Andy White Anthropology
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Mitchel Townsend is . . . Dr. Johnny Dagger, Bigfoot Tracker?

4/11/2017

11 Comments

 
This is going to be a short one, as I'm multi-tasking my way through a chaotic end-of-semester soup. I wanted to add a little information as a follow-up to Jason Colavito's post yesterday discussing a continuing education course about Bigfoot offered at Centralia College in Washington state.  The course ("The Old Ones, the First Americans") is being taught by Mitchel Townsend, whose claims about Bigfoot evidence I briefly discussed last June. Thanks to the miracle of social media, I have now learned that Townsend is actually, apparently . . .

Dr. Johnny Dagger, Bigfoot Tracker!

I was made aware of Townsend's alter ego by Steven Streufert, who pointed me to his blog post from June of 2015.

Have a look at this KickStarter page where Dr. Dagger attempted to raise $35,000 to "solve the mystery of Bigfoot once and for all:

"Dr. Jonny Dagger is a US Army Special Operations Trained NCO with 12 years of service. He additionally holds several Graduate degrees from world renowned Universities. Finally, he teaches Bigfoot courses at the college level. The only college professor in the world who designs and teaches these courses. He has the skill, experience, and abilities to solve this mystery once and for all with your help!!"
Picture
Screenshot from Dr. Dagger's fundraising campaign.
There: a ten minute blog post with thousands of loose ends to pursue. You're welcome.
11 Comments

And the "Bigfooter of the Year" Award Goes To . . . Man Who Claimed Alligator Leg was Bigfoot Arm

12/19/2016

31 Comments

 
I don't closely follow the goings-on in the world of Bigfoot. For the most part, I've written about Bigfoot claims when they intersect with the domains of archaeology, anthropology, and human evolution. There's a whole Bigfoot culture out there that I know little about. It's an interesting phenomenon, but there's only so much time in the day.

Last December, I wrote this post about the modern-day drama swirling around the claim that the arm of a Bigfoot (quickly revealed to be the articulated leg of an alligator) had been found in Florida.  I was interested in the story because the key ingredients of how it unfolded (including a climate of public interest, a lack of basic scientific acumen about the actual "evidence," profit motivations, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories) are all things that likely contibuted to the "giants" fad that rolled wave-like through late 1800's America. While the two are not the same thing, I see some potential parallels between finding giant skeletons back then and searching for Bigfoot today.

One part of the Bigfoot phenomenon that doesn't have a parallel in the world of 19th century giant skeletons, however, is the weird clan-based, trash-talking celebrity culture of self-poclaimed "Bigfooters." These guys (as far as I can tell, searching for Bigfoot is largely the domain of white males) compete for attention in just about every way possible except for producing actual physical evidence of Bigfoot. Given that we can't use the discovery of real evidence as an objective criterion for resolving all the mutually exclusive claims about who the best Bigfooters actually are, I was happy to learn that there are professional publications available for helping the layman sort the wheat from the chaff.  

And the 2016 award for Bigfooter of the Year goes to . . .  Stacy Brown, Jr.: the guy who mistook an alligator limb for a Bigfoot arm. 
Picture
I don't have access to the complete article, so I don't know exactly what went into the decision to give such an honor to Brown. In the snippet I have, it appears important that Brown hikes around a lot. I guess as long as you're out getting exercise, it doesn't really matter so much that you apparently can't tell the difference between the anatomy of the hypothetical hominid you're hiking around looking for and the bones of a quadrupedal reptile. Mammals and reptiles have only been separate evolutionary lineages for about 300 million years. No biggee.

​Maybe Bigfooting awards are like paticipation ribbons now.  Hey -- good for you!  You tried!

What brought this important story to my attention was a posting in a Facebook group of some emails that appear to show Brown discussing how to keep the "Bigfoot arm" story in the news even though he knew it was a hoax. I have no way of knowing if those emails are legitimate or not, but you can read them here if you like.

Maybe we should start a year end tradition of awards for the archaeological "fringe." Help me brainstom categories and we'll get it done.

Anyway, Happy Holidays to all the Bigfooters out there who didn't win an award this year. Keep up the good work!
31 Comments

I Smell Something . . . and It's Not a Giant Beast Man Buried in the Yard

7/14/2016

5 Comments

 
I'm still on the road in North Carolina. If you're interested, you can read about Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3. If not, you've only got a few more words to go until we get to giants.

Yesterday Jason Colavito wrote about the "Giant in My Backyard" website of Mirrell Blum. I had never heard of this one before. Blum claims to have found a letter left by her grandfather describing an encounter with a "huge, hairy beast man" that ended with the creature being shot and buried. Colavito's post discusses the strange interactions that Blum reported with Nephilim enthusiasts Steve Quayle and L. A. Marzulli. A few days ago, Blum claimed that they were actively digging up the beast man:

"We went as far as changing our phone numbers, emails, and cut off all communication about the letter and what might be buried on our property. After a couple of weeks of trying to figure out what we should do, we gathered a small group of family and friends to come up with a solution.

In the end, they were just as curious as we were and we decided pool our knowledge and skills. Myself and some of my friends work construction and other similar jobs, so we know our way around heavy equipment. We knew the general area that we needed to dig, so we rented and borrowed the equipment we needed and got to work."
 The post includes a picture of a pile of dirt and a dump truck (and a chipper-shredder). When you click a link at the bottom of the page ("Click Here To See Over 8 Hours of Video and 1,000+ Pics of The Dig") you're taken to a page asking you to provide complete credit card information for "Online Access To Pics and Video - Only $0.99." If you click the "Sign Up For Online Access" button (without entering any actual information, of course), you get the following screen (sorry - my laptop is damaged so I had to just take a photo with my phone):​
Picture
If your alarm bells haven't gone off yet, you haven't been paying attention.

When I did an image search on the "excavation in progress" photo with the dump truck and a pile of dirt, I got a hit on the website of Quality Landscaping Services in Connecticut. That site uses the exact same photo for illustration, which makes sense considering the presence of the chipper-shredded (which is not a piece of equipment I would bring on an excavation).

The photo of a hair sample being analyzed is taken from a May 2016 story about a Medieval-age plait of braided hair found in an English abbey.

So let's see these thousands of photos of the excavation of the beast man. At least we have a firm date and we won't be waiting long. Hartman Krug, fire up the countdown!
5 Comments

Bigfoot, Bone Stacks, and Binford's Body-Part Utility Indices

6/25/2016

18 Comments

 
An ongoing conversation on an old blog post about the Humboldt skull somehow led me to this story about the claim of Mitchell Townsend that stacks of gnawed animal bones in the Cascade Mountains provide definitive physical evidence for the existence of Bigfoot. I had flashes of "Roman sword white paper" as I read this paragraph:

"Townsend’s information will be published in a research paper, and he challenges the scientific community to discredit his information. He said the four-year project helped solve the mystery because the focus was based on forensic evidence. The information used was also heavily based on comparison proof from the top scientists in the world."
Just as I was settling in to wait for the paper, I was happy to find that I had misread the publication date of the news article: it was from May of 2015 rather than May of 2016.  The paper ("Using Biotic Taphonomy Signature Analysis and Neoichnology Profiling to determine the identity of the carnivore taxa responsible for the deposition and mechanical mastication of three independent prey bone assemblages in the Mount St. Helen’s ecosystem of the Cascade mountain range" by Aaron Mills, Gerald Mills, and M. N. Townsend) came out last June and is available here.  It doesn't appear that the paper generated much discussion, which I find curious given the amount of detail it contains. I don't know if the lack of attention means that the Bigfoot community just didn't buy it (?) or just didn't read it: the paper weighs in at 94 pages and is densely packed with jargon.

I was intrigued, so I waded through it.

