The Ketchum Report

[Guest Theagenes]

Before jumping the gun on this, recall that mummies found of early modern humans in China were not of typical Asians--what we think of today, but were dolichocephalic, tall red heads. Racial assumptions break down the farther back you go into prehistory. The fact is that people have been moving around very well and mixing for a very long time. Heck, if pre-erectus people were found in Liang Bua cave in Indonesia that tells you something about how well and how far back all types of hominins were mixing and moving around, even across strips of oceans. And there has been longer European contact in N. America than most would think. Russians have been here through Alaska, and the Norse even longer before that. If you consider stories like the voyage of St. Brendan, there may have been very early contact all along. The new anthropological stuff about pre-Clovis peoples, the africanoid woman in Mexico (circa 30,000 ya I think, not sure) all tells me we should maybe be throwing out a lot of preconceptions about this.

That's fine. Assuming all that's true---assuming that North American was a teeming multicultural melting pot for thousands of years before the Statue of Liberty started accepting huddled masses. Then where are the examples of non-human mtDNA? ALL 111 and eleven of her samples are 100% mtDNA. Surely there are some male sasquatches out there that actually have sex with female sasquatches on occasion instead of human women. Again the bottle neck theory would explain them all having human mtDNA, but not that many different haplotypes equally dispersed among the samples.

His objection is that there is too much variety in the human "eves" to support an early hybridization scenario. What it does support, it seems to me, is precisely what the NA stories said all along...that sasquatches abducted women and children on a regular basis. There ARE NA samples represented there, but Europeans have been here in NA a fairly long time already, even on the West coast if you consider Alaska and Russian contact.

http://www.cryptomun...ing-bc-squatch/

And that's my objection as well. Yes, there are three samples with Native American haplotypes---among how many dozens of samples? If I were serious about pursuing the hybridization theory, these three would be the ones I would focus on.

Why should she? There is no evidence that the sample came from a bear. Not only that, there is more evidence that this sample is NOT from a bear than there is evidence that she and Tyler analyzed the same specimen.

Seriously?

Wow, look guys, I'm not the one who put the turd in your punch bowl. I'm just pointing it out. If you want to keep drinking, be my guest.

I wanted this report to have something real too. It's one of the main reasons I came here and started posting. The hybridization possibility really intrigued me---it meshed really well with what we're learning about early humans and how they interacted with each other. I was fascinated by the possibility and had a lot of fun speculating on hypothetical scenarios to explain what she claimed her results were. This was stuff that is right up my alley. But in the end there is nothing here. It sucks, but it is what is. I know some of you have been waiting years for this and it's hard to accept, but there it is.

[dopelyrics]

Gosh - is there an Idiot's Guide to all of this??! I could really do with one.

best.

Lee

[AaronD]

^ LOL dopelyrics, if there is I'll be in line for it as well. I only took a couple courses in bio in college so my own lack of wisdom may be flying in the wind here--but, on the topic of male BF/female human mating....is it possible that the origin of BF was essentially human female mating with "unknown" and this has been the genetic foundation ever since? As opposed to repeated interactions, which would only produce the hybrid signature sporadically......? Just asking.

[Guest]

How on earth do you know that? She hasn't published the sequences. (And I wouldn't understand them if she did).

Did you not notice the ~2,000,000bp supplemental file with the paper?

[Guest Llawgoch]

Did you not notice the ~2,000,000bp supplemental file with the paper?

Good grief no, I'm not paying for that.

I'm going on the fact that all the experts that have read it say she hasn't put the sequences in GenBank so they need to see them before they can comment further. Do you have further information?

Edited February 15, 2013 by AaronD
to remove inappropriate language

[Guest]

Seriously?

So we have strict forensic sample preparation to remove contamination which would stand up in a court of law. A sample that was then put into a half million dollar sequencer, with a quality score of above average. Then analyzed with another independent sample that returns a result that would be consistent with two individuals of a new species. Then you expect us to throw all of that out just because Smeja crossed his heart. Wow, just wow.

[Guest Llawgoch]

So we have strict forensic sample preparation to remove contamination which would stand up in a court of law. A sample that was then put into a half million dollar sequencer, with a quality score of above average. Then analyzed with another independent sample that returns a result that would be consistent with two individuals of a new species. Then you expect us to throw all of that out just because Smeja crossed his heart. Wow, just wow.

Whereas you are happy to accept the above just because Ketchum has said so. Again, why has she not released the sequences in a form that will allow qualified people to check them? And if you say they're in a file, why are the qualified people saying they're not? Are you qualified to check them?

[Guest]

Good god no, I'm not paying for that.

I'm going on the fact that all the experts that have read it say she hasn't put the sequences in GenBank so they need to see them before they can comment further. Do you have further information?

Well then why don't they start with the data she provided with the paper first. If I knew how I would do so myself and maybe when I get out of bed I will try to figure it out how to do it. What's provided if I remember is that she ran a comparison on a fragment of chromosome 11 between the samples and with Homo sapiens. The DNA length was about 2 million bases and I downloaded one of the files. It's a PDF file with nothing but base pairs. I didn't realize how much was there until I did a count that yielded 1400 pages. I believe there were corresponding files associated with other samples but I didn't grab those.

