Centralia College Offers Continuing Education Course Covering How Native Americans Bred Bigfoot to Battle Solutreans

​The continuing education department at Centralia College of Centralia, Washington began offering an adult education course which claims that Bigfoot is a Native American and ape hybrid who was hugely “influential” in the culture of the Solutreans, whom educator Mitchel Townsend (a candidate for a doctorate in education) identifies as “the first Americans.” The course is called “The Old Ones, the Firsts Americans,” and it started running on Saturday, the first of four two-hour sessions. According to a newspaper article touting the course, it’s essentially a mishmash of various fringe archaeology claims woven together with the growing myth of Bigfoot

"Bigfoot" rock photographed by the Lewis County "Chronicle"

​Townsend’s evidence, as described in the article, is laughably awful. He collected a bunch of rocks with dark splotches on them, and like a History Channel Rorschach test, he sees in those splotches all manner of imaginary things: “The pictures on the rocks, which still need to be carbon dated, include elephants, bears and what he describes as a hybrid hominin in a similar pose to the Patterson-Gimlin film, which shows an unidentified subject thought to be bigfoot.” Carbon dating a rock! Centralia College educates its students but good. Despite a lack of “carbon dating,” Townsend is confident that his rock pictures are at least 20,000 years old, and while he says that he has not finished an academic paper that will thoroughly analyze the findings, he is also sure that the splotches were left by the Solutreans. Further, “bigfoot had to be an important part of their society” if there is a splotch that looks like a big ape.
 
Townsend, who has repeatedly claimed to have found evidence for Bigfoot such as teeth marks near his home in Washington, describes himself as a college volunteer and says that he teaches the course for free. Townsend has previously offered a continuing education class in “Bigfoot 101,” but the cost to learn about fictitious giant apes has risen significantly. In 2014, the Bigfoot 101 course was just $5, but today The Old Ones will set you back $20.
 
While I don’t care much about Bigfoot per se, several of Townsend’s claims are interesting enough to warrant my attention. The first and most obvious is the idea that the Solutreans were the first and true native Americans. Dennis Sanford of the Smithsonian proposed that Stone Age Spaniards called Solutreans came to America’s east coast and brought with them fluted points used by the Clovis people thousands of years later, but the idea that these European visitors colonized the whole of the Americas is a fantasy typically found among white nationalists, who (wrongly) think of the Solutreans as the first white conquerors of America. (Genetic evidence suggests that white skin had not evolved when they lived.) Townsend’s adoption of this fringe belief seems typically of the bleeding together of various brands of dissent from the historical mainstream. Townsend supports his version with recourse to post-Contact Native American legends about a prior race, legends long used by hyper-diffusionists to allege that white Europeans preceded Native Americans. Townsend differs, though, from the white nationalists in that he sees the Solutrean colonists as “primitive” rather than possessed of Atlantis-like superlative culture.
 
The equally interesting, but even more troubling, claim is the idea that Native Americans and apes cross-bred to create Bigfoot. The article puts it this way: “Townsend concluded the human-like teeth imprints, accompanied by footsteps with a length of 16 inches, belong to a creature like bigfoot who shares the genetic makeup of Native Americans and an ape.” I couldn’t believe anyone would say such a thing, so I checked, and it turns out that Townsend’s actual claim, given to a newspaper in 2015, is worse: “My theory is it’s not an ape, it’s a hybrid that has been interbreeding with Native Americans for the last 80,000 years,” Townsend said. “That’s why it is so smart and it has human teeth.”
 
So, to recap: Native Americans enjoy bestiality and created a race of carnivorous ape hybrids which they used to wipe out the European people who were here first and were the true original Americans.
 
Good to know what our colleges are teaching these days, even if it is under the lesser banner of continuing education.

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