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1:06

As a longtime foreign correspondent, I've

1:09

worked in lots of places, but nowhere

1:11

is important to the world as China.

1:14

I'm Jane Pirlas, former Beijing bureau chief

1:16

for The New York Times. Join

1:18

me on my new podcast, Faceoff,

1:21

U.S. versus China, where I'll take

1:24

you behind the scenes in the

1:26

tumultuous U.S.-China relationship. Find

1:29

Faceoff wherever you get your podcasts.

1:55

It scares you. And

1:58

when things go wrong. If

2:00

you'd like to advertise on the

2:02

show, contact sales at advertisecast.com. Monster

2:37

Talk! Welcome

2:51

to Monster Talk, the science show

2:53

about monsters. I'm Blake Smith. And

2:55

I'm Karen Stolzner. Friend of

2:57

the show Carl Mamre of the Conspiracy

3:00

Skeptic Podcast pointed me to the inspiration

3:02

for this week's episode, an

3:04

article by archaeologist Andy White from 2016

3:07

responding to a paper produced by

3:09

Bigfoot researcher Mitchell Townsend. Links to

3:11

all this stuff will be in

3:14

the show notes. The paper Townsend

3:16

published, which is hosted at the

3:18

interestingly named website sasquatchgenomeproject.org, is a

3:20

nearly 100-page description of some bone-stacking

3:23

behavior observed near Mount St. Helens,

3:25

which the author attributes to Bigfoot.

3:28

Andy White wrote his response in a

3:30

thoughtful, rational way that reminded me very

3:32

much of happier times in the world

3:34

of online cryptozoology when people would posit

3:36

serious ideas and others would critique them.

3:40

White's response is focused on the claims in

3:42

Mitchell's paper, and while I think the temptation

3:44

to dunk on the befuddling nature of the

3:46

claims or the paper's author

3:48

itself might be powerful, the

3:50

archaeologist sticks to the arguments, and I found

3:52

that commendable. I asked Andy to dust off

3:55

his response and refresh his mind and come

3:57

and talk with us today about how and

3:59

why he plays with us. posted his rebuttal.

4:01

I found it all to be very nostalgic

4:03

for better times on the net, but the

4:06

lessons are still valid and I liked his

4:08

approach. We don't have to fight with people

4:10

about stuff we disagree on. We can let

4:12

the ideas do combat. And in the end,

4:15

I think the scientific approach hues closer to

4:17

the underlying truth than wild speculation does. Have

4:20

a listen to this interview and

4:22

see what you think. Monster Talk.

4:24

So welcome to Monster Talk. Tonight we're

4:27

talking with Andy White, who is an

4:29

anthropological archaeologist, but since it's our first

4:31

time talking, I'd like Andy

4:33

to introduce himself. How would you

4:35

like to be known, Andy? I am a professional

4:37

archaeologist. I've been doing this for 30

4:41

years now. I've kind of spent

4:44

some time engaging with pseudoscience and pseudore

4:47

archaeology maybe for the past decade. Most

4:49

of what I deal with is stuff

4:51

like lost civilizations, ancient giants,

4:53

you know, stuff like that that is

4:55

kind of one of those things

4:57

that I think are egregiously false and wrong stories

5:00

about the human past. But as you

5:02

know, I do stray into things like

5:04

Bigfoot and that sort of thing. We all do.

5:06

I came to find your article through Carl Mamre

5:08

who hosts

5:14

a podcast called The Conspiracy Skeptic. Definitely a friend

5:16

of the show and a friend

5:18

in real life, although we are separated with

5:20

him living in Canada. So we can't be

5:22

close like we'd surely like to be. But

5:25

Carl pointed me to your article about

5:27

Bigfoot bone stacks and I found

5:30

it really interesting and it reminded me of ye

5:32

olde good days or ye olde

5:34

good old days. The past, the past,

5:37

when I used to roam around

5:39

on the internet on cryptozoology forums

5:41

and comment and read and just,

5:43

you know, everything wasn't trapped in

5:45

the social media, you know, walled

5:47

garden and you could just really

5:49

have some great conversations and ask

5:51

really interesting questions. But let's get

5:53

started with our interview questions and

5:56

I'll let Karen kick it off. Yeah,

5:58

I will. Hi Andy. Let's start

6:00

at the top. What is

6:02

your article or response to, and can

6:04

you kind of summarize the claims that

6:07

are made in the online posts and

6:09

the academic papers that you're critiquing? I

6:12

can, but it took some doing. So I

6:14

put in the hours for you. I

6:17

had to go back. Thank you. The blog, you're welcome. The

6:19

blog post was years ago at this point. It's not something

6:21

that I think about a lot. So I went back and

6:23

I reread that and I checked the links. The links are

6:25

still active. So the paper is still up. So it was

6:27

a 94 page

6:30

paper, a research paper. Wow. Yeah.

6:33

That, uh, this person,

6:35

Mitchell Townsend, who

6:37

was also known as Dr. Johnny Dagger.

6:40

Hey, that's right. When

6:43

you follow these threads out, it always turns

6:46

into this weird. It always turns into weird.

