January 22, 2012

Cryptozoology’s Future Men: Bald or Bearded?

Yes, today notes a time of renewed football madness in North America. As we have said before at Cryptomundo, Super Bowl Sunday has become a minor (maybe major) unofficial holiday in the USA, in which people abandon the internet to watch commercials, cheerleaders, halftime fashion malfunctions, and apparently some football. This weekend’s playoff games actually may rate a greater following that in years past because of the battles looming.

Okay, have you noticed the trend in football players ~ who are males, of course ~ to be bald, oftentimes on purpose? Or cryptozoologists to be bearded?

I often wonder about where humans are evolving, where we have come from, and will cryptozoologists of the future look like football players or professors. What does this have to do with football? Probably nothing, but then this Sunday and the one in two weeks has little to do with football any longer. It’s about celebrity, money, ads, and people, people, people. The men on the field are a portion of the day, so why not speculate on what future cryptozoologists will look like today too?

It started for me, growing up in the 1950s, reading articles on what future humans – mostly males it always seemed like – would look like. The drawings of the men would invariably be shown to be someone with a huge hairless head, as if we would evolve into “brain man.”

H.G. Wells imagined the men of the future as all brains, and with little hair. Later one would talk of them as atomic mutants.

Other images of bald men who are football players can also be found, but they are illustrations from our past, such as the imagined (without hair) reconstructions of Java Man (at top) and Neanderal Man (below).

At top is Java Man, Homo erectus Sangiran 17, reconstructed by sculptor Yoichi Yazawa, under the direction of Hisao Baba, Curator of Anthropology at the National Science Museum in Tokyo. Was the image of future man created by thinking too much about the past?

In my quest for the image of future man, I started noticing something strange. Modern men, some who have searched for Chupacabras, Lake Monsters, or Bigfoot, some who are rap stars, some who are football players, began appearing on my radar that looked similar to my 1950s’ remembrances of these future men. Had tomorrow’s brainy males already arrived, on the football field and nearly within cryptozoology?

Take skeptic Benjamin Radford:

Here is a comparison between Matt Crowley, skeptical Bigfoot foot cast investigator, and Ben Radford, managing editor at the Skeptical Inquirer:

Click image for larger version, if you wish.

Radford, at least, has called himself a cryptozoologist.

How about guys that appear on television shows about cryptozoology, like  Animal X host Bill Kerr? Is he the aging future man?

Then there’s also those who are unique beyond classifications, of course, like Todd Disotell (below), the usually very skeptical DNA expert on these shows.

Do cryptozoologists tend to have beards and sometimes wear hats. What does our future hold?

And what of future females in the field of cryptozoology? What appearances generalize them?

Just a couple days ago, by coincidence, the Smithsonian’s Paleofuture column by Matt Novak looked at the concept that by now all women would have been Amazons. If future women are suppose to have been Amazons in the 21st century, what does that say about fieldworthy cryptozoologists who are female today?

Future Man is here, and he/she may assuredly be a football player or a cryptozoologist, it seems. So, the answer to the question about whether cryptozoologists ~ male or female ~ will look like football players or professors is, well, they both already look like each other now. We seem to be in the future. Enjoy the commercials.

P.S. @paleofuture. Happy 5th anniversary.

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