The paper describes three "bone stacks" located and documented by the authors in the Mt. St. Helens area in 2013 and 2014. The authors attribute the formation of these bone assemblages to Bigfoot, arguing that (1) the stacks of bones could not have been created by any other known carnivore in the area and (2) the bones preserve evidence of consumption by a creature with very large but very human-like teeth.  Here is a quote from Townsend's "discovery narrative" about the first bone stack (pg. 6):​
". . . ​I did a physical examination of the site contents and discovered at least two sets of deer remains based upon the deer skulls found in direct proximity to the main assemblage of bones. The skulls had their noses/snouts crushed by what looked like blunt force trauma and had been placed in the same general nose downhill orientation. This seemed odd at first glance. What really caught my eye was a pile of bones next to a small log. My first impression was that something or someone had sat down and consumed these animals and just dropped the bones between their legs as they finished them. I further confirmed this by looking closely at the stack and noted some very interesting observations. The bones seemed to be mostly rib bones that showed evidence of teeth marks and mechanical manipulation to varying degrees. Some areas had seemingly been bitten out and discernable dental impressions left behind. These dental impressions looked measurably different from the other known species that inhabit this ecosystem." 

Townsend later (pg. 7) reiterates his vision of the behavior that created the record he was looking at: 

"What resident animal species would kill deer with blunt force trauma on the head, position them in the same directional orientation, eat the animals and drop the bones in a pile? How come scavengers were avoiding this site even though some of the bones still had flesh attached? These were just some of the questions now rushing through my thoughts." 
Picture
Image of the "bone stacks" discussed by Mills et al. as evidence of Bigfoot (from the paper referenced in the text).
The first thing that struck me about the assemblages described by the authors is the representation of body parts: heads, feet, ribs, and spines (with a few other bones also present). The "kill sites" do not include all parts of animals, or even random pieces of the animals. Here is a listing of what the authors report they collected:
​
  • Bone Stack #1 (BP1): 4 ribs, 8 lower foot bones, 2 wrist/ankle bones, a toe bone, and 2 partial hooves from black tail deer (a "partial shoulder assembly" was observed but not collected, and two damaged skulls were present);

  • Bone Stack #2 (EK#1): 4 ribs, 1 vertebra, and 4 lower leg bones from an elk. (in the discovery narrative, the authors report that the skull was also observed in the general area but "The odd thing was we found no leg bones in the area, as if they had been carried off later");

  • Bone Stack #3 (EK#2): "The lower spinal column, some ribs, and one rear leg were located in this location among elk hair tufts" (pg. 30).

​Students of anthropological archaeology will have anticipated where I'm going with this based on the title of the post: the bone stacks described by the authors appear to be examples of "low utility" assemblages, composed of the skeletal remains of those parts of the animals that contain relatively little meat.  All hunters know that different parts of a large animal have different "values" in terms of their protein and fat content. For cervids like deer and elk, the highest utility parts of the animal (those with the greatest concentration of edible tissue relative to bone) are the upper limbs. Heads, feet, lower limbs, ribs, and the spine -- the kinds of bones described in the bone stacks -- contain relatively less meat per unit of volume (and hence per weight).  When hunter-gatherers on foot (i.e., lacking ATVs, snowmobiles, pick-up trucks, and other mechanized transport technologies utilized by many sport hunters) must choose which parts of the animal to transport back to camp after a kill, they generally (and logically) pick the highest-utility pieces. As a general theoretical expectation, they will butcher the animal and preferentially transport the upper limbs back to camp, leaving behind the feet, heads, spine, etc. Thus we can generally expect that kill/butchery sites will have high proportions of low-utility parts while the camp/consumption sites will have high proportions of high-utility parts.
Picture
A crib sheet for cervid body-part utility. If you have to choose which parts of the animal to transport and eat, it's going to be the upper limbs.
The use of body-part utility indices as an aid to understanding the relationships between human hunting/scavenging behaviors and the resulting bone assemblages was pioneered by Lewis Binford, a true giant of late 20th century archaeology. Based in part on ethnoarchaeological data collected among the Nunamiut (here is an informal description of that work), Binford argued in the early 1980's against the prevailing interpretation of Lower Paleolithic (i.e., 1.8 million-year-old) butchered bone accumulations as the products of human hunting behavior, forcefully challenging the notion that big game hunting was a key component of early human evolution. Binford noted that the published bone inventories from sites like FLK-Zinj in Olduvai Gorge were dominated by heads and lower limb bones, suggesting that the hominids only had access to the carcasses after the "high utility" parts were gone.  If humans had hunted the animals (and therefore had access to the carcasses before the lions, hyenas, and vultures), where were all the limb bones that would have been transported along with the choice cuts of meat? 

Binford's contribution was the beginning rather than the end of the "hunting-scavenging debate," which continues to this day (e.g., here is an open access paper from 2013). It has been incredibly productive in terms of the development of new theory and new lines of evidence, and is one of the best examples of the inductive-deductive cycles that I know of in archaeological science. Without writing a book about the twists and turns of the history of the debate and where it is now (which I would not be qualified to do), I will just say that it appears to me as though an early human hunting model fits better with the multiple lines of direct and indirect evidence we have in front of us now than does a passive scavenging model. Not everyone will agree with that statement, of course.

But getting back to "Bigfoot:" what could the composition of the head-foot-rib-spine-dominated assemblages of the bone stacks be telling us about the behaviors that produced those assemblages?  The absence of the high-utility parts suggests to me that someone or some thing carried off the parts that had the most meat on them. I don't know much about what bears or cougars do to a dead deer, but I doubt they selectively dismember it and carry off just the good parts. That sounds like human behavior to me. Townsend's vision of Bigfoot sitting on a tree branch and munching on the ends of (low utility) ribs at the kill site doesn't make a lot of intuitive sense if the (high utility) limbs were the prize of the kill. Would Bigfoot enthusiasts who accept this evidence argue that the creatures are employing essentially human foraging strategies, selectively transporting portions of their kills back to a home base to share with friends and relatives? And if groups of Bigfoot are hunting separately but then bringing portions of their kills back to some central place to share (as would be implied by the removal of the high utility parts), where are the dense concentrations of bones that those behaviors would produce? Generally, those kinds of re-occupied, re-used sites "central place" sites are much easier to spot than kill sites that are produced, used, and abandoned over very short periods of time. If we can find these "central place" kinds of sites in Africa from 1.8 million years ago, how come we don't know about any in the Cascade Mountains? Three kill sites with no high utility bones but no sites where the "good parts" are consumed? Is Bigfoot really that tidy? 

What about the stacking behavior? The authors (pg. 67) quote a Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife bear and cougar specialist (Richard Beausoleil) as saying the following:

“To me, the bones look like they were placed there by a human (hunt site, illegal bait site). You looked at a lot of species to explain this, but in my experience with carnivores, this one is likely tied to Homo sapiens”.
Again, I'm no expert on bears and cougar, so it seems reasonable to give some weight to the opinion of someone who is. It is logical to me that a person who was trying to use carcass parts to lure in carnivores would use collections of low utility parts (heads, feet, spines) to do the job rather than prime cuts of meat. The presence of parts of at least two different deer (based on the presence of two deer heads) at the first site described by Townsend suggests to me that the deer parts were transported to the site rather than killed there. Maybe the ribs were carried in a bag and dumped out into a pile by whoever was prepping the bait, if that's indeed what happened. Perhaps the skulls were damaged on purpose in an attempt to enhance the scent of the rotting brains -- hell, I don't know. 

And what of the reported tooth marks?  This is a part of the report I have not yet considered in detail. I would be surprised to find that the tooth marks could not be reasonably attributed to non-human carnivores (perhaps more than one kind). But I'll reserve comment on that until I read through their analysis carefully. 

In summary, we're told that the bone stacks are the results of single events: a Bigfoot killing a deer (or two), sitting down and depositing ribs in a pile, one after the other as he/she eats. But it's easy to imagine an alternative hypothesis (the selective use of leftover, low utility parts in bait piles for illegal hunting) that also appears to account for many of the facts presented by the authors. If those alternative hypotheses were fleshed out, it would be possible to develop critical test expectations that could falsify one or the other. I don't think we're given enough information to judge where in the sequence of butchery and deposition the bones were chewed -- before being "stacked"? after? Did the biting occur around the time of death or later? Are there any cutmarks on any of the bones that demonstrate that tools were used to disarticulate the carcasses? Are there bite marks on any bones that are not in the "stack"?  As shown by the "discovery narrative" I quoted above, the assumption that the killing, biting, and stacking all happened at about the same time seems to have been embedded in Townsend's thinking about these sites since the moment of discovery. Discarding that assumption and considering the formation of the sites as a set of analytical questions (which, admittedly, it may not be possible to address satisfactorily with the information they report) may result in a simpler answer than "Bigfoot."

