Science Vs - Bigfoot

Episode Date: October 12, 2017

All over the world people report sightings of big, hairy, human-like beasts, so could Bigfoot really be out there... somewhere? We ask Dr. Jeff Meldrum, Prof. Bryan Sykes, Prof. Todd Disotell, and the Round Rock, Texas, Department of Parks and Recreation. CORRECTION: In a previous version of this podcast we said Dr Meldrum works at the University of Idaho. He actually works at Idaho State University. We've updated this episode with his correct title. Our Sponsors: Cole Haan | WP Engine | Sundance Now Listen to Gimlet's newest show, Uncivil wherever you get your podcasts Apple Podcasts | Overcast | Stitcher | Pocketcasts Credits: This episode has been produced by our senior producer, Kaitlyn Sawrey, as well as Wendy Zukerman, Rose Reid, Heather Rogers and Shruti Ravindran. Production assistance from Rose Rimler. Edited by Blythe Terrell and Annie-Rose Strasser. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Sound design by Martin Peralta. Music written by Bobby Lord. And a big thank you to Dr Michael J Hickerson and Professor James L. Patton for his 7 PAGE document describing the last large mammals discovered by western scientists in North America, suffice to say, Bigfoot wasn’t on the list. Selected Reading:Paper on Bigfoot reports in North AmericaBryan’s paper on Bigfoot hairsA review of the human family treeJeff Meldrum’s book Check out the full transcript here: http://bit.ly/2LyEOQn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Parkson Recreation, how can I help you? Hello, my name's Wendy and I'm calling from the podcast Science Versus and I heard that you guys had a Bigfoot sighting? Uh-huh. Is that true? Let me transfer you to Roger. Hold on just a second, okay? Okay, thanks. You're welcome.

I'm on the phone to Parks and Rec in Round Rock, Texas. It's a town about 20 minutes north of Austin. And in June, their official Parks and Rec department Facebook page posted pictures of suspiciously large footprints and other rather odd findings. This is Roger Heaney, the Parks and Rec spokesperson. So who saw Bigfoot? Yeah, there's been several sightings of Bigfoot prints and Bigfoot fur and other unexplained phenomenon in our parks, trails, in and around our woods areas here in Round Rock, Texas. It's been pretty amazing. Bigfoot has been seen all over the United States,

not just in Texas. A paper, yes, a scientific paper published several years ago, analysed more than 500 Bigfoot reports across the Pacific Northwest since 1944. And people have taken these reports so seriously that a county in Washington has outlawed the, quote, premeditated willful or wanton slaying of Sasquatch, end quote. That's aka Bigfoot. But it's this recent sighting in Texas

that has been getting a lot of attention. This is one huge footprint found along the Brushy Creek Trail, Father's Day weekend. More evidence keeps popping up. Curious clumps of evidence, maybe hair, perhaps from Bigfoot. So we had to send a reporter to examine the evidence. Whatever Wendy wants, Wendy gets. Rose Reed is a radio producer and friend of the show,

and she went into the heartlands of Texas to get to the bottom of this. How did it go? Well, as any search for a big man goes. Elusive, intriguing, left with questions. Rose found out that this big Bigfoot fervour kicked off when a resident said that they saw Bigfoot. Then a couple of days later, a park ranger at Round Rock noticed something really unusual.

Oh, this is famous Rodney. Hi, I'm Rose. How you doing, Rodney? And Rodney is a straight shooter, a by-the-book kind of guy. Yes, that is correct. So, a few months ago, on the morning in question, Rodney was just going about his regular business, making sure the park was in order.

Is part of your job looking for unusual things? Yes, that is correct. If we hear or see anything, we definitely have to come and check it out to see if there's something that we need to report. And that morning, he did say something that he needed to report. When I was changing the trash can, I heard a lot of noise down here. And I saw this. Basically, it's like a fort that's built with a whole bunch of sticks.

And I thought it was going to be a Bigfoot nesting area. And then, more evidence surfaced. Some giant footprints had been found. Rodney took Rose to see one. It was in some scrub near a creek. There's a footprint right here, so. It really actually looks like a footprint.

It sure does. I'm a size 8 in women's. This is about 4 inches taller than mine, you think? And wider. Much wider. When Rose was back in New York, she was still thinking about how real and big that footprint looked. That's what's so crazy about it.

And wait, so, but were there footprints like around it? Just one solo footprint? Just one. That's weird, right? Because unless it footprints like around it? Just one solo footprint? Just one. That's weird, right? Because unless it's like a peg leg Bigfoot. Or he was running through the creek bed. Or she was running through the creek bed. Touche.

