurrence in Laos was confirmed. It was perhaps the most surprising zoological find of the 20thcentury.”