I'm curious as to why the Bigfoot community did not seem to get excited about this work. Anyone care to chime in?  
​
18 Comments

Is Bigfooting a Century Behind Giants? The Example of Stacy Brown's Alligator Limb

12/13/2015

2 Comments

 
As I wrote yesterday, I was hoping that my next post would be about body size estimates for Gigantopithecus. It's taking more time than I hoped to track down some of the information I want for that one, so it will be on hold for a bit. I'm trying to find a source of raw metrics for individual Gigantopithecus teeth (I think there may be some in this new paper by Zhang et al., but I haven't been able to access the supplementary information from off campus) and I'd like to have a look at Russell Ciochon et al.'s (1990) book Other Origins (which I'll have to get in hard copy through the library, the old-fashioned way).

I'm interested in Gigantopithecus both out of professional curiosity and because it's one of those topics (like the Nephilim) that is nicely situated at the intersection of science/pseudoscience.  That's what makes it interesting to write about on a blog: it's a legitimate area of scientific inquiry that matters to the "fringe."

There's no question that the strongest fringe appeal of Gigantopithecus is among Bigfoot enthusiasts, some of whom contend that Sasquatch and the giant ape are one and the same. I'm not really that into the Bigfoot phenomenon, but when you talk Gigantopithecus online you get attention from the Bigfoot crowd. So I'm learning a little bit about how that world works.

(Aside: In my opinion, Bigfoot fans are the soccer hooligans of the fringe world.  If you want to see some ridiculous displays of racist, sexist, homophobic, scatological, immature, ad hominem attacks, go and read some of the comments on Bigfoot forums like this one. I get discussed on there when I write something related to Bigfoot.  What a compliment. I can't even tell who is who or what exactly they're trying to say . . . anyway, moving on.)

Perusing one of the Bigfoot forums, I stumbled across this story about a possible "skunk ape" arm being investigated by Stacy Brown, Jr. Brown has apparently proclaimed himself to be the best Bigfoot researcher on the planet, so we should take his claims seriously, right?  The links in the story are no longer active, so I'll reproduce a quote and an image that is reportedly from Stacy Brown's  original announcement (you can get the same information from this video):
PictureAlleged "primate arm" reported by Stacy Brown, Jr. It's from an alligator.
"We recieved a non-human primate arm this morning. FWC officials ruled out bear and human by the makeup of the bones. What kind of primate arm this is we dont know as of yet. Here is a photograph of the arm. We are in talks now with people to test the samples we send. We are hopeful this may be a skunk ape's arm."

That was on September 1 of 2014.  A week or so later, the verdict was returned: alligator limb.

Case closed, right?

Wrong!

A few weeks later, Robert Lindsay reported that the "alligator leg" story was actually a fabrication designed to cover up the discovery and sale of a possibly legitimate partial skeleton of a Bigfoot.  Lindsay alleges that

"Within one hour after taking possession of the arm, Brown received a phone call from a very wealthy Bigfoot enthusiast in Ohio. He wanted to get involved. Brown said no. The man asked how much would it take you to give up that arm. Brown quoted a very high figure – I can now reveal that that figure was $500,000. The man bit, unbelievably enough. The sale was made immediately, and incredibly, the entire $500K was wired into Stacy’s account, and the arm was in the mail just like that."

Lindsay goes on to say that Brown then went and bought an alligator arm from a taxidermist and "started putting out fake stories about how they were going to test the arm even though they didn’t even have possession of it anymore."  While the actual Bigfoot arm was in a mail truck, Lindsay alleges, Stacy Brown was covering his tracks and counting his money.

The reason I'm relating this tale is not because I care much about any of this nonsense, but because the story has so many of the elements of the accounts of "giant" skeletons discoveries from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Note these four similarities:

Appeal to Authority: First, there is an appeal to an authority to establish the credibility of the find.  How do we know we're onto something out of the ordinary?  Because an FWC (Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission) or FWS official said so! Interestingly, Lindsay also made an appeal to authority to bolster his counter-claim of conspiracy:

"I know someone who saw the arm with hair on it and was there when the FWS made that determination. In order to believe Stacy Brown’s insane story, we have to believe that a FWS biologist is so stupid that he cannot tell a reptile arm from a mammal arm."

Well . . . I doubt "stupid" is really the issue.  I would not expect every employee of a wildlife management service to have enough expertise in comparative anatomy to correctly identify a set of isolated limb bones. There are numerous documented examples of medical and anatomy professionals making mistakes in the past, identifying the bones of animals such as mastodons, salamanders, and turtles as those of giant humans. And I know from anecdotes that medical professionals of today don't have a great track record of being able to differentiate isolated human and animal bones from one another (and there's no reason to expect that of them - it's not part of their job or their training).  Anyway, the FWC/FWS person on the scene was actually not "stupid," but correct as quoted: the bones were not those of a human or a bear.

PictureImage of an alligator skeleton from a taxidermy website.
Jumping to Conclusions: Second, it seems that it was important to Brown for whatever reason to announce the "find" prior to doing even basic investigation.  My guess is that the FWC/FWS person was called to the scene to rule out the possibility that the bones were human (and thus not the purview of law enforcement).  In my opinion, if you go from an on-the-scene FWC/FWS conclusion of "not human" to "let's announce to the world that we MAY have a Bigfoot arm," you're skipping over a few steps that you could've taken yourself to avoid some embarrassment. I'm no expert on reptile bones, but it seems to me the "is it from an alligator" question would be a natural one to ask, given that you're in Florida.  If you Google "alligator skeleton" you come up with some pretty good drawings and photos (here's the source of the taxidermy image).  It's not that tough to see the resemblance to the alligator, or to discern that the limb has very different proportions than the arm of any primate.

So what's the rush? As in many old accounts of "giants," the sensationalism of the claim comes through loud and clear. Announcing that you found something that turned out to be part of an alligator doesn't get you much attention. Announcing that you found something that COULD be Bigfoot does get you attention.  So if attention is what you want, it makes sense to go ahead and announce your "discovery" before it has time to come under any scrutiny. Searching on the phrase "Stacy Brown skunk ape arm" returns thousands of hits. I would guess that most of those are about the "discovery" story rather than the "oh sorry it's just an alligator" story.

Conflicting and Foggy Details: Some of the stories/postings about the arm say that Stacy Brown found it. Others say that it was found by someone else and reported to Stacy Brown's team, which then went to investigate. None of the stories that I saw provide much additional detail about the "discovery," which should be a red flag to anyone who is paying attention.  When even the basic details are absent and what's there doesn't line up, your story has problems from the get-go. Just as in accounts of "giants," however, the absence or inconsistency of details doesn't really seem bother those who just want the story to be true (e.g., Joe Taylor's 47" femur sculpture, the "eyewitness" account of a giant skeleton from New York).

Conspiracy to Hide Evidence.  Those familiar with the conspiracy thread woven through giantology will immediately find familiar the "evidence purloined by a mysterious outsider" component of this story. Once the evidence is swept away, we'll never really know what happened, will we? So there's still a possibility that the story could be true, isn't there?  Making evidence disappear actually helps those who like to tell tales that could be falsified by that evidence: if the alligator limb was still out there, it would make it much harder to insist that it was the arm of a Bigfoot. But saying it was purchased by some millionaire in Ohio both makes it seem more likely it was legitimate (why else would the man have paid half a million dollars for it?) and explains why you can't see it anymore. That's pretty convenient, just like the Smithsonian-evolutionist conspiracy to hide all the giant skeletons.

The Stacy Brown alligator limb story makes me wonder if we're in the midst of a Bigfoot "fad" that will, in retrospect, look a lot like the giants fad that reached its peak in the late 1800's.  I think many of the fundamental ingredients are there: public interest, lack of basic scientific acumen about the actual evidence, profit motivations, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories.  We're clearly not in the 19th century, however, in terms of our communication infrastructure. The internet is both a faster and more democratic speader than traditional print media, and one would expect that those differences would have some significant effects on the patterns and processes of information spread, persistence, and error creation and transmission.  I think the rise of the internet probably underlies (and maybe even partially explains) the current re-emergence of the giants fad. Maybe the same could be said for Bigfoot.  Maybe I'll figure it out someday.  There's no rush:  I doubt that either giants or Bigfoot are going to disappear anytime soon. 