6:48

No complaints. I'm known as Dr. Atlantis. I

6:50

I'm not a doctor nor am I from

6:52

the mythical underwater city. So I get the

6:54

vibe. You

6:57

know, I don't know much about him and there's not much about

6:59

him out there. So the first thing I like to do is

7:01

look at the claim, right? You look at the claim, take

7:04

it at face value and try to

7:06

try to figure it out. But the

7:08

personalities are also interesting, uh, science and

7:10

these kinds of things are human endeavors

7:12

behind this stuff. But

7:14

anyway, 94 page paper claiming that,

7:17

um, he first found a pile

7:20

of bones, including a stack of ribs

7:23

somewhere on the side of Mount St. Helens or in

7:25

the foothills of Mount St. Helens or something like that.

7:29

And he could figure

7:31

out no other explanation for those other than they were

7:34

the remains of a Bigfoot kill

7:37

site and meal. And then he, some

7:39

students got involved and apparently found two more.

7:42

So they thought they had a pattern of behavior. They

7:45

documented these things. They collected some of the

7:47

bones, brought them back. They

7:49

looked at tooth marks. Um,

7:52

they, they claimed

7:54

that they eliminated all other possible sources,

7:57

you know, for these assemblages. And

7:59

that's the. basis of their paper and he concluded, the

8:03

totality of the evidence analysis very

8:05

conclusively proves that a new hominin

8:07

species with an estimated height of

8:09

over 8 foot 8 and a 16 foot print and

8:12

physically capable of striding over two times the

8:14

distance of a contemporary human is currently living

8:17

and feeding upon various ungulate

8:19

species in the immediate vicinity of Mount St.

8:21

Helens. So that's what he thought that he

8:23

had demonstrated with the evidence

8:25

that he put forward. As

8:27

an archeologist, I like claims that come

8:30

with material evidence of things that already

8:32

happened, like that's what we do. We

8:34

dig around in people's garbage and we try to make sense

8:36

of human behavior based on the things that are left behind.

8:40

So claims about Bigfoot walking

8:42

through portals and coming in on flying

8:44

saucers, I'm not interested in that, like,

8:46

okay, so here's a pile of bones, he's

8:49

attributing this to Bigfoot behavior and saying there's no other

8:51

explanation. So that to me is an

8:54

interesting claim. So that's why I kind

8:56

of got interested. Yeah, it is

8:58

interesting. Now, it

9:01

was, one thing is when I looked in the paper

9:03

itself, it is long

9:05

and it's a little different from most

9:07

of the academic papers that I've read

9:09

and I'm not gonna try

9:11

to critique the style, but it was different.

9:14

I see more conversational than I'm used to. But

9:18

you've done some analysis on the actual claims

9:21

and can you outline the key reasons

9:23

why you think maybe

9:27

Bigfoot's not the culprit

9:29

behind these discoveries? Maybe.

9:32

Maybe, yep. I think just maybe, there's a

9:34

chance. You

9:37

know, again, I don't know the guy I

9:39

don't know about. So

9:41

I tried it when I would teach

9:43

critical thinking to my students, I said,

9:45

the first thing you wanna do is you boil down the

9:48

claim to its essence. Like, what are they actually saying? And

9:50

what's the evidence to back up that claim? And when you start

9:52

to do that, like you can kind of get beyond a lot

9:55

of the, you

9:58

know, let's see if I can get that. I'm

10:00

going to restate that. If

10:05

you take your time and boil the claim down

10:07

to an essence, you can kind of set aside,

10:10

at least temporarily, perhaps

10:13

what the motives are or the aspects

10:16

of the belief that are

10:18

in there. And you can. Right. You

10:20

work on the actual argument, the testable

10:22

claims, right? Right. Right. So

10:25

when I skim through the paper, I noticed that

10:27

he commits a couple of kind of

10:29

key errors in thinking or logic or

10:31

assumptions, I guess, that give me pause.

10:35

One is that there is kind of a

10:37

submerged thesis that everything he's looking at, in

10:39

archaeology, we call it the Pompeii premise, this idea

10:41

that something happens and then time is kind of

10:44

frozen, and you get a record like a crime

10:46

scene. And that's really not the way things work

10:48

most of the time. So he

10:52

interprets this as a kill

10:54

site where Bigfoot did the killing, Bigfoot did the

10:56

eating, and then Bigfoot did whatever else was there.

10:59

That's all the behaviors that you need to account for

11:01

everything that's at the site. And so to me, that's

11:03

a bit of a red flag, because we know there

11:05

are all kinds of other

11:07

natural, taphonomic things that go on,

11:09

and there's kind of

11:12

a lot of assumptions built into that perspective.

11:15

And the other thing that he does, especially

11:17

with the, he has

11:19

a lot of discussion

11:22

in there of tooth marks on the bones,

11:24

which he says are similar to human tooth

11:27

marks, or they suggest a human dentitionally,

11:29

I think it was like two or three times larger,

11:32

or something like that. He

11:34

doesn't go through the steps of eliminating everything else

11:36

that could be. He kind of jumps to this

11:38

conclusion that because Bigfoot did

11:40

the killing, and Bigfoot's doing the eating, and

11:43

they look like human molar marks, but they're

11:45

too large. So I was

11:47

completely unconvinced by that part of the paper.

