Getting uNcomfortable with Jeff Meldrum part 2

As promised here is the the continuation of my conversation with Dr Jeff Meldrum!

www.isu.edu/rhi

https://www.paracay.com/sasquatch-legend-meets-science/

https://www.paracay.com/sasquatch-field-guide-folding-pocket-guide/

https://www.paracay.com/sasquatch-yeti-and-other-wildmen-of-the-world-a-field-guide-to-relict-hominoids/

https://www.paracay.com/dr.-jeff-meldrums-relict-hominoid-fun-and-learning-activity-workbook-five-pack/

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Welcome back to the show, my friends. I am your host,
Eric Solodgi. If you've had an uncomfortable experience and you'd
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(00:37):
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(01:01):
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(01:21):
Take a minute and check out the Uncomfortable Link Tree.
It's the single best place that you can find anything
and everything uncomfortable, all in one spot. The link for
that is in the show notes below. I got a
great show for you tonight. Part of me doesn't want
to spoil it, and another part of me wants to
tell you everything about it. So we're gonna meet halfway.

(01:44):
Tonight's guest is an esteemed member of what I like
to consider the topic of bigfoottery. He is responsible for
the Sasquatch Field Guide, Sasquatch Meet Legend meets Science, and
he is arguably one of the most record regnizable names
in sasquatch research. A professor of anatomy and Anthropology in

(02:05):
the Department of Biological Sciences at Idaho State University. Ladies
and Gentlemen, Tonight's guest is an expert, a true expert
on foot morphology and locomotion in primates. If you haven't
guessed Tonight's guests by that, I'd be shocked. So if
you're ready for part two with doctor Chuck Melcombe, let's

(02:27):
get into it.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
Have you found.

Speaker 1 (02:48):
Because my thought here is, if these things are what
we believe they are and they are barefooted, rather they
have they have a thick pad, you know, so they're
probably way more prone to not getting hurt on the

(03:09):
forest floor than we would tender fra it. But do
you see, like through your collection of casts, the ones
that you deem being very solid and no reason not
to believe that these were made by an actual creature.

Speaker 2 (03:29):
Do you see a lot of scarring or injuries or.

Speaker 1 (03:36):
Punctures or things that you would think if you're talking
about something that could be in the neighborhood of six seven,
eight hundred pounds and you know, yeah, they got big feet,
but it's still a very small part of the hole,
you would think that they would take a lot of damage.

Speaker 3 (03:59):
Well, there is that potential, yes, And to put that
into perspective, let's talk about another feature on the sole
of the foot that we have a record of, and
that's the dramatoglyphics. Now, these creatures being primates, just as
we have skin ridge detail on our palms and of

(04:20):
course our distinctive fingerprints, the core patterns on the tips
of our fingers, we have on the soles of our
feet dramatoglyphics as well, even core patterns on our toes.
But they're back a little bit, so they don't you
don't see them on the tips of the toes. They're
further back, so they're on the toe stem and that

(04:41):
rarely comes into contact with the soil. How many examples
of dramaticglyphics do we have across the sample, Well, very few,
maybe between a half a dozen to a dozen, and
some are just traced just hints. Well, why well, the
only way you can a ride at that is to

(05:02):
have the texture of the soul the foot transferred to
the substrate. Therefore, the graininess the consistency of the substrate
has to be fine enough that it picks up that
small scale feature and then it has to hold it

(05:25):
long enough for someone to discover it and then have
the expertise to consolidate it. Or you know, like if
it's in dust, if it's on logging road, logging road,
you might see dramaticglyphics. The problem is every time another
truck drives by, it rains down or it jiggles. Is

(05:46):
like that scene from a Oh I Just Went Blank
Independence Day when the giant ship went over the moon.
Neil Armstrong's footprints just get vibrated out, fly out, Well,
the same thing happens every time a big ponderous logging
truck goes barreling down the road. It literally bounces the

(06:08):
details out of these tracks. So if it's mud, then
it might hold up for a bit longer. You have
to have someone who has the wherewithal to, you know,
mix the plaster just the right consistency so it doesn't
distort because it's too runny. But it's runny enough that
it'll fill all the nooks and crannies without a lot
of tamping and tapping and patty. So I've through experimentation,

(06:32):
I've transferred dramaticglyphics to a very fine soil. Here in
Pocatelo and much of southern Idaho, like in southeastern Washington,
where the first dramaticglyphics were observed, we have very fine,
silty soils, so fine it's sometimes called glacial flower a LUs.

(06:54):
It's like flour, the consistency flour, so it blows all
over place. When it's wet, it's nice and clay picks
up remarkable detail. But but you have to find it.
But over what was my experiment? You know, I made
a footprint, and then I go out and washed my
foot I waited an hour, made another footprint, and I
waited an hour, washed my foot off good, made another imprint. Well,

(07:17):
then I came back and I started making casts. So
this one had been around for like five hours, six hours.
I left one overnight completely before I cast it, and
then I cast it. So we've got the record of
how these things in the weather deteriorate and get erased
just in a matter of hours. Most you know, under underwet,

(07:39):
drizzly conditions with a lot of moisture in the soil
already dramatic glyphics will be obliterated in about eight hours.
So someone that now.

Speaker 1 (07:49):
You keep using dramatic glyphics.

Speaker 3 (07:52):
Oh yes, so dramatic glyphics. Dermal means skin glyphic.

Speaker 1 (07:57):
So you are you are talking about dermal well, right.

Speaker 3 (08:00):
And then we'll transfer over then to your question. So
my point is this is just illustrates here's something we've
looked at very carefully and has gotten lots of attention,
and so I want people to appreciate how rare it
is the dermatoglyphics show up in footprint casts because of
those those reasons, you know, is the proper substrate that

(08:23):
it transfers and then is it transferred to the cast?
Is the thing discovered soon enough before it's weathered away,
and then it gets transferred to the cast properly well?
The features you're talking about, scars or injuries, abrasions, these
types of things are on the same scale. A healed

(08:43):
scar is a line that isn't much grosser larger in
scale than the dermatoglyphics. In fact, it might be finer even.
And so again, what are the odds of that getting transferred,
that getting discovered, that getting properly casted. Well, Lightning did
strike at least once. There's one of the best examples

(09:07):
of dramaticlyphics from the Blue Mountains outside of Walla Walla,
a set that Grover referred to as wrinkle Foot because
of the extensive, extensively preserved dramatic glyphics. And when these
were examined by Jimmy Chilcut, Officer Jimmy Chilcut of Layton
Fingerprint Examiner for Conrod, Texas, who came to my lab

(09:29):
and spent a couple of days. He pulls these out
and he was just amazed. He had just taken a
recertification class specifically on healed scars as identifying characteristics and yeah,
so he saw these examples that had healed scars, just

(09:51):
little hairline scars, and where they ran transverse to the
ridge flow the healing process as the scarring. It was
kind of like taking the thread on a weave and
pulling it because it would cinch up the yep. Well,
what he was so impressed with this. We did a

(10:12):
little latex pull, took some of your baby, you know,
your royal blue, well, in this case, it was dental silicon,
and we made a little applicuet and carefully peeled it off.
He took that to his instructor, and instructor looked right
at and said, yeah, that's textbook healed example of healed
scar Where'd you get this? And he said on a