2 Comments

Tooth Size, Body Size, and Giants: An Analytical Issue that has Persisted for Eight Decades

12/12/2015

4 Comments

 
The large teeth of a creature that would become known as Gigantopithecus were first encountered by science in 1935 after several were purchased from a Hong Kong drugstore.  Those teeth -- without any other parts of the skeleton -- were interpreted by physical anthropologists working in Asia as the remains of a huge creature.  While there were differing opinions as to whether the teeth had belonged to gigantic apes or gigantic humans, Ralph von Koenigswald, Franz Weidenreich, and W. C. Pei all agreed that Gigantopithecus was enormous.  

Those large teeth still fuel discussions of what the anatomy of Gigantopithecus was like. Estimates of very large body size (1000 lbs . . . 1200 lbs . . . ) attract a quantity of attention from Bigfoot enthusiasts, Creationists, and other "fringe" theorists that far exceeds that paid to other fossil apes. But where do those estimates come from? As I discussed briefly in this post, all of our information about Gigantopithecus is based on isolated teeth and a handful of mandibles.  That's something to go on, but not a lot. The complicated nature of the relationships between body size and tooth size, problematic when the first teeth of Gigantopithecus were discovered in the 1930's, remains an analytical issue today.  

How do we go from tooth size to body size?  Very carefully. Stanley Garn and Arthur Lewis discussed the matter in a 1958 paper in American Anthropologist titled "Tooth-Size, Body-Size and 'Giant' Fossil Man:"  

    "On the basis of morphology and size together, Von Koenigswald decided that the Hong Kong and Sangiran teeth and jaw fragments came from “giant apes.” However, Weidenreich later concluded that both the 1935-1939 Hong Kong [Gigantopithecus] teeth and the 1939-1941 Sangiran [Meganthropus] tooth-jaw fossils were the remains of true men, though extraordinarily large men, from the early Sino-Malaysian fauna (Weidenreich 1945:123-24). Finally, in his recent article, W. C. Pei reverted to the idea of a giant anthropoid and estimated that the “giant” ape of Luntsai stood “some twelve feet” high (Pei 1957:836).
    What is the evidence that these three sets of finds, separated from each other by space and time, all came from gigantic beings? How convincing is the evidence that big teeth necessarily indicate extraordinary stature? Lacking the postcranial skeletons, direct proof of body size does not exist. What remains is such indirect proof as can be gleaned from tooth-size relationships in man and apes. “This” admitted Franz Weidenreich . . . “is a very ticklish question. . . "


The question is "ticklish" because of the fact that tooth size, in addition to being related to body size, is also related to things like diet.  Similar-sized animals that eat different things emphasize different teeth. Animals that have to grind a lot of tough plant food tend to have cheek teeth (molars and premolars) with large grinding surfaces.  Animals whose diet consists of softer foods (like fruits) or involves lots of cutting and tearing (as in carnivores) typically don't have large chewing teeth relative to their body size because they don't need them (they're not selected for).

At the time Weidenreich wrote his 1945 monograph "Giant Early Man from Java and South China," the known fossil remains of Gigantopithecus consisted of just three teeth. Weidenreich's detailed comparative analysis of those teeth convinced him that Gigantopithecus was a hominid and a human ancestor. His discussion of the possible size of Gigantopithecus, while following from that conclusion, was cautious (pg. 111):
PicturePlate 10 from Weidenreich (1945) showing the three original Gigantopithecus teeth (a, b, and c).
'In Gigantopithecus the length of the lower molar row is only twice that of modern man, not eight times, as in the lemur example. When the dimensions for the femur are calculated on the basis of the lemur ratio for the femur and the hominid ratio for the length of the molar row, the Gigantopithecus femur proves to be little longer than the femur of modern man and only slightly thicker. The same holds true for Meganthropus. Therefore, we can dismiss the body dimensions of the giant hominids, Gigantopithecus and Meganthropus, with the very general statement that they must have had large, heavy, and massive skulls, large strong trunks, but only slightly longer and stronger leg bones. No more precise statement can be made." 

Weidenreich died in 1948 and never got to see the Gigantopithecus mandibles that were discovered in the late 1950's. Consideration of those mandibles (and the growing number of isolated teeth available for study), led Elwyn Simons and Peter Ettel to argue in a 1970 article in Scientific American that Gigantopithecus was a large, herbivorous ape weighing as much as 600 lbs (272 kg) and standing about 9' (2.7 m) tall when upright. Simons and Ettel reconstructed Gigantopithecus with a posture and body plan like a gorilla. The body size estimate of Simons and Ettel was somewhat informal, based on a general appraisal of the size of jaw and assuming ​a proportional relationship between jaw size and body size.  

The 1980's saw the publication of studies that considered the allometry of tooth/body size relationships across primate taxa. A 1982 paper by Philip Gingerich et al. ("Allometric Scaling in the Dentition of Primates and Prediction of Body Weight From Tooth Size in Fossils") considered how tooth area scales to body weight among extant primates and used that information to estimate the weight of fossil primates. I have reproduced the figure from their paper that shows the logarithmic relationship and the regression formula based on that relationship.

Picture
Adapted from Figure 5 from "Allometric Scaling in the Dentition of Primates and Prediction of Body Weight From Tooth Size in Fossils" by Gingerich et al. (1982). Added data from the Denisovan molar discussed in the text below.
While there is a general, positive relationship between tooth area and body weight among extant primates (which is a good thing for those of us interested in fossils), Gingerich et al.'s (1982) analysis makes it clear that there's a lot more going on than a simple, direct relationship.  What part of the relationship is based on geometry (bigger teeth as a result of bigger bodies) and what part is based on dietary adaptations (tooth size related to diet)? Good question.  Gingerich et al. (1982:99) concluded that

"Much remains to be learned about allometric scaling of tooth size and body weight in the dentition of primates and other mammals.  Our results demonstrate that there is a coherent pattern of differences in scaling at different tooth positions across the whole range of generalized primates.  We have not investigated how this general pattern might change if primates were subdivided into smaller taxonomic groups or into dietary guilds." 


As far as I can tell, that remains at least somewhat true today (I have yet to make a concerted effort to get into the current literature on tooth/body size scaling . . . hopefully I can get around to it soon).  Although we clearly know more about tooth/body size relationships than we used to, the estimation of primate body size from isolated teeth remains problematic.  While there are general relationships, they're not necessarily proportional. A big tooth doesn't necessarily mean a proportionally giant creature.

The large tooth from Denisova Cave is good example of how "big" is still equated with "giant" in the absence of other evidence.  According to this 2010 paper, the Denisovan tooth (probably a second molar) is the largest human tooth ever discovered. Because of its size (and because there aren't any other Denisovan fossils that can tell us something directly about body size), it has been interpreted by the fringe as evidence of giants (I wrote a little about it here). The tooth reportedly measures 13.1 mm by 14.7 mm, giving an area estimate of 192.5 square mm. Notably, it is smaller than the corresponding teeth of some austalopithecines (who were smaller in body size than humans but had a very tough diet, and, hence, big chewing teeth).  If I plug that area into the Gingerich et al. (1982) regression shown above (yes, I know it was based on areas of first molars, not second molars, but bear with me for the sake of general comparisons)  I get a body mass estimate of about 200 lbs (91 kg).  

Two hundred pounds: is that a giant? It's surely above average for humans today, but it's really a stretch to call a 200-lb individual a "giant."  Even allowing for that 200 lbs to be an underestimate (because it's based on a second molar rather than a first molar), how do we know that the the large tooth size isn't somehow related to the evolutionary history and/or diet of Denisovan populations? There are just a few teeth to go on - that's it. Just like with Gigantopithecus, I think we've really got to be aware that we're effectively blindfolded on the issue of body size until we've got some decent postcrania to look at.

As a final note, I think it's fascinating that Weidenreich saw the East and South Asian fossil record as supporting the idea that body size decrease through time was a major trend in human evolution. That is, of course, opposite of what the African record from the last 4 million years or so has now demonstrated. Weidenreich was wrong, but he was no lightweight and no dummy.  He based his ideas on the direct evidence that he had: fossils.  We'll never know what he what he would have thought of the decidedly un-human Gigantopithecus mandibles that were discovered just a few years after his death, but I would bet a large sum of money that he would not have stuck with the "giant phase of Man" idea that he outlined in his 1945 monograph.  Accepting that new evidence can falsify a hypotheses is part of doing science. 