11:49

He didn't do the hard work, I think,

11:51

of eliminating other alternatives, and

11:53

yet were expected to believe that those other alternatives have

11:55

been effectively eliminated, because there's a lot of jargon

11:57

in the paper, and I think that's there too.

12:00

dazzle you. You know, like

12:02

you said, it's strangely

12:04

written because he's got his first-hand account, I saw this

12:06

and then I did that, but then when you get

12:08

into it, he has words

12:11

in there that I don't even think are part of the

12:13

English language that I did not understand and

12:15

I looked up and I could not figure out what he

12:17

was talking about. I kind of put it together after a

12:19

while, but it's bizarre.

12:23

It's different. It's

12:25

a very kind word. So

12:28

Andy, you mentioned the absence of

12:31

what you refer to as high utility

12:33

parts in the bone stacks

12:36

and some alternative explanations. Could you

12:38

delve deeper into these alternative hypotheses

12:40

and explain a little as to

12:42

why they cast doubt on the

12:44

idea that Bigfoot was involved here?

12:48

Yeah, so that's kind of what piqued

12:50

my interest in the

12:52

first place. There has been a long-standing

12:54

debate, you know, over the course of decades in

12:57

anthropological archaeology, especially related to

12:59

human evolution, on understanding

13:01

bone assemblages that are left behind by humans and

13:03

what it can tell us about their behavior. And

13:06

this all started because Lewis Binford in

13:09

the 1970s and 1980s was pushing back on this idea

13:12

that early humans were hunting a lot

13:14

of large game. So

13:16

he said, look, if you go and you live among

13:18

the Inuit, for example, you'll

13:20

see that when they kill a caribou, they

13:23

take the parts that have a lot of utility.

13:25

They take the shoulders and they take the thighs

13:28

and then they leave behind the parts that don't have

13:30

a lot of caloric value for their weight. So that's

13:33

like the spinal column, the foot bones, and the head.

13:35

And he said, if you look at these early human

13:38

assemblages, they are head and foot and

13:40

spine dominated assemblages. In other words, these

13:42

humans do not have access to the

13:44

prime parts of the carcass, meaning they're

13:46

getting there after the other

13:48

scavengers have already gotten there and they're getting things that

13:50

the other scavengers can't

13:54

make use of. And that's the stuff that they carry back and they

13:56

smash with their hammer stones and so on and so forth. So

13:59

that gives us the concept of these high utility versus low

14:01

utility parts. So when I looked

14:03

at these purported bone stacks, they

14:05

have things like ribs, foot bones,

14:08

and deer skulls. None of the

14:10

good stuff is there. And

14:12

that is a problem right

14:15

away because you

14:18

have to explain where the good parts of that

14:20

carcass are

14:23

or where they went. So if

14:25

you follow out the chain of logic, if

14:28

they were there to begin with, if this was a

14:30

kill at that site, then

14:33

somehow the big foot is butchering

14:36

this thing or tearing it into pieces. The

14:39

high utility parts are gone. And then he's

14:42

sitting there and he's snacking on the very

14:44

worst parts of the carcass. Like I

14:46

don't know if you're you're from

14:48

the South, right? So you've eaten ribs.

14:50

I sure have. They are the messiest,

14:52

hardest thing to eat. There's

14:54

no meat on those. You have to

14:56

really work. I hate ribs for

14:59

that reason. It's not my cup

15:01

of tea. So you

15:03

have two explanations then. What happened to those high

15:05

utility parts? One is they were never there to

15:08

begin with. So

15:10

maybe parts of the carcass were moved there

15:13

for making a bait for other predators, for

15:15

hunting bears or coyotes or something like that.

15:17

That's one possibility. And I don't know anything

15:19

about that stuff, but that's what the game

15:22

guy said that he quoted. That's what it

15:24

looks like. It looks like a bait pile.

15:27

And the other possibility is that the deer were

15:29

killed there and then the high utility parts were

15:31

taken away. So that could have been

15:33

by a human if a human did it, because that's

15:35

what a human hunter would do. They would leave behind

15:37

the head, the feet and the spine and they would

15:39

take the shoulders and the thighs or

15:42

big foot took it away. And

15:44

that's the more interesting possibility. So if

15:47

Bigfoot is taking them away, where

15:49

is Bigfoot going with those pieces

15:51

of high utility carcass? And

15:53

the answer would be back to like

15:55

a home base, like an early human

15:57

evolution model where you're provisioning your family.

16:00

You're going out and hunting, you're taking things back. And

16:03

you know what happens at those sites is you

16:05

get really big accumulations of broken bones and other

16:07

detritus, and you have an

16:09

archaeological site that we

16:11

can find two million years later. And

16:14

if that's the case, why can't we find one that

16:16

Bigfoot made last week, where they've been living for months

16:18

and months or years and years or hundreds of years?

16:21

And that's the part that makes no sense to me.