(10:35):
bigfoot cast footbreak cast? What So then he got really
interested in the bigfoot evidence because of that. So anyway,
that's really the only example that I can point to
for the most part, you know, the unless the feet
are really abused and neglected. Who was it? Peter Burns

(10:59):
shared with me a snapshot, a very impressive snapshot of
a sherpa in the Himalayas. Who you know these guys
when they hire the sherpas to carry as porters. They'll
often give them inexpensive sneakers to protect their feet. They

(11:20):
go up into the high elevations across the snowfields. Well
what do they do. They wrap them up, stick them
in their backpack so they can sell them in the
market for a lot of money. And they still walk barefoot.
But he showed photos of this one gentleman's feet and
the pads, you know, had the skin had hyperture feet,
huge calluses that were cracked and split. So that's kind

(11:44):
of an exceptional example. Most of the sherpa is if
you looked at their feet, they're quite healthy. They're quite
you know, they don't have those kinds of things. So
with the sasquats, you know, it always reminds me. Some
people out there might remember the TV special miniseries called
Shaka Shaka Zulu about the Zulu Empire. Yes, and you know,

(12:07):
Shaka never wore shoes, and there's this scene where he's
being trained in the army and he won't wear his sandals.
He keeps tripping on him and the commander says, well,
you must wear those sandals, you know, otherwise you won't
be able to and he goes, I'll have no problem.

(12:30):
And the guy looks over and there's a dying fire
over here. He reaches down and he flicks a big
coal over and Shaka just walks up to it and
stands on it and grinds it into the ground. Never flinches,
never never wins this or anything. Well, then it shows
when Shaka rose to power, became the commanding officer and

(12:52):
trained his elite troops. They went barefoot everywhere. They did
everything barefoot, and you know they did. They did do everything.
I mean out where there's briars and stickers and rocks,
and and yet the foot, once conditioned, as you put it,
so well, we are tender feet. We keeping our feet confined.

(13:16):
Even over the course of the summer, we can gain
some you know, little kids. I remember when I was
a kid, we used to go barefoot everywhere, but unless
we were going out where the puncture weeds, which were
pretended to be quite frequent. No matter how conditioned your
feet are, you you're no match against a puncture weed.

Speaker 1 (13:37):
With those birds, so well, we we have a lot
of h I live very very close to Lake Michigan,
northern southwestern Michigan. Uh you know, so beaches, would go
to the beaches all the time, and you know, at

(13:58):
the beginning of the summer, your first couple of times,
you're trying everything you can to keep the bottom of
your feet from burning. And by the end of the summer,
you know, it doesn't matter. You're oblivious to it.

Speaker 3 (14:11):
So yeah it you know, And anyone out there who's
done a lot of manual labor, I mean I put
myself through school and and summer jobs. Was a framing
contractor back in the day when we didn't have nail guns.
It was all swinging swing swing, Yeah, that's it. Hammering boy.

(14:33):
You know, the hands, your fingers would thicken up, your
skin would thicken up. Those calluses got to where you could,
you know, stick a needle through them if you had
to drain the blister once in a while.

Speaker 2 (14:45):
But the same thing.

Speaker 1 (14:47):
As a young man, I used to lift weights a lot,
and it didn't take any time at all before you know,
like on the inside of air, you were building up calluses.

Speaker 3 (14:59):
And it's if you look at bear feet a B
E A R the er signe. They have a very
substantial pad and they shed that once in a while
and that will peel off like when they're hibernating, sometimes
you know, as much as three quarters of an inch
thickness of cornified skin. So when they do come out

(15:22):
in the spring, sometimes they are a little tender footed
that quickly hypertrophies and conditions out. But it's they're like
a little baby's bottom. Again, never held a baby bear.
They've got the softest, most delicate little soul pads that
you could possibly imagine. So whether I mean, even humans

(15:43):
go through sometimes periods when you slough off some of
that accumulated you'll go through kind of a molt. You know,
I've experienced, I'm sure other people have experienced where where
the skin just peels away. It's that, you know, it
gets so thick that it the sheer forces are too
much for it, and it and then you go through

(16:06):
a mold and it comes. But yeah, it's interesting. I mean,
there's so many things, so many things that we kind
of lose touch with where we are no longer familiar
with because of our lifestyle, because of our lack of
connection with wild condition. And when you consider those potential

(16:31):
human anatomies and behaviors and responses to things that are
reported for sasquatch. Again, I don't really think you need
to appeal to supernatural or paranormal explanations, because it's it's
all remarkably consistent with our own biology, our own anatomy

(16:52):
and physiology, as well as those of the great apes.
I mean, I think when when doctor Bindernagel wrote his
book that was and I review it, published review, and
that was one of the things I said, is he
had so deftly navigated the literature, the primary literature on
primate anatomy and behavior, and had shown in such a

(17:14):
persuasive fashion how everything described for sasquatch could be accommodated
within reported or known or at least suspected anatomies and physiologies,
even like to eating fish, you know, that was something
that was thought to be odd for an ape. Apeston't
eat fish. Well, in fact they do, it just hadn't

(17:36):
been reported yet. So in that aspect, as in many others,
actually things that sasquatch was doing actually anticipated subsequent discoveries
of the natural behavior and anatomy of apes, as well
as our current understanding of bipedal hormonides early bipedal horminis

(17:58):
like paranthropists or other australapithescenes it uh. I mean the discoveries,
the narratives of Sasquatch were ahead of their time by
multiple decades. And now sciences, I've been saying lately in
some of my talk, science is kind of catching up
with the narrative of Sasquatch.

Speaker 1 (18:23):
It's it's a it's such an interesting thing. The whole
the whole topic is is you know, And I'm I'm
guilty of I'm guilty of being in a camp that
would say I think that Bigfoot is is probably leans

(18:52):
more heavily towards us intelligence wise. I'm probably assigning some
uh attributes to it that are unfounded. I think, I

(19:13):
think naturally, it's just I maybe I want to believe
that they are close, more closer related to us than
a than a dumb animal.

Speaker 3 (19:27):
You haven't been around enough animals. Yeah, they're a lot
smarter than we've historically given them credit for.

Speaker 1 (19:38):
Well, fair enough, And I didn't I didn't mean to,
uh to disparage animals with that comment.

Speaker 2 (19:45):
But and I think it's, you.

Speaker 1 (19:51):
Know, because you have the people that are are very
convinced that these are a a would ape. They are
They're nothing more of that and a branch that we
don't we haven't discovered. And for me, maybe it's just
that I want to believe that they are because you know,

(20:18):
like we're relatively in the same age. You know, I
grew up as a youngster hearing the term missing.

Speaker 2 (20:28):
Link a lot, you know.

Speaker 1 (20:32):
That, and that and that was always very captivating, very
fascinating to me. Well, there's a missing link. What does
that mean? What does that mean?

Speaker 2 (20:38):
You know? Where is it? Where did it go?

Speaker 1 (20:41):
What is it? Is there anything in the fossil record
that confirms Bigfoot as what what you would expect to be.

