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THE FIRST RUSSIAN REPORT ON THE 1967 BIGFOOT FILM FOOTAGE,
BY DMITRI BAYANOV AND IGOR BOURTSEV OF THE DARWIN MUSEUM, MOSCOW

GENERAL REMARKS ON THE FILM - Roger Patterson's filmstrip shows a hairy man-like creature, walking erect, having well-developed breasts and buttocks. The last three points, if we accept for a time the authenticity of the creature, indicate its belonging in the Hominid, not the Pongid (anthropoid), line of evolution of higher primates.

Morphology of the head shows a very outstanding brow ridge, a low bridge of the nose, very pronounced prognatism, a cone-shaped back of the head.

Judging by the well-developed breasts the creature is female. However, the muscles of the back, arms and legs are so much in relief that they call for comparison with those of a heavy weightlifter.

The creature "has no neck," or at least the neck is not to be detected at first sight. Looking back the creature turns its upper torso along with the head to a much greater extent than would normally a human being. This might indicate a somewhat different attachment of the skull to the spine than in man, and a strong development of the neck muscles which conceal a short, sort of simian, neck.

LOCOMOTION AS SEEN IN THE FILM - It seems smooth and resilient like that of a big quadrupedal animal. One gets the impression that the creature steps on slightly bent legs. If that is the case the impact on the heels should be less manifest than in man's walk, and the hominoid tracks, usually rather even in depth, seem to corroborate this conclusion. While walking the creature swings its arms intensely using them as walking beams as it were.

COMPARISON TO SUPPOSED GAIT OF NEANDERTHALER - Prof. Boris Porshnev, who put forward the Neanderthal hypothesis ot the relict hominoid origin, in his monograph (1963), page 288, refers to the opinions of Russian anthropologists V.P. Yakimov, G.A. Bonch-Osmolovsky and V.V. Bounak concerning the walk of Neanderthalers as construed by analysts of fossil material. We find it very significant that the two characteristics mentioned above-i.e. less impact on the heels and arms swinging-are listed by anthropologists as supposed traits of Neanderthal locomotion, while slightly bent legs are ascribed to Neanderthalers even in a standing position.

THE HOMINOID FOOT - The main features standing out in both the American and Soviet (Russian) material: 1. Tracks show flat feet (without an arch). 2. The width of the foot in proportion to the length is much greater than in man's foot. 3. The hominoid foot is generally much bigger than man's.

Besides, as has been often noted by late Pyotr Smolin, chairman of the Hominoid Problem Seminar at the Darwin Museum in Moscow, the hominoid foot is distinguished by a great mobility of its toes which can bend very much or fully extend or spread very widely.

One more peculiarity: the so-called double ball at the back of the big toe as evidenced in many North American tracks (Green, 1968; Krantz, 1972). We find Grover Krantz's explanation of this feature very interesting, and we especially value at this stage the conclusion drawn by him concerning the size of the creature's calcaneus (heel bone). In some frames the creature's foot seems to have an unnaturally protruding heel. To a casual observer this may look like a sticking out edge of an artificial sole, but to those who know better this is an omen of the creature's reality.

As for the double ball itself we would like to make here the following remark. The double ball is made up not only of two bulges of tissue but also of a furrow between them, which is like a kind of fold on the sole. Hence the question can also be put this way. Why is a fold formed at this spot on the hominoid sole?

The answer, probably, can be like this: because the hominoid foot is not so rigid as man's foot, it still retains a certain measure of mobility inherited from the hand-like foot of the ape, and therefore has a furrow somewhat analogous to lines on man's palm.

Grover Krantz finds the correlation between the great weight of the creatures in question (as evidence, among other things, by the depth of footprints) and the anatomy of the foot, as it is revealed in the very same footprints, so natural and binding that he makes the following conclusion: "Even if none of the hundreds of sightings had ever occurred, we would still be forced to conclude that a giant bipedal primate does indeed inhabit the forests of the Pacific Northwest."

It's the first time such an unambiguous statement is made by a professional anthropologist regarding the problem of relict hominoids, a statement made even more welcome by the fact that it came about as a result of study of material evidence which is the plastercasts and photographs of footprints.

COMPARISON TO THE NEANDERTHAL FOOT - As far as we know, none of the American researchers has compared the hominoid foot, as revealed in footprints, to the Neanderthal foot, reconstructed on the basis of fossil material.

In the Soviet Union this job has been done by Prof. B.F. Porshnev who noted a similarity in such features as lack of an arch, the width to length ratio, great mobility of toes (Porshnev, 1963).

It seems that a new and very important development in this direction of research is a comparison made by us between the calcaneus (heel bone) of the Neanderthal foot and that of North American Hominoids as shown in the materials of American hominologists. Grover Krantz, on his part, concludes that the Bigfoot has "enlarged heels", "the heel section must be correspondingly longer." He also writes that the creature's "ankle joint must be set relatively farther forward along the length of the foot", its length is expected to be "set relatively farther forward on the foot than in man."

Thus, this is also true of the Neanderthal foot, dramatically illustrating the above point.

To make things even more fascinating, the very same features show on the foot of the creature in Roger Patterson's filmstrip. To our knowledge, this fact has not been mentioned before by analysts of the film.

It follows that analysing a possible anatomy of the hominoid foot we find agreement in three, apparently, independent sources: 1. Roger Patterson's film; 2. Photographs and plaster casts of footprints obtained by Rene Dahinden and others, and analyzed by Grover Krantz; 3. Morphology of the Neanderthal foot.

As for the giant size of North American Hominoids, we think this cannot be a sufficient argument against Porshnev's standpoint since big variations in size are also true of the species Homo sapiens.

In our analysis we did not refer to Gigantopithecus because virtually nothing is known about that form of primates except their giant size. As for what is known of the foot of Australopithecus and "Homo habilis", it does not seem to fit the pattern of the hominoid foot we are dealing with.

NOT MAN-MADE - So our conclusion at this stage is the following: though it is not yet clear in what relation North American hominoids stand to the making of man, it is pretty clear now they themselves are not man-made.

                                         Moscow , October, 1972. Dmitri Bayanov , Igor Bourtsev

References:

Porshnev, Boris,1963. Sovremennoe sostoyanie voprosa ? relictovykh gominoidakh (Present state of the problem of relict hominoids), Moscow, V.I.N.I.T.I.
Porshnev, Boris,1969. Troglodytidy i gominidy v sistematike i evolutsii vysshikh primatov (The Troglodytidae and the Hominidae in the Taxonomy and evolution of higher primates) in Doklady Akademii Nauk SSSR, volume 188, issue 1.
Krantz, Grover, 1972. Anatomy of the Sasquatch Foot, Northwest Anthropological Research Notes, Vol. 6, No. 1.
Urisson, Mikhail, 1966. Pithecanthropus, Sinanthropus and the related hominid forms, in the Collection of articles Iskopaemye Gominidy i Proiskhozhdenie Cheloveka (Fossil Hominids and Man's Origin), Moscow, Nauka publishing house.