Hominid (38 page)

FACT OR FICTION?

A
lot of different factors led to the creation of
Hominid
. Since I was a kid, I have always been fascinated by the idea of bigfoot. I asked my kids—my oldest is eight—if they knew about bigfoot, and they did as well. Bigfoot is pervasive in American culture.

The idea for this story came about when I was conducting research for a different book,
The Belial Children
. I was looking for information about giants interacting with humans. Everywhere I looked, I found mention of bigfoot. And a seed took root.

When I first came up with the idea for
Hominid
, though, it was going to go in a completely different direction. I had just seen a documentary on the 1959 deaths of a group of nine college students in the Ural Mountains of Russia. Their broken bodies were found, but the autopsies were withheld from the public for years. The documentary made the case that the menk—the Russian name for bigfoot—was responsible for the gruesome deaths. So when I first started thinking about a bigfoot book, that event stuck in my head.

But then I started doing more research. First off, if you’re looking to do research on bigfoot, go for the books and not the websites. The websites tend to provide good examples of incidents, but I was looking for something that drew conclusions from those incidents.

So with the Russian Yeti documentary fresh on my mind, I started looking for reports of violent attacks by bigfoot, sasquatch or yeti—and I was coming up empty. Oh, they threw trees, chased some people, and seemed to really dislike dogs, but there just wasn’t a lot about them attacking humans, which seemed odd.

Almost all the research agreed that the beings were between six and eight feet tall, although some suggested that ten to twelve feet might be possible. And reports consistently said they were seriously fast. And I thought, if that’s the case, if they wanted to catch humans, or to hurt humans, they should have no problem doing so. So why weren’t there more reports of injuries from bigfoot encounters?

I realized that if I wanted to write a book on bigfoot, even though it’s fiction, bigfoot needed to peaceful toward humans—because that fit with the actual encounters.

And even though
Hominid
is indeed a work of fiction, there was a lot of research that went into making it
believable
fiction. So here are some of the facts incorporated, in no particular order.

Bigfoot Scenic Byway
. Yes, it exists. It’s an eighty-six mile stretch of roadway in Northern California. And the land along the highway is known for bigfoot sightings.

Names
. All the names for bigfoot mentioned in
Hominid
are real: Yeren, yowie, skunk ape, etc. There are dozens of names for a tall, hairy hominid across the country and the globe.

Bigfoot and Early Humans
. There really is a pictograph in Sonora California called the Hairy Man, which depicts a bigfoot family where the bigfoot is crying as man runs away. And the Hoopa story of how humans came to be through animals deciding their fate is a real story. And there are other stories, hundreds of years old, about man’s interaction with a hairy bipedal wild man.

Jane Goodall Quote
. The Goodall quote at the beginning of the book is real. Jane Goodall, according to interviews,
does
believe that bigfoot exists. A large reason why, according to Goodall, is the tales she has heard from indigenous people in areas said to be inhabited by bigfoot.

Bigfoot Erotica
. Yup, it’s real. No, it’s not something I read… regularly. Seriously though, when I was doing research on bigfoot, I put in all sorts of keyword searches. One of them revealed the tale of a woman who fell in love with bigfoot. Or at least, part of bigfoot. Needless, to say, I was a little surprised.

Gigantopithecus
. A ten-foot-tall ape did once roam the earth.
Gigantopithecus
is believed to have come into existence about a million years ago and survived until almost one hundred thousand years ago. It was believed to have gone extinct due to the lack of availability of bamboo. But as mentioned in
Hominid
,
Gigantopithecus
has actually been found to have been an omnivore—eating both meat and plants. So people don’t know why exactly the giant ape went extinct—or if it really did. And the realization that
Gigantopithecus
existed came about just as described in
Hominid
: a doctor found a giant tooth in a bazaar in China.

Annual Cryptozoology Conference
. There is no single annual cryptozoology conference. There are, however, different cryptozoology conferences held across the country to discuss cryptids.

Land Bridge
. The land bridge between North America and Asia was around when
Gigantopithecus
existed. Bigfoot believers have made the argument that
Gigantopithecus
could have crossed the bridge from Asia and ended up in North America. It is known that other Asian animals did so, such as the red panda, whose remains have been found in Tennessee. And as indicated by the fossil record, the land bridge had lots of vegetation to support animal life.

Fossil Record
. Speaking of the fossil record, it is indeed spotty. Environment plays a role here: damp, heavily forested areas are notoriously unreliable in the creation of fossils. But the larger issue is that a fossil or lack thereof is not indicative of when an animal ceased to be, but only when it actually was. Take for example the coelacanth, which disappeared from the fossil record for sixty-five million years before it was spotted in the Indian Ocean.

Ancient Hominids
. As anyone who’s read the
Belial
series knows, there have been many different types of hominids on planet Earth at one time or another. Science has now demonstrated that those hominids’ existences have overlapped.
Homo sapiens
existed alongside both Neanderthals and
Homo denisova
. In fact, as mentioned in the book, research has indicated that the
Homo sapiens
gene pool is not pure
homo sapiens
. It includes indications of other hominids, although these percentages are very low. But the existence of different hominids in our gene pool at all suggests there was interbreeding between these different hominid groups.