Weidenreich's published ideas about also give the lie to the fringe/Creationist notion that 20th century academics have conspired and are continuing to conspire to suppress the "truth" about giants in the past. Or maybe someone just forgot to send Weidenreich his conspiracy brochure. I guess that's possible, since I have yet to receive mine, either.

Next up:  The history of body size estimates of Gigantopithecus.

References
​
Garn, Stanley M., and Arthur B. Lewis. 1958. Tooth-Size, Body-Size and “Giant” Fossil Man.  American Anthropologist 60(5):874-880.  

Gingerich, Philip D., B. Holly Smith, and Karen Rosenberg.  1982.  Allometric Scaling in the Dentition of Primates and Prediction of Body Weight From Tooth Size in Fossils.  American Journal of Physical Anthropology 58:81-100.
​
Simons, Elwyn L., and Peter C. Ettel. 1970. Gigantopithecus. Scientific American (January 1, 1970).

Weidenreich, Franz. 1945. Giant Early Man from Java and South China. Anthropological papers of the AMNH, Volume 40, Part 1.
4 Comments

There Are No Known Postcranial Remains of Gigantopithecus

12/6/2015

18 Comments

 
I've occasionally been accused by those on the "fringe" side of being too hard on them and too easy on mainstream scholars and skeptics. I don't really think that's true. I think I call BS when I see it. I attribute the perception of unfairness to a couple of different factors.  First, I'm probably a little more careful about my choice of words when I'm discussing the work of those who are genuinely interested in answering a question or solving a problem (rather than just selling books). That's much more common among mainstream scholars.  Second, I think "fringe" theorists tend to be more sensitive to criticism because they're not used to having their ideas openly challenged on the basis of evidence.  Sometimes, unfortunately, scrutiny hurts their feelings. Third, some "fringe" theorists probably assume that I'm part of some wide-ranging conspiracy to suppress their ideas.

If I'm part of a conspiracy, I have yet to be told about it.  Maybe someday "they" will let me in on the secret and I can start writing blog posts on a laptop with a fully functional keyboard and a working battery, maybe even while not at home watching kids on evenings and weekends. Just think how effective I could be if I could work without also being responsible for wiping noses, stopping couch wrestling, and pretending to eat imaginary pasta.

​The fact is, professionals get things wrong also. Today's "whoops" comes from Paolo Viscardi, a natural history curator at the Grant Museum of Zoology in London.  This "Ask a Biologist" page includes Viscardi's answer to the question "Were there ever giant humans?, which includes the following:

​"Next I would say that there were Pleistocene apes called Gigantopithecus that stood about 10 feet tall. Their remains are very similar to those of humans, particularly when the skull is damaged. Mammoth and elephant skulls are also remarkably humanoid in appearance when they are damaged."

The appeal to the remains of Gigantopithecus is as unfortunate as it is wrong.

While there was a genus of ape (that we call Gigantopithecus) that existed in South and East Asia during the Pleistocene, we only know of these creatures through a few mandibles and teeth.  No-one has ever found a Gigantipthecus skull or any other part of the skeleton. Just teeth and mandibles. So how could we say the remains of a Gigantopithecus look like those of a giant human?  We can't, because we've never seen them.

The teeth and mandibles of Gigantopithecus are large.  Those teeth and mandibles form the sole basis of our estimates of body size. Big teeth and jaws mean a big primate, right?  Well, sort of. The problem is that there is a lot of variation among primates in the relationship between tooth size and body size (I touched on this subject in this post about why the original owner of the large Denisovan tooth wasn't necessarily a giant).  Tooth size alone doesn't necessarily tell us much because tooth size is related to diet. Relatively small-bodied australopithecines had large grinding teeth because they had a diet that included a lot of tough, low quality foods that needed to be heavily masticated.  The teeth and jaws of robust australopithecines (which were also small-bodied compared to modern humans) were even larger and were accompanied by a skull and chewing muscles that were clearly designed to produce and resist massive chewing forces.
PictureLiuzhou, China: fossils of Gigantopithecus waiting to be discovered?
So how do we estimate the body size of Gigantopithecus?  If you model the size relationship between teeth and body based on something like a gorilla (a primate with a relatively soft, fruit-based diet and small chewing teeth) you get a very large primate. If you use a model more like a robust australopithecine (a primate with a relatively tough diet and large chewing teeth), body size estimates are smaller.  Gigantopithecus was large, but I don't think we'll know how large until someone finds some postcranial bones. I'm sure they're out there somewhere. When I have the opportunity to talk about Gigantopithecus in my classes, I show pretty pictures of Liuzhou in China (image source) hoping they will inspire someone to go out and look.  Finding some Gigantopithecus bones other than teeth and jaws would be sweet.

PictureGrover Krantz and his reconstruction of the skull of Gigantopithecus.
Anyway, the figure of a 10' tall ape is repeated often. Maybe Gigantopithecus was that large, and maybe it wasn't. Bigfoot enthusiasts love a big Gigantopithecus, as do some advocates of the idea that humans have "degenerated" in size over time. There is zero evidence that Gigantopithecus is a human ancestor, and, in fact, we don't even know that it was a biped.  As with body size, ideas about whether Gigantopithecus walked upright on two legs are based on a few jaws and teeth. Anthropologist Grover Krantz's celebrated reconstruction of a Gigantopithecus skull, beloved by Bigfoot enthusiasts, was based on the same tooth and mandible fragments as all of our other interpretations. Krantz extrapolated a bipedal posture for Gigantopithecus based on the morphology of the mandible.  Not a lot to go on there, but I guess that doesn't matter much if you already know the answer. (See this post for more discussion.)

The academic imagineering was further amplified recently when Jeff Meldrum and Idaho State University produced a "full-size" skeleton of Bigfoot to help the History Channel create more schlock programming for its already crowded schedule of crap.  

"Meldrum borrowed from the physical looks of extinct animals such as the Gigantopithecus blacki — an ancient ape that was twice the size of apes today — and the Neanderthal — a species of human that is said to have became extinct 40,000 years ago."

So this "Bigfoot skeleton" is based partially on the "looks of extinct animals such as the Gigantopithethecus blacki"? Oh my.  If you've read this far, you know that we really don't know much about what those extinct animals actually did look like. We've got some teeth and mandibles - that's it. From those meager remains, wishful thinkers (including academics) have built up several real-looking reconstructions that will probably be cited for years to come as actual evidence. That's why Viscardi's statement ("Th
eir remains are very similar to those of humans, particularly when the skull is damaged") is so unfortunate: he's reinforcing the incorrect notion that all of this business about the giant, bipedal Gigantopithecus is fact, established based on the existence of skeletons and skulls.

That's just not true.

Maybe Gigantopithecus was a 10' tall biped. But maybe it wasn't. What we don't know about Gigantopithecus far outweighs what we do know. That vacuum of knowledge is what allows all kinds of notions (not all of which can be correct) to survive. Some of those notions will be killed off when actual postcranial remains are found. In the meantime, I hope that academics will take care to convey to the public what we actually do and do not know about this creature.
18 Comments

Bigfoot Researchers Still Insist Native American Skull is Not Human

5/10/2015

83 Comments

 
An alert reader of this blog emailed me on Friday to point to a discussion of my posts on the Humboldt and Lovelock skulls (both from Nevada) on the Bigfoot Evidence forum.  Those posts were about the "double rows of teeth" alleged to be on the Humboldt skull (an error the author has now corrected) and the size of the mandible from one of the Lovelock skulls.  I'm not really into Bigfoot, but I found the misinterpretations of the Nevada skulls interesting because of what seems like a pretty high level of "fringe" chatter revolving around what look to me to be normal human skulls of normal size and with normal features. Both claims (double rows of teeth and "giant-size") are nonsense.

Diehard fans of interpreting the Nevada skulls as Bigfoot crania apparently didn't like my analysis, and one accused me of
"not being intellectually honest" because I focused on the misinterpretation of the teeth and avoided "everything else regarding the Humbolt [sic] skull's morphology and ratios, which is what I would have expected an honest, impartial anthropologist to do."  In that same exchange, Daniel Dover said "Andy White calls himself a scientist but I'm not impressed with the way he goes off on stuff, making bad assumptions/rants."  So there you have it . . . making new friends every day through science!  I'm sure neither of these Bigfoot enthusiasts would have had any complaints if I had written a piece declaring that Bigfoot was real.

