Regular Episode
#171 – LONG AND DRAWN OUT: BIGFOOT PICTOGRAPHS
A quick vocabulary note before diving in: pictographs are images painted on rock; petroglyphs are images carved or scratched into rock; and geoglyphs are large designs formed by arranging durable material on the ground surface. The site under discussion is primarily a pictograph site, though it contains both types.
🪨 Painted Rock and the Tule River People
Painted Rock is a rock shelter — not a solution cavern, but a natural overhang formed by tectonic or glacial processes — located on the Tule River Indian Reservation near Porterville in south-central California. The roughly 54,000-acre reservation is home to the modern descendants of the people who almost certainly created this art somewhere between 500 and 1,000 years ago.
The Tule River people were primarily hunter-gatherers whose subsistence relied heavily on fishing, hunting, and — critically — the harvest and processing of acorns, which required leaching out tannic acid to produce an edible meal. They are also renowned for their exceptional basketry. The rock shelter is a sacred site to the tribe; Ken emphasizes that it is private land, not a public park, and that he obtained explicit permission from tribal leadership before visiting. He was escorted by a tribal member named Zach, who shared his own perspective on the Hairy Man and the relationship (or lack thereof) between the traditional figure and modern Bigfoot belief.
The shelter contains an impressive array of pictographs and petroglyphs depicting animals from the Tule River creation tradition — including a striking ceiling image of what appears to be a coyote swallowing the moon, rendered in red, black, and white — as well as the large back-wall figure that has attracted Bigfoot researchers.
🦶 The Hairy Man Figure — and Why It Became “Bigfoot”
The central figure on the back wall of Painted Rock stands roughly eight feet tall and six feet wide, is depicted upright on two legs, and is known in the Tule River language as Mayak Datat (approximate spelling: M-A-Y-A-K D-apostrophe A-T-A-T; correct pronunciation remains uncertain). The earliest known documentation of the site is in Garrick Mallery‘s 1889 work Picture-Writing of the American Indians, which includes a full-plate illustration of the back wall — and notably does not describe the figure as “hairy” at all.
Ken points out that the lines crossing the figure’s arms appear to originate above the arms and pass through them, which makes them a poor fit for depicting hair or fur. More significantly, he notes that tribal oral histories collected in 1975 and published in book form in 2008 — a volume the tribal chairman personally gifted to Ken — do not identify this figure as Bigfoot prior to the mid-1970s. Moskowitz-Strain herself acknowledges in her research that the Hairy Man was understood as a spirit being until approximately 1975, after which the Bigfoot identification begins to appear.
What changed? Ken and Blake identify the mid-1970s as the moment Bigfoot entered mainstream American pop culture in a big way — through the Patterson-Gimlin film of 1967, followed by films like The Legend of Boggy Creek and the TV series In Search Of…. Native people, like everyone else, are embedded in popular culture, and it would not be surprising if an already-existing figure of a large bipedal being became retroactively associated with a newly famous cultural phenomenon.
🐻 The Grizzly Bear Hypothesis
Ken’s most striking contribution to the debate comes from the 1975 oral history collected from Tule River elders. When he finally reads the relevant creation story in that book, expecting to find Mayak Datat conferring bipedalism on humans, the passage instead attributes that gift to Grizzly Bear: “Grizzly Bear said people should be able to stand on their hind legs like me, and they should have no tail.”
This leads Ken to advance a hypothesis — one he acknowledges is speculative but which he finds more parsimonious than the Bigfoot interpretation — that the Painted Rock figure may actually depict a grizzly bear. His reasoning:
– The proportions of the figure (short, stubby hind legs; low crotch; wide-spread arms) are inconsistent with any known hominid or hominoid, but fit a rearing bear reasonably well.
– In the tribe’s own creation story, it is Grizzly Bear — not a hairy man — who models and bestows bipedal locomotion on humans.
– The parallel with the word orangutan (“person of the forest” in Malay) is instructive: a linguistically anthropomorphic name does not mean the named creature was literally believed to be human.
– Eyewitness Bigfoot reports in general have long been explained by some skeptics as misidentified bears walking on their hind legs.