Homo Denisova
. All of the information provided in
Hominid
on
Homo denisova
is accurate to the best of my ability. And yes, new hominids are being discovered at a quick rate—such as the previously unknown hominid whose jawbone was found in Taiwan in 2014. Our family tree seems to be continually growing branches.

Bili Ape
. The Bili ape is a real animal. For generations, there were reports in Congo of giant chimpanzees that walked on two legs, hunted lions, howled at the moon, and made nests on the ground. These tales weren’t taken seriously—chimps couldn’t possibly behave that way and they were not that large. Then in 2005, primatologist Shelly Williams discovered them.

Troglodytes
. In 1735, Carl Linnaeus did indeed write the first codex on all the animals in the world. It was called
Systema Naturea
and included nine thousand species. In it, he said there were two types of humans: man and the troglodytes. The troglodytes, whom Merlin was said to reside with, were described as wild hairy men.

Invisible Gorilla
. The invisible gorilla experiment was an actual experiment conducted at Harvard University, and the results were just as depicted in
Hominid
: half the subjects did not even notice the gorilla walking through the middle of the basketball game. The video used for the study can still be found online.

Leif Ericson
. The tale of Leif Ericson’s interaction with bigfoot comes from Leif Ericson’s own journal. According to the tale, around 1000 AD Leif and his crew landed in Newfoundland, where they found towering hairy men of incredible strength and odor.

Cross-Species Breeding
. Dr. Ivanov was a real individual who attempted, on behalf of the USSR, to create soldiers who were half human and half ape. As mentioned in
Hominid
, he attempted to inseminate chimps with human sperm, but no fertilization took place. He was in the process of soliciting human volunteers when the project was scrapped.

New Jersey Red Eye
. In the late 1970s there were reports of a bigfoot-like creature with bright red eyes in the northwestern section of New Jersey. During the time when the sightings occurred, bloodcurdling screams were also heard late in the night.

EPAS1
. EPAS1 is a real genetic marker found in the people of Nepal. And as mentioned in
Hominid
, it allows the Nepalese people to thrive at high altitudes. Individuals without the genetic marker are unable to sustain the high altitude for long without getting sick, and in many cases, dying. It has also been theorized that EPAS1 is allows people to resist cold weather.

DUF1220
. Researchers have identified DUF1220 as being responsible for increases in human brain capacity. It is believed to have allowed us to evolve beyond animals. It has also been linked to autism. Autistic individuals with a higher number of copies of DUF1220 have more severe symptoms of the disorder: repetitive behaviors, communications difficulties, and social deficits. It’s a new direction for autism research.

Legal Rights of Bigfoot
. There is only one county in the United States where it is illegal to shoot a bigfoot: Skamania County, Washington. In 1969, Skamania passed the Undiscovered Species Act, which contends that any individual who kills a bigfoot is subject to a substantial fine and/or imprisonment.

Tree Structures
. Structures built from tree limbs have been found in areas where bigfoot have been sighted. The limbs are not rotted at the end and show no evidence of having been cut with a tool, even though they are between four and eight inches thick. The limbs are often interwoven, but not in a way that would provide shelter.

Twinkies
. I have no idea if bigfoot likes Twinkies.

Yeti and ancient polar bears
. In 2013, Oxford University emeritus professor and geneticist Bryan Sykes conducted an analysis on twenty-seven samples of alleged bigfoot hair. Some samples came back with matches to known animals such as bears, but two of the samples came back matching an ancient form of polar bear believed to have gone extinct forty thousand years prior. Then, in 2014, new analyses of the same sample indicated that the sample was actually that of a subspecies of a type of Himalayan bear.

Infrasound
. Infrasound refers to low frequency sounds that occur below the hearing range of humans, and it has been found to be used by lions, giraffes, hippos, and even elephants. In humans, these low frequency sounds can result in nausea and dizziness.

Bigfoot Must Die
. There is not a TV show called
Bigfoot Must Die
. There is, however, one called
Killing Bigfoot
and another called
10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty
. I have never watched the shows, although I did read about them. They involve groups of individuals going out to track down and—yup—kill bigfoot. There are also
Finding Bigfoot
,
Bigfootville
, a few radio shows dedicated to the topic, and dozens of websites. Not to mention the individual episodes on shows like
MonsterQuest
and
Survivorman,
Les Stroud just did a season on bigfoot as well. Bigfoot is actually big entertainment. In fact, once you start looking for bigfoot, you find it everywhere.

So do I believe in Bigfoot? I don’t know. But there is someone much better qualified to comment on them than me: Jane Goodall. In a 2003 interview, when asked why no one had found a body of a bigfoot, she said: “You know why isn’t there a body? I can’t answer that, and maybe they don’t exist, but I want them to.”

So thank you for reading.  I
hope you enjoyed yourself. If you have the time, I would appreciate if you left a review.  It makes it easier for other people to find the book and decide if it might be right for them. 

Take care,

R.D.

P.S. If you are looking for some books on the topic, here are some of the books I found very helpful: