Has Bigfoot Science Stalled?

[Guest freelygiven]

It'd be nice to prove their existence scientifically, but with all these cards stacked against you, it's almost like flying by the seat of your pants out there, hoping for a lucky break. I'm pulling for you!

[Guest Crowlogic]

If Matt Johnson is still peddling portals then bigfoot science hasn't been stalled, it's actually backsliding.

[southernyahoo]

Georgerm, BF may be close enough that it falls within normal human variation. Since we are not perfectly identical, we probably are more different than .1 % among our own species. So finding where the difference is between us and BF would be critical, and it may be in the nuDna and not the mtDNA where Barcode species ID is done.

[norseman]

Chimps are 98% human genetically, so the DNA , if from a bigfoot will be closer than that with all their human like physical form. Ketchum could be easily right, without the proof. Not that bigfoot is a man bear, but that they are a wildman, as she proposed they are.

Ain't it funny how easily you forget that?

================================================

98.9% to be exact......

But then again Humans share like 50% of their DNA with a Banana. So that 1.1% is really not as close as it seems.

Have you considered that Sasquatch could be a bipedal form evolved from Asian apes and more closely related to an Orang?

whatever it is? The answer is not in Ketchums paper thats for sure.

[southernyahoo]

Yes, the 1.1% is a large difference because it matters where the differences are and what they do. It doesn't take very much to make a new species of hominin. Just a couple of mutations in the FOXP2 gene in humans totally switches off vocal language ability.

 

[norseman]

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/07/an-honest-attempt-to-understand-the-bigfoot-genome-and-the-woman-who-created-it/1/

Best Ketchum article I've read yet. It explains it all quite clear, as to the x's and o's of how the train derailed from the tracks. As well as the damning evidence that Melba interpreted her data the way she did because she was attempting to protect the forest people from being shot.

The cart is in front of the horse.

Wanna know why Bigfoot science has stalled!!??? Because of horse manure like this.

[Yuchi1]

In reading the article, the impression was given she had tested samples of a huge number when IIRC, the team tested ~12 samples of the 100+ furnished as they culled many for all the obvious reasons.

 

Also, dissension and infighting within the scientific community has long been recognized as a routine order of the day function.

[southernyahoo]

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/07/an-honest-attempt-to-understand-the-bigfoot-genome-and-the-woman-who-created-it/1/

Best Ketchum article I've read yet. It explains it all quite clear, as to the x's and o's of how the train derailed from the tracks. As well as the damning evidence that Melba interpreted her data the way she did because she was attempting to protect the forest people from being shot.

The cart is in front of the horse.

Wanna know why Bigfoot science has stalled!!??? Because of horse manure like this.

It will always be impossible to prove bigfoot is human, even with a body. I think Henner Fahrenbach had the same results along with Meldrum and the snelgrove lake sample. It will either always be contamination or its not bigfoot anymore. Don't let that vicious cycle keep your hopes to high for a nonhuman ape to arrive. It is simply not probable that all the tests do date are all wrong.

BTW yuchi, there was a hundred plus samples that tested human out of several hundred submitted. Of those that tested human 20 had the entire mitochondria sequenced with no change in the interpretation from outsource labs.

[georgerm]

 

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/07/an-honest-attempt-to-understand-the-bigfoot-genome-and-the-woman-who-created-it/1/

Best Ketchum article I've read yet. It explains it all quite clear, as to the x's and o's of how the train derailed from the tracks. As well as the damning evidence that Melba interpreted her data the way she did because she was attempting to protect the forest people from being shot.

The cart is in front of the horse.

Wanna know why Bigfoot science has stalled!!??? Because of horse manure like this.

It will always be impossible to prove bigfoot is human, even with a body. I think Henner Fahrenbach had the same results along with Meldrum and the snelgrove lake sample. It will either always be contamination or its not bigfoot anymore. Don't let that vicious cycle keep your hopes to high for a nonhuman ape to arrive. It is simply not probable that all the tests do date are all wrong.

BTW yuchi, there was a hundred plus samples that tested human out of several hundred submitted. Of those that tested human 20 had the entire mitochondria sequenced with no change in the interpretation from outsource labs.

 

 

Sorry the DNA science is confusing. Are you saying that bigfoot could really be human and the DNA test showing this are not contaminated but accurate?

