DNA Evidence of Bigfoot?
I think that there might really be Yeti in the Himalayas, and there’s a lesser chance that Bigfoot is also real, in North America. So I was really excited to read the following at Red Orbit:
A team of scientists has published the results of a five-year study of DNA samples from Sasquatch in the journal DeNovo Journal of Science.
Researchers claim they have sequenced three whole Bigfoot nuclear genomes, helping to prove that the legendary creature exists in North America, and is a human relative that arose 13,000 years ago.
The scientists hypothesize that the Bigfoot creature is a hybrid cross of modern Homo sapiens, with a novel primate species, giving it the species name Homo sapiens cognatus.
And it sounds legit, with the study appearing in a scientific journal, and information like this:
“Clearly non-human hair (morphologically), washed thoroughly as is accepted procedure in forensic science to remove contaminates by two laboratories with two techniques, yielded human mitochondrial DNA sequence in all 111 samples in the study,” she said. “Thirty samples were taken past the screening to yield human mitochondrial haplotypes with twenty of those being entire mitochondrial genomes 16,500 bases long. Since species identification depends on the mitochondrial DNA in forensics, this clearly placed the samples in the family Homo, ie hominin. Screening by sequencing with universal primers would have also shown contamination if it had been there.”
So the hair is non-human looking, but has some human DNA….
This would be a massive story (and therefore would perhaps be in your daily newspaper or TV news) if it were true. Sadly there is plenty of evidence that this is not the proof many had hoped for. According to the website of the “journal”, their current issue is Volume 1, Issue 1, and the Bigfoot story is the only work mentioned. The website is new this year, and there is nothing anywhere about who runs it, let alone who the editors of the journal are. So, the journal has been created solely to add credence to the study. That is massively suspicious…
You need to dig a bit deeper, Rob, Ive been following this team of scientists and their research for months, dont let the new journal put you off, its just the mainstream science journals, as always, keen to avoid sticking their necks out even a little.
Check out the full backstory on a blog called ‘Phantoms and Monsters’, a well respected website run by Lon Stickler, you may be surprised…
Steven