Speaker 3 (20:58):
Let me let me preface it with a couple of
it's one, it's the the uh. That term missing link
has an interesting history. And when you go back to
early notions, even pre Darwinian notions about the the diversity
of life, one of the views was that living things

(21:20):
were organized or or showed a pattern of what was
called the great chain of being, which went from the
simplest to the pinnacle of creation, which was us. And
so each each of these was a link in a
single chain of increasing complexity. But there seemed to be
such a vast gulf between us and our nearest neighbors.

(21:45):
And this was at a time too, when when very
little was was known, let alone appreciated, regarding the non
human grade apes, and so that gulf was perceived as
even being greater. So there there had to be some
missing links, something that completely because if God is perfect

(22:07):
in his creation, that perfection would be would be represented
in its completion, its completeness, and so it couldn't be
tolerated that there was such a a of a gap,
and so when these fossils were being found, they were
thought to be the missing links. Of course, you find

(22:31):
one and then it seems like, well, there's two more
missing links. I newly discovered one, So there's that. It's
kind of interesting. And of course now Darwin see and
I made the point of pre Darwinian because in Darwin's
book on the Origin of Species there's one illustration, one figure,
and that figure is a branching tree where he was

(22:54):
trying to envision the unfolding of nature as a series
of of bifurcations, where of the splitting as a new
species erodes and differentiated from the stem. Okay, that was
really an insight, a novel insight to comprehend, to interpret

(23:17):
the diversity of nature, all right, So the missing link,
the term is kind of was kind of obsolete, It
was antiquated, it was outdated. Instead, we were looking for
these branches of this bushy tree. So there's that. Then,
So much of this conversation depends on your point of view.
Just as I said that Western Europeans of that time

(23:41):
they had little concept of apes, and when they were
first confronted them with these man like apes, these anthropomorpha,
the human shaped, man shaped creatures, well, for some it
was it was blasphemous. It was an affront to have
something that was so similar. It must be a mockery.

(24:02):
This must be the work of Satan, mocking the creation
of man in the image of God. So so you know,
all other animals had tales, essentially, and these creatures that
look so much like us also were like us in
that they lacked a tail. And they even went so
far as to the term for tale is kuda. And

(24:25):
in the Latin the co dex is the book of
authority that gives authority to the clergy, to the to
the clerics. And so when see when Satan fell from heaven,
he lost his authority, he lost his Codex and his
followers cut off their tails as a sign that they

(24:48):
were following uh, their their their master. And so it's
all this stuff conflated with religious overtones. And and so
you can see where where a lot of the sentiments
the anti evolution and anti you know, anti or viewing
human even human diversity as steps along this acme. You know,

(25:13):
the indigenous populations reviewed as more primitive, more sub human
even I mean, clearly the Western European was the epitome
of the expression of the image of God, you know.
And so anyway, so then the other thing you said
with that notion about perception, how much exposure have you

(25:38):
had when you say that they are not just animals
or you know, you use the phrase dumb animals and
then used another phrase. Now I dropped and I missed it.
But nothing more than that was it? You said, nothing
more than animals? Can you hear? If you stand with me?
Pointed out how pejorative that statement is towards people today,

(26:07):
especially those who have little experience. I mean, it's an
amazing natural experiment in your own home if you pay
attention to the behavior and the antics of your pets,
even if it's a it's a fish. They're smarter than
we've given them credit. They recognize you. They they can

(26:27):
be conditioned to the to the feeding time. They you know,
they anyway, they respond even though they don't have muscles
of facial expression, they don't have an expressive face. Their behavior,
they can show excitement, they can you know, anyway, my dog.
I'm repeatedly amazed at how much they can communicate with
a stare anyway. So with that in mind, when we

(26:53):
then look at this what has become artificially dichotomized into
forest people versus just apes, just apes, not apes, but
just apes. You see, if you spend some time with
those great apes, it is just amazing the behavioral repertoire.

(27:18):
And yet they are not us, you know, they don't.
They have their their their mastery of tool use is
largely mimic mimicry, not innovative. They don't have the manipulative
capabilities for for real precision work find precision grip for

(27:38):
tool making. Interestingly, on that note, you look at the
sasquatch hand. The limited cast imprint material we have suggests
of a thumb that's not rotated in such a way,
modified in such a way for precise grip. Precision grip.
They don't have the modification of the muscles at the

(28:00):
base of the thumb, this drumstick down here, which is
distinctive of human If you look at a chimpanzee or
gorilla hand, it's flat right across here because there isn't
the development of these two clusters of muscles.

Speaker 2 (28:13):
They're very well and it's made more too, exactly.

Speaker 3 (28:18):
So they have a very small they're they're extreme adaptations.
I mean, they are not intermediate. We are our ancestors
are not intermediate between them and us. But that way,
they have evolved in their own way of specialization for hanging,
for arm hanging and swinging and climbing, and so they

(28:38):
have these long, permanently curved digits that and and such
passive tension in their flexers that they can hang. I
watched a chimp hang from one finger, just hang there
and you know, was interacting and was watching what was
going on, and then eventually he went on his business.
But one finger. Can you imagine trying to do that

(28:59):
with body anyway? So you're back to your then your
ultimate question, what's the fossil record? Say? Well, early on,
John Green, a famous you know now, late investigator chronicler
and historian journalist Mini hats He had suggested, given the

(29:21):
fact that we knew of a giant primate in the
fossil record, that perhaps Gigantopithecus offered an interesting candidate as
an ancestor to consider. It's worthy of consideration. I think
because it's the right size, in the right place at
the right time. I mean, other than the lack of

(29:43):
a complete fossil record. We have now up to four jaws.
It was doubled recently at a few thousand isolated teeth,
and there have been arguments about the whether it was
bipedal or not, based on Krantz's arguments about the angulation
the raymi of the jaws in the body of the
corpus and raymi, whether it was you know, had a

(30:07):
neck in between there. If it was its head was
jutting out with the attachment higher back, you know, we
don't have that information. There is there is reason I
got to put the locks. I keep going back out
of the picture. There is reason to suspect that there
was better than a fifty to fifty chance that it

(30:27):
stood upright. And that comes about if you look at
eights common shoulder arrangement. Instead of having the flat and
narrow thorax with the shoulder blades on the side as
direct extensions of the limb for fore and a F movement,
we have this broad, flattened chest, shoulder blades on the

(30:48):
back somewhat upwardly directed shoulder joints for overhead hanging. Now,
we're not as specialized in at it as chimps and
Garriullas are, but hey, all you have to do is
look at a school playground. What do you see? Monkey bars,
jungle gym. I mean, that's that's how we play, as.

Speaker 1 (31:08):
You back back when America is healthy class all over.

Speaker 3 (31:12):
The place, fall in the sawdust or fall on the
matt and break your album. But so uh so, anyway,
the point is right size, right place, right time. Not
sure if it's by Beetle, but I think it's a
pretty good chance. And it has some of the hypertrophy
of those jaws and teeth and lacking projecting canine teeth,

(31:36):
which is characteristic of the artistic depictions as well as
eyewitness descriptions where they have the privilege of seeing the
teeth bared. Commenting about the squared off dentician, no big
projecting things canines. Well, the other possibility there is another hominin.

