Bigfoot Ballyhoo
A few individuals, including some serious researchers, have argued that the Sivapithecus lineage of great apes from which the orangutan arose has another living ___ 31 ___. Details of the beast’s anatomy vary from account to account, but it is consistently described as a large, hirsute, nonhuman primate that walks upright and has reportedly been spotted in locales across North America and Asia. Unfortunately, this creature has more names than evidence to ___ 32 ___ its existence (Bigfoot, yeti, sasquatch, nyalmo, rimi, raksi-bombo, the abominable snowman – the list goes on).
Those who ___ 33 ___ Bigfoot (on the basis of suspicious hairs, feces, footprints and fuzzy videotape) usually point to the fossil great ape Gigantopithecus as its direct ancestor. Gigantopithecus was probably two to three times as large as a gorilla and is known to have lived until about 300,000 years ago in China and Southeast Asia.
There is no reason that such a beast could not persist today. After all, we know from the subfossil record that gorilla-size lemurs lived on the island of Madagascar until they were ___ 34 ___ to extinction by humans only 1,000 years ago. The problem is that whereas we have fossils of 20-million-year-old apes the size of very small cats, we do not have even a single bone of this putative half-ton, bipedal great ape living in, among other places, the continental U.S. ___ 35 ___ every primatologist and primate palaeontologist I know would love for Bigfoot to be real, the complete absence of hard evidence for its existence makes that highly unlikely.
David R. Begun, Scientific American