Hybrid History: Sasquatch Sexuality and Prehistoric Pairing
Posted by: Micah Hanks on June 16th, 2014
Post by Micah Hanks of The Gralien Report:
Reports of hairy humanoids in the Americas like Bigfoot have captured the public’s fascination for decades. The proposed existence of such creatures beckons to us, after a fashion, and hints at a primal element that even modern humans seem to possess after all these many thousands of years of evolution and pairing that have made us what we are today.
Most often, the stories we hear about Bigfoot entail creatures much larger than humans, but similar in their general bipedal posture, physiognomy, opposable thumbs, and other human-like traits they are said to possess. Larger than life in the very literal sense, the problem scientists face when trying to understand them is how such a creature, with their humanlike appearance and potential for intelligence, could exist undiscovered; save only for the scant recollections of those claiming to have had remarkable encounters with the things.
The encounters, as circumstantial evidence, must account for something: these “scant recollections” actually number in the thousands, and no single complete survey of all reports that have appeared online, in books over the years, on podcasts and radio shows, and which have circulated by word of mouth, has ever been organized and collected. Indeed, mass delusion on this scale would require a new understanding of psychology and the workings of the human mind, as well as a bleak new acceptance of the fallibility of the senses.
By contrast, the hard questions remain just as well: what would a group of creatures like Bigfoot consume, particularly in the remote regions of North America? Why have no bodies ever been recovered? For enough of a breeding population to exist, there would have to be enough of the creatures in existence for their regular appearances to occur; are the plethora of reports mentioned previously capable of accounting for this, and if so, why does the academic establishment still hesitate to take this subject seriously?
For the sake of conversation, let’s suspend our disbelief for a moment about whether or not such a creature could exist, and explore a hypothetical scenario involving human and Sasquatch relations that may be remarkably similar to another potential scenario in early human pre-history.
During a correspondence I had with an academic friend of mine recently, the subject of purported “Sasquatch kidnappings” in relation to the idea of hybridization between humans and other hominid species was brought up, at which time I posed the following observations:
If Native American legends among bands like the Chehalis and other Northwestern tribes are to be taken any more than on count of the novelty of their existence as legends, the multitude of Indian tales involving kidnappings of women by Sasquatches might equally bring forth the notion of forced copulation between similar species…
Read the rest of the article at The Gralien Report.
About Micah Hanks
Micah Hanks is a writer, researcher, lecturer, and radio personality whose work addresses a variety of areas, including history, politics, scientific theories and unexplained phenomena. Open minded, but skeptical in his approach, his research has examined a broad variety of subjects over the years, incorporating interest in cultural studies, natural science and scientific anomalies, and the prospects of our technological future as a species as influenced by science.
He is author of several books, including his 2012 New Page Books release, The UFO Singularity, as well as The Ghost Rockets, Magic, Mysticism and the Molecule: The Search for Sentient Intelligence from Other Worlds and Reynolds Mansion: An Invitation to the Past. Hanks has served as a consulting editor for Intrepid Magazine, FATE Magazine and The Journal of Anomalous Sciences. He also writes for a variety of other publications including New Dawn, Mysterious Universe, and UFO Magazine. Hanks has appeared on numerous TV and radio programs, including Coast to Coast AM with George Noory, Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland, National Geographic’s Paranatural, the History Channel’s Guts and Bolts, CNN Radio, The Jeff Rense Program, and many others. A weekly podcast that follows his research is available at his popular site, www.gralienreport.com, in addition to a news and current events podcast, Middle Theory, at www.middletheory.com.
You know, there have been genetic studies of Native Americans aimed at determining if they came to the Americas in one or more migrations. These studies have convincingly shown that they came from Siberia in only one migration, and that there is no discernible component of Polynesian or Chinese ancestry, as there might plausibly be. This makes it pretty clear that any “hybrids” (if any existed) were not retained in the Native American gene pool.
(Yeah, Neanderthals and Denisovans. Well, (1) we would surely consider these sub-species of humans if they survived today. The difference between species and subspecies seems more-or-less a matter of taste, particularly when dealing with extinct lineages. (2) Native Americans do not appear to be particularly “enriched” by either Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA.)
On re-reading that, I think it might be taken the wrong way. My point was that any genetic study capable of picking up the small genetic differences between human populations would surely have picked up any abnormalities due to “hybridization”.
Also, my memory was completely wrong about the result of the study. “Scientists have found that Native American populations — from Canada to the southern tip of Chile — arose from at least three migrations, with the majority descended entirely from a single group of First American migrants that crossed over through Beringia, a land bridge between Asia and America that existed during the ice ages, more than 15,000 years ago.” The error doesn’t affect the substance of my argument, but it still should be corrected.