(31:59):
If by p really is that distinctive wasn't widely present
in amongst the ape radiation, and it characterizes the hominins,
then it would be on this side of the split
with a common ancestor shared with those of our nearest
ape neighbors, the chimpanzees and their forebears. But then given

(32:24):
given the lack of material culture, the total lack of
stone tools, that would suggest an early offshoot of that
you know, basal offshoot from that radiation of hominins. Well,
an interesting example is something like a paranthropist a robust australopithesene,
which is robust. It's robusticity is designating the robustness of

(32:48):
the face, these deep jaws and big flaring cheekbones and
a crest for the increased size of the muscle, but
still on a brain that has on a skull that
has a brain barely larger than a chimpanzees maybe fifty
ccs bigger ten percent bigger than a chimpanzee, but also

(33:10):
lacking the projecting canines to allow side to side grinding,
whereas the locking canines he or the interlocking canines restrict
that side to side kinds of motion and more open
and clothes of a herbivore. But where do we find

(33:30):
paranthropists Africa eight hundred thousand years ago? Perhaps, well, we
don't know. We don't have a good range. It's probably
about one point two to four hundred thousand years ago,
somewhere in that range. I'm a little rusty on the dates,
the latest dates. But if you take paranthropists, which has

(33:50):
a much more complete skull, and we know it's posture,
We know it was by people. We have the skeletons,
we even have footprints. Now it's thought recently described. You
take that skull and you put it next to Patty
behind me there and point for point from the top
of her head to her brow, to her cheekbone, to

(34:11):
her mouth, to her receding chin, to the flaring angle
of her jaw. It lines up. It lines up, and
that skull is distinctive. It's much with that flat face
that those deep jaws. Is a very distinctive combination of
morphologies that was really unexpected, quite astounding, and wasn't fully

(34:34):
described and analyzed. The first graduate student doctoral thesis wasn't
published until the early eighties, And yet we've got Patty
nineteen sixty seven anticipating the very morphologies, the very again,
the unexpected morphologies, anticipating it by at least ten, if

(34:55):
not twenty years.

Speaker 1 (34:57):
And following the blue print.

Speaker 3 (35:01):
Exactly how I mean again, if you were modeling some
hoax in nineteen sixty seven, what would be the pattern
for a giant eight king Kong, a giant gorilla with
a jutting face and horrendous canines, you know, and all
that goes with being a big, monstrous gorilla. We don't

(35:25):
see that in Patty at all. In fact, I've often said,
if I was writing an introductory textbook in physical anthropology
human evolution, and I needed a picture to illustrate our
concept of early bipedal hominyms with small, small brains, lacking tools,
you know, lacking the accouterments of a large social organization,

(35:47):
and so forth, boom, there it is. If it wasn't
already stigmatized as the Patterson Gimlan film, and we ignored
the scale that it was standing seven feet and imagined
her about five feet tall, the five and a half
feet tall, you know, which isn't that small, small, but boom.
You know, no one wouldn't be the wiser. So here Patterson,

(36:10):
just on his own, as a fluke, came up with
a perfect representation of a robust austro epithesy twenty years
before they were understood as such.

Speaker 2 (36:24):
You know, and you point back there to her.

Speaker 1 (36:27):
I have that very same picture down here somewhere.

Speaker 2 (36:37):
You know, we talked.

Speaker 1 (36:39):
UFOs were the thing for me five years old, six, seven, eight,
whatever year it was. My first experience with Bigfoot was
grade school. I went down to the library and there
was a paperback book that was pretty worn, and it
was there were two halves to the book. The first

(37:02):
half of the book was about Bigfoot, and then the
second half of the book was rotated, so you had
to flip the book to read the second half. And
that was the locknest moods.

Speaker 3 (37:19):
Oh yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 (37:21):
And I couldn't tell you how many times I checked
that book out from the library and there was I
think only one one still frame of Patty in that book.
And then it wasn't too much after that. I want

(37:43):
to say it was maybe nineteen seventy seven when I
saw when I first saw the Patterson Gimlin film, and
I believe it was featured on In Search of with
Leonard Demoy in its estate, the jiggling and the shaking

(38:04):
and the eye of focus and and all of that,
I have never wavered that what I was watching was organic.
It was fluid, It moved the way it was supposed to.

(38:24):
It didn't look like somebody in a suit that was
struggling with oversized feet to traverse that uh that that
creek bed, to step over things that might be in
its way. It never struck me as being somebody with
a mask on who was you know, their eye sockets
were probably two inches further out away from the face

(38:46):
than their eyes were and limited tunnel vision of where
they were going. I never never ever got that, even
if even in its roughest form. And then through the
years we've had, you know, stabilization and better stabilization. But

(39:06):
it was just a few years ago that you were
involved with I forget the two other gentleman's names.

Speaker 4 (39:14):
Was it mil And and I was a team and
that that was that was very eye opening because the.

Speaker 1 (39:30):
My son, I've I've talked about this before. My son,
you know, he he is, he is my child and
and as as my daughter. They are.

Speaker 2 (39:39):
They are. They grew up with.

Speaker 1 (39:40):
Me being into this kind of topic. They've been around
me with the UFOs and and all the things. And
the one thing that my son has always said was, yeah,
it looks real. I don't think it's a suit mhm.

(40:01):
But I can't see its feet move, I can't see
it's I don't see its feet bend when it walks.
But then that that latest version that you guys were
involved with that came out and I called him and
I said, hey.

Speaker 2 (40:20):
Bud, the foot flex and you can see it.

Speaker 1 (40:26):
And he pretty much said, oh, bullshit, And I'm like no,
and I sent him. I sent him the link and
it took about an hour. Yeah, and he messaged me
back and he goes, you're right. You can literally see
her foot bend.

Speaker 3 (40:45):
And that was incredible. Yeah, that scene where the foot
swings out and the toes extend dorsal, dorsal word skyward.
That just.

Speaker 1 (41:00):
I mean, it's literally doing what I do when I
don't have shoes on and I'm walking through the house
in the middle of the night and I don't want
to bump, I don't want to kick the wall with
my toe.

Speaker 3 (41:10):
That's right. You know, how was that little like that
little guard between the tile and the kitchen and the carpet. Yeah, exactly,
not to catch that second toe.

Speaker 1 (41:21):
And you know, I mean everything else is considerably clearer.
And what wasn't like twenty six or twenty eight different
versions of that film that were used and.

Speaker 2 (41:35):
Compile like that.

Speaker 3 (41:37):
Yeah, And so they're you know, they're generational copies. And uh,
Bill has been able to establish the you know, sort
of the genealogy that the derivation of copies of copies
of copies. But it's that stacking ability that super that
precise super imposition that allows you to empty size the

(42:01):
common features and and sort of swamp out as idiosyncrasies
that the artifacts of copying from grain to grain. That's
the key that people have to bear in mind. These
were not pixels discrete pixels being being digitally replicated on
another drive. These were a projection of an image that's

(42:26):
already constrained by the crystal pattern of the photosensitive chemicals
of the film emulsion onto another film emulsion with its
own idiosyncrasies of crystal patterning. And so the potential of
you know, introducing edge artifacts and blurry edges and so forth.