An aside: I'm not sure why writing a blog post about only one aspect of a skull
makes me "intellectually dishonest." By pointing out that the Humboldt skull doesn't have double rows of teeth (which it doesn't) and the Lovelock mandible is not giant-sized (which it's not), did I somehow commit to analyzing every other aspect of those skulls in the same posts?  No, I didn't. I mentioned in the Humboldt post that I planned on writing more about the Nevada skulls in the future (and a few days later, voila, I did!).  And here I am writing more, which was my original plan. For those of you who want to call me "intellectually dishonest" on some Bigfoot forum that I might never see: if you want to do that (or, perhaps, ask a question or make a point or do something that's actually potentially productive), why not do it on my blog where I'll actually see it?  You can even use your same anonymous screen name so your identity will remain a mystery and you can keep your day job without being made fun of for believing in Bigfoot. Try having an honest discussion about evidence.  You might like it.

Anyway, let's move on.  In this post I'm going to address some of Dover's other claims and interpretations about the Humboldt skull.  Dover says that the Humboldt skull has
a "browridge, sloping forehead, high vault of the cranium, and protruding jawline . . . all typical sasquatch traits."  Here is the image of the skull that he shows, with a "modern human skull" for comparison:
Picture
Screenshot from Daniel Dover's webpage about the Humboldt skull: http://sasquatchresearchers.org/blogs/bigfootjunction/2014/11/19/sasquatch-skull-found-near-lovelock-nv/
PictureOutlines of the Humboldt skull (blue) and the "modern human" skull (red) that Dover uses for comparison, aligned on the Frankfort horizontal and roughly scaled the same.
I have added lines representing the Frankfort plane to Dover's image.  The Frankfort plane is a reference line that is used to consistently orient skulls for comparison.  It is a line that passes through the lower margin of the eye orbit and the upper margin of the external auditory meatus (the ear hole) at a point designated porion.  Superimposing this line on both the profile skull images lets us orient them the same so we can really compare.  I traced an outline around each skull, roughly scaled them the same (lining up the orbits and porion), and superimposed the drawings on each other so they were both in the Frankfort horizontal (figure to the right).

The superimposed outlines show several of the characteristics that
Erik Reed noted in his 1967 paper ("An Unusual Human Skull From Near Lovelock Nevada" - I found a copy of it here on M.K. Davis' website): a supraorbital torus (brow ridge), a sloping forehead, and a well-developed nuchal crest.  The jaw of the Humboldt skull also appears to project more than the "modern human" skull, as Dover notes.

PictureOutlines of the Humboldt skull (blue) and the skull drawing from Gray's Anatomy (green), aligned on the Frankfort horizontal and roughly scaled the same.
Let's talk about the jaw first.  The "modern human" skull that Dover picked for comparison appears to have something atypical going on with the front teeth and mandible.  I don't know what the ultimate source of the image was, but I found a higher resolution version here.  The individual (who I would bet was a female based on the shape of the forehead and the small mastoid processes - physical anthropologists out there can feel free to offer an opinion), had a pretty strong overbite, and I wonder if that doesn't contribute to the difference in the profiles of the jaws.  To check that, I drew the outline of the drawing of a "normal" human skull as depicted in Gray's Anatomy (illustration here). When that outline (in green) is superimposed on the Humboldt skull outline, the "jutting jaw" pretty much disappears.  In other words, the jaw of the Humboldt skull does not protrude greatly compared to a normal human skull.

The brow ridge, sloping forehead, and nuchal crest remain, however.  Does that mean this is the skull of a Bigfoot and not a Native American?  No.  That becomes clear if you try to understand what those features actually mean.

There is a lot of variation in human skulls, and there are several overlapping sources of that variation.  Some variation can be attributed to sex (male and female skulls have patterned differences).  Some variation is geographical (humans in different parts of the world can look different).  Some variation is functional (skulls, like other parts of the skeleton, may reflect adaptions for different environments, different degrees of musculature, etc.).  Sorting out how much variation there is, what causes that variation, and what that variation might mean (in terms of human evolution, gene flow between populations, movements of populations, patterns of physical activity, etc.) are things that physical anthropologists, paleoanthropologists, and archaeologists wrestle with all the time.

I guarantee you the simplest explanation for the morphology of the Humboldt skull is not that it's not human.  The skull is very much human, and the combination of features (brow ridge, sloping forehead, and occipital area with pronounced attachments for the rear neck muscles) that Dover asserts are "unlike what you will ever find on any normal human skull" can be observed on other prehistoric human skulls and in living humans.  That  doesn't mean the skull is "average" - it is described as a large, strongly constructed skull that falls at the robust end of the modern human spectrum.  But it is thoroughly human.  Erik Reed (1967) says the following in his description:

    "The skull obviously falls--among New World material--in the general category of the archaic type which is most often referred to by Georg Newmann's term 'Otamid variety.' More specifically, it resembles Early period central California material from the lower Sacramento Valley (Newman, 1957) and from Tranquility in the San Joaquin Valley (Angel 1966).  Metrical correspondence to the Tranquility crania, as shown in Table 1, is remarkably close.  Strong brow ridges, glabellar prominence, and well-developed occipital torus appear in some of the California material.
    Finally, the Humboldt Sink skull closely resembles the Ophir calvarium from Virginia City, Nevada (Reichlen and Heizer, 1966)--even sharing the special peculiarity of a genuine os inca."

 
The Humboldt skull was presumably that of a large male.  The brow ridge and sloping forehead are associated mechanically, as the brow ridge serves to reinforce the face against forces generated during mastication when the forehead slopes away rather than being vertical (that's the explanation of the brow ridge that makes the most sense to me, anyway).  The biomechanical model of the brow ridge explains why it is so prominent in chimpanzees, gorillas, and many early hominids, and less prominent (to the point of being absent) in many modern humans.  The strain placed on the portion of the skull above the eyes increases when the face is more prognathic (i.e., the jaws protrude more), the frontal bone is less vertical, and there is more emphasis on using the front teeth.  The brow ridge - the shelf of bone above the eyes - serves to reinforce the face at the point where strain is greatest.  Mary Russell wrote extensively about the biomechanics of the brow ridge in primates: here is a paper of hers from 1982; here is a paper of hers in Current Anthropology from 1985 (but most of it is behind a paywall); here is a 1985 commentary on Russell's work by Milford Wolpoff.  The take-away point is that the brow ridge likely has a functional (and perhaps even developmental) origin: it's not some random feature that can be used to discern "human" from "nonhuman" skulls.  It's easy to find examples of modern humans with brow ridges, especially associated with large, strong males (which the Humbolt skull presumably was).  How about Lex Wotton? Nikolai Valuev? Cain Velasquez?  Note the brow ridges and sloping foreheads.  Last time I checked, none of these guys was a Bigfoot.

There are also biomechanical explanations for the back of the skull.
Dover correctly states that the nuchal plane is where the neck muscles attach to the rear of the skull.  There is a general relationship between the robusticity of the nuchal crest and the strength of the rear neck muscles - gorillas and chimpanzees have strongly developed nuchal crests because their neck muscles have to hold their heads up while they are moving about as quadrupeds. That doesn't mean that humans can't have big attachments for the nuchal muscles, however, associated with strong muscles at the back of the neck.  I wasn't able to find a comprehensive, cross-primate study of the mechanics of the nuchal line/crest while I was writing this post, but that doesn't mean such a study doesn't exist.  I would bet there are other examples of human skulls with nuchal crests like those of the Humboldt skull (here is a paper
that has a photograph of a Late Pleistocene human from Romania with a moderately well-developed nuchal crest; here is Angel's 1966 paper on the skeletons from Tranquility, CA, that is mentioned by Reed). Dover's statement that "Human skulls have no such markedly protruding nuchal crest" like that of the Humboldt skull is an assertion that I would guess won't stand up to scrutiny.  There's no doubt the Humboldt skull has a big nuchal crest, but that doesn't mean there's nothing else like it in the world and that the skull is therefore not human.

