A Pop Cultural History of Bigfoot

Aka Sasquatch, and his Tibetan cousin Yeti

Of all the cryptids (un)known to humankind, the mysterious forest ape that lurks in the background of almost every society seems to have the firmest grasp on the popular imagination. Whether or not you accept that humans descended from ape-like creatures (hint: we did), we see the similarity between us and our alleged furry cousins residing in the mountains. Unlike Nessie, chupacabras, and all the others, Bigfoot and his ilk have spawned an entire subculture. It began in the 1920s, when Canadian teacher J.W. Burns started putting together pieces of stories from his Native friends and coined a term: “Sasquatch.” Eventually, this name became synonymous with “Bigfoot,” which of course was what the Americans called it after a construction worker came to the paper with a plaster cast of a huge footprint.

The yeti had a decidedly more elegant position in cultural history, as a mythological creature inextricably linked to a spiritual tradition. Appropriately, descriptions and sightings vary widely, with everything from Sherpa accounts of the “meh-teh” to Everest mountaineer accounts of naked hominids (likely someone experiencing hypoxia) or thick, black-furred creatures out in the snow. It’s come to the point that any unknown Tibetan creature is called “yeti,” but the image of a gigantic, white…