16:23

So something does not compute there at all. If that's

16:25

a Bigfoot kill site, then where's the

16:27

Bigfoot home-based site? Well,

16:29

I would suggest one thing is

16:31

that with humans, especially

16:35

a long time ago, we had to

16:37

use stone tools to do

16:39

this work, which was very messy. But

16:42

all this Bigfoot stuff can be

16:44

done with the incredibly sharp Occam's

16:46

razor, which doesn't leave

16:48

a mess. The

16:51

stacking behavior though, like these bone

16:54

assemblages, we

16:56

know of any animals that do that besides

16:58

humans and I don't want

17:00

to dismiss that because sometimes animals,

17:03

especially pack rats, there's animals that do

17:05

weird things with items. I can think

17:07

of a few examples where they

17:09

make things with other

17:11

animals' trash. And again,

17:13

I don't know enough about this. So he's right. If

17:16

you look at the photos, at least one of those,

17:18

there is a stack of rib bones there. I put

17:20

stack in quotation marks. I'm doing air quotes. I know

17:22

you can't see me, but I'm doing air quotes. Because

17:25

stack to me suggests, I'm

17:28

sitting there with my dinner plate. I eat a rib, I put

17:30

it down. I eat a rib, I put it down carefully next

17:32

to that one and I make a little stack on the side

17:34

of my plate or whatever. That's what stacking

17:37

implies. It looks like a jumble of rib

17:39

bones. So it's like an assemblage that's there

17:41

that's not articulated anywhere with the rest of

17:43

the skeleton. So how does that happen?

17:47

I don't know. If you're making a bait pile, do

17:49

you have a bucket full of ribs and you dump them out? And

17:52

that's where the rib pile comes from. When

17:54

my kids find a deer skeleton, they start picking up

17:56

bones and putting them into a pile. So

17:58

I can think of a lot of... Different ways that might

18:01

happen that. That. Don't involve some

18:03

kind of supernatural, undetected eight foot

18:05

hominid walking around in the forest.

18:10

Was I feel like the word stalking I

18:12

think kind of implies. Part. Of a

18:14

behavior that I wouldn't necessarily assume is there. And

18:16

if you look at the pictures like one of

18:18

the quote, have a bone tax. There are ribs

18:20

scattered around and one of the ribs is sticking

18:23

out of a cup of grass. That.

18:25

Is not stack. I don't care what your

18:27

descendants that confessed that is not yet. It.

18:31

If you want to believe that, serve.

18:34

Any assemblage of bones can be manipulated by

18:36

big fight, but if you're looking for real

18:38

pattern of behavior, Ah, I will

18:40

not hear you critiquing bone hands. Of.

18:45

Our the other weird thing. Is.

18:47

The first one he found had to

18:49

dear Scholes adding so either big foot

18:51

is like ambushing deer. And.

18:53

Groups yeah killed him somehow.

18:56

or. Djokovic. It's not like

18:58

a single hunters kill but sometimes when you see stuff

19:00

that's left behind by poachers or whatever like will take

19:02

multiple deer and them. To. Butcher.

19:04

Them all. and if you look at a small number of

19:07

rebounds. One has for the

19:09

other one has for like a lot. And

19:12

the best I could do with count the ribs on

19:14

a. On a picture of an elk that I saw

19:16

him today for our whether it's you know I'm not going to.

19:19

Smuggle defended and court for maybe twenty

19:21

twenty six ribs. So.

19:23

What what kind of behavior leaves behind just a

19:25

couple? and my answer to that is probably the

19:28

rest and roll scattered around and eaten by bears

19:30

or coyotes or whatever And they just didn't happen

19:32

to see them or they were completely consumed by

19:34

some of these other scavengers that he says don't

19:36

exist but I can. We can have to weigh

19:38

the negative evidence their little bit too. So overall

19:41

on I feel like it's a very unconvincing argument

19:43

and of when you're making that argument like the

19:45

burden of proof is on you. Married.

19:48

But. The an anthropologist bell goes off and me

19:50

and like that's why I just didn't make any

19:53

sense. Get.

19:55

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details. Hello I'm

20:27

Paul Giamatti. And I'm Steven Isma. Each

20:29

week on Chinwag we dig into the

20:31

weird topics you wonder about that you

20:34

care about. The stuff none of us

20:36

are totally sure of, like the Bermuda

20:38

Triangle, Mothman, Consciousness, Olfactory,

20:41

UFOs, Ghosts, or say, Six.

