Time Magazine: Should We Declare Open Season on Bigfoot?

In our earlier post Skeptic Benjamin Radford posed the question, "If You Spot Bigfoot, Should You Shoot Him?" This is a debate that continuies among Bigfooters to this day. It has been said that the late Grover Krantz was  in favor of killing a Bigfoot for science (read the Grover Krantz Obituary by Loren Coleman) .

You can read an interview of a man who would kill Bigfoot and an article documenting Bigfoot has been shot or killed, on average, once every four years.

To see the kill/no kill debate reach mainstream media status makes us hopeful that the rhetoric has gone beyond , "Is Bigfoot real?". True, this is only two articles that take on the debate, but two points makes a line. 

Below is the Time Magazine piece on the debate:

Every year, believers and enthusiasts provide heaps of secondary proof that Bigfoot exists: low-quality video, out-of-focus snapshots and the occasional fossilized “footprint.” But it’s not the quantity but the quality of proof that’s lacking, MSNBC reports. These days the public will accept nothing less than concrete physical proof.

Animal Planet’s show, Finding Bigfoot, does its part to increase the amount of evidence that the “creature” really does roam the wild. Now in its second season, each week the show features a team of four explorers traveling the globe and adding more shaky hand-cam fuel to the fire.

Gonzo Bigfoot hunters aren’t the only people trying to move the creature from myth to reality. Last October, more than a dozen “experts” traveled 2,000 miles east of Moscow to the Kemerovo region of Russia for a daylong conference. There, the existence of Yeti (Bigfoot’s Russian cousin) was confirmed with 95% certainty.

But that rate is just not good enough. The other 5%  must be proven in blood, or at least a high-resolution, tranquilizer-dart-induced photo. This has stirred a debate among the Bigfoot community as to whether it’s ethical to shoot and kill the creature.

The real question NewsFeed is pondering: does anyone really want to find Bigfoot? Proving Bigfoot’s existence puts an end to all of the fun, and in the case of Animal Planet, some serious ratings. The season-two premiere of Finding Bigfoot had 1.6 million viewers, making it the most watched episode of the program and the second-best season debut of any show on the network.

Four episodes into season two, Finding Bigfoot is still going strong. The show averages more than 1.4 million viewers a week, beating out other reality-TV favorites like TLC’s Hoarding: Buried Alive and HGTV’s “Holmes Inspection.” Not Kardashian numbers, but pretty respectable for basic cable.

Hunting Bigfoot poses potential ethical, legal and permitting issues, not to mention putting an end to profitable TV franchises. “Finding Bigfoot” has six more episodes before it’s season finale.

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/01/25/should-we-declare-open-season-on-bigfoot/#ixzz1kUNvUIHR

Hobbit Wars

Here at the Big Foot Lunch Club we have a high interest in Homo floresiensis. Homo floresiensis ("Flores Man"; nicknamed Hobbit) is a possible species in the genus Homo, remarkable for its small body and brain and for its survival until relatively recent times. It was named after the Indonesian island of Flores on which the remains were found.

This small bipedal hominid lived among us over 1 million years ago. More significant, as we declared in an earlier post, it is an entirely different species than us, Homo sapiens.

As Bigfoot enthusiast we like the idea of other bipedal hominids living among us. In another post we also suggested Hobbit’s feet were more structurally similar to Bigfoot’s than humans.

A new Time Magazine article declares there is opposition to the different species theory below is an excerpt from the article. To read the whole thing click here.

Inhabitants of the Indonesian island of Flores used to tell stories of a separate race of little people called the ebu gogo, 3-ft.-tall, hairy human-like creatures that hid in the island's many limestone caves.
That changed in a paper published in the current issue of the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The PNAS team closely examined the one almost complete skull unearthed at Flores and say they found no evidence that it was belonged to anyone but a modern human.
The original authors of the Nature paper — Peter Brown and Michael Morwood, both of the University of New England in Australia — aren't about to surrender their belief in a new species. In an email, Brown says that the PNAS paper "provides absolutely no evidence that the unique combination of features found in Homo floresiensis are found in any modern human."
Colin Groves, an Australian biological anthropologist who is an author on an upcoming paper in the Journal of Human Evolution that discounts the microcephaly hypothesis, says the PNAS team subtly shaped the evidence to fit their conclusion: that the hobbit was just a developmentally stunted human. Henry Gee, a senior editor at Nature who was responsible for overseeing the publication of the original Flores paper, concedes that the PNAS paper is "very interesting" but says the authors "cherry-pick the evidence [they] like."

The two sides quickly descend from debating the finer points of human fossils to slagging off on each other's ethics. If only the Flores debate could be so clearly decided. What's certain is that the scientific stakes are extremely high: if the Flores find is really a separate species, then the history of human evolution will have to be rewritten.

DID HUMANS MAKE LOVE OR WAR WITH CAVEMEN

Its an ongoing question. Time Magazine has a new article out today suggesting we made war.

It is one of the world's oldest cold cases. Sometime between 50,000 and 75,000 years ago, a Neanderthal male known to scientists as Shanidar 3 received a wound to his torso, limped back to his cave in what is now Iraq and died several weeks later.

New research suggests that Shanidar 3 may have had a more familiar killer: a human being.

At the time of his death, only humans, who had adapted their hunting techniques to the open plains of Africa, had developed projectile weapons; Neanderthals, who hunted in the close quarters of forests, used thrusting spears. To learn the cause of Shanidar 3's wound, Churchill and his team used a specially designed crossbow to fire stone-age projectiles at precise velocities at pig carcasses (a pig's skin and ribs are believed to be roughly as tough as a Neanderthal's). At kinetic energies consistent with a thrown spear, the pig's rib bore damage resembling Shanidar 3's isolated rib puncture. What's more, Churchill found that the weapon that killed Shanidar 3 entered at about a 45-degree downward angle. Churchill also found that Shanidar 3's rib had started healing before he died. By comparing the wound with wounds documented in medical records from the American Civil War, a time before antibiotics, Churchill hypothesized that Shanidar 3 probably died within a few weeks of the injury.

Others suggest they may have interbred with humans.

Read The full Article here.
Read the competing interbreading theory here.