There are two recent and notable studies that have been published in peer-reviewed scientific Journals that should need to have more attention paid to them in the Bigfoot community.  According to these studies, an unknown species of human occupied North America 130,000 years ago and early human ancestors practiced inter-species mating that resulted in the commingling of genetic traits.

Both of these studies in conjunction may shed light on the conclusions made by Dr. Melba Ketchum and The Sasquatch Genome Project in 2012, stating that DNA evidence collected showed the existence of a species with a modern human ancestor but decidedly non-human.  A blood relative of humans whose scientific name is Homo sapiens cognatus[i]; otherwise known as the North American Sasquatch.

Humans in North America much earlier than previously thought

On April 26, 2017, an article in the journal Nature indicated than an species of unknown species hominid capable of tool use and was present in North America 130,000 years ago.

“These findings confirm the presence of an unidentified species of Homo at the CM site during the last interglacial period (MIS 5e; early late Pleistocene), indicating that humans with manual dexterity and the experiential knowledge to use hammerstones and anvils processed mastodon limb bones for marrow extraction and/or raw material for tool production.”

“The [Southern California] site is, to our knowledge, the oldest in situ, well-documented archaeological site in North America and, as such, substantially revises the timing of arrival of Homo into the Americas.”[ii]

The Editor’s Summary of the article states recapitulates the importance of the findings.

“If confirmed, this would extend tenfold the time that human beings are known to have been present in the Americas and predate the time that modern humans are thought to have first left Africa. The identity of the hominin species—if any—remains unknown.”

Although this article ages the evidence for a human population able to use tools and hunt woolly mammoths in southern California to be an approximated 130,000 years, the actual presence of humans in North America could be even more ancient.  The Pleistocene epoch (Ice Age) lasted from about 2,588,000 to 11,700 years ago.[iii]  How and when humans arrived on the North American continent is now up for grabs.

Co-mingling of genetics and inter-species mating

The next article’s significance may not be as straight-foreword, but it is also essential to understand.  The last line in the abstract of an article from a team of University of Buffalo researchers published in Molecular Biology and Evolution states in a longhanded way that early human ancestors mated with other species of human ancestors based on the findings of an in-depth analysis of genetic markers found in human saliva.

“…based on in-depth simulations, we conclude that a divergent MUC7 haplotype likely originated in an unknown African hominin population and introgressed into ancestors of modern Africans.”[iv]

(I know it’s confusing, but please keep reading.)

Definitions:

“Hominin” is a tribe that comprises of humans and their closest ancestor.[v]

“Introgressed” is defined in Wikipedia and is “also known as introgressive hybridization, in genetics is the movement of a gene (gene flow) from one species into the gene pool of another by the repeated backcrossing of an interspecific hybrid with one of its parent species.”[vi]

In a University of Buffalo online News Center article, Dr. Omer Gokcumen explained the findings in more detail.

“It seems that interbreeding between different early hominin species is not the exception — it’s the norm,” says Omer Gokcumen, PhD, an assistant professor of biological sciences in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences.

“Our research traced the evolution of an important mucin protein called MUC7 that is found in saliva,” he says. “When we looked at the history of the gene that codes for the protein, we see the signature of archaic admixture in modern day Sub-Saharan African populations.”

“Based on our analysis, the most plausible explanation for this extreme variation is archaic introgression — the introduction of genetic material from a ‘ghost’ species of ancient hominins,” Gokcumen says. “This unknown human relative could be a species that has been discovered, such as a subspecies of Homo erectus, or an undiscovered hominin. We call it a ‘ghost’ species because we don’t have the fossils.”[vii]

Bringing The Sasquatch Genome Project Into Focus

On July 26, 2017 Dr. Melba Ketchum posted tweet that simply said “This pretty much says it all” attached to an article from a New Zealand news source the NZHearald with the headline “Ancient humans had sex with non humans.”

Getting past the attention-grabbing headline the article briefly discusses the saliva study from the University of Buffalo.  Why was this article so important to Dr. Ketchum?

Dr. Melba Ketchum is the founder of DNA Diagnostics, Inc and the force behind the Sasquatch Genome Project.  The Sasquatch Genome Project team announced in 2012 the result of a five-year study of DNA evidence from several sources that resulted in the identification of a species of hominid with a human ancestor, Homo sapiens cognatus.

One of those DNA samples came from a creature known as “Matilda” who is shown in the video below.

The resulting article, “Novel North American Hominins, Next Generation Sequencing of Three Whole Genomes and Associated Studies” by Ketchum et al went through a tumultuous and unreasonable peer review process.  The reviewers were unfair, unrelenting and offensive.  Ketchum’s team finally published in the journal Denovo.

The key to why understanding all of the above and its importance to the bigfoot community as a whole lies in the final line of the Saquatch Genome Project’s abstract.

“In summary, our data indicates that the Sasquatch has human mitochondrial DNA but possesses nuclear DNA that is a structural mosaic consisting of human and novel non-human DNA.”[viii]

Note: It has been assumed for decades that humans inherit their mitochondrial DNA solely from their mother, but it can also in rare circumstances be inherited from their father.[ix]

SUMMARY

• There was a sustainable population of humans in North America much, much earlier than we previously thought. 

• Early human ancestors bred and produced offspring with other species of hominids.

• Homo sapiens cognatus (Bigfoot / Sasquatch) has human mitochondrial DNA and a mix of human and nonhuman DNA within the nucleus of their cells.

• Therefore, it is wholly reasonable to speculate that humans were in North America early enough to mate with a non-human species and give rise to a population (or tribe) of creatures we now know as Bigfoot that migrated across the continent and are now confined to areas where human development is at a minimum.

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References:

[i] http://zoobank.org/NomenclaturalActs/40E2FA1F-10A1-4D42-8B02-A007347F1B43

[ii] Holen, S. R., Deméré, T. A., Fisher, D. C., Fullagar, R., Paces, J. B., Jefferson, G. T., . . . Holen, K. A. (2017). A 130,000-year-old archaeological site in southern California, USA. Nature, 544(7651), 479-483. doi:10.1038/nature22065 [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v544/n7651/full/nature22065.html?foxtrotcallback=true#figures]

[iii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene

[iv] Xu, D., Pavlidis, P., Taskent, R. O., Alachiotis, N., Flanagan, C., Degiorgio, M., . . . Gokcumen, O. (2017). Archaic hominin introgression in Africa contributes to functional salivary MUC7 genetic variation. Molecular Biology and Evolution. doi:10.1093/molbev/msx206 [https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/3988100/Archaic-hominin-introgression-in-Africa]

[v] Relethford, J. H. 2010.The Human Species: An introduction to Biological Anthropology, 8th ed. State University of New York College at Oneonta, New York, NY: Mc-GrawHill.

[vi] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introgression

[vii] http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2017/07/028.html

[viii] Ketchum, Melba, Patrick Wojtkiewicz, Aliece Watts, David Spence, Andreas Holzenburg, Douglas Tolar, Thomas Prychitko, Fan Zhang, Sarah Bollinger, Ray Shoulders & Ryan Smith. 2013 Novel North American Hominins, Next Generation Sequencing of Three Whole Genomes and Associated Studies. Denovo, Accelerating Science 1(1, Supplemental). [http://www.denovojournal.com/denovo_002.htm]

[ix] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2716-mitochondria-can-be-inherited-from-both-parents/

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Monsters In Print: A Collection Of Curious Creatures Known Mostly From Newspapers

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