Monte Roraima

So I was watching this show last night about a group of scientists that recently were assembled and sent to explore Monte Roraima in Venezuela. For those not familiar with random plateau's in Venezuela, Monte Roraima is one of the least explored places on earth. This table-top mountain, or tepuis, is thought to be the oldest mountain on earth having formed when Africa and South America split apart. Monte Roraima is unique in that it is nearly 9,300 feet tall and is almost inaccessible due to sheer cliffs on all sides. This is the point in this blog post where you all begin to drift as I write about random mountains in Venezuela.... Here's why this place, and this expedition, are fascinating to me: Monte Roraima's unique set of circumstances, and inaccessibility, have long made it a candidate for housing unknown, or even long extinct creatures. The thought here is that when this landscape rose from the ground, it's eco-system was essentially frozen in time, and has not been touched since. This place was what originally inspired Arthur Conan Doyle to write The Lost World in 1912 (the inspiration for Jurassic Park and King Kong).

So this random group of scientists set out to explore this place. There is this one guy who is a cryptozoologist. Yep, crypto as in hidden/secret, and zoologist as in animals. This guy was a "specialist" in lost/mythical or unknown-to-science animals. He basically walked around waiting for a pterodactyl to come flying down and eat him (local Indians talk about this species as one of many still thought to reside on the mountain) the whole episode. He was joined by a herpetologist, a couple of cave specialists, a random biologist, and a specialist in tarantulas. Long story short, they find a bunch of new creatures, but no dinosaurs or giant mammals.

I mention all of this because something fascinated me during this show. I began to notice that no matter how remote a tribe, no matter how remote a location, even those on opposite ends of the earth with no contact whatsoever with one another, every single place and tribe have stories of the same type of creature: An ape man. In the Himalayas, it's called the Yeti. In North America, it's been long referred to as (even Native American mythology tells of it) Bigfoot or Sasquatch. In Australia the Yowie, in Central America the Dwendi. In this area of South America, I can't remember what the local tribe was calling it, but essentially it meant "demon-ape." I'm not saying I am going to start believing in Big Foot, but there is something to be said for every ancient culture telling of literally the same creature: A giant bipedal ape/man thing. It's not even that bizarre really. After all, there was a creature that basically was this exact specimen called Giganthopithicus that lived perhaps as recently as 3,000 years ago in SE Asia. Who is to say something similar didn't live elsewhere, and even recently? So my question today is if anyone out there believes in Bigfoot?