20:44

So who's to say that there's not

20:46

alien species that are Sasquatch? Like

20:48

I've seen a ghost and I would hear

20:50

something walking and breathing. Maybe every path is

20:52

right. I will accept as a premise that

20:55

every path is right. That

20:57

is a face on Mars, eyes,

20:59

nose, it kind of looks like Wilson

21:02

of volleyball. Some people enjoy

21:04

the waves or whatever, crashing. I

21:06

enjoy listening to a quantum physics audio

21:08

book. I do think there are many

21:11

things in the world that we just

21:13

don't understand and probably won't understand. That's

21:15

a whole show. So join us every

21:17

Wednesday on all major podcast platforms

21:19

and find us on Instagram,

21:21

TikTok, and Twitter at ChinwagPod

21:23

and WAGON. This

21:28

reminded me of so

21:30

many online Bigfoot discussions that

21:33

I've been a part of or have read. And

21:38

one of the recurring claims that

21:40

you will hear around why

21:43

you never find Bigfoot bones is because

21:45

in the Pacific Northwest, the soil is

21:47

very acidic and no bones are left

21:49

behind. Between the

21:51

work of ground

21:54

animals that like to chew on bones, between

21:58

that and the acidity But you just never

22:01

find bones. And now, I knew instinctively

22:03

that that was not so, but there

22:06

seems to be a pretty clear indication that whatever

22:09

bone disappearing act is going on in that

22:11

soil, and I'm not saying that the acidic

22:13

soil doesn't break down bones, it's not instantaneous

22:15

and there are bones available. So I think

22:17

we can learn something from this, right? Yeah,

22:20

I mean there's bones all over the place.

22:22

And I get that argument. Another argument

22:25

I've heard is that they're burying their dead somewhere. Yeah. Yeah.

22:29

And I don't know how many tens or maybe

22:31

even hundreds of skeletons of Neanderthals now who were

22:33

burying their dead 40, 50, 60, 100,000

22:35

years ago, we find them. The

22:39

fact that nobody has ever found a

22:42

Bigfoot burial or... I

22:46

mean, I know this is a short podcast, but my

22:48

critique of the Bigfoot phenomenon, even as I'm kind of

22:51

looking at it from 30,000 feet because I don't get

22:53

into this stuff too much, because

22:56

it just, like it's not, none of

22:58

it is really compelling to me.

23:00

So like I'm interested in why people

23:03

believe in it. And like it really feels like a belief

23:05

system rather than like they don't want to find the truth.

23:08

They want to find things that confirm their beliefs. And

23:10

that's tough when you get in there to apply

23:13

critical thinking, like I get it, it's almost like

23:15

a religion. They don't... Well, yeah.

23:17

And also the... We've discussed that a

23:19

lot. We sure have. The

23:22

number of... It's kind of like the

23:24

number of anthropologists who believe in

23:27

Bigfoot is kind of like the

23:29

number of astronomers who believe in

23:31

UFOs in the sort of... From

23:35

another planet sense. It's

23:37

not a zero number, but it's a real

23:39

small number. That this kind of scientific training,

23:42

if you take it seriously and take it to heart, tends

23:45

to push you away from believing in these

23:47

things being literally real creatures. I

23:50

always ask like, what's the evidence? Like, is

23:52

it possible that there's a large hominid wandering

23:54

around? Sure. And

23:56

there were species of big

23:59

primates. that were, quote unquote, discovered,

24:01

you know, by Europeans and Africa until

24:04

relatively recently in the modern era. So like, that's

24:06

fine. We find new species all the time. But

24:09

if you look at the totality of it, and you say, like,

24:12

what's the claim being made? And what's the

24:14

evidence for it? You know, the claims are

24:16

really, really big. And the evidence for it

24:18

is so, so, so very thin. And all

24:21

you would need is one. Yeah, exactly. Go

24:23

home. You know, one,

24:25

just give me one of anything. And,

24:28

and it's none, they all they all evaporate.

24:30

And then you have to invoke

24:32

conspiracy theories on people hiding evidence, or you

24:34

have to invoke some kind of supernatural powers

24:37

and things like that. And like, you get

24:39

out of the realm of anything that science

24:41

can actually deal with really quickly. Yeah,

24:44

absolutely. So, Andy, your

24:46

response discusses tooth marks

24:49

that were supposedly found on the

24:51

bones. Have you been able to follow up

24:53

on this aspect of the the arguments? Well,

24:56

I followed up on it today. As in

24:59

I read the report, again, I

25:03

am not a tooth expert. I actually know, or

25:05

I did at one time, I don't do it

25:08

anymore. But I knew quite a bit about human

25:11

teeth. But I

25:13

don't know a lot about bare teeth, or coyote

25:15

teeth, or Wolverine teeth, or anything else.

25:17

And I feel like that's the error

25:19

that is made in that section. As

25:22

he looks at parts

25:26

of the bones that are chewed or bitten off. And there

25:28

are like he has nice pictures of them, like there are

25:30

a lot of tooth marks on those things, something has been

25:32

chewing on them. And then he

25:34

finds confirmatory evidence that these look like this

25:36

kind of human incisor, or these look like,

25:38

you know, this kind of juvenile human molar,

25:42

without eliminating any of the alternatives. Like, how do I

25:44

know that's not a bare canine

25:47

or incisor that did that? And he

25:49

doesn't provide any of that evidence.

