Seems I was beaten by Drapier, Diogenes and Ray...
But here it goes aniway to fatten my postcount.
Well, lets just put what we may or may not have currently aside. What I always go back to though with the Native American culture, is most of their stories even if not 100% factual, are based on something that really did happen, even if the events are somewhat skewed. In order for the Native American to even conjure up such a creature, I would think they would have needed something as a reference.
As drapier wrote, the refference might as well be a human.
You know the story behind the Patagonia (a region of Southern South America inArgentina and Chile) name? I more than once here hinted about it to pro-bigfoot posters. AFAIK none of them bothered to do the research. Here it is:
Patagonia comes from the Spanish "patagon" that means *drums roll* Big foot. When the first European explores and settlers arrived there, they found a race of "giants". The giants were a group of Native South American tribes (Tehuelches and Aonikenk) that were very tall (for the time) when compared with the Europeans.
They were about 1.8m tall, while the average European was about 1.6m tall. They also used fur "coats" that gave them an even bigger appearance. Their size and appearance are registered by records that span since the early European voyagers, archeological findings and pictures (not to mention their descendents)
Link:
http://www.bariloche.com.ar/museo/TEHUEL.HTM (In Spanish but the pics help you get the picture)
Fossil tracks of giant terrestrial sloths (and dinosaurs, Patagonia has a very interesting and varied geological register) also played a role on casting the name. Its easy to see how a similar story could evolve and a Tehuelche-like tribe become a tribe of hary giants and nowdays lie behind one or more of the Native American myths nowdays sheltered under the "sasquatch" umbrella.
And that's one among other possibilities that I think are more probable than a giant Nort Ameican bipedal primate lying at the heart of the myth.
Was north america ever the home of a primate of any kind? (other than human), and was it here at the same time as humans?
Yes, there is a fossil record of primates in North America. It is, however, much older than human presence and of small size. Note also that -as already pointed many times, the very absence of fossils of large primates in North America is not compatible with the interpretation of mythological hairy giants being unknown-to-science homnids.
But again, a myth about tall hairy man is not necessarily about a giant bipedal ape. There are alternatives.
Here are a couple more:
-A "Campbellian" approach, where the hairy man in the woods would be the result of the desires/fears of crossing the barriers that separates men from beasts;
-A "dehumanization" process of a rival tribe (possibly earlier settlers), perhaps coupled with some propaganda/distortions ("Granpa, how were the warriors you fought to conquer this land?" "Ah, big, wild!" *time passes* "Daddy, how were the people your grandpa fought?" "Oh, big, wild like animals" *time passes* "Daddy, how were the people that live here before?" "Oh, my grandfather told me they were tall and hairy").
-Moral or cautionary tales. “Son, stay away from the forests, there are brown bears there!” “So what mamma? Dady kills brown bears every now and then and I’ve got my bow!” “Ah… Yes, but there are also big hairy giants there, they are much more dangerous than bears and bows can not harm them.”
Heck, even apes could be at the root. There is a (small?) possibility that myths related to the constellation Ursa Majoris were brought from Asia with the ancestors of current Native American tribes and persisted. Myths of hairy wildmen started by orang-utangs (or even Meganthropus -if they existed- or a hipothetical remanant Gigantopithecus population) could have followed the same path.
To be honest, I think the each individual wild hairy man myth probably has a composite origin.
Bottomline: it is very hard to track a myth's origin; it may be even harder to use them to back the existence of real animals that are not known by science. Myth interpretation is strongly dependent on cultural background and personal bias. Thus, the many wildmen myths are quite probably among the weakest line of evidence for bigfeet as real animals.
Note that many of these myths are about shape-shifting entities that may even travel between the spiritual and material world. In this case, they would back Beckjord's interpretation of bigfoot!
