Two Clear Possibilities for Bigfoot: Hybrid or Mutant

Possible Bigfoot Origins can be summed up in two words: Hybrid or Mutant

 "We used to think that mutations occurred individually and slowly over time, but fossil evidence suggests that new species pop up fast, driven by gene pool isolation, and then stabilize with population increase." -- Anthony Ciani, UIC condensed matter physicist

Bigfoot Lunch Club has been waiting for Dr. Melba Ketchum to contact us to no avail. It is a shame, without Melba Ketchum's input it is hard to provide a balanced take on her research. Today may be as close as we can get.

Anthony Ciani tells us he was introduced to Melba Ketchum earlier this year, January of 2013. When he was asked to be a guest editor for the journal in which her paper would be published.

Mr. Ciani brings up some interesting points based on Melba Ketchum's paper of which I've publish below.

There are two clear possibilities for the origin of bigfoots: hybrid or mutant.  The mtDNA is fully consistent with known human sequences (given a base pair or two).  The maternal lineage is, without a doubt, H. sapiens sapiens.  Even more interesting, is that the oldest mtDNA sequence found was from about 15,000 ybp, while the youngest was only a few thousand years old, if that.  This means that bigfoots have been continuously splitting from or interbreeding with normal humans since about 15,000 ybp until rather recently.  The problem with the hybrid idea is that if bigfoots are a cross between humans and some closely related hominid (Homo X), then they probably would have breed with Homo X, and we should find unknown mtDNA from Homo X; but there is not, at least, not in the bigfoots from which samples were collected.  Some people might think that the Homo X chromosome 11 and human chromosome 11 should still be distinctly identifiable, but chromosomal crossover could have mixed them together, turning a heterogeneous hybrid into a homogeneous race.

The other option is that bigfoots originated as a mutation from H. sapiens sapiens.  We used to think that mutations occurred individually and slowly over time, but fossil evidence suggests that new species pop up fast, driven by gene pool isolation, and then stabilize with population increase.  There was a global disruption about 15,000 ybp, and it is quite possible that bigfoots are cold-adapted humans.  Given their physical features, they do seem to be dark skinned and negroid, which were the predominant human traits until about 6,000 ybp (when human skin color lightened in the north).  Add in the hair and size, and you have a bigfoot.  Throw in a bit of racism, and you have perpetual segregation.  Given the broad range of physical descriptions, bigfoots may still be mutating.  Bigfoots may have been even smarter in the past, and if Gerald Crabtree is correct, both they and us may be getting even less smart.  Intelligence is not the objective of evolution; survival is, and evolution may have us all giant and hairy, running around in the woods.

Of course I ran this past my go-to micro biologist Dr. Tyler Kochjohn and he had this to say:

There are many possible models to explain Bigfoot origins and I feel [Anthony Ciani] has done a great job coming up with some ideas.  Ideas are the easy part and sometimes Nature does not work the way we think it should, making it essential to examine all the possibilities by confronting hypothesis with data.  I also point out that disputes over data and ideas are part and parcel of science, this is certainly not unique to Dr. Ketchum’s paper.  If you ask a scientist whether they have had a paper rejected by a journal in an unwarranted manner, I feel most will admit to that and probably tell you they were furious about it as well.  You move on, seek help if need be and try again.  This is the norm.

You can read Anthony Ciani's entire letter to Bigfoot Lunch Club below.

Dear Editor,

In his post, "Ketchum Paper "Peer Reviewed" by Academic Professor", Guy Edwards stated that Dr. Ketchum had not responded by the time of publication.  Considering there is no follow-up article, it seems she will not responded.  I am familiar with some of her work, including unpublished findings and the drama concerning its publication, so I thought I might take a stab at responding to Tyler Kokjohn's comments.

Kokjohn is quoted as saying, "if it was me who held solid evidence of a new species and a remarkable pattern of origin, I would be breaking down the doors of any mainstream scientists I thought might be able to verify my data."  Knocking on doors is exactly what Ketchum did.  Many skeptics have claimed that the "scientific community" would consider all good evidence seriously, but what Ketchum discovered was an abundant mix of knee-jerk ridicule and institutional cowardice, in both the attempted collaborations and in publishing the paper.  The "scientific community" has been very childish in this endeavor.

