casebro said:
"well beyond the mean for humans " hmmmm I am a furniture designer and have some knowledge of anthropometrics- and the immense variation there of. Perhaps I can look up the IM of humans by percentiles. The mean has no bearing on Patty, since there was only one guy in the suit. Demographics don't matter. I wonder what the RANGE of human IM is?
Re: the precision of the estimates for arm and leg length, a difference of 10% in the guess of where bones begin and end (NOT overall length of arm, but bone length from shoulder ball to wrist) will cause a IM variation of +/- 50%. A short arm estimate and a long leg estimate would put Patty well within the range of a human. Sorta depends on how you want the IM to come out, don't it?
Skip my following math excercise if you like:
Im 98th percentile of height, at 6'3". My leg length joint-to-joint is 31" (guesstimate) , so I used 30". If a leg is estimated at 27, and an arm at 33 (each +/- 10%), the IM is 120. Try leg 33, arm 27, and the IM is 80, giving a variation of 50% (120 is 150% of 80), so IM calculations are meaningless without actual bones to measure.
When it comes to IM, I'll tell you what we say here in Southern California- "Save the BS for the tourist!"
Average human IM index is 72.
The whole quote:
By Jeff Meldrum Ph.D.
Associate professor of Anatomy & Anthropology Idaho State University Pocatello, Idaho
It has been obvious to even the casual viewer that the film subject possesses arms that are disproportionately long for its stature.
John Green is a veteran researcher into the question of Sasquatch or Bigfoot. He was among the first to view the film captured by Patterson and Gimlin and has studied it intensely in the intervening years. His recognition of the significance of the unhumanly long arms of the film subject is a point that has not previously been articulated in such a straightforward manner. It is such a fundamental observation that it is considered a breakthrough in assessing the validity of this extraordinary film.
Anthropologists typically express limb proportions as an intermembral index (IM), which is the ratio of combined arm and forearm skeletal length (humerus + radius) to combined thigh and leg skeletal length (femur + tibia) x 100. The human IM averages 72.
The intermembral index is a significant measure of a primate's locomotor adapatation. The forelimb-dominated movements of the chimp and gorilla are reflected in their high IM indices of 106 and 117 respectively.
Identifying the positions of the joints on the film subject can only be approximate and the limbs are frequently oriented obliquely to the plane of the film, rendering them foreshortened to varying degrees. However, in some frames the limbs are nearly vertical, hence parallel to the filmplane, and indicate an IM index somewhere between 80 and 90, intermediate between humans and African apes.
In spite of the imprecision of this preliminary estimate, it is well beyond the mean for humans and effectively rules out a man-in-a-suit explanation for the Patterson-Gimlin film without invoking an elaborate, if not inconceivable, prosthetic contrivance to account for the appropriate positions and actions of wrist and elbow and finger flexion visible on the film. This point deserves further examination and may well rule out the probability of hoaxing.
Dr. Meldrum is an expert in primate anatomy and locomotion. He recently coedited, From Biped to Strider: The Emergence of Modern Human Walking, Running, and Resource Transport.
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Krantz, pg.118,
Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence, on a similar issue:
"The only alternative is that the man in the fur suit had his elbows sticking straight out to the sides into the shoulders of the costume. This means that his hands were at the "elbows" where he held onto sticks that supported the forearms. But this would require that from one outstretched elbow to the other he measured less than the observed 28.2-inch shoulder width. No man who stands two meters tall has shoulders and arms that add up to such a short span; my own is 42 inches, and a man who is 3 inches taller than me could not have an elbow span almost 14 inches less. This also seems to be ruled out by observing frames 61 and 72 shown in figure 60, where the right hand can be seen with clearly different wrist bends and finger curls. The observed shoulder width requires that a new joint be introduced into about the midpoint of the man's upper arms. We can safely rule out any sophisticated surgery of this kind. What we are left with is that no human body can possibly be fitted into the shoulder proportions that have been observed and measured."
I'll take the word of anthropologists who have actually studied the film over that of furniture designers, if you don't mind.
