http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/02/ ... h-is-real/
Bigfoot genome paper “conclusively proves” that Sasquatch is real
And it only took founding a new journal to get the results published.
by John Timmer - Feb 13 2013, 6:00pm CST
LIFE SCIENCES
124
Bigfoot cares for its young.
Katy Kristin
It's not often you come across a scientific paper which notes that the information it covers is like something "seen on the television series Monster Quest." And you rarely read a paper which concludes, "The data conclusively proves that the Sasquatch exist as an extant hominin and are a direct maternal descendant of modern humans." But today, we have such a paper—and there's nothing usual about it, including the journal where it appears.
Back in December, our own Nate Anderson drove me to the bottle with a flurry of questions about cryptozoology. One of the big motivators of Nate's interest in sasquatch was a report that a Texas group had sequenced the creature's genome. Not surprisingly, the team behind this startling research had some trouble publishing a paper describing their results.
By all appearances, they've solved that problem... by establishing a brand new journal, called De Novo (I'm not kidding; they apparently bought an existing journal and renamed it). The journal's site appears to be a mix of clip art and some basic HTML. Though it claims to be "open access," the site actually charges $30 to see the bigfoot paper (although their press person was kind enough to provide Ars with a free copy). Payment requires a Google Wallet account.
Currently, the sasquatch genome report is all you can see. It's the only paper in Volume 1, Issue 1 of De Novo.
Running the data
Normally, publishers require genetic sequences to be submitted to a public database before a paper's publication, but there's a slight hitch here: the big public database requires a species identification, and sasquatch isn't officially a species. While the research team works on sorting out the species issues, it has provisionally settled on Homo sapiens cognatus. Some of the sequence data from the alleged bigfoot is available as downloadable supplements.
We're currently working with someone who has relevant genomics experience to do an analysis on those sequences, but much of the paper speaks for itself—and it says some very strange things. Figures in the paper show everything from iconic large footprints to old engravings of mythical ape-like creatures. There's even a photo of what seems to be a very shaggy carpet sleeping in the woods (with an embedded video, naturally).
The researchers (primarily a mix of forensics experts) have been collecting alleged bigfoot samples for years, accepting submissions from across North America. These include everything from stray hairs to clumps of fur with flesh attached to a pool of blood (collected after—wait for it—a sasquatch chewed on a pipe).
The team used fairly standard forensic techniques on these items: minimize contamination, gather the DNA of those who collected the samples, then ship everything out to contract facilities for analysis, with a large variety of tests being performed.
At this point, we get into some actual biology with enough details to analyze. And the details appear to point in the exact opposite direction of the authors' conclusions that bigfoot represents a recent hybridization between modern humans and an unknown species of primate.
To begin with, the mitochondrial DNA of the samples (when it can be isolated) clusters with that of modern humans. That isn't itself a problem if we assume that those doing the interbreeding were human females, but the DNA sequences come from a variety of different humans—16 in total. And most of these were "European or Middle Eastern in origin" with a few "African and American Indian haplotypes." Given the timing of the interbreeding, we should only be seeing Native American sequences here. The authors speculate that some humans may have walked across the ice through Greenland during the last glaciation, but there's absolutely no evidence for that. The best explanation here is contamination.
As far as the nuclear genome is concerned, the results are a mess. Sometimes the tests picked up human DNA. Other times, they didn't. Sometimes the tests failed entirely. The products of the DNA amplifications performed on the samples look about like what you'd expect when the reaction didn't amplify the intended sequence. And electron micrographs of the DNA isolated from these samples show patches of double- and single-stranded DNA intermixed. This is what you might expect if two distantly related species had their DNA mixed—the protein-coding sequences would hybridize, and the intervening sections wouldn't. All of this suggests modern human DNA intermingled with some other contaminant.
The authors' description of the sequence suggests that it's human DNA interspersed with sequence from some other primate—hence the interbreeding idea. But the best way to analyze this would be to isolate the individual segments of non-human DNA and see what species those best align with. If the authors have done that, they don't say. They also don't mention how long the typical segment of non-human DNA is. Assuming interbreeding took place as the authors surmise, these segments should be quite long, since there hasn't been that much time to recombine. The fact that the authors don't mention this at all is pretty problematic.
It's impossible to say anything for certain until we can get the sequences analyzed; hopefully, we'll have an update on that before the week is out. At the moment, though, all indications suggest that the sasquatch hunters are working on a mix of human DNA intermingled with that of some other (or several other) mammals
You know, I like to give a cryptozoologists the benefit of the doubt. So long as they are sane and rational, there is a lot of strange shit living in some of the remote places of the world. It would be arrogant of me to assume that every sighting of something unknown is a hoax or a mistake. There WERE aquatic reptiles like the Choristoderes that lived until at least the Miocene, . There may be a couple of them clinging to existence in a remote South Asian mangrove swamp, or in some forgotten corner of the Amazon basin. Africa was called the Dark Continent for a reason--not because of the local's skin color, but because much of it was unexplorable for a long time. The jungles of West Africa are largely unexplored. There is cool stuff there we dont know about.
If local people see something strange, go check it out. It might be a relict of something really old, something new, or something ordinary doing something we have not observed before. There is historical precedent for it, and this often has some value.
Then the Sasquatch and Nessie people come out of the woodwork like cockroaches. Loch Ness is well surveyed and does not have the productivity to support archosaurs. The Pacific Northwest is also well surveyed, and if there was a stable population of some sort of relict hominid that migrated over from Asia at some point, we would have something other than grainy photos of a thing that moves like a guy encased in vulcanized rubber.
What do they have? Clumps of fur (that could just as easily be from a squirrel or one of the Moose Overlords), some blood from...somewhere, that was contaminated with Everything, from an unknown original source.
In other words, nothing. A sane person would have tossed in the towel by now, but these people are not sane. *head-desks*