Okay, so could Bigfoot have made those footprints? Is Bigfoot living amongst us? That's what we're going to find out here today. And you might think, Bigfoot doesn't exist. Knock it off, Wendy. But all around the world, people have stories of these kinds of creatures. In the Himalayas, it's called the Yeti. In Russia, they're called Almas. In Australia, it's the Yowie. But whatever you call it, and on today's show, we're going to call it Bigfoot,

recent scientific discoveries have made the idea of this creature kind of plausible. When it comes to Bigfoot, there are lots of hairy things in the woods. But then there's science. Science vs Bigfoot is coming up just after the break. After decades of shaky hands caused by debilitating tremors, Sunnybrook was the only hospital in Canada who could provide Andy with something special. Three neurosurgeons, two scientists, one movement disorders coordinator,

58 answered questions, two focused ultrasound procedures, one specially developed helmet, thousands of high-intensity focused ultrasound waves, zero incisions. And that very same day, two steady hands. From innovation to action, Sunnybrook is special. Learn more at sunnybrook.ca slash special. It's season three of The Joy of Why, and I still have a lot of questions. Like, what is this thing we call time? Why does altruism exist? And where is Jan 11?

I'm here, astrophysicist and co-host, ready for anything. That's right, I'm bringing in the A-team. So brace yourselves. Get ready to learn. I That's right. I'm bringing in the A-team. So brace yourselves. Get ready to learn. I'm Jana Levin. I'm Steve Strogatz. And this is... Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why.

New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st. What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology? And what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI.

And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. Welcome back. Today, we're on the hunt for the fresh prince of Bigfoot. Because some scientists, they haven't ruled it out. Even the famous primatologist Jane Goodall has said that she's sure that they exist. And she's not the only scientist with questions. I'm simply arguing that, hey,

there is some really fascinating evidence that we should probably take a look at. There are things out there that have not been discovered, and there always will be. Anyone who says, oh no, there can't possibly be, is guilty of being unscientific. Okay, so the first question we want to look at is, if Bigfoot does exist, what could it be? Well, a couple of ideas have emerged. One is that it's an ancient human-like ancestor that's still kicking around in some remote forest.

You see, in the decades after Darwin, many scientists thought that the evolution of Homo sapiens, that's you and me, was a straight line from the chimps that left the trees to the pinnacle of human intellect that you see today. Anyway, you've probably seen those t-shirts from the knuckle-dragging monkeys to fully upright humans. Well, that's kind of how we thought that evolution worked. But then, scientists started picking up these weird human-like bones and teeth all over the world. In fact, in just the last few decades, we've found odd human-y looking fossils in South Africa, Kenya, Indonesia, Portugal and Russia.

So far, there's around half a dozen species on our ever bushier family tree. Fossils are continually added to that family tree so that now instead of a singular stem, we've got this bush with lots of branches. That's Jeff Meldrum, a professor of anthropology at Idaho State University. And Jeff says that not only did these discoveries change the way that scientists thought about our family tree, but for scientists like Jeff wondering if maybe Bigfoot is real, these discoveries really changed the game because it gave a scientific explanation for Bigfoot. I mean, it's always been assumed that these branches of the family tree became extinct, but maybe they're still living out there somewhere. You know, the argument that, as was thrown in my face one time, they can't exist, therefore they don't

exist, and I don't care what evidence you think you have. You know, real scientific attitude demonstrated there. But that's just absolutely inane and baseless in light of what we now know. Because we know that at least at some points in our long history, humans hung out with these human-like creatures. And we know this because they did more than just watch Netflix. They also chilled. Oh, yeah. And by that, I mean they had sex.

Ta-da-da-da! Homo sapiens had sex with at least two other human-like creatures on the family tree, Neanderthals and another group called the Denisovans. That was perhaps some 30,000 or 40,000 years ago. And how do we know this? Because those odd couples had babies, who had babies, who had babies. And today, some of us have bits of their DNA in us. Remarkably, some people have up to 6% of their DNA from Denisovans.

If you could jump in a time machine and go back 30,000 years to East Africa, you potentially would bump into different species living across the landscape, different species of hominin. And that's probably just scratch on the surface. See, that's the thing. And so to you, the fact that this tree is branching out and branching out and branching out, it gives more weight to this idea that a branch could lead to Bigfoot. Exactly. Also the recognition that now we know many of these branches have persisted until remarkably recently.

