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I wish I could say yes, because Bigfoot stories captured my imagination when I was in high school and got me interested in cryptozoology. Unfortunately, I've grown very skeptical of Bigfoot as the years go by. Why?
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Bigfoot Candidates (From Most To Least Likely)
A Surviving North American Primate
An Unknown Offshoot of the South American Monkeys
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Pretty self-explanatory. Unfortunately it doesn't help us do an alternate history--unless, of course, there is something unusual about those bears. Three species of North American bears went extinct 8-10,000 years ago. What if one of them survived? That doesn't give us much unless that bear was the Giant Short-Faced Bear. Think Kodiak-sized bear built for speed and very carnivorous. This bear would have made a sabertooth tiger look puny. They died off when the big ice age animals that they ate died off, but what if they had managed to survive? Maybe in an alternate history they adapted by shrinking from 1500 pounds to 500 or so, and lingered on in the Northwest. They would undoubtedly look and act a great deal differently than living bears.
We have no way of knowing what the markings on their coats looked like or details of behavior such as whether or not they stood up and even shuffled along on its hind legs for short distances as a threat behavior. Surviving Short-faced Bears could explain some Bigfoot stories. If someone saw one, they would know it wasn't an ordinary bear. With Bigfoot stories circulating, the obvious other choice would be Bigfoot. If the person didn't get a close look, their imagination would fill in details like hands rather than claws. If they got a good look, or maybe even shot the animal, they would see claws and a muzzle. They would realize that they were seeing a bear, which is no big deal. So, by setting people up to expect either a Bigfoot or a normal bear, Bigfoot stories would be obscuring the existence of a supposedly extinct bear.
So, does that give us a plausible Alternate History with a Bigfoot? Probably not. First, making Bigfoot a bear is definitely cheating a little. Also, even with a supposedly extinct bear, it doesn't do much that we can predict. Knowable consequences are plausible but trivial. Indians would have probably noticed that this bear was faster and meaner than ordinary bears. It might have taken the place of grizzlies in their myths. Ten thousand years of contact with the bear would have unknowable rippling consequences. I suspect that few of Indians that interacted with white settlers in our time line would have ever been born, but I also suspect that the ones that were born would have done about the same thing that the real ones did. There is no way to predict the direction of any changes. I don't see much alternate history potential here.
Before the Ice Ages, Great Apes were much more common and widespread than they are now. There were apes in Southern Europe and Pakistan, for example. Some of these apes may have been more cold-adapted than existing apes. Bears and Apes compete to some extent, with bears usually winning out in colder climates and apes usually winning out in tropical areas. The rise of bears, along with the cooler climates, pushed apes back into Africa and Southeast Asia.
In an alternate history one of those moderately cold-adapted apes could have made it's way across from Asia before the ice ages. There were times when a land bridge was open. Once it got to North America, the cooling climate and the rise of North American bears could have forced it down into Mexico or Central America. That would explain the lack of Bigfoot fossils, because the fossil record from Mexico and Central America is not nearly as good as the record from the U.S. and Canada. Legends of the creature could have passed north from Indian tribe to Indian tribe. Finally, this Oak Ape/Bigfoot could have spread or been pushed north in the last century or so. If the Mexican civil war happened, it could have pushed them out of their hideaways, or the fact that bears had been killed off over a large area could have left a vacuum that they could move into.
So, does that give us a plausible alternate history with a Bigfoot?
These scenarios have some potential. They could lead to anything from slight alterations to Europeans meeting a drastically different bunch of Indians or even intelligent non-humans. There are a couple of things here that I've added to my long list of story ideas to develop once I get the ones I'm working on now done.
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For more than twenty-five million years after the dinosaurs died off, in the Paleocene and Eocene, North America had its own thriving group of primitive primates. These weren't monkeys. They were somewhat like lemurs and tarsiers. In Africa and Asia groups like that eventually developed into monkeys and apes. But North America gradually cooled off, and those primates faded out of the fossil record. One straggler appears in the early Miocene, after a gap of several million years. South America was cut off from North America by an arm of the ocean throughout this time, so apparently the North American primates died off as North America got too cold to support tropical forests. But that last Miocene survivor's ancestors hid out somewhere for millions of years without making it into the fossil record. They probably survived in Central America, with the straggler coming North during a warm spell.
What forms developed in Central America, and when did they die off? I know of no primate fossils from Central America to answer those questions. In other areas, if there was rain forest, primates developed into a wide range of ape-like and monkey-like forms. That happened independently in Africa/Asia, South America, and to a lesser extent in Madagascar. Madagascar proves that it doesn't take a lot of land area for a whole lot of primate species to develop. That could have happened in Central America. Then again it might not have. If the North American primates were dependent on tropical forest and the tropical forests ever completely disappeared, then they would have simply died out.
In the absence of evidence either way, we can have some harmless fun speculating. An ape-like form could have developed, then adapted itself to colder climates and living on the ground, then moved north temporarily between ice ages. The other forms could have been wiped out by South American monkeys when North and South America connected up a couple of million years ago. This leads to the same kind of alternate history scenarios that the oak ape thing does, but the resulting animals would be even more alien to us.
There is another possibility. The early ancestors of the monkeys and apes were around in Africa and possibly Asia by the Eocene. It is possible that a species or two of that line could have made it to North America shortly before climate changes made moving between the continents impossible for tropical forest animals. In that case, you could have a parallel development of an ape-like form from a common ancestor. In reality, monkey and ape ancestors may have gotten to Asia and Europe a little too late to get across to North America, but since this is alternate history, we can certainly speculate on the possibility.
For many years there was a fierce debate among people who studied primates over where the ancestors of South America's monkeys came from. The predominant theory was that South America's monkeys came from North America and developed their "monkey-ness" independently from the Old World monkey's. More recently, fossils and DNA evidence tends to indicate that Old World monkeys and South America monkeys are more closely related to one another than either are to Lemurs and Tarsiers. That points to South American monkeys somehow crossing the Atlantic Ocean to get from Africa to South America. There is a third possibility that I haven't seen discussed much: the ancestors of the South American monkeys could have come across to North America already at a "monkey" stage of development, then somehow crossed to South America. As a Bigfoot-producing scenario, I suppose we could have some of those ancestors stick around in North America and develop into Bigfoot.
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Harry Turtledove has already explored what would happen if H. erectus got over to the New World instead of Indians and stagnated until European settlement (A Different Flesh). It is more likely that if H. erectus got to the New World, they would have continued developing over here in independent but somewhat parallel directions to the ones our species took. So, let's say that a cold-adapted H. erectus gets to North America and develops into a "Bigfoot". As I noted earlier, this would not be precisely the Bigfoot that people are claiming to see. Chances are that whatever developed would use tools extensively, have some sort of primitive language, and be able to use fire, though not necessarily make it. The first Indians run into this developed H. erectus and do what?
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