There's Always Room for Pye

We have introduced our fellow lunch clubbers to Lloyd Pye back in July 18th 2009. This is the man who refers to Bigfoot and Sasquatch as hominoids not to be confused with the scientific establishment's taxonomy (taxinomical?) use of hominoid You wanted more Pye, you got more Pye.

The video above is from the 2005 Bellingham Sasquatch Research Conference. Not only does Pye present an extensive defense of his theory, but he is almost political in his call to action to fight the scientific establishment.

Lloyd Pye's Bio can be read below.

Lloyd Pye is an author, researcher, and lecturer in the field of alternative knowledge. He calls on over 30 years of experience to write and speak about the origins of life, human origins, Hominoids (bigfoot, sasquatch, yeti, and others), and the work of Zechara Sitchin. This broad base of knowledge makes him one of the world's leading proponents of the Intervention Theory of origins, which stands in sharp contrast to Darwinism, Creationism, and Intelligent Design.

Lloyd is also the caretaker of the famous Starchild skull, and has written a new book about his eight years of struggle to get it scientifically tested to establish beyond dispute the precise genetic heritage of both of its parents. So far, extensive testing indicates that its mother was a normal human but its father was, in all probability, something other than entirely human. More information is available at www.StarchildProject.com. Lloyd Pye's new book titled The Starchild Skull -- Genetic Enigma or Human-Alien Hybrid? will be available in July, 2007, in bookstores or directly from www.BellLapBooks.com.

Bigfoot Knows what your thinking--or feeling.

In our "never play poker with bigfoot" series we file a report from Newsweek claiming all major apes are able to empathize and understand human emotion just by the expressions on our face.

For those who have seen Bigfoot and been scared, he/she knows it.

A cool paper in the September issue of the journal Developmental Science describes studies on 17 chimps, five bonobos, five gorillas and five orangutans from the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center in Leipzig, Germany…The apes' skill at reading an expression of happiness… indicates that they can read meaning in the emotional expressions on human faces, suggesting that despite 6 million years of separate evolution apes and humans share a common emotional language.

you can read the full artcle here or click below


Apes Feel Your Pain
by Sharon Begley
There's new evidence that primates can read human emotions.

Memo to zoo visitors making faces at the chimps and gorillas on the other side of the glass: they know what you're thinking. Or, more precisely, feeling.
The extent and limits of ape intelligence is a hot area in science, but most of the research has focused on cognition. Now a team of scientists has turned the spotlight on emotions, and how well apes can read the human kind as displayed in our facial expressions. Earlier studies had shown that apes understand people's goals and perceptions. But whether apes understand our emotional expressions was pretty much a mystery, even though there are striking similarities between the facial expressions that we and our more hirsute cousins make, as researchers as far back as Darwin noted. Both human babies and newborn chimps make a pouting face to get mom’s attention, for instance, and bare their teeth in something like a smile in order to make nice—or "achieve social bonding," as primatologists put it.

A cool paper in the September issue of the journal Developmental Science describes studies on 17 chimps, five bonobos, five gorillas and five orangutans from the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center in Leipzig, Germany. In the first test, a researcher sat at a table on one side of a plexiglass panel while an ape sat on the other side. Two opaque boxes rested on the table. The scientist opened one box (making sure the ape could not see inside) and smiled with pleasure. He next opened the other and made a disgusted face. The ape was then allowed to reach through one of the holes in the panel and pick one box. Which would he choose?

In 57 percent of the tests, the ape chose the box that elicited a smile from the scientist rather than an expression of disgust. Good choice. The box that brought the smile contained a grape, and the ape was rewarded for his perspicacity in reading human facial expressions. The other box contained dead cockroaches. The apes' skill at reading an expression of happiness, write David Buttelmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and his colleagues, indicates that they can read meaning in the emotional expressions on human faces, suggesting that despite 6 million years of separate evolution apes and humans share a common emotional language. (It's always interesting to compare apes to babies: human infants can read facial expressions and act on them at around 14 to 18 months.)
In the next experiments, the set-up with the plexiglass was the same. An ape saw the scientist hold up a grape and a slice of banana, but his view was then blocked as the scientist put one treat under one cup and the other under the other cup. The ape then watched as the scientist looked under each of the two cups in turn, making an expression of happiness at one and of disgust at the other. The scientist next reached under one cup (at this point, the ape's view was again blocked, so he could not see which cup the scientist chose) and ate what was inside. His view restored, the ape saw the scientist munching on something, and then was allowed to choose a cup for himself.

This time the apes tended to choose the cup that had triggered the expression of disgust. Counterintuitive? Not at all. The apes went beyond the simplistic "pick cup that elicited happy face" to make a fairly sophisticated computation. That is, they seemed to reason that the human would eat the food that made him smile, emptying that cup, with the result that only the disgust-inducing cup would still contain a snack.

That was even stronger evidence than in the first test that the apes understood the meaning of the human's facial expression, and were not simplistically equating "disgust" with "stay away from this cup." Their skill at inferring how people will act on their emotions, conclude the scientists, suggests that they "understand facial expressions as expressing internal states that cause certain [human] actions—in this case, eating one food but not another." The apes had to understand that expressions of disgust or happiness reflect an internal state that people will then act on, and infer that the person was more likely to eat the food that made him look happy. Species did not matter—chimps, gorillas, and the others all did about the same—but age did: the older the animal, the better he did. Call it the wisdom of old age.

In my recent story describing the rising criticism of evolutionary psychology and the idea of human universals, I noted that emotions and emotional expression do seem to be universals (unlike, say, rape). If so, that suggests that emotional expressions have deep evolutionary roots, perhaps reaching as far back as the common ancestors of humans and modern apes. That possibility looks even more likely as evidence accumulates that apes can read the emotions on our faces.
© 2009

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.