[Guest]

Would have been nice if she got some writing help from someone like Hadj-Chikh (who submitted a sample) don't you think?

Yes, at least - that's why I also said in the post you quoted:

I personally would have tried to go with more well known names...

But people, all of this is a distraction. It doesn't really matter who wrote what. Even if all of these lab directors got together and banged out this report as a massive collaborative effort you are still left with the end product---and that end product is junk.

I'm not disagreeing... again, that's why I said (amongst other things) in my next post:

...there is a difference between bias and poor science, and from what I've read so far, I'm not sure the delays were due to bias. That said, I'm pleased to see comments such as the one from Richard Gibbs - Ketchum needs to get the data out there and let it do the talking.

[Guest]

Whereas you are happy to accept the above just because Ketchum has said so. Again, why has she not released the sequences in a form that will allow qualified people to check them? And if you say they're in a file, why are the qualified people saying they're not? Are you qualified to check them?

So now everybody should now disregard independent lab conformation as well as the scientific method of peer review and consider Melba a complete fraud and liar because?????

[bipedalist]

Just curious, but of those who have read the paper, besides the misspelling of the last name of the co-author how do the mechanics read both grammatically and with respect to spelling etc. How does the formatting look.

What is this reference to the 2 million plus genotype submitted as an appendix or reference? Do you pay to get it, click on it and come up with a google wallet icon? How does that work?

[Guest]

Im not an expert on papers so I cannot comment on format. But yes you have to click on a link to get the PDF files, they are not visible on the main page, the links are about half way down by the real sierra sample pic, you need a gmail account(I think) and a CC#.

[Guest Llawgoch]

Well then why don't they start with the data she provided with the paper first. If I knew how I would do so myself and maybe when I get out of bed I will try to figure it out how to do it. What's provided if I remember is that she ran a comparison on a fragment of chromosome 11 between the samples and with Homo sapiens. The DNA length was about 2 million bases and I downloaded one of the files. It's a PDF file with nothing but base pairs. I didn't realize how much was there until I did a count that yielded 1400 pages. I believe there were corresponding files associated with other samples but I didn't grab those.

They have.. They have read that and say it's not enough.

Incidentally I don't think this is something you can figure out how to do in a morning after getting out of bed.

So now everybody should now disregard independent lab conformation as well as the scientific method of peer review and consider Melba a complete fraud and liar because?????

Because all the qualified people say she hasn't released the nuDNA sequencing information which they need to check her conclusions.

Also you have a strange idea of peer review. Peer review is people who know what they're talking about it reading it and checking everything's ok. Which is happening now. But you want to disregard all those named qualified people, in favour of claimed anonymous peer reviewers.

Edited February 15, 2013 by Llawgoch

[Guest Theagenes]

There aren't any glaring problems with grammar or spelling---it appears to have been proofread. The whole approach of viewing it on the web instead of just having a downloadable pdf was clunky. The supplemental information and tables are pdfs that popup when you click on a link, even things like footnotes. So every time you click on a footnote it opens up a new pdf with all the notes again. By the time I was finished reading it I had two dozen pdfs open, many of them duplicates and none of them with an easily recognizable file name. So I thought that was problematic. Some of the tables were formatted in a confusing manner and led me to misinterpret something early on (though admittedly I had just gotten it and was reading it through quickly the first time). If you're asking if it looked and felt amateurish in general then yeah, it kind of did. Certainly compared to what I'm used to. Having everything together in one searchable pdf would have been a lot better, with perhaps a second pdf with all of the bases pairs. But from what I understand, just listing a thousand pages of A's, C's, G's, and T's isn't enough for the geneticists to comment on it anyway. They need it to be uploaded to GenBank so they can compare it to other sequences.

But ultimately that's all just window-dressing. It's the substance that matters. It can be as clunky as it wants if the substance is there. Unfortunately it wasn't.

Oh and the mis-spelling of the name was in the press release or abstract (I forget which), not the actual paper. It's spelled correctly there and in fairness it's a tough name.

Edited February 15, 2013 by Theagenes

[Guest]

She did buy the other journal and not just create it from scratch.

http://www.bigfootbu...nt-peer-review/

Note that she claims to have passed peer review at 'the other' journal, then bought it.

Then she claims to have changed its name (and put together a fast/cheap website) without ANY reference to the previous journals history.

Lets read some more from your link:

I found that the following journal was recently registered to Dr. Melba Ketchum: Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Exploration in Zoology. I found that Dr. Ketchum had registered the Journal in her name in January of 2013.

So.. the previous journal name was "Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Exploration in Zoology". A journal that has no history prior to it being registered by Ketchum in January this year.

So she claims the paper passed review by referees at that journal, without naming any of the old journals editors or referees. She also does not provide any of the referees comments. Neither does she provide the data for independent analysis by other experts. She lies and states she cannot upload the data to genbank. We now have heard from several sources that she can easily upload it for access and verification. If she lied about that, why not about the peer reviews? If she has peer reviews, she needs to release them (along with the names of the reviewers). Until she does we should all assume she has none.