Brian Regal, a historian of science at Kean University in New Jersey, has an interesting theory about the relationship between werewolves and Bigfoot. He notes that hundreds of years ago werewolves were very prominent in popular culture. But during the past 150 years the werewolf's place in popular culture has declined, while Bigfoot has grown enormously in popularity. He attributes this shift to the theory of evolution. From
Science Daily:
From the late 19th century onwards, stories of werewolf encounters tailed away significantly, says Regal. "The spread of the idea of evolution helped kill off the werewolf because a canid-human hybrid makes no sense from an evolutionary point of view," he says. "The ape-human hybrid, however, is not only evolutionarily acceptable, it is the basis of human evolution."
Contrast this with Joshua Buhs' theory, detailed in his new book
Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, in which he attributes Bigfoot's popularity in the 20th century to working-class men who saw in Bigfoot "an icon of untamed masculinity, a populist rebel against scientific elites, the last champion of authentic reality against a plastic, image-driven, effeminate consumer society." (text from the Publishers Weekly review)
Comments
And I'm surprised that no one's commented to the Brian Regal quote, "The ape-human hybrid, however, is not only evolutionarily acceptable, it is the basis of human evolution." An ape-human hybrid is not evolutionarily acceptable or genetically possible. Humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor--but apes were never humans, and humans were never apes.
As the Smithsonian Human Origins Project website puts it:
"Comparisons of DNA show that our closest living relatives are the ape species of Africa, and most studies by geneticists show that chimpanzees and humans are more closely related to each other than either is to gorillas. However, it must be stressed that humans did not evolve from living chimpanzees. Rather, our species and chimpanzees are both the descendants of a common ancestor that was distinct from other African apes. This common ancestor is thought to have existed in the Pliocene between 5 and 8 million years ago, based on the estimated rates of genetic change. Both of our species have since undergone 5 to 8 million years of evolution after this split of the two lineages."
Not that this really has anything to do with Bigfoot....
This can be attributed to the change of the environment?
Well, technically, humans are considered to be a species of African ape. So the phrase "human-ape hybrid" is a tautology.
Not unusual, though a little surprising. Whethr any putative Bigfoot ( If they aren't polio-infected black bears ) exists or not, the fact is taht seperate species often collapse back into one again, like the way certain finches on the human-inhabited Galapagos islands did when their food source changed to human feeders with boiled rice; the broad-beaked forms in the poulce who could eat certain native seeds began to disappear as the average beak width was favoured again .