It's time

[SWWASAS]

2 hours ago, WSA said:

Just  some responses to offer to some of the comments and questions about sequencing fossil DNA....

 

Any who have an interest in this topic should absolutely get a copy of Svante Paabo's great book, "Neanderthal Man".  It can be tough sledding in places, but the narrative of how DNA was extracted from fossilized remains is exciting and captivating.  The question has been asked about why all ancient DNA hasn't been sequenced at this point. If you read the book, you'll be left with the impression that it is miraculous that ANY ancient DNA has EVER successfully been sequenced. DNA is a fragile thing, even when it is modern, fresh and uncontaminated. What you get when you try sequencing DNA this ancient, if you get anything coherent at all, is only bits and pieces of the genome. These DNA fragments need to be stitched together to form anything remotely useful that allows you to identify it as a distinct species. (A time consuming, tedious and expensive process) Even then, you won't have completely sequenced the genome....just enough to give you something useful.  Only after doing this will you be able to competently compare the genome sequence to modern descendants' DNA and identify which sequences are likely to have come from those ancestors. Without the ancient template to compare it with, the modern genome doesn't screams, "This is Neanderthal"!  Until you have something know to compare it to it is only just one sequence fragment in the modern DNA.  You need a map.

   

This is a good explanation.   I wanted to add that a hair if it has any, has very little genetic material.     What is there has to be amplified.   That is basically making copies of what is there.   Little duplicates of the existing DNA string segments.    A genome of a species is basically like a huge long  jigsaw puzzle that consists of thousands of pieces that you have to fit together to assemble the complete string.     By amplifying the little segments,  instead of one segment that fits,  you might have several and the puzzle and the process goes together much quicker.    But as with a complex jigsaw puzzle there is one and one way it will fit together.     To make the analogy complete,   a puzzle has a picture on it.      You look at the picture to help you assemble it.     If you have the complete human genome as your puzzle picture, that makes the process easier.   But early in the process if you assume because of parts of your puzzle picture are looking like a human you might assume it us just a human and not notice or ignore subtle differences that are showing you it is not human because some of your puzzle pieces are not fitting right.     If your DNA could have been contaminated,   you assume that it was, to explain why some puzzle pieces are not fitting where they should.    But those pieces that are not fitting right could be telling you that it is not modern human DNA and really is something different.    

Edited February 15, 2019 by SWWASAS

[WSA]

The internet disrupted so many of the common ways knowledge was acquired, analyzed and distributed, we all know. Although I think the consensus on BF is one of the more difficult informational  nuts to crack, it will be eventually, thanks largely to the miraculous way the information can be shared.  It is easy to become impatient, but it helps to look how far the topic has been advanced in just the last 20....a blink of the eye in the pre-internet world.  Despite the moans and groans about how there has been no substantial progress since the PGF was published, that really is not true. Just the access to information on this topic alone is light-years from one guy with a film print, trooping around the country with a BF lecture presented to mere dozens (on a good night) of attendees.   Helps to keep that perspective.

[hiflier]

Good points WSA but the internet also gives us accesses to things and people. And it can get a lot of minds working on a problem very quickly. The internet facilitates individuals' forming of a consensus and coordination a plan for action. There are groups all over the web doing such things. But not here even though there is potential for earth-shaking developments to occur. Remember that "random person"? It doesn't have to be that way anymore. What would it take (using what we already have and know) to get a movement aimed at getting an official answer to Sasquatch existence to go viral??   

[wiiawiwb]

On 2/15/2019 at 9:23 AM, Old Time Lifter said:

 

Because doing so would mean destroying those fossils at least in part.  It's not a realistic objective.

 

Then what's the point of having a fossil to sit and merely collect dust when it could be holding within the answers to much broader questions?  We need only to unlock those answers that lie in wait.

[Old Time Lifter]

3 hours ago, wiiawiwb said:

 

Then what's the point of having a fossil to sit and merely collect dust when it could be holding within the answers to much broader questions?  We need only to unlock those answers that lie in wait.

 

Because someday we may have the technology to not destroy them in the process and may even be able to do more things to extract more knowledge from them.  There are many fossils and sites that today would yield more information to us had they been left alone years ago.

 

Patience is a good thing.

[SWWASAS]

I would be delighted to find a BF fossil.    Just from morphology alone it would be obvious it is a new species.     Drilling into larger bone such as femur would supply DNA if there is any viable.   It would hardly sit around gathering dust as everyone would want to study it.  Way better than having to shoot one!  