25:51

So, so he doesn't include like the

25:53

measurements with the scale and what you

25:55

know, the, you can see the curvature

25:57

and that sort of stuff. He

26:00

does, he has pictures and there's a lot,

26:02

there are a lot of measurements in the

26:04

text. But again, like

26:06

I would have to, I

26:09

as the reader shouldn't have to do the work to go, okay,

26:11

let me make sure those aren't there. That's

26:13

something that in a real paper, you would eliminate that

26:15

in the real paper, which is why this is published

26:18

on the Fastwatch Genome Project and nowhere

26:20

else because it's not a real paper. It's

26:23

a, you know, it is what it is. He put a

26:25

lot of work into it. But ultimately, like, if

26:28

this paper came to me for peer review, even me

26:30

not knowing all these specifics, like I would say, you

26:32

need to do all this stuff and

26:34

then resubmit. Like, that's not up to

26:36

me to do that work. Yeah, but

26:38

as a skeptic, I'm like, well, you're making

26:41

a claim here that there's a, you know,

26:43

an unknown hominid out here doing these

26:45

things. Your claim is based on the

26:47

teeth marks, tooth marks look like

26:50

human tooth marks to you only they're

26:52

scaled up. You don't eliminate any

26:54

other possible alternatives. That's

26:57

not enough. Not enough at

26:59

all. That's nowhere near enough. So I

27:03

feel like there's a lot of wishful thinking and

27:05

wanting it to be true. And that's, as you,

27:07

I think both of you would agree. I've now

27:09

known you now for half an hour. Kind

27:15

of part of it. Yeah. I mean, I mean, the

27:17

reason we had you on or we asked you to

27:19

come join us and I appreciate it is it's

27:22

because what you did in your article was

27:24

a very rational

27:26

analysis of someone

27:29

else's Bigfoot claims. And they

27:32

sort of put, put on the

27:34

cloak of science in their, in their

27:36

approach. But I don't think it fit

27:38

them well in the sense that they

27:40

were saying sciencey things, but it didn't

27:42

feel like a proper methodological approach to

27:44

this case situation, whatever you want to

27:46

call it. This, this, this phenomenon. And

27:49

what you did in your writing is exactly what

27:51

I would like our listeners to do is when

27:53

you see a strange claim, think

27:56

about it. Like, does it make sense? You

27:58

know, does this claim hold up? up? Is

28:00

there adequate evidence for it? You

28:02

know, get beyond the, this feels cool

28:04

and mysterious. What an interesting question. We

28:06

don't have to stop with, that's an

28:08

interesting question. We can actually get a

28:10

little further even without having to travel

28:12

to the Pacific Northwest. There are things

28:14

you can deduce, there's inductive reasoning, etc.,

28:16

that you can do if you have

28:19

the proper training skills and just sort

28:21

of think it through. And

28:23

introducing a Bigfoot into

28:25

the story is always a giant

28:28

leap because we don't have any proof

28:30

that Bigfoot's a real animal. So you

28:32

always have to eliminate every possible natural

28:34

explanation and known explanation before you hop

28:36

to Bigfoot or chupacabras or

28:39

dogmen or whatever, you know. And so

28:41

I thought this was really well

28:43

done and it gave me a good warm feeling

28:45

of nostalgia for the good old days of my

28:47

Bigfoot youth. You

28:51

miss that Bigfoot youth? Yeah, well hey,

28:53

now I will say, and I say

28:55

this all the time but I still believe it, many

28:58

a sharp mind was honed

29:00

on the whetstone of Bigfoot. Like I think it

29:02

can teach you critical thinking if you let it,

29:04

you know. I mean you can certainly

29:06

learn how to, and I think one thing that happens

29:09

to a lot of people is they start out as

29:11

believers and then they start running

29:13

into, oh, well that's a good argument.

29:15

Oh, oh, I didn't think about that.

29:17

And then they might become disillusioned but

29:19

if they don't become disillusioned and they

29:21

don't become big

29:23

bundles of cognitive dissonance, it can be

29:25

a gateway to learning how to think

29:27

critically about weird claims which I think

29:29

is an extraordinarily useful skill. And so

29:33

I appreciate you exercising it in your article. I

29:38

agree with you. Like I don't know how old you

29:40

are, you're probably younger than I am, but I grew

29:42

up on in search of... No, no,

29:44

I'm 54. I literally love in search of way

29:46

more than I should. So, yeah. I'm the same

29:48

age. So I'm pretty much. Me too, but I'm

29:50

big younger. So

29:53

like I grew up on that stuff. I wanted it

29:55

to be true. You know, I

29:57

wanted these fantastic things to be true. even

30:00

through high school and college, like, and you know, back

30:02

in the pre internet days, like you'd have to go

30:04

to library and check out books on this garbage in

30:06

order to digest it, or get whatever you could on

30:09

TV. And as I was like, I

30:11

read more and more of that stuff. And as I, you

30:13

know, learned how to do archaeology and learned about the real

30:15

prehistory of the world. Yeah,

30:19

you realize that that stuff is garbage, but I

30:21

learned the stuff that the producer shows not to

30:23

include. That's the missing

30:25

thought. Right.