So if we know that some of us were chilling together a cheeky 30,000 years ago maybe we're all still hanging out. OK, so that's one idea of what Bigfoot could be. That is, a creature related to Homo sapiens, but that's a little more Neanderthal than Gyllenhaal. But there is another possible explanation. That Bigfoot is not someone in our kinda immediate family. It's something very different.

An ape that goes by the rather appropriate name of Gigantopithecus. Gigantopithecus was thought to have been the largest ape that ever existed. Now, when you look at recreations of this thing, it looks like exactly what you would imagine Bigfoot to be. It's a gigantic ape-type creature standing on two legs and towering over humans. And, fun side note, scientists first found bits of Gigantopithecus in the mid-19th century in Asia.

Its giganto teeth were being sold in drugstores as dragon teeth. So, could Gigantopithecus really be Giganto Bigfoot? In Gigantopithecus, we have something that's the right size at the right time. But when Jeff says the right size, it's not like researchers have a full skeleton of this thing. The only representation is two jaws and a few thousand isolated teeth, which is paltry. I mean, when you think about it.

Oh, that's all we have. We don't have any, like, no legs, no arms. No, we have no long bones, no legs. Yeah, exactly. So we don't even know if Giganto was all that Giganto. And when Jeff says that Gigantopithecus was around in the right time, he doesn't mean we have evidence that this thing is pottering around Texas right now. In fact, the bones that we do have have been dated to a long time ago.

Perhaps as recently as 200 to maybe 300,000 years ago. And that really is a long time ago. Now, either explanation that Bigfoot is an ancient human-like thing that's still around or a gigantopithecus-like thing, they're both somewhat plausible. But for these ideas to be convincing, we need evidence that these creatures are, of course, still living today. So, are they? Well, of course, maybe it's possible that they survived after all this time. I mean, after all, so did we.

But unlike humans, we don't have a body or any bones from modern times that would suggest that these creatures are still around. All that we have is some fuzzy photos and videos that people claim show Bigfoot. So, if Bigfoot's around, where is it? Well, where's the body? OK. Well, many of these questions sort of pale when you recognise the rarity of these creatures.

Geoff has thought a lot about why there is no body and no skeleton. He says, OK, so what if there's just not a lot of them around? And say they tend to hang out at night and often on their own in big forests, which would make them harder to find. Solitary, nocturnal, far-ranging. It's not that surprising that we haven't found a body. And Jeff says, OK, what if there's a small group in Idaho, like 100 Bigfoots?

Wait, what's the plural of Bigfoot? Is it Bigfeet? OK, so say there's 100 Bigfeets. At most, perhaps, in all of Idaho, 100 individuals. There's 20,000 black bear in Idaho. Compare 100, potentially 100 Bigfoot with 20,000 black bear. Now you go out in the field, how many times do you bump into a black bear? Okay, but Jeff of course knows that people do sometimes bump into black bears.

So, with no body, what else can we look at to see if Bigfoot is out there? Well, one thing we can look at is footprints. Remarkably, scientists can use tracks to try to understand how animals live. It's particularly useful for understanding extinct creatures like dinosaurs and even early humans. As one researcher wrote, Footprints can give us hints about how fast a creature was travelling, whether it was an adult or a child, how tall they were, and even if they had missing toes or arthritis.

And footprints are actually Jeff's specialty. But here's another thing you need to know about Jeff. Bigfoot is kind of his passion project. And since the 90s, he's amassed one of the world's largest collections of footprints attributed to Bigfoot. Well, I don't have an exact count, but it's in the neighborhood of 300 probably. 300 just casts and then files with photographs of probably hundreds more. Where are they stored? In my laboratory.

I've got drawer banks that go from floor to ceiling. And these casts of Bigfoot prints have convinced Jeff that there really might be something to this Bigfoot story. He says that these Bigfoot prints are very different to humans or bears or apes. He says, for one, they're bigger. After all, they're big feet from Bigfoot. They're also much wider. Toes that are more uniform in size.

In some instances, individuals have a little more webbing between the toes, up under the toes. Jeff can remember the first time he saw what he thinks was a Bigfoot print out in the woods. It was some 20 years ago, and he went to meet a Bigfoot amateur investigator in Washington State. He says, do you want to see some fresh tracks? And I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, I just found some this morning. I'll be happy to take you up and show you.

And so I was a little incredulous, but I thought, well, what have we got to lose? Let's go take a look. So we went up, and here was this remarkable line of tracks, you know, 35, 45 clear footprints in the mud. I knelt down. I could actually see skin ridge detail in some of them. They were that fresh. How big were they? They were 15 inches long. 15 inches?

