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Destination Truth Yeti Hair Sample


norseman

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I hope the excitement turns out to be justified. There has been a LOT of excitement over many other claim before...

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I hope the excitement turns out to be justified. There has been a LOT of excitement over many other claim before...

The excitement is always a let down, I hate to sound like a depressant but people have been looking for fifty years for that magic bullet that solves this thing, yet with the advent of the internet it seems like people hang on baited breath with each new discovery, or they place scientists and the "old tiners" up on a pedastal for their efforts rather than getting off their duffs and go finding their own.

People should stop torturing themselves and get to work.

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I may be wrong, but I'm starting to think that the monkey wrench :) in DNA analysis of a hair sample that does not match a known sequence, is that it relies on statistical analysis to reach a conclusion as far as the identity of the source.

Where the DNA is very close to a known, then the statistics, how much DNA is sequenced, and available data from the knowns come into play. It is still worth repeating though that "no match" does not equal a complete unkown, it can still be placed on the tree of life between which ever organisms it's closest to, and that still gives you a very good description of the creature.

Rightly or wrongly (based on your point of view), any result will be subject to debate and interpretation until a slab monkey, or part of it is produced for a conclusive comparison.

The debate will be whether it is a more parsimonous position to conclude that biological evidence of ordinary humans could account for the unique mutations in the DNA across a multitude of specimens "and" the morphology associated with the samples "and" the circumstances in which they were collected, or that there is another hominid in our midst. Keep in mind that the data set includes many independent sources of the samples from various teams across the country, some of which may have other forms of evidence to go with the samples submitted.

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Have DNA results from tested hair been used effectively as evidence in court cases?

court cases don't try to make the caes for unidentified species, but distinction between individuals of the same, not the same thing.

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Guest Sallaranda

court cases don't try to make the caes for unidentified species, but distinction between individuals of the same, not the same thing.

This.

Everything I've learned about DNA suggests that it is a useful tool for studying small differences between individuals. However, when it comes to speciation or the categorization of animals into taxon DNA isn't all that useful a tool. Physiological characteristics are.

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Have DNA results from tested hair been used effectively as evidence in court cases?

DNA puts guilty people in prison and sets innocent people free. It also "is" used to identify new species.

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Guest ajciani

Without talking to Nelson, it is impossible to know whether the polymorphism he found was atypical for a human, or not human at all.

Ask and ye shall receive.

I got a response from Mr. Nelson. He stated that the sample was fully human, with a single rare human polymorphism. The MQ stuff about humans and chimps having 35 differences in their mtDNA, and it being a 1:5000 chance of being human, etc., was all BS (that's big squatch) made up by the MQ staff (writers, director, producer, take your pick).

This is the second time I have had a first-hand recounting of MQ exaggerating, omitting, or falsifying expert opinions.

Nelson didn't mention if it was contamination or not, but I didn't ask.

In the follow-up episode (Sasquatch Attack II) the expert analyzed the sample and found only fungal and bacterial DNA. He speculated that the tissues were just too weathered, and that any DNA was long gone or highly fragmented.

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I should say I'm still interested in this sample because a human stepping on the screw board with shoes on would not have likely deposited a hair. A Native American depositing a hair on the screw board would have had to have dropped it from his head or hit his head on it.

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Ask and ye shall receive.

I got a response from Mr. Nelson. He stated that the sample was fully human, with a single rare human polymorphism.

So does this mean full modern human or does it mean post chimpanzee split lineage?

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Guest Sallaranda

So does this mean full modern human or does it mean post chimpanzee split lineage?

Full modern human. The polymorphism was human in nature - meaning it wasn't the result of being from a different species.

Am I right?

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Full modern human. The polymorphism was human in nature - meaning it wasn't the result of being from a different species.

Am I right?

That's the point of my question, this mutation occurred sometime in the past, so how could you be certain this isn't shared among an unidentified species close to humans.

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Guest ajciani

Yes, that polymorphism obviously occurred in the past, as did all of the human genome. It is something known to exist in humans. The rest of it was easily identified as human. Human includes a lot of known variation. A typical mitochondrial gene might vary in 4 to 8 places between humans, but to our next closest kin (neanderthal) that same gene might vary in 12 to 20 different places. Even if bigfoots are in the Homo genus, they are not H. sapiens, and so their DNA will have more than a few differences.

This was material taken from the screws (not hair), and the analyzed genetic material was almost certainly from contamination. Two other places looked at the same material and found no animal DNA.

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Ajciani, since human includes alot of known variation and ofcoarse we are more variable than most species, atleast in my opinion, What role could gene expression play in what we see in BF and what the DNA to date shows?

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