Thom Powell Drinks the Ketchum Kool-Aid

Thom offers up a tasting of the Ketchum Kool-Aid

"If that makes me a “Ketchum supporter” then, yes, I guess I drank the Kool-Aid. All I can say is, it was delicious." -- Thom Powell

There is no doubt that Bigfoot Lunch Club is a friend of Bigfoot author, Thom Powell. Heck I even illustrated the cover of his best selling Bigfoot book Shady Neighbors. I am also a huge fan of his previous must-have book The Locals. Click the following link to buy either of his Bigfoot books.

Due to Thom Powell's books he is on record for reporting many of the Bigfoot phenomena before they became mainstream conversations--mainstream among bigfooters anyway. While not everybody "bought" into these topics we still discuss them; topics like infrasound, cover-ups, habituation and yes, even Bigfoot DNA. Thom Powell is no hack when it comes to the topic, he has given a lot of thought to it and clearly has made his own conclusions. 

Thom and I talked about the topic of his recent post, "Bigfoot DNA Evidence Redux" a full week before he posted it. We didn't agree much over the phone, but if I'm honest, his blog post affords him greater ability to make his points. Points of which I still disagree with, but I do have some favorite parts. I loved his synopsis.

OK, so here it is in a nutshell: 109 samples were obtained from all over North America.
(Obviously, the sasquatch phenomenon is more widespread than most people realize.) Most samples were hair, but not all. Blood, saliva, and even a tissue sample was analyzed. Not all of the work was done by a single lab. Some of it was farmed out to university labs that were not initially given any background about the samples they were asked to examine.

The findings were remarkably consistent: mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA), which is indicative of the female component of the genome, came back as human! The nDNA (nuclear DNA from the male progenitor) was found to be ‘novel’, which is geneticist code for “doesn’t match anything previously extracted.”  Also, large sections of the DNA strands appeared as single strand molecules (haploid), as opposed to the uniformly double-stranded DNA of all human DNA that is not found in sex cells (gametes). This might indicate that the DNA being sequenced was highly degraded DNA, but degraded DNA is found to contain lots of bacteria, and no bacteria was found in conjunction with the DNA that showed single strand configuration.  It was not degraded, but it was single strand DNA in about half of the segments that were sequenced. Multiple labs observed this anomaly, an[d] dutifully reported it to Ketchum.

It is the last sentence that I find troublesome. Does it matter that Ketchum was dutiful?

In another paragraph from his post, Thom and I absolutely agree that Ketchum's study can be vindicated if she allowed other scientist to replicate her work.

I suggested to Dr. Ketchum that vindication of her work will only happen when it is replicated by another study, maybe even more than one. She wholeheartedly agreed. We are told that Dr. Bryan Sykes at Cambridge is already on it. Meanwhile, Ketchum has complete confidence that her methodology and her result will withstand the test of time and scientific scrutiny, if scientists will just look objectively at her work.

There are a few parts where the post seems like a Valentine to Ketchum, but I have been known to fawn over personalities myself; namely Cliff Barackman, Sharon Hill and Thom Powell himself. My biggest concern regarding Thom Powell's post is that people will miss his reference to Chapter 10: “No Stone Left Unturned.” of The Locals.

This is where Thom impresses (and inspires) me most, with his own studies and thoughts compiled from many sources.

There is one final doozy of a stone that is still unturned.  It’s sort of the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room that nobody wants to talk about...

I’m referring to the other half of the sasquatch genome that the Ketchum study identified; the part that isn’t human. The sasquatch genome, according to the Ketchum’s work, is human DNA that interspersed with DNA that is absolutely unknown.  It is neither ape, nor human, not lemur.  Ketchum has no idea what it is, nor does anyone else, but the ‘novel’, single strand, haploid DNA is there for anyone to find who knows how to sequence it. Is it some evolutionary offshoot of humanity that we have yet to identify in the fossil record?  Maybe. But the mysterious sequences are single strand, that is haploid DNA, and all terrestrial DNA in somatic cells (blood, hair, tissue, bone) is diploid unless it is in gametes (sex cells).

OK, so what is the origin of this truly novel DNA that Melba Ketchum found in the sasquatch genome? For one possible answer, check out The Locals, Chapter 10: “No Stone Left Unturned.”  What gave me a chill when I read the Ketchum study is the possibility that I may have written down an answer ten years before I even asked this question.

