Yeti

[duncan II]

Anyone see the Ch4 documentary - Yeti: Man, Myth or Beast, or something like that - that was on couple of weeks ago? Had taped it and just watched it there.

 

So many locals convinced they'd seen one and it exists in folk legend almost everywhere across the Himalayas. Some samples of hair, feet etc had been collected by those who thought they'd seen it. All these came back as different species of bear - black bear and two different kinds of brown bear. So seems a bit of a dead end and disappointing result.

 

BUT, and perhaps even more interestingly, a different hypothesis was proposed. The fact that belief in this is so widespread is perhaps due to folk memory of a different species of human existing until relatively recently. The Tibetans have a mutation that allows them to live at high altitudes with little oxygen. Turns out an extinct and little known sub-species of human - whose remains have been found in, I think, Siberia or somewhere also had the same gene mutation (Denisovans - had to look that up there). Plausible that they migrated to the Himalayas, inter-bred with humans on occasion but were generally feared as mountain dwellers. Over time they eventually became extinct but humans who had inherited this ability to live in high altitudes gradually replaced them in these areas and they lived on in folk memory as beasts to be feared.

 

I find it quite convincing. According to DNA, they plausibly could have bred with humans as little as 7,000 years ago. Could folk memory last this long? Well, he gave as an example the existence of folk stories about little people in Indonesia that everyone thought were just stories. But remains were found of a tiny human species in Indonesia (you might remember, it was in the news ten years ago or so - Homo floresiensis - called the hobbit by the press)  and it is dated to about 15,000 years, I think. So it is totally plausible that folk memory lasts as long. Also, folk tales of floods and other cataclysmic events that exist in many cultures are thought to come from memory of real events passed down over countless generations.

 

Anyway, it would be sad if yetis don't exist, but the fact that creatures like that are remembered by societies of humans today is, for me, equally as exciting.

 

Any alternative theories?

[giblet]

Not seen that documentary, will look for it on catch up.

Always been interested in Big Foot and Yeti stories.  Everytime though they dna test some hair, it turns out to be Monkey or Yak.  I think the chances now of something like that existing are virtually nil.  Very little of the world has yet to be explored and we would have found bones or carcasses by now (the dead cant hide).

Sounds an interesting theory though, most plausible yet. 

 

[phart]

I mind the Indonesian "hobbits" as they were labelled.

Isn't there also a track in the snow with regards to a Yeti?

[phart]

Just to add both Attenburgh and Jane Goodall suspect there might be an unknown "great ape"

[duncan II]

6 minutes ago, phart said:

I mind the Indonesian "hobbits" as they were labelled.

Isn't there also a track in the snow with regards to a Yeti?

There was a track in the snow mentioned in this documentary. Apparently a place really inaccessible to humans. It was a Western mountaineer guy. He was interviewed and said he was a convert to idea yetis existed as it had to be a biped who made the tracks. However, a (relatively) local inhabitant was convinced they were snow leopard tracks. It was the fact that they were single file tracks as opposed to looking like two lines that led mountaineer to dismiss idea it was a snow leopard. But Tibetan guy was sure they were.

[neil r]

Difficult to refute this evidence.

[phart]

2 minutes ago, duncan II said:

There was a track in the snow mentioned in this documentary. Apparently a place really inaccessible to humans. It was a Western mountaineer guy. He was interviewed and said he was a convert to idea yetis existed as it had to be a biped who made the tracks. However, a (relatively) local inhabitant was convinced they were snow leopard tracks. It was the fact that they were single file tracks as opposed to looking like two lines that led mountaineer to dismiss idea it was a snow leopard. But Tibetan guy was sure they were.

Yeah guy called Shipton and another guy who was a doctor, plus a sherpa probably. I have no idea. I'd always remembered seeing the photo of the print, could also be a hoax to get more money for expeditions.

 

 

[biffer]

Or this

 

 

[thplinth]

A chap called MK Davis did some excellent stabilization work on the famous Patterson film. What is amazing is that it is a female with breasts. 

[Ormond]

If you can believe in God, anything else is entirely possible. That includes Nessie.

[Orraloon]

2 hours ago, thplinth said:

A chap called MK Davis did some excellent stabilization work on the famous Patterson film. What is amazing is that it is a female with breasts. 

That's just some geezer in a fancy dress suit.

 

[thplinth]

[thplinth]

The guy who does the stabilization has also enhanced the images to make out details such the buttocks and bum cleft plus the footpads including individual toes. You can see muscles and parts of the back defined. Plus most bizarrely this one has breasts. He seems to think the film and creature is genuine. It left tracks all the way which they took casts off. It walked to the tree line and as soon as out of sight broke into a run (the length of stride increased dramatically), they followed the tracks for a good distance I understand. It is easily the best sighting there is. 

As you can see, a female. Now if it is a fake that is some touch.

Edited June 15, 2016 by thplinth

[fringo]

[Ally Bongo]

43 minutes ago, Ormond said:

If you can believe in God, anything else is entirely possible. That includes Nessie.

In a Theist v Athiest debate the Theist would argue that we have not yet found any evidence of the ancestor of humans and apes that evolution "suggests"

[thplinth]

6 foot six apparently...

 

[phart]

I'll have to re-read all the patterson stuff as i thought it was someone in a suit.

[RenfrewBlue]

There was a report on the BBC news website a few months back. The last sighting of a Yeti was 30 years ago. It seems with the lifestyle improvements over recent years the locals no longer need to travel to the higher altitudes where the Yeti supposedly live.

The reporter interviewed the last eye witness who described sleeping in the Yeti's abandoned nest during a snow storm. It sounded like a stick version of the sleeping nests the gorillas build.

