Dr. Jeff Medrum's Presentation at Richland, WA Sasquatch Conference Pt 1/4

Saturday, May 19, 2012

WATCH: Dr. Jeff Medrum's Presentation at Richland, WA Sasquatch Conference Pt 1/4

Posted by Guy Edwards

Dr Jeff Meldrum at the Richland, WA Sasquatch Conference

Below is one of four video excerpts from the Dr. Jeff Meldrum's presentation at Thom Cantrall's Pacific Northwest Conference on Primal People (Sasquatch). (You can view Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3)

Richland WA PNW Bigfoot Conference 2012: Dr. Jeff Meldrum Part 1

In the first video, Dr. Jeff Meldrum discusses his new publication the Relict Hominoid Inquiry. According to the Relict Homoid Inquiry website:

The objective of the RHI is to promote research and provide a refereed venue for the dissemination of scholarly peer-reviewed papers exploring and evaluating the possible existence and nature of relict hominoid species around the world.

A strictly on-line free access publication, the RHI contains primarily Research Articles, as well as Commentary & Responses, Brief Communications, Essays, News &; Views, and Book Reviews.

An interesting point made by Dr. Meldrum is how the hairy-man myth is widespread but not universal. An important distinction. If the hairy-man was universal, it could be written off as a projection of human experience. This reminds us of the Jungian Archetypes, that Carl Jung suggests that are innate in our DNA. Dr. Meldrum is suggests these are not archetypes, these are not manifestations of the human psyche.

Finally, Dr. Meldrum uses an illustration from 1763 containing four mysterious primates. 1. Troglodyta Bontii, 2. Lucifer Aldrovandi, 3. Satyrus Tulpii, 4. Pygmaeus Edwardi

Anthropomorpha depicted in Hoppius' Amoenitates Academicae (1763)

The last three images have been associated to 2. Gibbon, 3. Chimpanzee 4. Orangutan respectively. This leaves the first illustration, Troglodyta Bontii, unidentified. Could it be the Sasquatch?

Watch the video below as Dr. Jeff Meldrum touches on each of these subjects in greater detail.

http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE7/NatHis.html
.....
[Essays by Thomas Huxley]

Linnæus knew nothing, of his own observation, of the man-like Apes of either Africa or Asia, but a dissertation by his pupil Hoppius in the "Amœnitates Academicæ" (VI. "Anthropomorpha") may be regarded as embodying his views respecting these animals.

From the Wikipedia,

The dissertation is illustrated by a plate, of which the accompanying woodcut, Fig, 6, is a reduced copy, The figures are entitled (from left to right 1. Troglodyta Bontii; 2. Lucifer Aldrovandi; 3. Satyrus Tulpii; 4. Pygmæus Edwardi. The first is a bad copy of Bontius' fictitious "Ourang-outang," in whose existence, however, Linnæus appears to have fully believed; for in the standard edition of the "Systema Naturæ," it is enumerated as a second species of Homo; "H. nocturnus." Lucifer Aldrovandi is a copy of a figure in Aldrovandus, "De Quadrupedibus digitatis viviparis," Lib. 2, p. 249 (1645) entitled "Cercopithecus formæ raræ Barbilius vocatus et originem a china ducebat." Hoppius [18] is of opinion that this may be one of that cat-tailed people, of whom Nicolaus Köping affirms that they eat a boat's crew, "gubernator navis" and all! In the "Systema Naturæ" Linnaeus calls it in a note, Homo caudatus,and seems inclined to regard it as a third species of man. According to Temminck, Satyrus Tulpii is a copy of the figure of a Chimpanzee published by Scotin in 1738, which I have not seen. It is the Satyrus indicus of the "Systema Naturæ," and is regarded by Linnæus as possibly a distinct species from Satyrus sylvestris. The last, named Pygmæus Edwardi, is copied from the figure of a young "Man of the Woods," or true Orang-Utan, given in Edwards' "Gleanings of Natural History" (1758).

