I think that the answer is simply that the Yowie have had 50000 years of Aborigines throwing spears at them. There are Aboriginal accounts of Yowie being killed and eaten. Also, Yowie are similar to humans in some respects - there are good ones and there are bad ones.

Just wondering out loud.

Where did sasquatchs come from.?

I realise some people believe sasquatch or its descendents, gigantipithecus, possibly used a pre Miocene? land bridge to cross the Bering Strait.

But given that “…sites where Gigantopithecus blacki remains occur along with Homo erectus, such as at Tham Khuyen in Viet Nam, and in the Hubei and Sichuan provinces of China (Ciochon et al., 1990).”

If the American scenario is viable then Australia appears even more plausible due to its closer proximity to these sites.

All you need is a land bridge.

Just like America, Australia does not appear to have any monstrous sized hominidae/pongidae precursors yet found in the fossil record.

Maybe one day.

It is very important to remember that Australia has been floating around in the Southern Ocean for the past 40 million years or so. This is about five times the generally accepted timespan for hominid evolution.

Although currently less so, Australia has remained in splendid isolation for all of that time. Consequently, I believe that the continent has been a quarantined breeding ground that has experimented heavily in all things biological, plant and animal. Some of this evolution has been parallel in nature – bipedalism and intelligence, but most has been wild experimentation without boundary. Sure, some things have slipped across from the Old World prior to European exploration - and you can add rats, cats and bats to the list. I have even read suggestions in New Scientist magazine that elephants may have reached Australia in recent geological history. That is not so surprising as elephants have been known to traverse more than 50 kms (31 miles) in open water, but this might be a new record.

The point is simply that Australian biota, without doubt, did not arrive here - it evolved here! This leads to many supporting examples with fully unrealised consequences.

Cook and Banks on sending samples of a platypus back to Britain after their voyages of the early 1770’s were confronted with accusations of fraud or of “stitching up” evidence on the long boring journey home. How else could you account for an aquatic egg-laying mammal having a soft pliable bill shaped like a duck’s, webbed feet, sleeky grey fur and a poisonous spurred leg? They were instead a previously “unknown” form of mammal - Australian monotremes.

Most visitors to Australia associate this continent with herbivorous kangaroos. In earlier times, some kangaroos were carnivorous and some single toed. These are of course, another mammalian form - Australian marsupials. Some related remnant marsupial populations are found in South America from the period when the two continents were joined.

In Victoria recently, a fossil rat was found that might represent another early/intermediate mammalian form. Who knows exactly were the Yowie fits into the Australian enigma?

The Yowie are not hominids. With three, four and five clawed toes and numerous other bazaar adaptations and variations, they can best be described as hominoids and typically part of the broad Australian experiment! Clearly, there is also a high degree of speciation. Since hominid evolutionary studies hold the widely accepted paradigm that our species originated “out of Africa”, this should not be applied to hominoid studies of the Yowie, since they are obviously and significantly different!

In conclusion, I regard discussions of Yowie migration as being misguided and irrelevant. Misguided because this is an attempt to make the Yowie fit prevailing models of hominid migration and evolution; and irrelevant because the Yowie have their origins here in Australia. Afterall, Aboriginal (Koori) oral history maintains that “they were here before us”!

As for “evidence”, conventional forms are still waiting to be found. Meanwhile, there is a wealth of consistent anecdotal and other evidence across Australian society found in this book that supports the case. To quote Dr Carl Sagan, the “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.

Mike

As I stated in another post what if these beings are far, far older than homo sap, and his near relatives, and developed in an entirely different way? As folcrum points out it is rather difficult to to get a spotlight on a Yowie and I don’t remember reading any stories about Sasquatch being caught in headlights or spotlights. These beings may be far more different from homo sap than homo sap is from a fish in the ocean. JMHO

WDT