Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre(43)
Where did it come from? How did it get here? And are there more than one? I mean, there has to be, at least in general. We’re not talking about magic. This thing’s not immortal. There’s gotta be more of them to make more of them. But how many? And how have they stayed hidden—no, that’s not accurate—hidden enough to remain unproven? How does an animal this big remain off the books for so long?
Dan just learned how to bypass all the cracked windows. Time for bed. I’ll put the coffee in the fridge. Gotta make it last.
From Steve Morgan’s The Sasquatch Companion.
Some theories surrounding the origin of Sasquatch trace its lineage back to a prehistoric ancestor called Gigantopithecus. From teeth and fossilized jawbones recovered in Asia (first discovered by anthropologist G. H. R. von Koenigswald in 1935), it can be hypothesized that this super ape stood as tall as ten feet, weighed up to eleven hundred pounds, and existed as late as 100,000 years ago.
The lack of a complete, or even partial, skeleton has left the posture of this creature to the imagination. Most artistic renderings paint Gigantopithecus as a stooped, long-armed, knucklewalker, while dissenters such as Dr. Grover Krantz postulate erect, bipedal locomotion. In his book Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence, Krantz described his reconstruction of a Gigantopithecus blacki skull based on recovered jaw fossils. From this process, he determined that the position of the neck “indicates a fully upright posture.”
Not only does Krantz’s hypothesis corroborate eyewitness accounts of Sasquatch’s humanlike gait, the thesis of Gigantopithecus’s terrestrial, rather than arboreal, existence would also explain the physical makeup of Bigfoot’s feet. Almost no cast or photograph of a Sasquatch footprint shows the traditional simian gripping digit. The mystery of its absence is solved when we consider that its ancestor Gigantopithecus, whose size and weight prevented life in the trees, had little evolutionary need for this feature.
If both hypotheses are correct, that this prehistoric mega-simian was both upright and ground dwelling, it would have stood in good stead to survive the climatic catastrophe that supposedly caused its extinction. According to the fossil record, the last Gigantopithecus blacki (the largest of its species) died out roughly 100,000 years ago, when the jungles of South Asia retreated into open grassland. But what if, as Darwin himself lamented, the fossil record is “imperfect”? What if the reason no recent Gigantopithecus remains have been discovered in central China is because Gigantopithecus simply moved away?
Some might have made it to the mountains of Hubei, where their descendants live today as the Yeren. A second group could have trekked farther west into the Himalayas, becoming what we now refer to as the Yeti. And a third, intrepid offshoot may very well have braved the northern wastes in search of an entirely new world.
For decades, it has been theorized that, like the first humans, Gigantopithecus migrated from Asia to America during the last great ice age, across the now-submerged Siberian land bridge of Beringia. This theory has recently run into some controversy, however, as the conventional “inland ice corridor” narrative has been challenged by evidence pointing to an earlier, coastal route. However, corridor or coast, it is logical to assume that these two hominid species reached the new world alongside one another.
This co-migration would explain the many behavioral adaptations that differentiate Sasquatch from other modern great apes. Nocturnal behavior, for example, would have been an excellent way to avoid the sharp eyes, and sharper spearpoints, of daylight hunting Homo sapiens. Likewise, their general expertise at stealth in day or night conditions would have been vital in the open, treeless tundra of Beringia. Coupled with swift, energy-efficient legs*2 and an upright posture to watch for danger, they could have not only survived the Beringian steppe but also the human “blitzkrieg” that annihilated so many other Pleistocene mammals.
The term “blitzkrieg,” or “lightning war,” comes from the early days of World War II, when the speed and shock of Adolf Hitler’s mechanized forces caught an unprepared Europe utterly by surprise. That is why the “blitzkrieg theory” has been used to describe the mass extinctions of large animals that were slaughtered by early humans. Like the Polish cavalry and the French Maginot Line, the wildlife of Europe, Eurasia, and finally the Americas, were caught completely unprepared. Regardless of how much climate is to blame, there is no denying that human hunting contributed to the greatest mass extinction since the death of the dinosaurs. In North America alone, entire species vanished within a thousand years of humanity’s arrival.
The ability to elude humans would not have been exclusive to North America’s great apes. According to the human paleobiogeography hypothesis, present-day Africa enjoys such a plethora of large animals because their ancestors evolved alongside ours. Taking evolution in steps, adapting to humans before they became fully human, spared Africa the horrors of blitzkrieg. It may also have spared some of the megafauna of southern Asia as well, including a certain giant ape.
We know that proto-humans such as Homo erectus began migrating out of Africa somewhere between 1.8 and 2.1 million years ago. They might not have been us, but they were enough like us to sound the alarm for Gigantopithecus. By the time fully evolved Homo sapiens arrived in Asia, the gentle giants would have had enough warning to avoid us altogether.
*1 In June of 2019, under the Freedom of Information Act, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released a twenty-two-page file detailing its laboratory analyses of hair “attached to a tiny piece of skin.” The sample, brought to them in 1976 by the Bigfoot Research Center, was determined to be “of the deer family in origin.”