![v](http://uploads.neatorama.com/images/posts/434/58/58434/1361284170-0.jpg)
Last
year, a group of Sasquatch investigators in Texas announced that they
had sequenced Bigfoot's DNA, but they had trouble getting the results
published in a scientific journal. Now that data has been published in a
brand-new journal called
DeNovo,
which was recently purchased by the Texas researchers and contains only
one paper: the Bigfoot DNA report. The thing is, you have to pay $30 to
read it. However, Ars Technica got a copy and lets us in on some
details. The researchers pose the hypothesis that Bigfoot is a hybrid of
human and some unidentified primate.
To begin with,
the mitochondrial DNA of the samples (when it can be isolated) clusters
with that of modern humans. That isn't itself a problem if we assume
that those doing the interbreeding were human females, but the DNA
sequences come from a variety of different humans—16 in total. And most
of these were "European or Middle Eastern in origin" with a few "African
and American Indian haplotypes." Given the timing of the interbreeding,
we should only be seeing Native American sequences here. The authors
speculate that some humans may have walked across the ice through
Greenland during the last glaciation, but there's absolutely no evidence
for that. The best explanation here is contamination.
As far as
the nuclear genome is concerned, the results are a mess. Sometimes the
tests picked up human DNA. Other times, they didn't. Sometimes the tests
failed entirely. The products of the DNA amplifications performed on
the samples look about like what you'd expect when the reaction didn't
amplify the intended sequence. And electron micrographs of the DNA
isolated from these samples show patches of double- and single-stranded
DNA intermixed. This is what you might expect if two distantly related
species had their DNA mixed—the protein-coding sequences would
hybridize, and the intervening sections wouldn't. All of this suggests
modern human DNA intermingled with some other contaminant.
There
will be more analysis coming from various science writers about this
paper, but you can get a good overview from
Ars Technica.
No comments:
Post a Comment