30:28

But it has like, it serves me well,

30:30

too. You know, like going like, well, I

30:32

know that this

30:34

is probably wrong. But like, how can I prove that

30:36

it is wrong? Or do I need to prove like

30:39

you understand, you start to understand flames,

30:41

and then being able to dissect them and try

30:43

to understand them and figure out where they're coming

30:45

from, and what science is about and how you

30:47

do it and the inductive side, the deductive side,

30:49

and like all those are great. And

30:51

I feel like they are sorely lacking in our

30:53

society today, unfortunately. And well, I used to teach

30:55

a class called forbidden archaeology for three years, where

30:57

that was the main we talked about all of

30:59

this kind of garbage, pseudoscience, and

31:01

pseudorarchaeology, you know, stuff that has to do with

31:04

the human past Atlantis and all that

31:06

stuff. No offense, Atlantis is. Thank

31:08

you. But what? It's related to

31:10

European colonialism and, you know, slavery

31:12

and all that good kind of

31:14

stuff. But, you know, to teach people

31:16

like, you can you can assert

31:18

anything you want, you can say anything you want. But

31:20

how do you know, when somebody

31:22

does that, whether their whether their story is

31:25

credible or not, how do you discriminate

31:28

between two alternatives, alternative explanations, like, what's the

31:30

process that you go through to do that?

31:32

And those are great, great thought exercises. You

31:34

know, all of these kind of outlandish claims

31:36

are fun to talk about, but in a

31:39

way, yeah, yeah, to circle back around, like,

31:41

I think they're actually teaching you something very

31:43

important. Yeah, the process of

31:45

discerning what not not even what truth is, but

31:47

kind of what, what you

31:49

can hang your hat on and what your your best,

31:52

you know, better serve leaving alone. I

31:54

think Bigfoot has a low anger

31:57

content. There are some people get very upset about Bigfoot.

32:00

And we also like to say that in the

32:02

world of Bigfoot, you see the entire spectrum of

32:04

human belief, right? Small, you know, because

32:06

you find people who don't believe at all, all the

32:09

way to people who treat it exactly like a religion.

32:11

But in between there, you can

32:13

engage with all kinds of levels of belief

32:15

and ideas and learn how to

32:17

engage and discuss stuff with people in ways

32:19

that don't trigger big fights, but maybe actually

32:22

can sway people to think a

32:24

different – not necessarily to change position, but to

32:26

at least think about it in a more critical

32:28

way that helps them. Yeah, I

32:33

mean, I think there's a spectrum, you know, from

32:35

– there's your con men, and most of them

32:37

are men, most of them are white men probably.

32:39

There's your mentally ill people. There are your, you

32:41

know, people who are religious about it, who are

32:43

true believers, and then there are the genuinely curious.

32:49

And like, that's the audience that I try to reach is the genuinely curious. Oh,

32:52

yeah, yeah. And I've

32:54

had people write me emails and say, you know, I found your

32:56

blog post. Like, you're a backstop for me for understanding this stuff.

32:59

And so like, that was one of the things

33:02

that got me interested in writing and like talking

33:04

about this stuff publicly because there need

33:06

to be resources out there to think through some of these things

33:08

and to help people do it. Oh, absolutely,

33:11

yeah. It's a public service. Well,

33:13

because our search engines no longer

33:15

work, at least we can point

33:17

people to your content through

33:19

our podcast posts, right? That'll

33:22

help. One quick sort

33:25

of not directly related question because a lot

33:27

of our listeners are younger and are interested

33:29

in science careers. Can you tell us a

33:31

little bit about what you do professionally with

33:34

your training and education? Like, are you working

33:36

in field right now? And

33:39

just, you know, is there anything you'd like to say to people

33:42

who are interested in becoming archaeologists? Yeah,

33:44

don't do it. Okay, that's what I

33:46

hear from most archaeologists. I'm not even joking.

33:50

You know, it's a fascinating profession. It's

33:53

not at all what

33:55

most of the public thinks it is. I love it.

34:00

it very fulfilling. At this point, like I'm working,

34:02

I'm kind of in the pasture, not out in

34:04

the field anymore. So I do a lot of

34:06

report writing and analysis. I do a lot of

34:08

computer simulation and modeling, but

34:11

it, you know, it requires a lot of

34:13

education, I think, to kind of do it right. But

34:15

I feel like the questions that we try to answer

34:17

as archaeologists, like humans are really, really hard to study

34:19

even in the present, like ask a psychologist

34:21

or a sociologist how easy it is to figure out

34:23

what humans do, and then try to do that in

34:26

the past when you can't actually see them, when all

34:28

you have are little bits of garbage left behind, and

34:30

that's archaeology. So we are trying to answer questions on

34:33

big scales of time and space with

34:35

very little record, and it's tough. So

34:38

in some ways it's very fulfilling, and in other ways, like, you

34:40

know, I know some of the questions that I have about humans

34:43

and how, why we are the way

34:45

we are, and why things are the way they are, like,

34:47

will probably not be answered by the time that I die.