Picture
Finally, for your enjoyment, I give you two versions of the outline of the Humboldt skull superimposed upon the profile of former UFC Heavyweight Champion Brock Lesnar (source of profile photo).  In the top illustration, I have oriented and scaled the outline of the Humboldt skull by placing the two landmarks used to find the Frankfort plane (the external auditory meatus and the lower margin of the orbit) in their approximate locations on Lesnar's head.  In this configuration, the vault of the Humboldt skull is slightly higher than Lesnar's, but the face actually projects less than Lesnar's. 

In the bottom illustration, I have placed the Humboldt outline so that it corresponds pretty closely to Lesnar's profile.  This puts the orbit a little too far forward and the external auditory meatus a little low, but you get the idea:  the shape of the Humboldt skull, presumably that of a large, powerful male, is not inconsistent with the shape of the skull of another large, powerful male.  I have no idea what Brock Lesnar's occipital area looks like, but it wouldn't surprise me if his skull had a nuchal crest just as pronounced as that of the Humboldt skull. If you think this makes Lesnar a Bigfoot, I'll let you be the one to tell him that.

The Humboldt skull is the the skull of a human, not a Bigfoot.  All the features found on the skull are found in humans.  The impression that the jaw of the Humboldt skull juts out significantly farther than a jaws of "modern humans" is incorrect, as shown by the comparison (in proper orientation) with an average human skull. The remaining combination of features that Bigfoot enthusiasts seem to be homing in on as "nonhuman" - the brow ridge, the sloping forehead, and the well-developed nuchal area - are characteristics that are most often expressed in humans that are large, powerful males.  I would guess that's what the Humboldt skull is - the remains of a large, powerful male. 

A Native American male, not a Bigfoot male.

References:

Reed, Erik K.. 1967.  An Unusual Human Skull from Near Lovelock, Nevada. Miscellaneous Paper 10, University of Utah Department of Anthropology, Anthropological Papers. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

83 Comments

Lovelock Cave and the Illusion of "A Jawbone That Slips Over That of a Large Man"

5/8/2015

19 Comments

 
The human skeletal remains from Lovelock Cave, Nevada, are like the pretty girl that all the fringe theorists want to take to the prom. Giant enthusiasts, ancient alien theorists, and Bigfoot researchers all covet them.  As you might guess if you've been paying attention, there is no empirical support for the idea that the human remains and the archaeological deposits from Lovelock Cave are related to anything other than Native American inhabitants of the region.  And as you also might guess, that doesn't stop fringe theorists from making the same inaccurate statements about Lovelock Cave over and over again. 

I won't recount the history of investigations in Lovelock Cave here (you can read a basic outline on Wikipedia). If you Google "Lovelock Cave" you'll get a mixture of results, some focusing on the actual archaeology of the cave and many talking about the Si-Te-Cah legend and the "red-haired giants."  Apparently the "Paiute legend" of cannibalistic, red-haired giants originated with a story by a Paiute woman named Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins in her 1883 book Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (see this 2013 post by Brian Dunning).  The part relevant to Lovelock is the last paragraph of Chapter IV. If you read it you'll notice there's no mention of giants:  the often-repeated statement that Paiute legends include giants in Lovelock cave seems to be a later addition.  I guess it makes it easier to find giants if you just make them up.  I haven't spent a lot of time checking into the various legends that are cited as evidence for the worldwide occurrence of giants, but I won't be surprised if a lot of them evaporate when you start to look closely.  So far, the giantologists are 0-2 in my book (Lovelock Cave and Steve Quayle's Celtic giants). 
So the legend part of the giant story from Lovelock Cave is baloney, but what about the physical remains?  For this we have, first, David Hatcher Childress, ancient alien theorist and originator of the Smithsonian conspiracy theory, to help us.  In this clip from Ancient Aliens, Childress visits the Humboldt Museum in Winnemuca, Nevada, to examine the Lovelock skulls and proclaim them to be those of giants:

"Inside this cabinet here are three skulls from the Lovelock Caves. When you first see these skulls, they pretty much seem to be normal looking skulls. However, it's when we really start to compare the jawbones with this modern dental impression of a normal adult male that we see that these jawbones are unusually large.  And these are really the skulls of giant people. Who were perhaps seven, even eight feet tall.  One of the odd things with these skulls is that they're not actually put on display here at the museum and they're kept hidden in this cabinet.  Now we don't know if that's really just out of respect for Native Americans or whether there's really something unusual about these giant skulls that they don't want them displayed."

The silliness of the comparison between
the "modern dental impression" (which includes only the teeth and a small portion of the gum line) and the Lovelock mandible should be evident to anyone who is breathing.  It has been pointed out before.  The total size of the cast is smaller because it doesn't include all the bone of the mandible.  In what we are shown, the comparable parts of the cast the and the mandible (the teeth and the tooth row) do not really appear to be that different in size.  Ancient Aliens only shows us the "normal" plaster cast sitting in front of the Lovelock mandible, however, and doesn't actually give us a view that allows a direct comparison.
Picture
Fortunately for us, Childress isn't the only one who has made the plaster cast comparison. There are at least two other pictures floating around on the internet that purport to show a mandible from Lovelock compared to the teeth of a "normal-sized" human (not surprisingly, most of the sites reproducing these photos conclude that the Lovelock mandible is "giant").  The top photo in my illustration is usually attributed to someone named Stan Nielsen and accompanied by his description titled "The Cave of the Red Haired Giants."  Nielsen is/was apparently a treasure hunter. The text of his description (e.g., here, here, and here) concludes that "The plaster model was much smaller than the jaw from the skull. In fact, the teeth of the jaw from the skull were almost twice the size of those of my plaster model."  I do not know the origin of the bottom photo. The similarities in lighting and background make me suspect that it was taken at the same time as the top photo. [Update:  In the comments section Gary pointed out to me that these are actually the same photo. The one on the bottom has just been edited by blacking out the interior of the cast, presumably to make it appear smaller?  Anyway . . . there you go.  Thanks Gary.]

Both the photos are arranged in the same way, with the plaster cast "inside" the Lovelock mandible, creating the illusion that the mandible is much larger than the plaster cast.  Superimposing an outline of the tooth row of the plaster casts onto the mandible shows that, while the teeth and tooth row of the mandible are a little larger, it is not "giant" in comparison to the casts (Terje Dahl points out the same thing on his site, but concludes that that must mean the "real" giant skeletons have been replaced with normal-sized ones).

The illusion of a dramatic size difference is created by the parabolic shape of the human mandible: parabolic objects of similar size can be nested inside one another.  Nineteenth and early twentieth century newspaper accounts of "giants" often describe the mandible of the skeleton as being so massive that "it will slip over the jaw of a large man." The uselessness of this comparison was noted by Gerard Fowke in his Archaeological History of Ohio (1902:142-143):

"It is a very common newspaper statement that a Mound Builder has been dug up somewhere 'whose jawbone will slip over that of a large man.' Sometimes the man elevates the marvelous into the miraculous by having a growth of 'remarkably heavy whiskers.'
    It is not necessary to procure a Mound Builder in order to perform this feat; the phenomenon is equally apparent with any other full grown human jaw.  It may be observed, also, in curved or open-angle objects generally, having approximately the same form and thickness; as spoons, saucers, miter-joints, gutter-spouts, or slices of melon rinds.  The significance is a great in one case as in the others.  The experimenter has failed to perceive a considerable interval between the end, or angle, of the jaw which he held in his hand and the one with which it was being compared.  He should invert the former and apply it to the lower part of the latter, when he would find much less difference than he expected."


Gerard Fowke worked for The Smithsonian, so I'm sure some of you out there will take his basic understanding and explanation of geometry to be part of a vast conspiracy to suppress information about giants.  If you're skeptical, I suggest you get some slices of melon rind and try it yourself. Paper cups will also work if you don't have melon rinds or human mandibles sitting around.

The mandibles and skulls of Lovelock Cave are not those of giants, and the "legend" of giants attributed to the Paiute appears do not actually contain any mention of giants.  The Humboldt skull does not have double rows of teeth (and neither do any of the Lovelock skulls, if you noticed).