(42:51):
It's just it's stunning the difference that superimposition was able
that cause it was able to tease out.

Speaker 1 (43:02):
How how involved were you with the process prior to
getting to see it in its well.

Speaker 3 (43:11):
The technical aspects I made. One one contribution I made
was was identifying, locating, and retrieving three or four I
can't remember now, three or four copies of the film
that were of several generations. But that added to the
data set. And then the technical aspects of the precise

(43:34):
landmark identification and then three dimensional alignments that was carried
out by Isaac. He's the computer vision specialist, so he
writes the algorithms that takes the raw footage and you
know how he does it. I'm not perfectly aware. Bill

(43:55):
was the one who had been the archival repository for
all these copses and then and then he had set
up a very a very nice copy stand with a
high resolution digital camera high for large format digital camera

(44:16):
that he then would run the copies through frame by
frame and take a digital image which then could be
enlarged to the to the limits of the grain and
the pixel density, and then those images were then utilized
by Isaac and then I came back into an offer.

(44:39):
I mean, uh, Bill is an anatomist in his own right.
I mean, in addition to costume to creature effects, he
also does forensic anthropological reconstructions, for you know, for either
living species from the from the bones up, fleshing out,

(44:59):
or taking a fossil specimen and recreating what it might
have looked like. He's done this quite quite stunning replicator
reconstruction of what Gigantopithicus might have looked like, giving it
an upright stance any way of posture, but also giving
it rather rather ape like limb proportions. But it gives again,

(45:26):
if it serves nothing else, it provides an interesting straw
man on the impact of such a creature of such dimensions.
But Bill is, like I said, a great anatomis in
of itself, but that I'm the functional morphologist, not just
the anatomy, but the function, especially the biomechanics and compared

(45:46):
to morphology of bipedalism and the interpretation of the of
the footprint analysis so on. So I can you know
when when when Bill is looking at the image, he's
noticing all the features that relate to the possible costume design.

(46:07):
Foremost in his mind. When I'm looking, I'm identifying muscle
masses and groups and tendons behind the knee, and the
proportions of the cranio facial anatomy and so forth, and
so while also, and.

Speaker 1 (46:22):
You kind of walked right into what I wanted to
know from you when you got to watch that in
its final beautiful, fully restored, the best it's ever been.
And what were the things that jumped out at you

(46:43):
like almost immanis, Well.

Speaker 3 (46:44):
It wasn't you know. Honestly, this is the thing I've
often tried to stress for me personally. There really wasn't
an Aha moment. It was. It was more of a
I told you so, because I have scrutinized this so
many times and in so many ways, looking for all

(47:09):
of these features which to the lay person are obscure,
especially when seen gyrating across the unstabilized image. So the
stabilization and the tremendous enhancement optimization. I don't like to

(47:30):
use the word enhancement because that implies there's information added.
There's no information added, it's just the information there is optimized.
And so now I can say, all right, now, can
you see the flexion of the foot, the toes dorsy flexing.
Now can you see the tendon of the biceps femris

(47:52):
in the hamstrings? You know? Now can you see the
thumb is actually visible and crosses the palm? And there
is no okay sign, There is no walks like in Egyptian.
You know. Not only these these things that that we
have drawn attention to and have discussed at length elsewhere,

(48:15):
are presentable in a way that it's hard for anyone
to look at and deny. I mean, because they're so obvious. Now,
they're so apparent, and they're so vivid and dramatic. I mean,
the the the in house sort of skeptic on the
TV show and I've just I've gotten embarrassed. Now I

(48:36):
went blank on his name, but he's a biologist, broadly
trained biologist, but he he's has a reputation of being
a rather skeptical curmudgeon when it comes to offering opinion
about some of the video pieces that they look at
on that show. And the proof is out there. And

(48:58):
I got a call from the producer he said, I
just had to call you, Jeb. I'm in my car,
but I just got off the phone with ton So
and he reiterated his reputation for being quite the curmudgeon,
and he said he called me out of the blue
and said he had just finished looking at this piece,

(49:18):
and his comment really hit home. He said, you're really
making it hard for me to remain skeptical. And it
was so he was so impressed. The producer was so
impressed that he felt he had to share that with
me right off the bat, while he was still driving
down the street. And so I was so impressed that

(49:39):
I said, well, can you think he would have a
conversation with me? Which we did, and I invited him,
once the thing had aired and so forth, to ride
up and summarize in a little guest editorial in the
Relic Hominoid Inquiry, the online journal that I scholarly journal
that I edit along with my editorial board. He did

(50:02):
a guest editorial summarizing this experience and his impression and
his sort of change of perspective on this as a
result of such a stunning optimization of the film, which
he did. He took a little more guarded position, but
it was very forthcoming and basically said, you know, there

(50:26):
could be something to this. I mean, this really gives
me reason to take a more open minded look at
the whole subject, and that's been published in the RhI.
You can find it in the in the editorial portion.
But yeah, it was it was impressive. It was impressive.
There's no question about it.

Speaker 2 (50:48):
Ah, it's it's.

Speaker 1 (50:50):
It's hard to go back and watch any of the others.

Speaker 3 (50:56):
Now, Oh, yeah, the bar is so high.

Speaker 2 (50:59):
It really is considerably yeah.

Speaker 3 (51:03):
Better, Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, that's that's been
one of the problems. Not well, not problems. I mean,
I've we're blessed with something. It's it's unfortunate that even
now with all the advancements in both the presentation and
the observations, but also now the scientific backdrop fifty years

(51:27):
fifty five plus years later, where in nineteen sixty seven,
sixty eight, you know, when they went to the UBC
University of British Columbia and then to the Smithsonian. I mean,
the mindset at the time did not accommodate the potential
existence of such a creature. There could be only one
species in the bipedal humminen niche. You know, the adage

(51:52):
from ecology is one niche, one species. And so the
difference then to now where instead of seeing horminin evolution
as a single file march, one species giving rise to another,
because there can only be one in that niche at

(52:14):
any time. Now we know, well that's not we painted
to picture the niche too broadly with two broad a brushstrokes.
There are different ways to be a bipedal hominin, and
they can coexist across the landscape. And in fact, there's
evidence now that at any given time there might have
been six, seven, eight, nine, ten different species across the landscape.

(52:37):
If you went in the time machine, went back, zip
back several tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands a
half a million years ago, stepped out, you know, walked around,
you might bump into any of a number of species,
and that those some of those lineages have persisted until
more recently than would have ever been imagined possible because
it was kind of thought, well, okay, maybe we can

(52:58):
accommodate these, you know, multiple species of basically what are
basically bipedal eight. But once Homo, once our genus emerged
from that bush, then it was an exclusive club. Well no,
sooner had they made that assertion than Richard Leakey discovers
four different species three hominins in paranthropists in East Africa

(53:22):
coexisting at the same time, and one of them was
quite advanced, you know, had a brain that was about
fifty percent bigger than a chimpanzees instead of only ten percent.
But yet there were still lingering hominins, the Homo habilis,
Homo rural fenses that were little that were really kind

(53:43):
of austral advanced. Australibuitessines advanced only in the reduction in
size of their premolars and a slight increase in brain
size and more more efficient use of very primitive stone tools,
which now they've also shown australapithescenes as soon as they
got the hands free, they had to do something with

(54:04):
their hands, and so they were even the australipithescenes were
using little flight tools to carve away the last scraps
of meat off the bones. You know, they weren't in
bows and arrows, but they were. You know, you just
break off and you can have a scalpel sharp flight

(54:27):
that can slice through that leather skin and cut through
those tendons and spare your you know, you've given up
your sharp piercing canine teeth.