Read Thom's complete post regarding his thoughts on the Ketchum Study at ThomSquatch. While you are there buy his Bigfoot Books too.

Stay tuned. Tomorrow I will publish a thoughtful letter sent to us from a Ketchum advocate!

Do Bigfoot Inbreed? This Complicates Bigfoot DNA Research

human inbreeding may have be more prevalent than we thought 

"...if small, inbred populations did exist, it would invalidate many of the genetic inferences about when humans split off from the tree of life." --Erik Trinkhaus, Anthropologist

It can go two ways, either Bigfoot has a sufficient breeding population, or they are extremely scarce and might resort to inbreeding. Inbreeding, it seems, may have been more common in early humans than we thought. If this is the case according to Erik Trinkhaus, an anthropologist at Washington University says if small, inbred populations did exist, it would invalidate many of the genetic inferences about when humans split off from the tree of life, because these inferences assume large, stable populations.

Why is human inbreeding even being debated? New fossil evidence is changing how anthropologist view the human tree of life.

The evidence comes from fragments of an approximately 100,000-year-old human skull unearthed at a site called Xujiayao, located in the Nihewan Basin of northern China. The skull's owner appears to have had a now-rare congenital deformity that probably arose through inbreeding, researchers report today (March 18) in the journal PLOS ONE.

The fossil, now dubbed Xujiayao 11, is just one of many examples of ancient human remains that display rare or unknown congenital abnormalities, according to the researchers. "These populations were probably relatively isolated, very small and, as a consequence, fairly inbred," study leader Erik Trinkhaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told LiveScience.

Before I get emails from an offended Sasquatch or an inbred challenging me to a banjo playoff. There may be an argument that primates, especially ones more in tune with their animal nature, have a mechanism against inbreeding.

According Live Science some primates recognize the sound of kin.

Previous studies have found that animals living in complex social groups have no trouble recognizing their own kin's calls, particularly the sounds of maternal relatives. Even goat mamas keep a long-term memory for their baby's calls, according to a study published earlier this year.

But less is known about how animals recognize their father's calls, and the cries of the relatives on dad's side of the family. Likewise, researchers know very little about how solitary-living animals avoid inbreeding with dad's side of the family.

That's where the gray mouse lemur (Microcebus murinus) comes in. These cartoonishly cute lemurs are raised by their mothers without help from dad. When they grow up, they head out of the nest to forage on their own. But male lemurs' ranges are large, and they often overlap with that of their daughters', suggesting the primitive primates have evolved some way to avoid accidentally mating with a relative.

The take-away, Kessler and her colleagues wrote, is that recognizing dad's voice requires neither a big brain nor a complex social life. In fact, ability to recognize kin may have preceded complex social structures in evolutionary history.

What is most interesting to us at Bigfoot Lunch Club is how inbreeding messes up how we understand human lineage and how it may have an affect on human DNA research, at least as far as . If the current Bigfoot DNA research being done by Dr. Melba Ketchum or Dr. Bryan Sykes is also based on human lineage, do these need to be rethought as well?

Watch the video below to learn more about how the deformed fossils found in China could change how we think of how humans split off from the tree of life.

WATCH: Exclusive Preview Video of Finding Bigfoot Cast on Jeff Probst Show

(James "Bobo" Fay, Ranae Holland, and Cliff Barackman on Jeff Probst Show)

Fans, when the mainstream media's industrial entertainment complex needs to get the word out they rely on Bigfoot Lunch Club. Whether it is an upcoming movie, a new Jack Link's commercial or the Jeff Probst show featuring the cast of Finding Bigfoot, they need the Bigfoot bully pulpit known as Bigfoot Lunch Club. And fans, we oblige.

We already mentioned there may be a debate with Ranae and Jeff Probst on one side and Bobo and Cliff on the other regarding Bigfoot proof. (read: Jeff Probst Interviews Finding Bigfoot Cast). It looks like, based on the video preview that they have a lot of fun too!

Enjoy the preview below.

Do you work during the day? Set you DVRs! with this nifty Jeff Probst Show Finder. Select your state and it will tell you where to find the Jeff Probst Show.