It was very interesting but obviously nothing conclusive came out of it.

[thplinth]

I was the same as everyone else but then coincidentally and quite recently but I forget why I got drawn into it and did a bit of reading and googling. I now think it is very plausible and am quite convinced that there is something to it. I almost started a thread on it but thought naw...

[Shed_Tartan_Army_Yeah]

On 15/06/2016 at 0:24 PM, thplinth said:

A chap called MK Davis did some excellent stabilization work on the famous Patterson film. What is amazing is that it is a female with breasts. 

 

What I've always found interesting is that this was in 1967..

 

Who, in 1967, would be able make or create something that looks so "real". To have some comparison, look at Chewbaka from StarWars: A major major film branch with a huge budget couldn't come anywhere close to matching the quality of the P/G costume. And that is another 10 YEARS on from the P/G film...

 

There is footage going round of being able to see the back muscles working and moving,  the soles of the feet, the no visible "wrinkles" in the neck that a rubber or fake (not sticking to skin) costume would have...  its by far either the best costume or the best evidence whatever way you look at it.   

[harrystarfish]

As much as the teenage me loved reading about the paranormal and supernatural, the complete lack of video or photographic evidence for any of it since the rise of the smartphone and digital camera has been telling.

Personally I've consigned belief in ghosts, yeti, nessie, alien abductions / sightings, telepathy, clairvoyance to the same place I hold religion and homeopathy.

I'd still be delighted if anything was ever found tho.

 

[Ally Bongo]

http://www.michaelshermer.com/2003/05/show-me-the-body/

Published 2003

Purported sightings of Bigfoot, Nessie and Ogopogo fire our imaginations. But anecdotes alone do not make a science

The world lost the creators of two of its most celebrated biohoaxes recently: Douglas Herrick, father of the risibly ridiculous jackalope (half jackrabbit, half antelope), and Ray L. Wallace, paternal guardian of the less absurd Bigfoot.

The jackalope enjoins laughter in response to such peripheral hokum as hunting licenses sold only to those whose IQs range between 50 and 72, bottles of the rare but rich jackalope milk, and additional evolutionary hybrids such as the jackapanda. Bigfoot, on the other hand, while occasionally eliciting an acerbic snicker, enjoys greater plausibility for a simple evolutionary reason: large hirsute apes currently roam the forests of Africa, and at least one species of a giant ape — Gigantopithecus — flourished some hundreds of thousands of years ago alongside our ancestors.

Is it possible that a real Bigfoot lives despite the posthumous confession by the Wallace family that it was just a practical joke? Certainly. After all, although Bigfoot proponents do not dispute the Wallace hoax, they correctly note that tales of the giant Yeti living in the Himalayas and Native American lore about Sasquatch wandering around the Pacific Northwest emerged long before Wallace pulled his prank in 1958.

In point of fact, throughout much of the 20th century it was entirely reasonable to speculate about and search for Bigfoot, as it was for the creatures of Loch Ness, Lake Champlain and Lake Okanagan (Scotland’s Nessie, the northeastern U.S.’s Champ and British Columbia’s Ogopogo, respectively). Science traffics in the soluble, so for a time these other chimeras warranted our limited exploratory resources. Why don’t they now? The study of animals whose existence has yet to be proved is known as cryptozoology, a term coined in the late 1950s by Belgian zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans. Cryptids, or “hidden animals,” begin life as blurry photographs, grainy videos and countless stories about strange things that go bump in the night. Cryptids come in many forms, including the aforementioned giant pongid and lake monsters, as well as sea serpents, giant octopuses, snakes, birds and even living dinosaurs.

The reason cryptids merit our attention is that enough successful discoveries have been made by scientists based on local anecdotes and folklore that we cannot dismiss all claims a priori. The most famous examples include the gorilla in 1847 (andthe mountain gorilla in 1902), the giant panda in 1869, the okapi (a short-necked relative of the giraffe) in 1901, the Komodo dragon in 1912, the bonobo (or pygmy chimpanzee) in 1929, the megamouth shark in 1976 and the giant gecko in 1984. Cryptozoologists are especially proud of the catch in 1938 of a coelacanth, an archaic-looking species of fish that had been thought to have gone extinct in the Cretaceous. Although discoveries of previously unrecorded species of bugs and bacteria are routinely published in the annals of biology, these instances are startling because of their recency, size, and similarity to cryptid cousins Bigfoot, Nessie, et al. They also have in common — a body! In order to name a new species, one must have a type specimen — a holotype — from which a detailed description can be made, photographs taken, models cast and a professional scientific analysis prepared.

If such cryptids still survived in the hinterlands of North America and Asia, surely by now one would have turned up. So far all we have are the accounts. Anecdotes are a good place to begin an investigation — which by themselves cannot verify a new species. In fact, in the words of social scientist Frank J. Sulloway of the University of California at Berkeley—words that should be elevated to a maxim: “Anecdotes do not make a science. Ten anecdotes are no better than one, and a hundred anecdotes are no better than ten.”

I employ Sulloway’s maxim every time I encounter Bigfoot hunters and Nessie seekers. Their tales make for gripping narratives, but they do not make sound science. A century has been spent searching for these chimerical creatures. Until a body is produced, skepticism is the appropriate response.

[phart]

lol Michael Shermer.

[Ally Bongo]

4 minutes ago, phart said:

lol Michael Shermer.

Youll need to expand

I quite like him

[Ally Bongo]

https://aeon.co/ideas/why-sasquatch-and-other-crypto-beasts-haunt-our-imaginations