Yeah, and about five inches across the forefoot, about four inches across the heel. And what else could explain that? Are there bears in that area? Oh, nothing. Well, yes, there are, but these were not bear tracks. I mean, I know bear tracks. And it was reduced to two alternatives. They were either real or somehow he had hoaxed these.

And I just looked it up. And so in the Guinness World Records says that the world's largest feet are pretty much 15 inches. Right. Yeah. So could it be the man in the world with the biggest feet? Could he have been walking in these woods that day? Not very likely.

Not very likely. Once you get past 12, 13 inches, you're up to less than 1% of the male human population. So while Jeff is convinced by what he says are footprint evidence, other scientists aren't. They say these footprints could just be a hoax, another animal, or just a weird pattern in the mud. And without evidence of a body, a live animal that's making those prints, it can be really tricky to know exactly what you're looking at.

But the scientific search for Bigfoot is far from over. After the break, a Bigfoot bounty worth millions of dollars and a scientist fears for his life. Welcome back. So we've established that it's possible that some ancient human or ancient gorilla-like thing might have evolved to become Bigfoot. But we've also established that there's no body to speak of and we can't just rely on footprints to prove that Bigfoot exists. Still, hope is not lost. We're going to meet Brian Sykes, an emeritus professor of human genetics at Oxford University, and he's been on the hunt for Bigfoot. And yes, Brian talks like he's got a pipe in his mouth. I thought I'd have a look at that.

It was worth a very long shot. This is certainly an eccentric project, unlike anything I've done before. Brian and a colleague were one of the first to sequence DNA from ancient bones. And while some of his work has been disputed, Brian's research has helped us unravel the human evolutionary tree. But back to Bigfoot. There was a time in his eccentric project when Brian felt certain that he was in danger. He was 100 miles north of Seattle, deep in the woods.

What I felt a little foolish about was that I'd gone prepared for death, I really had. And he thought he could hear Bigfoot, the creature, knocking about. I bought a GoPro so that if the creature leapt out from the cave and went for me, there would at least be some footage of the incident, even if I ended up in a bloody mess on the path. Luckily, he lived to tell the tale. And in fact, after his daring escape, he worked out that what he thought was Bigfoot noises

actually might have just been a big tree branch rubbing against a tree trunk. But still, that didn't dissuade Brian. And, in fact, he wasn't out in Bigfoot territory to faff about with GoPros. He wanted to use something that would prove once and for all if Bigfoot was real. DNA evidence.

Because that meant... We can have an end to all these fuzzy photographs and footprints and other vague indications, which are sometimes quite amusing to listen to but get a bit tedious after a while. Brian scoured the globe, hoping to put together the most rigorous collection of DNA attributed to Bigfoot.

And he was looking for hair samples with enough genetic evidence inside them to test properly. Brian got the word out to people who might have Bigfoot hair. He put a call out to museums. And just sort of joined in with Bigfoot hunts and met the Bigfoot enthusiasts. They were very, very nice people and they were very, very helpful. In the end, Brian came up with 30 hairs that he could extract enough DNA from

to identify what the devil these animals were. And all sorts of people gave him samples, including a man who claimed to have killed a Bigfoot and a museum that stored samples away for more than 50 years. They turned out to be really well. They were quite a few bears, not surprisingly, but there were also horses and cows, I remember. There was a porcupine. There was a raccoon even. What else?

Quite a few wolves as well. Point is, no anomalous primates that could be Bigfoot. And Brian isn't the only study to suggest that when people thought they saw Bigfoot, they were actually looking at something else. A study analysing decades of Bigfoot sightings across the Pacific Northwest found that Bigfoot hotspots often overlapped with black bear territory, suggesting that they're, quote, maybe cases of mistaken identity, end quote.

Well, of course, I was a bit disappointed. It would have been the find of the century, really, wouldn't it? You sound very colonial, don't you? Oh, dear. But Brian says that his research actually doesn't mean that Bigfoot doesn't exist. Would you be surprised if something were to come up? Not particularly. Not too surprised.

I suppose 30 hairs is really nothing. And anyone who says, oh, no, they can't possibly be, is guilty of being unscientific. At the risk of being unscientific, I still have to ask, is it really possible? Could a large mammal be in North America in 2017 and no one has found a verified skeleton or a body? Could Bigfoot really be the world champion of hide and seek? We've got one more expert who just might have our answer. Dr. Disatel will analyse the Bigfoot evidence you collect

in our state-of-the-art DNA lab. Yes. We're going to meet Professor Todd Disatel, who you might remember from such shows as $10 million Bigfoot bounty. The premise? Pretty simple. If any of you can provide us with visual and DNA evidence of Sasquatch, you will win a $10 million bounty.