Ken notes that Moskowitz-Strain’s 2012 article cites the 1975/2008 oral history compilation in its bibliography, making the Grizzly Bear passage available to her — and he argues, gently but firmly, that the article should at minimum have acknowledged and addressed this alternative reading.
📖 Folklore, Cautionary Tales, and the Limits of Literal Interpretation
The Tule River Hairy Man tradition is internally inconsistent across different story versions — in some he is a frightening figure who steals acorn meal and must be warned against; in others he is a helper who chases away grizzly bears; in still others he assists souls in moving on after death. Ken argues this is exactly what you’d expect from living oral folklore, where a character serves whatever narrative role the story requires at that moment.
The show discusses how the Hairy Man functions, at least in some versions, as a classic bogeyman figure — “don’t wander too far from camp or Mayak Datat will get you” — a role paralleled by the Yeti in Himalayan tradition and by the water horse and other cryptid-adjacent figures worldwide. Blake and Ken note the cherry-picking at work when Bigfoot proponents accept the Hairy Man as a literal biological creature while treating Coyote, Eagle, Lizard, and the rest of the creation-story cast as purely symbolic.
Ken also makes a point about cultural respect that runs counter to how it is usually framed: treating Indigenous spiritual beings as misidentified flesh-and-blood animals may feel like a compliment (“your stories are based on real observations!”) but actually denies those traditions their own cosmological integrity — replacing spirit beings with zoology without being asked.
⏳ Dating and Interpreting Rock Art
Ken walks through how archaeologists approach the age of pictographs. If organic material (e.g., charcoal) was used in the pigment, radiocarbon dating can be applied directly to the image. More commonly, stylistic comparisons with datable artifacts provide relative or indirect absolute dates — Ken illustrates this with the Fremont culture petroglyphs of Utah and the Pilling figurines, three-dimensional sculptures whose associated charcoal dates to roughly 1,000 years ago, establishing a chronological anchor for the stylistically identical rock art. The Painted Rock pictographs are generally estimated at 500–1,000 years old based on weathering, lichen growth, and stylistic analysis.
On interpretive methodology, Ken discusses the value of both emic (insider, community) and etic (outside, analytical) perspectives in anthropology and archaeology. Neither trumps the other; they are complementary. He invokes Stephen Jay Gould‘s concept of non-overlapping magisteria to make the point that folklore and science are parallel ways of making sense of the world, and neither is obliged to colonize the other’s territory.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 Ancient America: Fifty Archaeological Sites to See for Yourself 💵 by Kenneth L. Feder (Rowman & Littlefield)
– 📚 Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology 💵 by Kenneth L. Feder (Oxford University Press)
– 📚 Giants, Cannibals & Monsters: Bigfoot in Native Culture 💵 by Kathy Moskowitz Strain
– 📚 Strange Archaeology: A Field Guide to 40 of the Most Improbable Archaeological Sites in North America 💵 by Kenneth L. Feder (Rowman & Littlefield)
🔗 Related Links
– Tule River Indian Reservation (Wikipedia)
– Kathy Moskowitz-Strain’s 2012 article on Mayak Datat
– Relict Hominoid Inquiry (journal where the research was published)
– Patterson-Gimlin Film (Wikipedia)
– Black Dragon Canyon, Utah (Wikipedia)
– Bears Ears National Monument (Wikipedia)
– Non-overlapping Magisteria — Stephen Jay Gould (Wikipedia)
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
An interview with archaeologist Ken Feder (see numerous other episodes including Giants and Atlantis) about the Tule River reservation Mayak Datat (“Hairy Man”) pictographs which have been called evidence for Bigfoot. Hopefully, this will be part 1 of at least a 2 part look.
Warning: Some of the language in this episode may not be suitable for children. Listener discretion is advised.
Links of interest:
- Petroglyphs vs Pictographs
- Kathy M. Strain’s 2012 article on Mayak Datat
- 2003 version of Strain’s research on Mayak Datat
- Amanda (FN) Palmer’s Judy Blume song
- Protect Bears Ears historic site
- A “Bigfoot” version of the hairy man legend
- Relict Hominid Inquiry homepage
- More views of these pictographs
- Ken Feder’s Amazon page
Music
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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