I don't think I've ever met anyone like that. If I insist on stereotyping someone after I get to know them, the fault would be with me, not the person.
But if you accurately describe someone it's not a stereotype per se - it's a description. You could say that it is a stereotype of that person, but if it's accurate then the stereotype is indistinguishable from the description. I'm not sure that any debate about stereotyping is really relevant to the Bigfoot "question". It seems like just another diversion. It's very close to being one of those stupid semantic games that Baby Dangling plays.
And in that time did you see areas capable of supporting an omnivorous primate (other than man)?
In spite of being educated and familiar with wildlife ecology, I'm not fully qualified to give a definitive answer. FWIW, my own feeling is that the PNW could support some kind of wild primate(s). If a Bigfoot truly is something like a big bear (ecologically), I think it would work. Being omnivorous, opportunistic and intelligent would seem to be the right recipe. But those three criteria should always be expected to reveal themselves as adaptations formed by natural selection. The extreme fear of humans displayed by Bigfoot cannot be accounted for by natural selection (or at least the way that we think about NS). We don't kill them and Indians didn't either. What has been killing them to cause this exaggerated flight instinct? Is it the bears that have been killing them all along? If it is, then why are they so afraid of us? We must look like fragile stick beings to them. It's totally meaningless that the stick figure might be carrying a gun - because we never use those on Bigfoot.
Yeah, I guess Bigfoots could live in the PNW. I can say the same with equal (unqualified) confidence that the PNW could support
Mastodons and
Smilodons. But I think that it doesn't contain those animals. As it is now, we've got crytozoologists running around proposing and defending the existence of living dinosaurs in the Congo. There is an important distinction between an ecosystem that could support a species and does - and one that could support a species but doesn't. I think Florida could support wild leopards, but they just aren't there. Argentina could support grizzly bears, but they just aren't there.
When skeptics take a good hard look at what Bigfooters are doing, it's a very ugly scene. Think of it as a predator/prey relationship between skeptics and believers. The prey (believer) is constantly watching the predator (skeptic) and changes its behavior so as to not get caught and eaten alive. The Bigfoot myth and the "stereotype" description of Bigfoot evolves over time. The goal of the believer is to adapt their description of Bigfoot in any way that might possibly satisfy a skeptic. By picking and choosing from the variety of
already proposed descriptions of Bigfoot, a believer can customize their own personal description of BF with the goal being to try to stymie the skeptic. They will even do it right in front of a skeptic's eyes, as if they were a chameleon. Whether anyone realizes it or not, Lu can use the factual information and skeptical logic she sees in this forum to change the way she talks about Bigfoot. We can all see that this is a cultural game and has little to do with Bigfoot as a real animal. It's not about confirming Bigfoot, it's about beating the skeptics at the game. I think that applies to anyone who is actively perpetuating a myth as reality. Those people all act the same in fundamentally important ways. On JREF they get called woos. If you watch them closely, they look like desperate beleagered two-bit purse snatchers looking for respect.