To verify parts of her work, Ketchum sent "blind" material to well established laboratories, and frequently received enthusiastic responses concerning the novel nature of the DNA, with researchers begging to be let in on its source; until she mentioned, "suspected bigfoot", at which point those researchers, so eager to collaborate, would run away while venting their anger.  Even some of the reviewers, including ones reviewing for highly influential journals, treated the paper as a joke.  Many of those who did review the paper dismissed it with hand-waving arguments, mostly based on the catch-all claim of contamination.  Ketchum has even had difficulty in posting the sequences to GenBank.  In order to post a sequence, there must be a taxon under which to post it.  New taxons can be created, but must be approved by the NCBI taxonomy group.  According to Ketchum, this group rejected the creation of a taxon for bigfoots, so she has been unable to post the sequences to GenBank.  Perhaps she just talked to the wrong person?

The most controversial part of the paper is Ketchum's speculation (emphasis) that bigfoots are a cross between human females and some unknown hominid.  There is little data to identify the genesis of the bigfoot race, and Ketchum was originally loathe to make any speculation about it.  The speculation was a response to a reviewer, who suggested that including an origin for the species would make the paper publishable.  As Kokjohn notes, there are problems with the hybrid conjecture.  Unfortunately, Dr. Ketchum can be far too stubborn for her own good, and she grew attached to the idea of a hybrid, so she left it in the paper, rather than remove it after the paper was rejected.  She has even gone so far as to misread hear own phylogenetic tree, and has been talking about some possibility that bigfoots are a cross between giant lemurs and humans.  Ketchum is not a geneticist or evolutionary biologist; she is a forensic scientist.

Kokjohn is correct, in that the hybrid hypothesis has problems, but Ketchum's paper was not about proving that bigfoots are hybrids.  The paper was about proving that there is something unique and unrecognized roaming the woods, consistent with itself and nothing else, and the paper does exactly that.  The hair morphology and nuDNA were consistent across samples, and different from human or anything else.  Ketchum's work had the limited focus of establishing how to identify bigfoot evidence from DNA and hair morphology, not identifying what a bigfoot is or how it came about, and her first publication target was a forensics journal (which rejected the paper because it was too genetic and biological).
Ketchum's results can point us toward the origin.

For the nuDNA sequencing, Ketchum looked ONLY at chromosome 11.  The sequencing technique used a universal primer and provided the entire, continuous sequence along the chromosome (junk and genes, straight down the string).  What Ketchum (well, technically a geneticist collaborator) found was a mixture of easily identifiable human genes, slightly mutated human genes and unknown sequences, all on the same chromosome.  The genes that are identifiable as H. sapiens sapiens do not show up at exactly their proper loci, and the junk sequences between them are poorly matched, but it is a hominid chromosome 11.  I am uncertain where Kokjohn got the idea that Ketchum ever said the sequences have no homology, because she wrote, "all three samples showed homology to human chromosome 11."  Most of the genes are there, but many of them are just slightly different, and a few are very different (assuming they are genes and not junk).

There are two clear possibilities for the origin of bigfoots: hybrid or mutant.  The mtDNA is fully consistent with known human sequences (given a base pair or two).  The maternal lineage is, without a doubt, H. sapiens sapiens.  Even more interesting, is that the oldest mtDNA sequence found was from about 15,000 ybp, while the youngest was only a few thousand years old, if that.  This means that bigfoots have been continuously splitting from or interbreeding with normal humans since about 15,000 ybp until rather recently.  The problem with the hybrid idea is that if bigfoots are a cross between humans and some closely related hominid (Homo X), then they probably would have breed with Homo X, and we should find unknown mtDNA from Homo X; but there is not, at least, not in the bigfoots from which samples were collected.  Some people might think that the Homo X chromosome 11 and human chromosome 11 should still be distinctly identifiable, but chromosomal crossover could have mixed them together, turning a heterogeneous hybrid into a homogeneous race.

The other option is that bigfoots originated as a mutation from H. sapiens sapiens.  We used to think that mutations occurred individually and slowly over time, but fossil evidence suggests that new species pop up fast, driven by gene pool isolation, and then stabilize with population increase.  There was a global disruption about 15,000 ybp, and it is quite possible that bigfoots are cold-adapted humans.  Given their physical features, they do seem to be dark skinned and negroid, which were the predominant human traits until about 6,000 ybp (when human skin color lightened in the north).  Add in the hair and size, and you have a bigfoot.  Throw in a bit of racism, and you have perpetual segregation.  Given the broad range of physical descriptions, bigfoots may still be mutating.  Bigfoots may have been even smarter in the past, and if Gerald Crabtree is correct, both they and us may be getting even less smart.  Intelligence is not the objective of evolution; survival is, and evolution may have us all giant and hairy, running around in the woods.