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Greetings fellow phosphorus emitting lifeforms (and you golden urine jockeys too, I see you, and your bovine brethren). Trekker “the sexiest lizard” Tlumac here to lick you reality or uranus. Your choice really.

I’m just a lizard, standing in front of a lot, asking for a ride.



Yeah, so looking back, it’s been almost exactly six weeks since my last article. It seems more like a year ago.

Wait.

No.

That doesn’t seem right.

Hmm. I’ll need to get chatGPT to look into that conundrum for me.

Well anyways, I’m here, I’m green, so let’s get horizontal?

Huh, yeah, that still doesn’t seem quite right either. I think I need to fire the intern in charge of copywriting my articles.

No, Mr Trekker, you can’t fire me. I’m your nephew.

Nephew, you say? You don’t look familiar. Whose kid are you?

I’m REDACTED’s son. You know me. You were at my third, fifth, and eighty-seventh birthdays!”


REDACTED’s kid, really? Huh. I really expected REDACTED to breed more responsibly. Very well. I guess it would be awkward to see your REDACTED at the annual family rattlesnake chili convention. You can stay. Just make sure you clean up this whole dictation mess. Don’t want the pleebs to think I am psychotic and talking to myself, or anything.


Well, with the jokes aside, mostly, I guess it is time to write something mildly coherent.


Last time I published, I talked about a new show that my buddy was hosting and wanted me to partner with him on. We’ve since done two episodes, and are working on researching our third topic. Our first topic, Bigfoot, was way more interesting to me than our second one (Villisca Axe Murders of 1912).

I went out and listened to dozens of videos on Bigfoot. And because I am a nerd, I went and looked for books/papers/dissertations that approached the idea of a large unknown hominid on a more anthropological premise than strictly from a “I go camping every weekend and last week I heard something knocking on the trees after it got dark out” anecdotal type of testimony that the bulk of popular videos/books/shows seem to come at the question with. I came across a lot of stuff that fascinated me endlessly. It still fascinates me.

I learned quite a bit about other hominids and possibly relict populations of currently declared extinction large primates. There is actually fairly compelling evidence to suggest that such populations have existed up until the industrial revolution. Granted these populations were not in industrialized areas, in fact, most such reports occurred in regions of dense vegetation with very low population densities and were extraordinarily hard to get to.

Some of it I already had some ideas about, or came to similar conclusions (after reflection and consideration upon how I would expect things to work). The biggest surprise while reading up on the topic actually came when I read a paper about bigfoot feet. Uh, bigfeet foots? Nah. The first one is definitely (probably) correct.

*Smiles with he hopes appears to be confidence.*

Well anyway, paper goes on to look at the footprints that bigfoot leaves behind, and the casts that people take of them. The oldest (remaining known) casts date back to the early 1900’s, well before the coinage of the term bigfoot (which was only coined in 1958, after a reporter wrote a short article about strange footprints forestry workers discovered at their worksite).

The paper went on to describe the shape and depth of many of the more credible casts, and suggests that they show evidence of a midtarsal pressure ridge.

If you are like me, that doesn’t mean much to you. Yet.

A midtarsal pressure ridge only occurs if the middle of the foot has flexion (like if you bend your foot back from the middle of the foot, naturally and without pain). Modern humans do not have flexible feet. We have an arch and it is essentially the middle bones of the foot fusing together to create a harder area to bear more weight for longer periods of time. At least, that is the theory most scientists have for why our feet developed in that sort of way. This is in contrast to most primates (maybe all others, I can’t recall at the moment). Other great apes have middle foot flexion, even though it is not nearly as pronounced as it is in smaller, tree dwelling, primates.

Now it was originally thought that the fusion of the middle foot and the development of the foot arch was a major marker in the progression of humans. It was postulated that the foot arch is what allowed humans to walk upright permanently by providing added stability, and that it must have developed early on in our progression down a different road than other hominids.

I mean, that is a whole other thing, which is also surprisingly interesting, but not directly relevant to the bigfoot conversation, beyond understanding that hominids have an arch, other apes do not.

The most credible of the bigfoot footprint plaster casts show signs of having that midtarsal pressure ridge. And we are not talking about just the newer footprints, the best older ones show it too.

