Abstract
Grover Krantz occupied a unique and quirky place between the crackpots and the eggheads. A trained paleoanthropologist, by the middle of the 1970s he had come to the realization that for him straightforward evolution studies held little opportunity for notoriety. He therefore determined to win renown through his work on manlike monsters. He knew this would be a risky course to pursue. Fulfilling his expectations, Krantz’s career suffered, but the role of maverick appealed to him. Such a position allowed him simultaneously to support and criticize both sides of the issue and situate himself as the academic authority and leader in the field. He enjoyed taking the road less traveled, which he did from conviction, but also from the simple joy of contrariness. He would have opted for such a trajectory whatever area he devoted himself to, whether the lives of Neanderthals, the evolutionary patterns of Homo erectus, the migration histories of Indo-European peoples, or manlike monsters. He entered the latter field just as the Yeti/Asia phase ended and the Sasquatch/North America phase took off, finding himself with a tortuous route to negotiate between competing camps in an attempt to reach his goals. If any academic had the motivation to step into the public eye and make a career of supporting the existence of anomalous primates, it would have to be someone like Grover Krantz.
And what is not regarded as wondrous when it first gains public attention? How many things are judged impossible before they actually happen?
Pliny the Elder, 77 ad
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Notes
Matthew Bowman. “A Mormon Bigfoot: David Patten’s Cain and the Conception of Evil in LDS Folklore,” Journal of Mormon History 33:3 (Fall 2007): 62–82
and Shane Lester. Clan of Cain: the Genesis of Bigfoot (self published, 2001).
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Brian Regal. “Entering Dubious Realms: Grover Krantz, Science, and Sasquatch.” Annals of Science 66:1 (January 2009): 83–102. 90.
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Aaron Gillette. Eugenics and the Nature-Nurture Debate in the Twentieth-Century (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007).
For eugenics and typology see, George W. Stocking, Jr., ed. Bones, Bodies, Behavior: Essays on Biological Anthropology (University of Wisconsin Press: Madison, WI, 1988).
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Carleton Coon. The Races of Europe (Macmillan, New York: 1939) and Origin of the Races (New York: Knopf, 1962).
Carleton Putnam. Race and Reason: a Yankee View (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1961). Putnam is still held in reverence as a ‘scholarly’ author by reactionary right wing pundits and racialists as is Coon.
Aaron Gillette. Eugenics and the Nature-Nurture Debate in the Twentieth-Century (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan: 2007): 147, 162.
Pat Shipman. The Evolution of Racism: Human Differences and the Use and Abuse of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994): 173.
Sherwood Washburn. “The Study of Race,” American Anthropologist 65 (1963):521–31.
Theodosius Dobzhansky. “Genetic Entities in Hominid Evolution,” in Sherwood Washburn ed. Classification and Human Evolution (Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co., 1963): 361.
Grover Krantz. “Review of Human Variation: Races, Types, and Ethnic Groups,” by Stephen Molnar, American Anthropologist 85 (1983):702.
Carleton Coon. “Why There has to be a Sasquatch,” in Markotic, Vladimir and Grover Krantz eds., The Sasquatch and Other Unknown Hominoids (Calgary: Western Publishers, 1984).
Will Duncan. “What is Living in the Woods, and Why it Isn’t Gigantopithecus,” in Craig Heinselman ed. Crypto Hominology Special #1 on-line (April 7, 2001).
See Everett Ortner, “Do ‘Extinct’ animals still survive?” Popular Science Monthly (1959), Don Oakley and John Lane, “Earth, Stars and Man: Apemen and Giants,” Yakima Daily Republic (November 2, 1960) and Willy Ley, Exotic Zoology (New York: Viking Press, 1959).
Michael Grumley. There Were Giants in the Earth (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1974): 91.
B. Ann Slate and Alan Berry. Bigfoot (New York: Bantam, 1976): xiii.
Wolpoff’s first scholarly article on regional continuity was **Thorne, A. G., and M. H. Wolpoff, “Regional continuity in Australasian Pleistocene hominid evolution.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 55 (1981):337–349.
A. Adamson Hoebel. Man in the Primitive World (McGraw-Hill: New York, 1949):30.
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© 2011 Brian Regal
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Regal, B. (2011). The Life of Grover Krantz. In: Searching for Sasquatch. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118294_5
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