http://www.archive.org/stream/monographonalbin11pear/monographonalbin11pear_djvu.txt

Bontius (see Bibl. 26, p. 84) gives one of the earliest accounts of the ourang-
outang, which name he says the Javanese give it because it is a man of the woods,
Homo sylvestris. He says that the Javanese assert that it arises from the lust of the
Indian women, who mix with the apes — a tale he does not appear to credit. He
desci'ibes the rather human characteristics of the female, and figures her as a sort of
hairy woman, not much resembling our idea of the ourang-outang. He identifies this
Homo sylvestris or ourang-outang with Pliny's Satyr [Nat. Hist. Lib. vii. cap. 2).
There is nothing about pigmentation or sight, but the whole tale, without apparently
the least hesitation, was afterwards transferred to the albino (including the legend of
being the hybrid of man and ape !). Bontius is not responsible. He gives a bad cut
of an aboriginal or a beast he had probably never seen close at hand (see our Plate r/) ;
It remained for Linnaeus to identify this ourang-outang and the albino !

From Helmut Loofs-Wissowa:

Research in unidentified hominoids in Southeast Asia can be said to have begun in the 17th century with the works of Jakob de Bondt, alias "Bontius," a Dutch physician in Batavia (now Jakarta). But from then on, what happened in this field of research in Southeast Asia had its repercussions throughout the world to this day. To begin with, this research started here not with a whisper but with a bang: a monumental misunderstanding regarding the name Orangutan (Malay for "Man of the woods"- or "Forestman") which is still with us and which it is about time to rectify once and for all.