That set me off a whole different rabbit hole and it led me to the hypothesis that if bigfoot were real (big if) that they would likely be an unknown large ape, as opposed to a relict population of a humanoid-spinoff (cro-mags or neanderthals). A likely candidate for that is gigantopithecus or some evolutionary offshoot of it.

But more importantly… Faking a midtarsal pressure ridge in some prints for 60+ years all over the place seems like an awful lot of work to go through (not to mention nearly physically impossible) to fake the existence of bigfoot. Moreover, who would have possibly known about that in the early 1900s? Science was still coming to terms with the reality of dinosaurs and other fossils potentially being hundreds of millions of years old and had not yet really begun the process of separating out the youngest fossils from the epochs following.

Gigantopithecus, for instance, was only first described by science in 1935. Before that its teeth were being sold as dragon teeth (like many large fossilized teeth of the time) in medicine shops near where the fossils were found.

Obviously some (maybe most) of the tracks are fakes. That’s something that cannot be argued against successfully. However it is also equally difficult to argue against every single track being faked by some redneck strapping wooden carved feet.

Another thing that supports the premise that some are not fakes is that some of them actually show signs of having friction ridges on them (AKA: fingerprints, or, in this case, footprints).

Yeah… I mean, I guess that could be faked. But it is pretty difficult to conceive of someone waking up one morning pre-1950 and deciding that they want to start making fake footprints, to perpetuate the wildman rumors that the indigenous populations and early European fur trappers started talking about to anyone that would listen hundreds of years before. And then have such a well formed opinion in their head about what the hoax should be that they added obscure physiological details that would be accurate for a large non-human primate, during a time where very few people alive at the time knew about that apes large enough to be bigfoot ever existed, that they probably walked like with a flexible mid foot, or that they would have friction ridges on their feet, seems a bit sus.

But that’s not my business.







Anyways… I fully intended to talk about other things in this article too. But the bigfoot thing took up a lot more time to write about than I planned. That is actually how our episode played out too. I talked about it a lot longer than I thought we would. And, of course, I was only able to hit about half of the topics I wanted to talk about during the video.

If you are interested in watching me ramble on about bigfoot for 40 minutes while my Canadian buddy tries, and succeeds, to derail my thoughts, I’ll leave that link below.

My YouTube is @TrekkerTlumac. The page is still a work in progress and I have three shorts up there currently, a link to the videos about bigfoot and villisca murder house on my buddy’s page, since I joined him on live and they are therefore on his channel, a few choice playlists of content, and a link to my horror novella and one to the author page for my picture book pseudonym.










And now time for the obligatory real-life history plug: If you are at all interested in the real-life namesakes of the party and the MU, I encourage you to read up about the 506 Infantry Regiment and its legendary E Company. To get you started, I have included the wiki links to both below.



Here’s the 506th
Here’s E Company


I find so many things endlessly fascinating (it’s one of my many faults) and history (near and dear, to ancient and largely forgotten) interests me on so many levels. History gets straight up wild and is sometimes beyond belief. Just go Google Audie Murphy or Jack Churchill or Aimo Koivunen. And they are all from WW2.

Are some accounts of their exploits exaggerated? Probably. I would wager that some of the accounts are also underplayed, since history is a fickle business. Still, it makes for some entertaining and, at times, inspiring reading. It gives us a sense of heroes and heroic feats have been possible in the past, so why can’t they still be.

And that, more than many other things, is what interests me. The liberties taken are par for the course. You’d be hard pressed to find any lasting history that is not highly colored to one means or another. Heck, we can’t even agree on what’s happening in the present. What makes us believe that we are the first people to ever not agree with the narrative of history as we experience it?

At least the feats and exploits of the soldiers from the Greatest Generation and those immediately adjacent enough to serve in either of the great wars are likely to be a bit more accurate than some of the other things presented as “having happened” (I’m looking at you, Netflix).

That said, I am absolutely going to go watch “Cocaine Bear” in theaters in a couple weeks and love every highly exaggerated minute of it.

[Edit: I absolutely did go see Cocaine Bear. It was glorious and terrible for all the right reasons. I may have made use of my Regal Unlimited subscription to see it a few times. By may have, I mean most definitely did.]




Until next time,
Trekker SpanksALot Tlumac