When Todd's not on reality TV, he runs New York University's Molecular Primatology Lab. This must be it. Bigfoot crossing. Where, as part of his work, he identifies new primates and studies the origin of human species. Now, after that show he was on, where, by the way, no one got the bounty, Bigfooters are still sending Todd stuff to analyse. I get random crap in the mail constantly.

Some guy in January sent me a banana that he said he saw a Bigfoot eating and he went and got the peel and wanted me to sequence to see if there was any Bigfoot saliva on it. And Todd finds it very difficult to believe that Bigfoot is hiding in the woods somewhere. We put the idea to him that maybe there's just not that many Bigfoots around, Bigfeet around. And Todd was pretty unimpressed. Part of the reason for this is because he says there's just all this technology out there that makes it pretty easy to find big animals, like game cameras. It's a motion detector, infrared camera that's out there at night. I mean, anytime anything walks by it, it snaps a picture. And Todd says that it's not just the odd Bigfoot hunter

planting these cameras. It's scientists, naturalists, and hunters. It's the thousands of people going out on weekends, and then tens of thousands of game cams are out there. Lots of great pictures of bear asses, like black bear, grizzly bear. But where's the Bigfoot body? Where's the body?

Where's a skeleton? Todd couldn't remember the last time a completely new species of large mammal was found in North America. So we went searching, and one scientist told us that it was possibly a new species of sheep that was described by scientists more than a hundred years ago. But since then,

we haven't had much in North America that's big and new and lives on land. There are things out there that have not been discovered and there always will be. I just am skeptical we've overlooked a eight foot tall, 600, 700 pound giant walking amongst us. The probability isn't zero, but it's adjacent to it. So when it comes to Science vs Bigfoot, does it stack up? Well, we've got lots of footprints, big footprints, but they're tricky to make heads or tails of. And otherwise, we have no bones, no DNA, and no body. OK, so we at Science Versus, we're not holding our breath for any Bigfoot bodies to appear any time soon.

But that does raise the question, why are people still seeing Bigfoot all around the world? And, well, maybe it's because they keep looking for Bigfoot, wanting, hoping to see Bigfoot. And so, sometimes, they actually see it. That might be what's happening in Round Rock, Texas. This is one huge footprint found along the Brushy Creek Trail Father's Day weekend. More evidence keeps popping up. But there's also something you don't know yet.

We followed up with the Parks and Rec media team, Roger and Mary, just to get a little more info about those sightings. The enthusiasm from our Round Rock, Texas residents has been so positive and exciting. We're inviting kids to come with their flashlights to actually have their own nighttime Bigfoot expedition experience. And we kind of think that they might actually get a glimpse of him at that. Are one of you two dressing up as Bigfoot in order to encourage kids out on the park? Is that what's going on? It definitely won't be Mary and I. No, definitely no.

Oh, but it will be someone. It will be someone, yes. Guys! They've been looking for him. We've got to give them something to, you know. Whether Bigfoot's real or not, the community is so excited and positive about this that we've got to give them something to find. We don't want to let them down. But people believe.

They really believe. Well, I think some of the real evidence is the enthusiasm that our residents have. Oh, come on! Can you tell I work in media relations? That's Science vs Bigfoot. This episode has been produced by our senior producer, Caitlin Sori, me, Wendy Zuckerman, Rose Reid, Heather Rogers and Shruti Ravindran. Production assistance from Rose Rimla.

Edited by Blythe Terrell and Annie Rose Strasser. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Sound design by Martin Peralta. Music written by Bobby Lord. And a big thank you to Dr Michael J Hickerson as well as Professor James L Patton. Thank you, James. He sent us a seven-page document describing the last large mammals

discovered by Western scientists in North America. Suffice to say, Bigfoot wasn't on the list. Next week, Science Versus is tackling vitamins. What do you actually need to take? And will you regret it if you don't? So if you were going to explain this to your seven-year-old, he said, Daddy, should I take calcium supplements? What would you say?

I would say, no, that would be a complete waste of time for you. Why do you ask? I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time. I'm in Gimmelstad. No, I don't know where I am, in Switzerland in the Alps. Have you heard of Bigfoot? Bigfoot? Do you know the monster? No, I don't see the monster, no.