Yes, they’re good for climbing trees. They’re not very good if you generally go about on two feet, which is my point. Apes can, if they need to, get around on their legs alone, but that does not make them bipeds. A human can hop around on one foot if he needs to (I wonder if a chimp or gorilla could?); for that matter, some people can walk on their hands, and people with no legs can be surprisingly mobile. It’s obviously not what we’re adapted for as a species, though.

“The fossil record, now, has several animals that did away with divergence. The evidence supports the continued existence of at least one more.”

I know what you mean by the 2nd sentence, but I’m not biting on that debate.

The question is not about several “animals” (I think you mean species of hominid, or at least of ape), but about how many lineages. Sure, australopithecus and paranthropus had feet very much like ours — but they are not just hominids, they are hominins. If you know of a non-hominin ape with feet that are like ours, I’d be interested in knowing the species name.

Setting aside Bigfoot (which, if it exists, still has an unknown lineage), our nearest surviving relatives do not have feet adapted to walking or running long distances on two feet.

““Why do WE still have pinkie toes?”

Probably the same generic reason we have a uvula and an appendix. Don’t help that much. Don’t hurt. Evolution isn’t about perfection; it’s about good-enough. I’m not volunteering to try walking without my pinkie toes.”

I don’t think so. They don’t contribute much to our feet now, as you appear to admit, but they still get jammed, stumped, broken, and otherwise damaged. I did a number on my small toe just a few months ago that came just short of breaking it; on the savanna, this would have been a serious disadvantage. Of course you’re right that evolution has its priorities, but if our ancestors had really been walking upright for 20 million years, I would expect the foot to be somewhat more optimized.

“Yet, you mean? That this specific support doesn’t exist for the theorem doesn’t invalidate it. Scientists intelligently speculate all the time. And in this case, the spine is fruit for some intelligent speculation.”

We are not talking about a theorem. Theorems are rigorous math. We are talking about amateur speculation. I am not a professional expert in primate evolution; neither are you; neither is Filler.

But your answer is, “no”. This would have been useful evidence in favor of Filler’s idea, but there’s nothing here he can point to. So all he’s got is his interpretation of the spine. At least the aquatic ape theory had more than one piece of evidence.

Here’s the thing: If you’re going to overturn the dominant theory, you have have a better overall fit to all the data than that theory. New evidence really helps, but even that can’t be the only thing that is considered. Filler does not appear to do that. I’ve looked at the table of contents of his book, and it doesn’t even address important considerations like the spine and pelvis. That means that even if his conjecture is CORRECT, it is not VALID. Even if what he has is an acorn, it doesn’t change the fact that he is acting like a blind squirrel.

“Yet we are still tolerating, on crypto websites, the obscene non-theorem that a kneeling elk made the Skookum cast…” Excuse me, but Loren just left because he was tired of being blamed/credited for what appears on Cryptomundo. Are you now claiming to do what he didn’t? DWA is as meaningless a combination of letters to me as Fhqwhgads is to you, but you do not appear to be an owner of this blog. It’s not your call what is tolerated and what is not, any more than it is mine.

As for the “kneeling elk”, that’s a total red herring, and you know it. I’ve never said that, even in a thread where it would have relevance. This is not such a thread.

seems like it would be hard to find any remains in the locations these things are supposed to live in.

I mean… do we find bear bones frequently? (dunno, i’m asking)

I think they showed on tv that a carcass would disintegrate in like 2 weeks or a month… maybe less…. so that could explain why no bones or remains… i mean that would probably be more difficult to find that a living one…. and we know how difficult that is.

In my opinion, if a trained scientist gets a position before the public – as is his obligation as a scientist – it is the obligation of the scientific community at large to address the position, and either refute it with evidence or add it to the canon of what we know. We have such a case here; and the scientific proponents for sasquatch are another case.

Filler’s expertise is sufficient to establish the position as legitimate. Now it must be determined whether other evidence supports it. If nothing can be found…well, it is fossils we are talking about. 95% of extinct primates left nothing. That we have found.

Yet.

guess we need more evidence/proof?

i guess one thing is sorting out the facts from the hearsay… especially since some of the evidence can be (and has been) hoaxed…. and a lot of the evidence really doesn’t follow any type of scientific protocol.

really wonder if anyone will solve this in our lifetime.

“question to you guys…. how can it be giganto when the DNA evidence is supposed to say otherwise?”

Well, this is one of crypto’s problems: not sorting out the science from the, er, Ketchum.

OK, fine, we don’t know what she really found yet, and at this rate we never may. But the idea that these are people, or human hybrids, is something that most if not all of the serious researchers consider unsupported by evidence. When I have seen such assertions, I have considered them generally naive. I mean, you may have seen a sasquatch. But unless you are a primatologist, I’m not going to take your word for it that it was human, particularly when you base it on the foot or nose shape, or the animal simply displaying some sign of intelligence that, by ape standards, is not so far-fetched.

Giganto is certainly supported by more evidence than we have seen yet from DNA (which won’t be conclusive until it comes from an identified type specimen).

Um, some do. Some still need those divergent big toes to do what they do with them: climb trees. They’re good-enough for the bipedal locomotion those animals do. No “reason,” therefore, to change a model that works.

The fossil record, now, has several animals that did away with divergence. The evidence supports the continued existence of at least one more.

“Why do WE still have pinkie toes?”

Probably the same generic reason we have a uvula and an appendix. Don’t help that much. Don’t hurt. Evolution isn’t about perfection; it’s about good-enough. I’m not volunteering to try walking without my pinkie toes.

“We have fossil footprints of both humans and australopithecines; are there (credible) human-like fossil footprints before these?”

Yet, you mean? That this specific support doesn’t exist for the theorem doesn’t invalidate it. Scientists intelligently speculate all the time. And in this case, the spine is fruit for some intelligent speculation.

“So why does Green tell us that Dr. Aaron Filler is a Ph.D. anthropologist? [Note: not paleontologist] It’s to establish Filler’s credentials. This is the love side of the equation, the credentials-envy side of the equation, the Darren-Naish-is-one-of-us side.”

Well, there are a lot of us who wish crypto would start acting as a science…and start screening out, with extreme prejudice, “skeptical” “theories” that are backed by no evidence.

I wonder (I may try this) how long I could last on a solar-science website repeatedly posting “the sun is a heat lamp! Stars are a ridiculous concept!” or on a particle-physics website yelling “I am not made up of ‘particles’. See? (with attached video of me poking myself in the arm. Look! Solid!)

Yet we are still tolerating, on crypto websites, the obscene non-theorem that a kneeling elk made the Skookum cast, and the never-ending search for the first piece of evidence – 45 years now! – that the Patterson-Gimlin film was faked.

When we start shutting that stuff down as trollery, crypto will start being a science.

Not before.

I said “We don’t really have much more evidence for the conventional hypothesis than we have for the one under discussion here.”

Really, we don’t have any more. The conventional hypothesis is an interpretation of an incomplete record. As are so many.

We don’t really have much more evidence for the conventional hypothesis than we have for the one under discussion here. The history of anthropology is basically the gradual chipping away of Humans Are Image-of-God by, well, facts. The fossil record gives us no particular reason to believe Filler’s wrong, any more than it convinces us Filler’s right.

(The aye-aye isn’t Image of God? Um, you are gonna need to prove that.)

I’ve never been a sucker for the Giganto theory. It smacks too much – actually, it is – what we always do with the fossil record: this is all we have so it’s all there is. I would tend to think – and might bet lunch money – that sasquatch’s lineage hasn’t been turned up yet. There might be a link or two but we sure don’t have the recent links, IMHO.