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. 

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.