So where are they?

 

This is a long but somewhat interesting video on the Wild Man, a character known from European folklore and mythology. There are also some excurses to North Africa and the Middle East. Yes, that would be Enkidu and the Biblical Esau, who was born hairy. In fact, there is even more than this to cover. For instance, legends of giants. Or even pygmies, if you want to go there. There is a Swedish/Finnish connection, too: a Wild Man is depicted in the coat of arms of Lapland.

But back to the video. The content-creator treats the Wild Man folklore as genuine reports of Bigfoot-like creatures. From this, he draws the conclusion that Bigfoot is more human-like than we´ve been lead to believe. Above all, Bigfoot is real and has been around since the dawn of time, perhaps as an alternate lineage of Homo?

Of course, to believe this, you have to first believe that modern Sasquatch reports are genuine. The Wild Man is virtually impossible to distinguish from *other* creatures of myth and folklore I assume the content-creator doesn´t believe are real. What about fire-breathing dragons, thunderbirds that can abduct adult moose, or enormously large lindorms in the Swedish countryside? There is zero evidence that such things ever existed, in fact, it´s not even clear whether they *can* exist. Yet, there are alleged eye witnesses (see my review of Hyltén-Cavallius´ 1885 book on the famed lindorm elsewhere on this blog). 

It´s not clear to me that the modern Bigfoot reports are any better (or worse) than equally modern reports about even more fantastic creatures, such as thunderbirds, dog-men, or the Jersey Devil. And they, too, have analogues or even direct precursors in mythology and folklore. Are *they* real, too? 

Ultimately, we have to ask: if the Wild Men (and, I suppose, Women) are real, well, where are they? There is no archeological evidence that such tribes of people persisted into the Middle Ages or Early Modern Period (yes, medieval and modern archeology is a thing). Nobody has found any bodies. The only thing we have are stories, many of which can be given alternative explanations. Yes, they are myths about liminality, not literal accounts of meetings with surviving Paranthropi. The extremely fierce "Gorillai" encountered by Hanno in Africa could have been chimpanzees. The se´irim are Hebrew demons, not hairy savages. Well, at least not according to Wikipedia! 

And of course there is no evidence for dragons, werewolves or super-sized birds of prey either. 

My main problem with (modern) Bigfoot is that people keep seeing the squatches everywhere across North America - including the plains of Kansas, at tourist hot spots, at highways, or even in suburbia - and yet there is almost no tangible evidence that the creature exists at all. Yet, scientists have tracked down rare but real animals such as the Bili ape. This suggests that we´re either dealing with an extremely rare species hyped by the media (so people think they see it everywhere), pure fantasy all the way down, or some kind of paranormal phenomenon. 

The YouTube channel "Cabin in the Woods" is open to paranormal explanations. But the Wild Man mythology doesn´t depict a woodland sprite, but a flesh-and-blood creature with a rather broad range. And that´s surely the least likely explanation to this problematique.