Primate Survivors & Fossils Found

The Real Bigfoot and Genuine Bigfoot Tracks
Part 9: Primate Survivors & Fossils Found
by Mark A. Hall

The Neo-Giants of the Pacific Northwest are one type of primate among several distinctly different primates that remain as elusive. To varying degrees they spread to different parts of the globe as part of the competition among advanced primates with intelligence superior to that of the recognized great apes.

We are so familiar with animals like the gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans because they are not the brightest among our primate relatives. Those relatives have suffered for being unable to elude us. We kill them, lock them into zoos, and experiment upon them. Such fates have been successfully avoided by the Neo-Giants and others.

All those that remain “unrecognized” or “un-catalogued” B put it however you will B are smart enough to have competed for living space and resources with our direct human ancestors. Their inability to compete successfully was proven long, long ago. They have retreated and survive in areas we call wilderness. Now, when they put in appearances near human habitations, we do not easily recognize them for who they are.

The diversity of primates was apparent to me in the 1970s. I used the cases of appearances in the Dakotas and in Iowa to draw attention to the existence of different sources for tracks. I have discussed their presence at length in books and articles (such as The Yeti, Bigfoot & True Giants, Living Fossils, and Wonders Volume 6.) My views were incorporated into the book The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates by Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe. [48]

Over these same years the finding of new fossils for intelligent primates has been painting a new picture of how mankind has emerged over the past several millions of years. And the new picture is consistent with the survival of upright and intelligent primates other than humans into geologically recent times. The scientific establishment has been slow to acknowledge this fact. This is now changing with the announcement in January of 2003 that some famous names among primate experts think an examination of Bigfoot is necessary.

The paleoanthropological record will be easier to sort out when primatologists accept that several lines of primate evolution extend into the modern day. Where they came from will be matched with where they are now.

Serious studies need to be made of several surviving primates. The fame of Bigfoot made it easier for people to believe their eyes when they also saw True Giants, the Taller-hominids, and the apes of the Southern swamps. This has included a few of a remnant population of Neandertals in remote parts of Canada and Alaska. My work has not been based only on tracks. Instead, the differing physical descriptions and the details of what has been recorded as folklore have been successfully linked to specific types of tracks. In addition, fossil primates in distinct lines of evolution have been suggested as the ancestors of each type of creature.

When Benjamin Radford examined the last fifty years of Bigfoot history recently he began by describing how difficult the subject is. [49] You might have thought he was warming up to praising those who pursue Bigfoot for their remarkable perseverance and personal sacrifices in the face of such a task. But no. Instead he generalized the subject, tossing all mystery primates into one jumble, and quoted a few confused Bigfoot-seekers to bolster weak arguments about how nothing could exist. It is symptomatic of such treatments that the weak arguments are propped up by one enormous falsehood. His big lie was that no bodies or fossils have been found to indicate the presence of such primates.

The bodies. The bodies have turned up in Georgia in 1829, in Pennsylvania in 1972, and the famous case of “Jacko” in 1884 in British Columbia. [50] But human beings as a group have been totally unprepared to accept and deal with those cases. There are still more instances of captures of mystery primates for which we have some record. The false construction here is the implication that those bodies would have been treated properly back then in some way that does not even exist today. There are no “Bigfoot Body Examination Teams” standing by B not then and not now. The fact that those cases had no chance of a positive outcome for advancing knowledge is now used as an excuse to dismiss them and pretend, as Radford does, that they do not even exist.

The fossils. The primary example of fossils found is Homo gardarensis. The bones have not been entirely misplaced by scientists.

They have been mislabeled as a case of acromegaly and been put away at the Panum Institute in Copenhagen. The bones were found in Greenland in 1926 and formally excavated. Their peculiar identity was recognized by F.C.C. Hansen. Hence they were given the name H. gardarensis. When Hansen died, others declined to dispute the early mislabeling of them by Sir Arthur Keith. They swept the find under the rug where they have remained to this day. [51]

Other finds have been misplaced, leaving them lost for the time being. Some day they might be recovered if people will search at the University of California at Los Angeles and at the Smithsonian. Quite specifically, I am referring in the first instance to the Minaret Calvarium found in 1965 by a retired doctor, Robert W. Denton. It was also considered to be a remarkable find by a pathologist, Gerald K. Ridge. When the find passed into the hands of two scientists at UCLA, it was allowed to be stored in a museum warehouse where it is probably in a poorly labeled box awaiting re-discovery. [52]

The second instance involves bones sent to the Smithsonian. Some unusual bones were found in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area of Minnesota in 1968. [53] Dr. Richard Adams, identified as an anthropologist and leader of the university team that examined the bones, was quoted: “The skulls. . .may well represent a pre-Indian type of man that is more closely related to Neanderthal Man than any previously found. Their discovery tends to push the occupation of the Western Hemisphere by human beings way back.” And that they could “represent a remnant population of a primitive type of man who inhabited the North American continent long ago and somehow survived until comparatively recent times by living in isolated refuge areas.” [54] By the time this was revealed in 1972, the bones had been sent to the Smithsonian where Dr. Lawrence Angel could not find a record of them. The press noted: “He said this means the bones probably are not an important find.”

Bones might be lying around simply unrecognized for their importance. An example would be bones once in the possession of Samuel Eddy, at one time a curator at the James Ford Bell Museum in Minneapolis. Eddy died about twenty-five years ago. According to Dr. Charles Huver, a retired biology professor who worked with Eddy and told me about them, the bones had been found in a bog in northern Minnesota. They were kept unlabeled in Sam Eddy’s own collection. They were large, human-like bones, with a very thick Calvarium. Eventually his collection of odd bones was dispersed among the faculty at the University of Minnesota or just tossed all at a time when Eddy was on sabbatical. Huver recalled that a whale bone ended up as a garden ornament.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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