Bigfoot a Ventriloquist?

National Geographic reports a study that orangutans may manipulate their voices with leaves pushed to their lips. With the theory of Gigantopithecus being a common ancestor to both Orangutans and Bigfoot, perhaps this behavior extends to Bigfoot as well.

Like Bruce Wayne switching to his Batman voice, orangutans may be going deep to deter predators, and some are even using tools to sound more intimidating, a new study says.

Sometimes the apes use just their lips; sometimes they kiss their fingers. But in some communities, orangutans—male and female, young and old—go so far as to push leaves against their lips as they kiss-squeak.

To find out, researchers recorded kiss squeaks between 2003 and 2005 near a research station in Indonesia's Central Kalimantan Province on the island of Borneo. The team noted whether the sounds had been made with hands, leaves, or lips alone.
"Classic" kiss squeaks—lips only—were fairly high pitched, registering around 3,500 hertz. When hands were used, the frequency dropped to an average of 1,800 hertz. Leaves further deepened the sound, to an average of around 900 hertz.

Deeper, Bigger, Badder
In most animals vocal pitch and body size are tightly connected: Larger vocal organs create larger, deeper sound waves.

So perhaps, the new study says, the orangutans are trying to fool predators into thinking the apes are bigger than they actually are.
"This effect [probably] further discourages the predator from the hunt," said study co-author Madeleine Hardus, a behavioral biologist with the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.

Though the team didn't gauge predator reactions to the various kiss squeaks, she thinks the popularity of the leaf method hints at its effectiveness.
But Hardus doesn't expect leaf kissing to sweep Borneo.

"Most of the areas where it is currently used are isolated, and we do not expect it to spread to other populations," she said.
"Although, where it currently exists, almost all of the orangutans use it."
Findings to be published tomorrow in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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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.