[Huntster]

1 hour ago, Old Time Lifter said:

Because someday we may have the technology to not destroy them in the process and may even be able to do more things to extract more knowledge from them........

 

Sometimes it appears that we already do. People extract all manner of knowledge from things with mere pronouncements.

[Old Time Lifter]

3 hours ago, Huntster said:

 

Sometimes it appears that we already do. People extract all manner of knowledge from things with mere pronouncements.

 

 

You got that right... LOL

[Trogluddite]

On 1/21/2019 at 9:01 AM, Huntster said:

.... The aboriginal experiences are another poorly recorded field of reports.....

Case in point?  The two earliest reports in my database are now from 1630 and 1657.  A French settler who was captured by Native Americans and lived as a member of their tribe for almost a decade recounts what he was told by an older Native American friend.  They are not dispositive - one could have just been 300 bears along the river bank and the other one sounds like very tall, non-NA humans (remnants of Vikings?).  

 

On 1/21/2019 at 10:22 AM, NatFoot said:

Correct. There's also a sighting in my family history that is not recorded anywhere...and it was a very close, face to face, encounter.

 

If it happened in the northeast, I'd like to discuss details that you know.

 

On 1/22/2019 at 1:37 PM, NathanFooter said:

... as being honest and professional in nature, no monkey business. ... 

Phrasing Nathan!    That one made me laugh out loud.  That was a good write-up.  I will give the BFRO high marks for having the most detailed  public database.

[NatFoot]

@Trogluddite It was in WV.

[Huntster]

9 hours ago, Trogluddite said:

.........The two earliest reports in my database are now from 1630 and 1657.  A French settler who was captured by Native Americans and lived as a member of their tribe for almost a decade recounts what he was told by an older Native American friend.  They are not dispositive - one could have just been 300 bears along the river bank and the other one sounds like very tall, non-NA humans (remnants of Vikings?)........

 

Are these reports accessible online? I'd love to read them. 

 

It would be a bear hunters dream to have 300 bears to choose from, but that's only with modern firearms and lots of ammo. Coming upon that scene with 17th Century weaponry could suck. 

 

A friend counted 17 bears in his yard at Hurricane, Alaska in 1967.

[Trogluddite]

^^

Absolutely. The link to the free online copy is: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6913/pg6913-images.html .  You can download or read online.  The problem with reading online is that there are no page numbers, but the whole text is well worth the read.  In the fall of 1657, while on a six-week trip to take gifts and captives to the area of Onondaga, NY, Radission wrote that: 

 

I saw once of an evening a very remarquable thing. There comes out of a vast forest a multitud of bears, 300 att least together, making a horrid noise, breaking small trees, throwing the rocks downe by the watter side. We shot att them but [they] stirred not a step, which frightned us that they slighted our shooting. We knewed not whether we killed any or no, because of the darke, neither dare we venter to see. The wild men (IIRC, these were local NA captured on the trip) tould me that they never heard their father speake of so many together.

[Huntster]

37 minutes ago, Trogluddite said:

..........There comes out of a vast forest a multitud of bears, 300 att least together, making a horrid noise, breaking small trees, throwing the rocks downe by the watter side.......

 

Huh. I've seen bears do lots of things, but throwing rocks has never been one of them.

 

The Lewis and Clark journals tell of a migration of some sort of squirrels crossing the Ohio River in a great multitude as they floated west. Stephen Ambrose commented that either that breed of squirrel is extinct or they are no longer in such high densities, because that phenomenon doesn't occur anymore.

 

I've seen many hundreds of caribou milling about in bands or groups here and there as far as the eye could see or on the move in very large herds several times. I remember thinking that what I was observing was what Americans used to see on the Great Plains with bison, antelope, elk and deer as described in the Lewis and Clark journals. What a sight that would have been!

 

 

[Trogluddite]

^^ Yeah, I don't know if he means "throwing" or batting the rocks into water w/their paws.  But, this also sounds like a show of force.  Raddison, by that point, had lived in the wilderness as a NA for 10 years - he knew what bears were and what they did.  I would think if the bears were in the water hunting salmon or other fish (this occurred on the St. Lawrence River), then Raddison would have described the events differently.  

[Huntster]

I just read the wiki page on Raddison. Wow! The tortures described are incredible!