34:50

That's kind of depressing. But at the same time, like, I

34:52

feel like it's kind of, you know, it's a noble pursuit,

34:55

in a way. You're not going to get rich doing

34:57

it. It's not about finding a lot of artifacts and

34:59

selling them. There's ethics involved

35:01

and that sort of thing. But I feel like getting

35:03

the human past right is important, which is one of

35:05

the reasons why I chose to engage

35:08

with pseudo-archaeology and pseudoscience, because a lot of

35:10

the kind of misinformation the human past has

35:12

a pretty sinister side to it historically, and

35:14

there's a lot of bad context. There

35:17

is a lot of racism and white supremacy and things like

35:19

that that go into ideas and claims about Atlantis

35:21

and giants, and all these kind of fantastical

35:23

things, ancient aliens, that people think are funny. There's

35:26

a dark side to that, so it's important, I

35:28

think, to help people understand the context. But,

35:31

you know, it's not for everybody. I

35:34

will say that. And sometimes, some days, I don't

35:37

think it's for me, but most days, I'm pretty

35:39

happy with my choice. Well, thank you for doing

35:41

it. So I appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely, Andy,

35:43

you're our kind of guy. But

35:46

we, this is your first time on the

35:48

show, so hopefully we can have you back

35:50

on again about some other topic. But we

35:52

always like to ask our guests when they

35:54

come on for the first time a particular

35:56

signature question. So I'm going to ask you

35:58

now, what's your favourite monster? So

36:02

I was prepared for this question and I

36:04

thought about it all day, Karen.

36:09

Thank you. I finally came up

36:11

with my answer and I'm gonna waffle

36:13

and I'm gonna divide my favorite monster

36:15

into three different pieces, which each each

36:17

piece has a representative. So it's a

36:19

chimera. Right. See

36:22

you later. Thank

36:24

you very much. The first one

36:26

is monsters from my childhood.

36:28

And this is this is a general group

36:30

award that I knew were not real. That's

36:32

like your monsters from Godzilla, like

36:35

Mothra and stuff like that that I would enjoy watching

36:37

on Saturday morning. And

36:39

those really, really bad movies from the 1950s and 1960s. And

36:43

just like they were fantasy monsters. And I understood that.

36:45

And I love those kind of monsters. And I still

36:47

do. And number two,

36:50

as monsters that I always hoped were

36:52

real and my flagship

36:55

monster for that is the Loch Ness Monster. Because

36:58

as a kid, again, growing up within search of that was

37:00

one of the things that would come on in the beginning

37:02

of that show was that famous picture of the purported Loch

37:04

Ness Monster neck and head, freaking

37:07

reflection. And like I

37:09

was so into dinosaurs and I

37:11

wanted there to be one that had survived, you know,

37:13

when it was swimming out to the ocean, like a

37:15

plesiosaur or something like that. And like, I loved that

37:18

idea. So I really hoped that that monster was real.

37:21

So that's, you know, that goes for a lot of those

37:23

kinds of things. But I chose Loch Ness just to just

37:25

to pick a classic. And then

37:27

the third type is the monster

37:29

that I always hoped was not real. And that was

37:32

the one that I am still sure to this day

37:34

was living right underneath my bed and

37:36

would grab my hands and my feet if

37:39

they dangled off side. See,

37:42

see, this is this is a classic archaeological

37:44

question that I ask all the time on

37:46

this show. What

37:48

was the ecosystem that those monsters

37:50

lived in before we invented beds?

37:56

That's a great question. I know. I know. Why? Yeah,

38:04

I mean if you look at like ethnographic myths and stuff,

38:06

they're full of like, you know, cautionary tales of this is

38:08

going to get you and that's going to get you but

38:10

I don't know if anyone's ever like wondered where those are

38:13

like asked specifically, like they're not hiding the bed of

38:15

the closet. So where are they? They're probably like out

38:17

in the woods. They would often make children go out

38:20

on these. Yeah. You

38:22

know, there you go. There

38:24

you go. Well, it's

38:26

I'm just thinking about the life forms that like,

38:28

you know, carpenter bees that have now, you know,

38:30

routinely live in our houses. But you know, that

38:32

wasn't until we brought houses to bear there weren't

38:34

houses. Where do they live? I mean, I guess

38:36

they lived in dead wood, but we've certainly made

38:39

it easier for them. So the

38:41

bed just the perfect ecosystem for this particular

38:43

monster. We really need to do

38:45

a lot more deep diving on those

38:47

bed monsters. We do. Yeah. They're out

38:49

there. I believe it. Thank

38:52

you so much for visiting with us, Andy. And

38:54

we will put links to your article in the

38:56

show notes and people can

38:58

check that out. And thank you for

39:00

your service in helping to reduce nonsense

39:02

as we can. Well, thank

39:05

you for the invitation. It was a lot of fun. And

39:08

if I ever say anything else that's interesting to you,

39:10

let me know. All right.

39:13

Well, good night, everybody.

39:15

Good night. Thank you. Thanks.

39:17

Bye bye. Monster talk.

39:20

You've been listening to Monster Talk, the

39:22

science show about monsters. I'm

39:24

Blake Smith. And I'm Karen Stolzner.

39:27

You just listened to an interview with archaeologist

39:29

Andy White discussing his 2016 responses

39:32

to a Bigfoot article about bone

39:34

stacking in the Pacific Northwest. The

39:37

original article and some very peculiar ideas

39:39

researcher Mitchell Townsend has posited have landed

39:41

in Mount Coast to Coast AM multiple

39:43

times. I'll put links to Andy's

39:45

response and several links to Townsend's work in the show

39:47

notes for you to check out. We

39:50

hope you've enjoyed this episode of Monster

39:52

Talk. Each episode we strive to bring

39:54

you the very best in monster related

39:56

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39:58

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