A genetic researcher who was once a skeptic where Bigfoot is concerned, has concluded after a five-year study of more than one hundred DNA samples that Sasquatch actually does exist. In fact, Dr. Melba S. Ketchum, a veterinarian and 30-year veteran of genetic research, says her talented team of experts has found three Sasquatch nuclear genomes — blueprints of an organism’s hereditary code. This has led Ketchum to believe that Sasquatch is real and — hold onto your hats –a human hybrid!
Claiming that Sasquatch has a separate lineage from the large apes, Ketchum’s “personal theory is that it probably branched off and evolved in parallel with the rest of the primate lineage. The branching off involved Bigfoot’s ancestors having sex with human females about 15,000 years ago, leading to the creation of a hybrid species currently hiding out in North America. Cross-species mating! I predict a direct-to-video movie, and perhaps even a porn flick. One theory is that Sasquatch could turn out to be a large primate called Gigantopithecus, a nine-foot tall ape that, according to conventional wisdom, supposedly went extinct 100 millenia ago. But, what if it didn’t? What if, on the verge of extinction, a Gigantopithecus male went over a hill and ran into a home sapiens female and hauled her off to keep him company, starting a new trend among what was left of his brethren? . Anthropology Professor Jeff Meldrum has long held that Sasquatch is most likely Gigantopithecus. “It’s a matter of the preponderance of the evidence, be it eyewitness accounts, footprints, or hair that defies identification or attribution to known species,” says Meldrum, author of Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science. However, skeptics point out that Gigantopithecus was a quadruped, not an upright biped as Sasquatch clearly is. They further insist that it is unlikely Gigantopithecus could have evolved into an upright hominid. . Researchers from Oxford University and the Lausanne Museum of Zoology are studying alleged Bigfoot remains to test DNA. It will be interesting to see if their findings support Dr. Ketchum. . Just how prevalent are Bigfoot sightings? Here is an excellent website with a listing of sightings by state, and short descriptions of each encounter… . http://www.bigfootencounters.com/sbs/sbs.html . According to this site, there were nearly 5,000 sightings in Canada and the United States through November of 2001, with no signs of abating as we move deeper into the 21st century.The creature got its nickname, Bigfoot, from the discovery of large footprints by a bulldozer operator at a construction site in 1958 California. But this was not the first recorded sighting. Im 1924 a prospector in British Columbia claimed to have been abducted by a Bigfoot-like creature. That same year, five miners were attacked in their cabin in a remote area called Ape Canyon in Washington, by four or five ape-like creatures, one of which was allegedly killed. . Back to cross-species mating; some of you may think that sort of thing simply isn’t possible. But it is. In fact, recent studies indicate that hybridization can be important, especially as a vehicle for rapid evolutionary change. Hybridization has been successfully used to create better crops and animal breeds. That’s not always the case, though. Mules, a cross between horses and donkeys, are sterile. Other hybrids have proven to be weak and sick and cannot compete with pure blood specimens in passing on their genes to future generations. Personally, I’ve always thought it most likely that the famous Patterson-Gimlin video of 1967 was of a man in an ape suit, and that a cottage industry has sprung up to perpetuate the hoax. So for me it’s not the presence of human DNA in Bigfoot specimens that piques my interest as much as how animal DNA got into those samples. Either way, I’m still looking forward to that movie. |
TO BE OR NOT: BIGFOOT'S EVOLUTION
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