Bontius came to Java in 1625 and stayed there until his death in 1631. During this time he wrote the pioneering work Historiae naturalis et medicae Indiae orientalis, published only in 1658 in Amsterdam. In it, he mentions anthropomorphic hairy creatures in Java, which, although not being humans, looked and behaved like them in all respects, except that they had no language, and to which he gave the name Ourang Outang or Homo silvestris (later sylvestris). It is now generally believed, even by the most prominent Western scholars, that this was of course the first reference to the ape orang-utan (Pongo pygmaeus). But this cannot be so for a number of reasons.
Bontius who himself saw several of these creatures of both sexes, only says that they were walking erect: utterly uncharacteristic for the mainly arboreal ape orang-utan that behaves awkwardly on the ground and rarely stands up at all. Furthermore, Bontius also refers back to Pliny the Elder who noted that there were, in the eastern regions of India, "Satyrs" who could run so fast that only the old and sick could be captured, and goes on to say how privileged he felt for having seen such creatures himself (although we do not know whether he had actually seen them running). However, the ability to run very fast is an attribute observed in many unidentified hominids, from the relic Neanderthal Enkidu in the Sumerian Gilgamesh epos who ran along with wild animals, to apemen in the Vietnamese Highlands chased without much success by the villagers; it is definitely not an attribute of the ape orangutan.
From two other contemporary Dutch travelers we have more information about the creatures Bontius described, confirming that they cannot be orang-utans. Thus we read that they communicate by "twittering" which is the precise word used independently by several informants describing wildmen in Indochina and the Caucasus; the noise orang-utans make has never been likened to the twitter of birds! We also read that the Javanese used to kill these apemen because they stole everything they possibly could overnight in their villages; this too, corresponds to the many reports by American soldiers in Vietnam of "gorillas" raiding their camps and is utterly unlike the behavior of orang-utans. Moreover, it is said that sometimes, instead of being killed, these hairy creatures were captured by the Javanese villagers and made to perform some manual domestic tasks such as fetching water; an orang-utan cannot do this. And finally, the arms of these apemen were said to descend to their knees; those of orang-utans are much longer.
But there is still the controversial matter of the drawing of such a female Homo sylvestris Bontius published with his report and which is generally taken to "obviously" be that of a very hairy sapiens woman because of her human limb proportions and her human vulva. Therefore, it is argued, Bontius cannot be trusted. It seems to me, however, that it was rather the draftsman who could not be trusted to have faithfully drawn, true to nature, a creature the nature of which he was not familiar with. To accuse Bontius of such a pointless misconstruction or even a deliberate attempt to trick his readers seems somewhat hasty. Incidentally, how do we know what the vulva of a Wild-woman really looks like? In any case, we may conclude that the good doctor's hairy bipedal creatures can definitely not have been orang-utans.
An early 18th century account from Borneo also strongly supports the conviction that creatures locally referred to as Forestmen cannot be the ape orang-utan. The first Englishman to write about Dutch Borneo, Captain Daniel Beeckman, notes in his A Voyage to and from the Island of Borneo (1718): "The Monkeys, Apes, and Baboons are of many different Sorts and Shapes; but the most remarkable are those they call "Oranootans," which in their Language signifies Men of the Woods: these grow up to be six foot high; they walk upright, have longer arms than man, tolerably good faces (handsomer I am sure than some Hottentots that I have seen), large teeth, no tails nor hair, but on those parts where it grows on humane bodies; they are nimble footed and mighty strong; they throw great stones, sticks, and billets at those persons that offend them." I wonder how any primatologist could really identify this tall, bipedal, nimble-footed almost glamorous"handsome" creature with a crouching longhaired hideous orang-utan. Nothing fits. This simply had to be the description of a Wildman.
Consequently, it was mainly on the strength of Bontius' report that the great Linnaeus (1707-1778), bold inventor of the order of Primates, made room in his Systema naturae for a separate human genus Troglodytes in which Homo sylvestris orang outang had pride of place. Thus, by the middle of the 18th century the existence of at least one more species of man next to Homo sapiens was generally accepted; he had found his legitimate place in Nature's complicated but nevertheless logical system and in particular in that of the primates. At the end of the chapter dealing with the classification of humans and apes in the 12th edition of his Systema, the last in his lifetime, Linnaeus wrote prophetically "what else has been revealed must be explained by theologians".
Sure enough, one of his disciples, the strongly Protestant Swabian medical professor Johann Friedrich Gmelin (1748-1804) who supervised the 13th edition of Systema naturae in 1789, took it upon himself to correct Linnaeus' views concerning humans which he thought were blasphemous and against the teaching of the Church, by simply eliminating any reference to men other than Homo sapiens from the Systema. God, Gmelin argued, created Man in His own image and this man could only have been Homo sapiens as God could not possibly look like an apeman; makes sense, does it not? A truly paradoxical situation developed therefore whereby the name Orang outang which was coined to scientifically designate a human being other than Homo sapiens, but which has always been applied by Malay speakers to various perfectly sapiens forest dwellers such as the Siamang or the Sakai, has become in the West that of the red-haired ape which at home is called by names not including the "man" component, such as mawa, maia or mias.
The unfortunate result of this development was that in Western science the quest for Forest Man was abandoned as useless and whenever there were rumors about such beings in Southeast Asia it was automatically assumed that they must refer to the incorrectly named ape orang-utan!
[Below, Alika Lindbergh's illustration of the Surviving Neanderthal man from Loofs-Wissow's article, taken from Heuvelman's book about the Minnesota Iceman]

Although Bontius localized the "Wildmen of the Woods" in Indonesia, in the 1600s it would have been recognised as identical to the Wildmen (Homo sylvestris) still being commonly seen, reported and illustrated in Europe: also being called "Cavemen" and "Apemen" even then.

An array of Wildmen illustrations. Upper Left, the "King of the Wildmen" as illustrated on a pack of playing cards from the 1600s. Upper Right, A more recent illustration of the traditional Wildman from a Fantasy context. Lower Left, a report of one of the "Forest People" of Vietnam, one of the sort that Loofs-Wissowa was talking about and was identifying as Bontius' "Ourang-outangs" and as Ivan Sanderson's Hairy Malaysian Submen. And at bottom right, reconstruction of the Wildman as a Living Neanderthal, Identical to the Iceman examined by Sanderson and Heuvelmans, which was Loofs-Wissowa's identification for the Wildmen in question.