[norseman]

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/07/an-honest-attempt-to-understand-the-bigfoot-genome-and-the-woman-who-created-it/1/

Best Ketchum article I've read yet. It explains it all quite clear, as to the x's and o's of how the train derailed from the tracks. As well as the damning evidence that Melba interpreted her data the way she did because she was attempting to protect the forest people from being shot.

The cart is in front of the horse.

Wanna know why Bigfoot science has stalled!!??? Because of horse manure like this.

It will always be impossible to prove bigfoot is human, even with a body. I think Henner Fahrenbach had the same results along with Meldrum and the snelgrove lake sample. It will either always be contamination or its not bigfoot anymore. Don't let that vicious cycle keep your hopes to high for a nonhuman ape to arrive. It is simply not probable that all the tests do date are all wrong.

BTW yuchi, there was a hundred plus samples that tested human out of several hundred submitted. Of those that tested human 20 had the entire mitochondria sequenced with no change in the interpretation from outsource labs.

Its not impossible at all, where are you getting this faulty thinking from? I know for a fact with multiple good DNA samples that geneticists can place bigfoot on the tree of life by sequencing its complete genome. They did this with a Denisovian DNA from a finger bone! And discovered that some humans in Asia have about 4% Denisovian DNA proving hybridization happened.

If Bigfoot was some sort of hybrid? We are not throwing science any curve ball here.

The problem of course isnt with Ketchum's DNA.....its her INTERPRETATION.

From the article;

-------------------------------------------

So team bigfoot sequenced the mitochondrial genome of several of their samples. And rather than a novel primate sequence that was distantly related to humans, the sequences were human. Which is what you might expect if the species is a hybrid as the authors concluded. What you wouldn't expect is that the sequences would come from multiple humans—from the wrong side of the planet.

All indications are that successful interbreeding between humans and closely related groups like Neanderthals and Denisovans was relatively rare. You'd expect that something that looks like a walking shag carpet would be more distantly related, and that it would be much, much harder to successfully interbreed. This makes the hybrids even rarer. Instead, each sample tested produced a different mitochondrial DNA sequence, which implies the interbreeding had to have taken place many, many times. (And that the hybrids never bred with females of whatever the primate in question was. And that said primate is, apparently, extinct, since none of its mitochondrial DNA showed up.)

Who were these human females that ostensibly did the interbreeding? If you wanted to make a scientifically plausible guess, you'd bet on the mitochondrial DNA lineages that originate in Asia (most likely those branches that expanded into the Americas). Those are the only humans that are likely to have been around until a few hundred years ago. And that's exactly what they didn't find. Instead, most of the sequences originated in the human populations of Europe, with an African sample or two.

And at least one of them was recent—Ketchum described one of the mitochondrial sequences in detail, saying, "about 13000 years ago is when that haplotype came into existence. It was in Spain, basically, where it originated. So the hybridization could not have occurred before that haplotype came into existence." In her view, that put an upper limit on when these sequences made it to North America. "It couldn't have been longer than 13,000 years ago," she told Ars.

On the face of it, there's simply no way to make sense of this—the European and African DNA, the recent time frame for its arrival, the fact that there must have been so many interbreedings.... The obvious interpretation is that the samples were all from humans or contaminated with human DNA, which nicely explains the diversity and modernity of the sequences.

But remember, to Ketchum, that possibility had been ruled out. In the absence of the obvious, her team went with a far less obvious suggestion: sometime during the last glacial period, a diverse group of Europeans and Africans got together and wandered across the vast empty spaces of the Greenland ice sheet and found themselves in North America. "Several of the Smithsonian scientists even wrote a book about it, where they've gone below the Clovis layer and found artifacts that they feel came from [an] area in France," she said. But she wasn't committed to that idea and later suggested that the interbreeding might have taken place in Europe... after which the Sasquatch left to cross the Bering Sea-land bridge before the Ice Age ended. "It's feasible they could have crossed the world, basically," she said. "They're very fast."

Ultimately, though, Ketchum indicated these are just technical details. She wasn't especially interested in sorting them out. "We don't know how they got here, we just know they did."

