Although of course the eyewitness reports go back a long way for both.

Has anyone considered the possibility that a southern population of gigantopithecines moved south to colonize Oz, while a northern population moved to colonize North America? Because if that can be ruled out, I’m running out of ideas. Unless there is a lot about primate evolution that the fossil record isn’t telling us.

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The study (of “Mungo Man,” Oz’s oldest known modern-human remains) has been controversial because it presents a challenge to the “Recent Out of Africa” theory of human evolution, which holds that all humans are entirely descended from common ancestors who originated in Africa within the last 200,000 years. The study authors proposed that their results support the multiregional hypothesis, which holds that traits of modern humans evolved in several places around the world, and that gene flow created the genetic uniformity seen today, not a recent migration of a single population from Africa.
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Not sure what geology says about the possibility that primate evolution in general might have occurred in the same or a similar way. And I know the fossil record of Oz is silent on this. But the fossil record is also always incomplete. I think that the story of how the Aborigines made it to Oz may have chapters in it that we can’t imagine with what we “know” now. And the story of primate evolution might, as well.

Or the Yowie came to Oz in someone’s boat. OK there, I guess.

I mean, on the “crazy” part. The “far fetched” part. The “out there” part.

In a “science” which someday should really get there, if there’s one “out of the box” idea I have heard that ISN’T crazy, or maybe I should rephrase that to “is testable,” it’s that the Yowie may be a marsupial. That’s a proposition that can be tested, unlike, say, “the sasquatch is a supernatural being.”

I even think I might have propounded that idea here once some time back.

One might think that encounter reports should have picked up on this sooner or later. Then again. Seeing a marsupial without young in its pouch, one wouldn’t know it was one. You’d have to have sighting records of such a thing, if not photos and a body. Now, I’m not aware of any. But with cryptids, absence of evidence is not etc.

As has been pointed out here, it’s a pretty farfetched idea that there’s a native ape in Oz in the first place. A marsupial, from what we know, actually makes MORE sense. Remember, the only native placentals in Australasia are bats. And even they came there from somewhere else – and they had the means. (A not-so-aside here: the Yowie seems to me to have some not-so-primate features, too.)

I haven’t read anything that would even lead me to believe that the Yowie has the cranial capacity of the apes. That, if I am wrong, is simply ignorance of the evidence. And of course there is no reason why the Yowie could not be the product of a parallel evolutionary track in which – as with primates – eyes hands feet and brain worked together over millennia to make each other stronger.

We have too many blinkers that keep us from considering possibilities in crypto. That’s why people go off on these it-can-disappear-orb-and-shapeshift tangents: the blinkers. One of the worst of those blinkers: thinking something is impossible because no one has confirmed it yet.

The sasquatch is a very, very plausible animal. So is the yeti. And too many people – unfortunately including too many proponents – don’t understand this, and make stuff up.

If they are plausible…well, so is a marsupial ape. Says here.

Which would, I should think, mean that if it exists it’d have to have rudimentary sea-faring ability to get here. Which would suggest a species of Homo. We know Australian Aboriginals are fully modern humans, the mungo skeletons appearing to be somewhat earlier than current inhabitants, but none the less “modern” of possibly archaic modern (debated), so the next contender would have to be Erectus. But we have zero fossil evidence for this. Admittedly Australia has a disaterous record of fossil preservation due to the climate.