Speaker 1 (54:37):
So am I mistaken or do I remember hearing or
reading something relatively recent that it's now believed that those
branches that you're talking about that there had been some

(54:57):
cross mingling.

Speaker 3 (54:58):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, there was some con mingling. So
we have, you know, Homo sapiens in Homo neander to lensus,
we're sharing sharing beds, sharing sharing jeans, and Denisibans, which
were cousins to the Neanderthals. Further too, they were spread
largely further to the east that they were co mingling

(55:21):
with Homo sapiens as well. So modern Homo Sapiens have
remnants of their genes, even Homo heidlbrigensas, the species that
preceded us but yet persisted. There's there's a specimen of
heilbrigensas that was recovered outside of Beijing that the tentative date,

(55:42):
although there still remains some controversy over the dating twelve
to twenty thousand years ago. Well, yeah, homost sapiens were
in the neighborhood at least seventy five thousand years ago,
and Homo sapiens had been around, if not around the block,
they were over in another continent that they were already
on the scene three hundred thousand years ago, so there

(56:05):
was overlap with Homo herlebrigensas with Homo neanderthal lenses Homo denisovan.
And then it turns out the hobbit Homo floridienzis was
down in Southern Asia, Southeast Asia, and that looks like
a remnant Australopithesene for all intents and purposes. So it
had to migrate from East Africa about two million years ago. Well,

(56:29):
let's not use migrate, because that conjures in people's minds,
you know, putting the old hobosac on over your shoulder
and marching into the sunset. Their range simply expanded into
available habitat as it came into being. They occupied it
maximally and spread all the way into Southeast Asia. But

(56:53):
you know they were around until at least fifty thousand
years ago, if not to the present Fastening book, I
plugged one person's book, which hasn't gotten the exposure that
I would hope it would. But doctor Gregory Fourth, a
cultural anthropologist from the University of Alberta, wrote a fascinating

(57:13):
scholarly work based on his dissertation research and so forth.
In Southeast Asia, about the image of the wild man
in Southeast Asia, the persistence of these stories of these
little people for about little three three and a half
feet tall. But he wrote a more recent, more accessible book,
Between Man and Abe, and I mean he comes right out.

(57:35):
He doesn't beat around the bush anymore. Here are two
points two dots. The only logical solution to the remarkable
similarity so much of the described characteristics of the Ebu
Gogo or other by other names, the relict horminoid and

(57:58):
the Australia pithesy or a home of or as he
endsas is that we connect them. We draw a line,
straight line between them, connecting the dots. I mean, he
makes that argument, but still people are reluctant to I
don't know why. I don't know what the resistance is now.
Well Kuhn Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the very influential, insightful

(58:21):
book Scientific Revolutions, who coined the term paradigm shift. He said,
very preciently, sometimes it takes the entire preceding generation to
turn over, to die off and push up daisies before
the new idea can take root and sprout and flourish

(58:42):
and be accepted by the next generation. And I think
we're right on the cusp. The notion of the single
species hypothesis is still casting the shadow. Some of those
old adherents are still the gatekeepers, journal editors and society
presidents and department chairs. But give it another five years
and I think we'll see a new faculty with new

(59:07):
assistant professors with tenure who have been raised with the
notion that yes, there can be relic commonoids. You know, yes, Virginia,
there is, there are, And then we'll see it take off.
So I'm hoping to stick around long enough to witness
some of that happened.

Speaker 1 (59:29):
I wanted to go back real quick to gigantipithegus fossil
evidence of a bunch of teeth, four jaws. Has there
been any part of.

Speaker 2 (59:48):
The foot?

Speaker 3 (59:50):
No, nothing that's been identified or attributed.

Speaker 1 (59:53):
Nothing, because wouldn't that be wouldn't that be?

Speaker 3 (59:58):
We're telling yeah, could depending on the part of the foot.
There's a lot of I mean, I wrote a paper
co author to paper with a colleague of fifth metatarsal.
The little long bone in the fifth digit of the
foot was discovered and attributed to Australopithecus and given its

(01:00:24):
superficial similarity in size and proportion to the human condition.
The author concluded, well, there you have it. The foot
was essentially moderate with full blown arches. Well it wasn't
either or it's not like evolution flipped a switch and
you went from non arch to arch. The emergence of

(01:00:48):
the stabilization of the foot was very mosaic, very sequential,
and the first part to stabilize was the lateral column.
But we took that same bone, those same measurements and
compared it, compared those measurements across a much wider represent

(01:01:09):
representative sample of other hominins, grade apes, various human populations,
even monkeys, baboons, you know, terrestrial monkeys, and there was
tremendous overlap. There was. You were just as justified in
saying that, well, Lucy had a foot just like a

(01:01:30):
gorilla as you had insane. She had a foot just
like a human because actually, in the proportions that they
chose to measure and report, which didn't didn't capture the
nuance of qualitative anatomical features, showed that they were remarkably similar.

(01:01:53):
There was lots of overlap in many of the metrics.
The indices that they derived from their measurements, but you
know those are It's like I say, and this is
a crude example, but if you brought out an apple
and you brought out an orange, and the only way
you compared them was to compare their height to brettth ratio,

(01:02:13):
guess what, you probably couldn't tell the difference between the two.
It takes a lot more. You have to really understand
the anatomy. You can't just rely blindly on simplistic metrics.
I mean, metrics can capture a lot of aspects of
shape and thereby discriminate things on the basis. But if

(01:02:38):
you're too superficial or you you know, with an agenda
in mind, select indices that support your narrative that these
are just little people walking on our feet, you know,
then you emphasize the similarities rather than point out the
remarkable disparities that have biomechanical significance. So it's always frustrating

(01:03:03):
because that paper first got cited over and over and
over again as evidences, as as documentation of the presence
of arches in the in the austrolar Fittessene foot everything else.
When you look at the whole skeleton that has been
assembled from other individual pieces and other specimens doesn't support

(01:03:24):
that in the least, not in the least, and the
footprints attributed to the same at least this grade of
evolution shows mid tarsal pressure ridge, which attests to flat
flexible feet, which was the primitive condition for early bipedal hominet.
They walked on flat flexible feet for probably seven million years,

(01:03:44):
nearly at least five or six millions before the arch
started to you know, by the time you get to homohydlbrigenzas,
then there's you.

Speaker 1 (01:03:54):
Know when you say that, when you when you say
those numbers, isn't it just like almost impossible to fathom?

Speaker 3 (01:04:07):
Well, yes, yes and no. I mean it's kind of
like our earlier discussion about animal intelligence. If you if
you're not preoccupied with if you haven't been extensively exposed,
then sure it's hard to imagine. It's hard to when
we start throwing around half a million, three million, seven million,

(01:04:28):
What does that and what does that really mean in
our frame of reference day to day, You know, it's
hard to fathom. But if you are immersed in it,
I mean, if you as a doctoral student, you you eat, sleep, breathe,
I'll stop there it. You know, it becomes part of you.