-----------------------

And this;

------------------------

A problem of technique

Most of the problems so far weren't really experimental ones; rather, they were problems with interpretation. It's only when the team went after sequences from the genome that things got a bit strange. A few of their samples appeared to have sufficient DNA to send them for sequencing on one of the current high-throughput sequencing platforms. The quality score assigned to the sequencing runs was good, meaning that they had lots of DNA sequence data to assemble into a genome (although, oddly, the team interpreted this to mean that the sample came from a single individual, which it does not).

The challenge is that the high-throughput machines typically produce short sequences that are about 100 bases long. Even the smallest human chromosome is over 40 million bases long. There are programs that are able to recognize when two of these 100 base-long fragments partly overlap and combine their sequences to create a longer sequence (say 150 bases). By searching for further partial overlaps, the programs can gradually build up longer and longer stretches, sometimes ranging into the millions of base pairs. Although this software will still leave gaps where sequences don't exist or show up at multiple places in the genome, it's still the standard way of assembling genomes from short, 100-base-long reads.

For some unfathomable reason, team bigfoot didn't use it. Instead, they took a single human chromosome and got some software to line up as much as it could to that.

There are a number of serious problems with this approach. You could have an entirely different genome present in the sequences, and the software would ignore most of it. Most of the gene coding regions are highly conserved among mammals, so they'd line up nicely against the human chromosome—in fact, they might be difficult to distinguish from it. But the entire rest of the genome would be ignored by the software. By taking this approach, the authors pretty much guaranteed they'd get something out that looked a lot like a human genome.

The other problem here is that the software will typically treat the human chromosomal sequence as a target that it attempts to recreate. If it can't find a good match, it will stick the best match available where it's needed. Sometimes, the match will be fairly good. Other times, the sequence will be barely related to the template it's supposed to match.

Even given all these advantages, the software still couldn't assemble an entire chromosome. Instead, it ended up matching sequences to three different stretches of the chromosome, each a few hundred thousand base pairs long. Remember, the human genome is over three billion base pairs total. This only represents a tiny fraction of it. Given that the quality score provided for the DNA sequencing run was high, this tells us one of two things: either the software was woefully incapable of assembling a genome, even when given a template; or there was very little human DNA there in the first place. As we'll see, it might be a little bit of both.

--------------------------------

Melba never had a complete Genome, maybe this is why she has convinced herself and others that sequencing Sasquatch is impossible?

[JDL]

The solution to all of this is pretty simple really.

 

Find one that is trying not to be found.

 

Kill one that is trying not to be killed.

 

Collect one that its buddies are trying to keep from being collected.

 

Present a specimen to a scientific community that is reluctant to accept evidence.

 

Get a scientist to take a position out on a limb that he doesn't want to sit on.

 

And convince people who don't really want to know.

[SWWASAS]

^^^^^^That pretty much sums things up.  

 

You know a tribal leader at a BF conference said something that has bothered me since I heard it.    When he was asked if BF were dangerous,  he told some tribal history, related to abductions of women etc.  Then he said it is not the big people in the woods (BF) you need to worry about it is the little people.    Anyone heard NA legends about little people?    Remote tribes of little people are every bit as interesting to me as big ones since we do have skeletal/ fossil remains of such people in some parts of the world.   

Edited February 26, 2016 by SWWASASQUATCHPROJECT

[norseman]

The solution to all of this is pretty simple really.

Find one that is trying not to be found.

Kill one that is trying not to be killed.

Collect one that its buddies are trying to keep from being collected.

Present a specimen to a scientific community that is reluctant to accept evidence.

Get a scientist to take a position out on a limb that he doesn't want to sit on.

And convince people who don't really want to know.

It falls apart at the fourth line, sorry.

Our evidence is bad, but a body would change everything.

Edited February 26, 2016 by norseman

[JDL]

Yeah, I was mostly just blowing off steam.

 

Edited to add:  Like most others.

Edited February 26, 2016 by JDL

[southernyahoo]

Norseman, your article doesn't address the mitochondria results from over a hundred samples, and like you, simply assumes contamination, or what ever suits their own interpretation without any study of the actual evidence.

It is unfortunate that so many of those samples are not available for independent study, but that's not the case for all of them.

Where modern sapiens, neanderthal and denisovans are distinguished, it started in the mitochondria. It wasn't there in the bigfoot samples submitted to ketchum.

If the hybridization continued from the time of denisovans, it would be possible that a single mitochondrial lineage prevailed. Meaning multiple human ones, because the crossing never stopped.