Why does this mythology about Lovelock have such staying power?  This is one of the relatively few cases where the skeletal remains of supposed giants have been available to look at.  Even when it is perfectly obvious that these are normal human remains, wishful thinkers proclaim them to be the remains of giants.  David Hatcher Childress, actually holding the normal-sized skull in his hands, says "these are really the skulls of giant people." I just don't get it.  At least when people found mastodon bones in the 1700s they were looking at something that was unexplainable given their knowledge of the natural world. But this isn't that. This is the willful maintenance of a fringe myth that can be easily discarded based on what is sitting right there in front of you.  The desire for the "smoking gun" is so strong that not even the most obvious evidence to the contrary can dampen it - when you've made yourself immune to the evidence, you've inoculated yourself to the "truth" you claim to be uncovering. So silly.

If you're mad at yourself for some reason, you can watch this video of M. K. Davis spinning tales about why so many of the skulls from Lovelock Cave appear to be missing.  He says that an earlier photo of the cabinet that David Hatcher Childress looked in shows that there used to be more skulls.  As pointed out by one of the comments to the video, what Davis is actually looking at is an image that is two photos of the same skulls (in a different arrangement) spliced together.  Note that the "shelf" disappears into nothingness on the right side, and the skull on the far right on the top is the same as the second skull from the right on the bottom (you can tell by the missing teeth in the upper and lower jaws).  Davis' website makes the same mistake. 



19 Comments

ATTENTION GIANT ENTHUSIASTS: Bigfoot Researchers Are Stealing Your "Evidence"

4/27/2015

10 Comments

 
I got very little reaction to my recent post that used quantitative data to explore the meanings of the idiomatic phrase "double rows of teeth" as applied to all kinds of things completely unrelated to giants.  That hurts my feelings: it took me many hours to assemble those data (and at least $15.90 worth of Newspaper.com subscription fees), and I would have thought that at least one giant enthusiast would have tried to tell me I was wrong.  Maybe that means they think I'm right? Or maybe it is just because they're not listening.

Anyway, the one thing I have discovered from the very limited response to that post is that at least some Bigfoot researchers also have a fetish for "double rows of teeth."  I learned this when one person, in response to a posting of the latest "double rows of teeth" post on Facebook, posted a picture of the base of a skull from the Humboldt Sink Flats, Nevada, that purportedly showed evidence of double rows of teeth. The Humboldt Sink Flats are near Lovelock Cave, a site beloved by giant enthusiasts for several "unusual" human skulls that they say are evidence of giants (I'll write about Lovelock at some point when I have more time). 

I reproduce below a photo of the Humboldt skull from this page about Bigfoot by Daniel Dover.  The yellow arrows that Dover has added to the photo are supposed to show the sockets of a double row of teeth, while the blue arrow is supposed to show an actual "double tooth" still in place.  As best I can tell, the original photo was taken from this 1967 publication by Erik Reed titled "
An Unusual Human Skull from Near Lovelock, Nevada" (I don't yet have access to the original).
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Photo of the base of the Humboldt skull allegedly showing evidence of a double row of teeth.
Here is what Dover says about the skull:

"If you thought the features couldn’t get any odder then you were wrong. The unusual features just keep rolling in. Pictured below is the underside of the Lovelock Skull displaying another unusual feature — it has double rows of teeth. Now, if that isn’t divergent from Homo sapiens then nothing is. This odd feature is demonstrated by holes in the roof of the mouth where double rows of missing teeth were once embedded. and a few double teeth still remain.

It should have been obvious even before looking inside a sasquatch’s mouth that this is not a human skull, yet experts in this field declare it is Homo sapien by default due to scientists being “unaware” of anything else to attach it to. The anthropologists who wrote the paper on this skull likened it to “. . . Eastern Asiatic subdivision of the general Upper Paleolithic Homo sapiens.” So, they likened it to a “subdivision” of Homo sapiens who once lived during the Upper Paleolithic, that era lasting from 50,000 to 10,000 years ago, even though this skull is not anywhere near that ancient."

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The dental features that Dover is pointing out as indicative of "divergent from Homo sapiens" are, in fact, absolutely normal features of a normal human dentition.  Human maxillary molars (the large grinding teeth in the back of the upper jaw) typically have three roots: two on the cheek (buccal) side of the tooth and one on the tongue (lingual) side of the tooth. Mandibular molars generally only have two roots. Each root is associated with a socket, so each maxillary molar has three sockets (called alveoli).  A diagram of a normal human palate missing all the teeth (source) shows the same morphology as the Humboldt skull:

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Dover also tries to make a connection between Bigfoot and the skeletons from Delavan, Wisconsin. Good luck with that. You'll have to fight off L. A. Marzulli and the Nephilim brigade for ownership of the misinformation about that site.

I'm not really into Bigfoot, but it's clear that Dover isn't the only Bigfoot researcher who has latched onto the idea that the skeletons with "double rows of teeth" reported from the late 19th and earth 20th centuries may be the physical remains of Bigfoot (here's another example).  The inability of Bigfoot researchers to produce physical remains of their own has led them, like giant enthusiasts, to claim for their cause any skeleton or skull that seems to be unusual. In addition to now claiming some of the same physical evidence and same misinterpretations of historical sources, giant enthusiasts and Bigfoot researchers also rely on the same lack of anatomical knowledge to perpetuate the idea that something is being hidden from them.

Each maxillary molar has three roots.  Do you think they each only have one root? So each hole in the bone is from a single tooth?  Did you think about looking into that a little bit before announcing that you know more than all the experts who have ever studied human anatomy?  Go ask your dentist. Google it. Read a book. Stop being silly.

I do wonder, however, if this mistake was also made in the past and may have also contributed to the identification of skulls with only tooth sockets (i.e., where all the teeth have fallen out) as having had teeth arranged in multiple rows. It is another data point (along with things like the "giant's teeth" from Sardinia and the 1845 mastodon man) that highlights the generally low level of knowledge about human skeletal anatomy in our population.  Unfamiliarity with features of the human skeleton and the comparative anatomy of humans and animals (even among health professionals such as dentists and physicians) has led to numerous misidentifications and misinterpretations and continues to do so. Maybe all giant enthusiasts and Bigfoot researchers should take an anatomy course before they can become certified. Maybe that's how I'll make my fortune: I'll develop an online training program that teaches basic familiarity with mammalian functional and skeletal anatomy.  It's really not that tough to tell a cow's tooth from a human tooth, or to count the roots on a molar - I'm pretty sure I can help just about anyone achieve basic proficiency in that sort of thing.  Let me know if you're interested. I'll start a sign-up sheet.  Seriously.

Update (5/3/2015):  Daniel Dover let me know on Facebook that he edited his original post.  Here is what he said:

"Hello Andy White. I corrected that portion of my article, which I meant to do a good while back after [Micah Ewers] pointed out what looks like double teeth is likely just roots of molars. I had forgotten about it but I rewrote that portion. However, I find it interesting that there are several reports of double rows of teeth in large skeletal finds. Not to say I care for the condescending approach toward me and bigfoot in general, but I appreciate the correction anyway."

As far as the "several reports of double rows of teeth," I refer the interested reader to the now extensive work I've done discussing the various permutations and meanings of the peculiar phrases "double rows of teeth" and "double teeth all around," which are uncritically interpreted by giant enthusiasts (and apparently also Bigfoot enthusiasts) as indicating something abnormal, inhuman, of even supernatural.  That's not what those phrases were intending to indicate in the large majority of cases - read some of my work on it and see for yourself.

In response to my "condescending approach," I
would say that when you make such a basic error in anatomy as interpreting normal tooth root sockets as evidence that a skull is nonhuman while also saying that you know more than all the "experts" in human anatomy . . . you're asking for the that kind of treatment.  And to be made aware that you made such a basic error but just to let it sit out  there for years (? I don't know the date of the original post - I think it might have been 2012 or 2013?) . . .That doesn't suggest to me a great deal of concern about getting the details right.

The link to Dover's new post is the same as the old one, so the original text I quoted in my blog post is no longer visible.  Dover's section about the teeth now reads:


"Included in the odd features of this skull are what appears to some to be double rows of teeth, an idea championed by M.K. Davis and others. Pictured below is the underside of the Lovelock Skull displaying the supposed double rows of teeth; however, the holes seen in the photo below are normal dentition found in humans caused by the multiple roots on molars."

I'll get back to the Lovelock and Humboldt Sink skulls at some point in the future.  There are so many misinterpretations and misrepresentations about these remains that it's hard to decide what to look at next.
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