(01:04:50):
You you appreciate it to the story and it is
ultimately storytelling. But it's storytelling that's very informed. It's non
fiction storytelling. It's you know, sometimes historical dramatization, but it
becomes very real, it becomes very coherent. It flows, and

(01:05:12):
you understand the ebbs and the tides and and and
the diversity of the organisms and how real. You know,
just as as the your impression of of Patty evolved
and was amplified by greater clarity of depiction, you know,

(01:05:34):
as I've come to be to be extremely familiar with
these not only species names, but individual specimens, you know
sometimes who are given familiar names just to enhance that familiarity.
You know it it becomes very clear for me in

(01:05:55):
the same way. And so you know this is isn't
you know not that this get into a creation evolution discussion,
but you know, people should know I'm not a I
don't lack of faith, a spirituality, how whatever you want

(01:06:16):
to call it, as such as a person who whose
fascination with the evolutionary history of life on this planet.
For me, it's just the there's no problem, no matter
how persuaded or unpersuaded, lack of persuasion I may embrace

(01:06:36):
at the moment, but that way, there's no nothing offensive
in describing the natural processes, which if I do believe
in a god, it is a god of nature, a
god that is not apart from and creates by edict,

(01:06:57):
but is a part of and creates by the application
of natural principles. Not even that he is necessarily the
author of those principles, but operates within the system. And
what and what he is part of is a grand

(01:07:17):
divine evolutionary story where from his his current vantage point,
he's able to facilitate the progression of other individuals that
will eventually it may or may not attain his his station,
or some inkling of it. I mean, if if we

(01:07:40):
are literally his children, or even figuratively only his children,
he would want us. We're not just pawn pieces on
the chessboard or whimsical you know, figures that he he
amuses himself with we. We are his offspring uh in

(01:08:01):
in either a literal sense or a figurative and spiritual sense,
and he wants just as we want the best for
our children. He wants to us to experience the ultimate
potential of humanity. So anyway, I.

Speaker 1 (01:08:18):
That's that's very interesting, and I know you're trying to
get away from that, but I want to touch on it.

Speaker 3 (01:08:24):
Uncomfortable talking about it.

Speaker 1 (01:08:28):
You know, I'm I'm sounds like I'm in the same
boat with you. I have a faith, I have a
belief I have I have a relationship that is very
much more a personal relationship than attributed to any building.

Speaker 2 (01:08:53):
Or institution, you know, yeah, institution.

Speaker 1 (01:08:58):
And I've said this in some of my episodes where
I've we've talked about the possibility of extraterrestrial, ultraterrestrial or
interdimensional life. And I know for someone with your background,

(01:09:19):
those are those are tough things to try to even
get into a conversation with. But like I've made the
comment before, if you took every every species, every every
little animal, from the tiniest little shrew to you know,

(01:09:42):
all the way up through us common modern human and
you put them all in a lineup, and you looked
from from one end to the other, what's the one
thing that does not look like it belongs here?

Speaker 3 (01:10:05):
Oh? Oh well yeah, well yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:10:08):
Everything else has tails and hair and fur or claws
or teeth, you know, sharp things. You know, even even
sasquatch in within that parameter would look more, would be
more proper than us. You know, So was it is

(01:10:31):
it divine intervention? Was it an alien intervention that altered
our DNA to make them make us slightly different than
everything else? You know, there's a number of different viewpoints
on it, but the one thing is that we stand
out so dramatically from everything else. Even though we are

(01:10:56):
very close to gorillas and monkey and chimps, you know,
as far as how we look and how we behave
and how we take care of our young, there's so
many similarities and everything, but we are still significantly different.

Speaker 3 (01:11:12):
There are differences. Yeah, I think there are more differences
of degree rather than differences of kind. And so you know,
when you when you consider the fact that we share,
say with chimpanzees, depending on whether you're looking at the
whole genome or the mitochondrial genome or whatever, you know,

(01:11:35):
anywhere from ninety what is it ninety four to ninety
six or seven percent identity, it's in that in that
three or four percentage points that we differ. I mean,
you can flip that around and say that not that
chimpanzees are identical to us, But we have ninety six

(01:11:55):
percent Chimpanzee DNA and U S and that and so
and so. It amazes me or impresses me the amount
of divergence that was possible with just a modification of
a handful of genes and UH and a few chromosomal

(01:12:19):
rearrangements which have also had some dramatic impacts. Now, whether
that required extraordinary interventionary means to achieve or whether that
see and if that were the case, I would expect
there to be a more abrupt change. How is it

(01:12:43):
that Mother Nature, if you will, was able to propel
a primate lineage so close to us, but just wasn't
able to not just across the finish line yet in
the fossil record? You know? This was it? In that
search for missing links? You know, people say, well, look

(01:13:03):
at there's the apes and there's us. There's this. You know,
like you said, you as you framed it, we don't
seem to belong here. We're so subtly different, even though
we share so much in common. How do you explain
this was? This was the medieval perplex perplextion was how
do you explain that gulf? And of course They're their

(01:13:24):
experience was with your basic farm animal. They didn't have
exposure in Europe to chimpanzees and orangutans and gorillas that
look so much more like us. That's why it was
so astounding when they were finally brought to Europe. But
if you then, and so I'm going to tell my students,
you know, would you if evolution were too you would

(01:13:45):
expect a missing link right between our nearest neighbor us
and them. Well, you look in the fossil record, and
what do you find. You look at at the Australia
pithesenes and you couldn't ask for a better missing link,
something that's exactly intermediate between chimpanzees and humans. And then
in fact you find there's this whole sequence of missing

(01:14:08):
links that span that chain of being remarkably smoothly through
the millennia, the more more than the millennia through the
last seven million years since the divergence from a common
ancestor with chimpanzees. That's why you know you have to
when you appreciate, when you understand the fossil record, you
know notions that, oh, we can put all the fossils

(01:14:30):
for human evolution in a shoe box. No, that's not true.
That never was true. But I mean maybe at one time,
way back, it was true. But I mean there are
rooms full, cabinets and drawers full of skeletons of our
ancestors and relatives that have gone extinct and have passed

(01:14:53):
on that are not just haphazard. It's not just a
smattering bunched up by by the turbulence of a global deluge,
a flood, but it's it's this orderly succession of remarkably
transitional evidence of transitional evolution from one species to another,

(01:15:18):
all with that same trajectory. I mean we have some yeah,
we have some collateral branches that kind of but still
the overall trajectory of increasing brain size, more sophisticated tools,
more you know, a tendency for reduced robusticity of the
skeleton and muscular system. I mean, that was the big

(01:15:38):
thing that really set us apart. And you can do
that just by duplicating one gene, by duplicating the Mayostaten gene.
Suddenly are instead of walking around like you know, like cults,
which our predecessors did, I mean they were, they were
great apes essentially with bigger brains. Suddenly now you knock

