Search for the north American ape, Part 2 The great hoax of the 1800s

Humboldt Beacon
Posted: 09/22/2010 02:45:48 PM PDT
By Jason Valenti

In August, the Humboldt Beacon carried the article, “Validating Bigfoot” which described the work of researchers with the Falcon Project, a plan that intends to carry out research in Humboldt County. This is the second in a 4-part series by Jason Valenti, a member of the Falcon Project team. For additional information, contact the writer at jason@sasquatchresearch.net.

In the latter part of the 1800s, everyone thought that the Great Panda was a joke, a hoax and a grand tale that hunters brought back to augment their tales of adventure. I mean, come on. Here is an animal that is not doing anything sophisticated in its environment to hide from predators, and is a two-toned black and white bear, living its life against almost nothing but green background, and is a vegetarian. No one could believe that a bear lived like that. It had to be a tall tale.

Plus, with these slow moving creatures living on a restricted diet of only bamboo leaves, you would think that finding them would be a fairly simple game plan: find the bamboo, and you'll find the Pandas, right?

Wrong.

Their habitat is in the Szechuan province of China, which is geographically the size of Washington state. It is mountainous, very few roads run through much of it, and there are steep mountain cliffs at every turn, making it an extremely difficult area to navigate on foot (and this was the only mode of transportation available in the 1800s).

Proving the existence of the Panda is a perfect example of how a good sized animal can remain elusive for a long period of time in a given region.

It took over 60 years, from when the first expedition was launched in 1869, to find and capture the first panda. Then it was 30+ more years until someone accidentally came across a second one and shot it, thus proving their existence once and for all in 1935.

This “hoax” has now been hunted nearly to extinction.

The difficulty in finding those Pandas had nothing to do with what the Panda was doing to remain elusive, but everything to do with how we humans behave in the environments of our world. As much as people would like to believe that we can live in the deep forest and the jungles on this planet, there are an overwhelmingly large amount of evidence showing that we are not biologically equipped to do so, let alone pursue elusive animals on foot.

How humans do it, how hominoids do it

Humans take down sections of forests and jungles to set up their communities and farms for their basic survival needs.

Hominoids gather, hunt, eat, sleep, reproduce and live happily and easily in the forests that the planet provides them. Humans take years to painstakingly build roads over mountains. Hominoids just climb straight up said mountains.

Humans don't live anything like Hominoids, but we've been trying to track them their way, in their environment, on foot, where none of our modern conveniences, farms or roads exist. And we wonder why we can't find them.

We don't have the physiology to match theirs, and without some type of cooperative survival practices with other humans, we cannot keep up with them. Ecological niches, like where the panda lives, are perfect examples of why Hominoids may dwell in total self sufficiency, and completely out of the average range of humans.

Gathering evidence

The first photographic evidence of the existence of Hominoids came from an expedition in the Himalayas in 1951. Eric Shipton took a series of images of an alleged trackway produced by a Yeti or Abominable Snowman.

Now, the Himalayan ranges are comprised of an area the size of the United States. The terrain is very uneven and is covered with jagged rock, ice and snow in many places. There have been millions of years for this Hominoid to speciate and for its feet to modify through micro-evolution, so that it can navigate this type of terrain well. The shape of the track of these Hominoids, in this part of the world, totally matches the type of foot it would have to possess in order to walk on that type of terrain.

Tracks are the best evidence we have to date that can be verified, studied and explained through the science of ichnology. This is basically the study of plant and animal traces, and has been less used by the average person in “civilized” countries, since humans don't live much in the wilds of the jungles and forests of the world.

Our ancestors didn't have a choice but to be well-educated about the tracks being made in the environment in which they lived. Their very lives depended on being able to identify the animals in their environment for the purposes of either avoiding predators or being able to hunt for food.

(Source not given)