(01:15:59):
out or you do implicate that that gene that that
moderates that muscle development, and you get we get a nice, lean,
mean running machine. We get changes to the foot that
allow us to walk and run great distances with tremendous endurance.
We get selection for UH physiology that allows us to

(01:16:20):
run with greater endurance than just about any other animal
out there. You know, it's just anyway, it's a fascinating story.
I I just don't think again, It's just like with Bigfoot,
the more you know, the less you have to appeal
to magic. You know, one man's magic is another man's
science once you come to comprehend the principles involved, and

(01:16:44):
and so same with with this story. The more you know,
you know, I taught human evolution and I taught biological
evolution for years and years and years, so I'm intimately familiar.
I mean, I'm not an expert. I mean, my my
my forte is anatomy and functional morphology and locomotion of

(01:17:05):
the primates. But I'm you know, deeply deeply versed and
widely read and in in these topics, and so you know,
I'm not just waving my hands in the air talking
of making stories up to that sound good around the campfire,
But these are you know, I tell you when the

(01:17:27):
first time, and you know, it's just like as you
were relating the impact that that one little book that
you checked out over and over again add on you.
When I was a brand new graduate student, you know,
heading out from from Utah, you know, to the Big
Apple to go to graduate school at sunny Stonybrook State

(01:17:49):
University of New York at Stonybrook on Long Island. We
hadn't been there for about a month when that summer
was the Ancestors exhibit, the first time that so many
of these remarkable original fossils were brought for an exhibit
in one place. And I mean there was huge preparation,

(01:18:12):
huge security. These are fossils that are so significant, you know,
they're kept in vaults in museum collection rooms, and they
were under bulletproof glass and so on. But to sit
there and you had to go through security. You couldn't
take in your bags, couldn't take strollers, you know, you
had to check all this stuff in and just going.

(01:18:33):
Couldn't take pictures even because the flash can damage, you know,
and so but to sit here and look at at
this empty, well it seems empty, A bony face, a
facial skeleton, you know, peering back at you from behind
that three inch bulletproof acrylic box. And realize that was

(01:18:58):
a living creature sure three and a half million years ago.
You know. It's like you talked about being able to fathom.
I mean, that was what was amazing, that the sense
at that and to realize that there was continuity there,
you know, for all I know, I could be carrying
a gene, a copy of a gene that was once

(01:19:20):
in that creature. You know, it's just really amazing to
think about it. And uh, there was just something about
seeing those original fossils and I had it had a
tremendous impact on the public at large. Lots of people,
you know, shared the same kind of experience. The only
you know, I've had the opportunity to go out and

(01:19:42):
dig fossils and and it's it's amazing experience. And I
for to help people to understand it a little better.
If you've ever been panning for gold is one example.
You're sitting there slashing that, slashing that, and then all
of a sudden, that little glint and there's a there's
a flake of gold and this feeling it just you know,

(01:20:04):
the gold fever kind of. I mean, it's just but
it's just that that astounding discovery of that rare, little
rare flake of gold there and picking that out. It's
the same thing when you're sifting through or you're splitting
open a rock and there's a tooth of a creature
that lived maybe not three million years ago, but thirty

(01:20:26):
million years ago, and you know that was part of
a living creature. It's an organism. It's just like finding
that little piece of rare gold and that was then
amplified to where you're not looking at just a little fragment,
but here's the skull of one of these creatures. It's
just yeah, it's hard.

Speaker 2 (01:20:45):
To amazing, absolutely amazing.

Speaker 3 (01:20:50):
You know, people ask me what do you do for fun?
I go to work. I learn all these interesting things
and all this research, and I have chanced.

Speaker 2 (01:21:02):
There could be worse things.

Speaker 1 (01:21:05):
I mean, that's the one of the things that comes
off about you, comes across very well, is that you
are you are very You're very into your thing.

Speaker 2 (01:21:20):
It it it it just it exudes out of you.

Speaker 1 (01:21:25):
And I mean I've watched I can't tell you how
many interviews that you've been on. And you know, we're
at two hours and forty minutes now, and you you're
just you're You're always pleasant, You're always very.

Speaker 2 (01:21:42):
Accessible.

Speaker 1 (01:21:44):
It's just it's been an absolute pleasure having you on
kind of a kind of a bucket list thing. I
guess not to not to gush over it.

Speaker 2 (01:21:53):
But it was. It was very good of you to
make the time to do this.

Speaker 1 (01:21:58):
I know I kept you a longer than I thought,
but certainly appreciate it.

Speaker 3 (01:22:03):
It's been a pleasure. It's been It's always fun to
to explore and to share those experiences with other people,
so I always appreciate the opportunity. So and there's a
great conversation that makes all the difference.

Speaker 2 (01:22:20):
It does.

Speaker 1 (01:22:21):
It is that is an important thing that is unfortunately
being lost on a lot of people nowadays. Yep, once again,
doctor Jeff Meldrum, would you please let everybody know what
you have going on.

Speaker 3 (01:22:38):
Websites, books obviously if you've not read And I'm always
surprised that people who who claim to be interested in
this subject matter are involved in it, have not or
are even unaware that I've written a book. But sasquatch
Leisure Meet Science, not to hawk a book, but it

(01:22:58):
is the primer, It's the is the big Foot one
oh one that you really need to read. So I
still encourage even though a number of years have passed
and I'm working on a sequel right now. My big
summer project is working together with Doug Hychek, who's producing
a documentary series Sasquash Leisure Meet Science two two point

(01:23:21):
zero or whatever. I'm writing a book to go with
that that will eventually be available. Obviously it'll lag a
little bit behind the release of the documentary in order
to synchronize it, but that's the place to start. I
don't have a web page per se, but I do
have a Facebook page that serves as my sort of
bulletin board, and it's under my full name, Don Jeffrey Meldrum.

(01:23:46):
And as far as where I might be speaking publicly,
if you scan back down through that Facebook page I've posted,
I should probably repost it so a teaser to come
up a calendar for this year of the different speaking
engagements public speaking engagements. There's actually more than that that

(01:24:08):
are you know, private, you know, school classroom presentations and
other institutions and so forth. But encourage you to, you know,
do the research, selecting the the venue summer are better
than others. There's there's no getting around that. But oftentimes

(01:24:28):
very worthwhile, good programs with a variety excuse me, of speakers,
a variety of topics and what else. Oh, the Relic
Commanoid Inquiry for those of you that are ready for
a little more meat on the bones. It's very easy
to get to. It's www dot I s U dot

(01:24:50):
e d U slash r h I. The Relic Commonoid
Inquiry is a registered scholarly journal for in our thirteenth year.
I'm the managing editor, but I'm assisted extensively with a
editorial board of a dozen academics or professionals, and we

(01:25:12):
have research papers, extensive essay style, in depth book reviews,
news items, editorials, translations of historical papers and items, and
it's just lots of good stuff. Obviously, it's a narrow scope,
so it's taken a while to kind of get ahead

(01:25:33):
of steam. But the accumulation over the past, you know,
thirteen years, has produced some really great stuff, and so
I encourage you to take a look at that.

Speaker 1 (01:25:46):
Okay, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, Doctor Jeff Meldrum,
Thanks again so much, sir.

Speaker 2 (01:25:55):
It's an absolute later