http://science.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/14/16964023-bigfoot-dna-discovered-at-last-not-so-fast?lite

By Benjamin Radford

LiveScience

In November of last year, a Texas veterinarian made national news claiming that genetic testing confirmed that not only is the legendary Bigfoot real, but is in fact a human relative that arose some 15,000 years ago.

The study, by Melba S. Ketchum, suggested such cryptids had sex with modern human females that resulted in hairy hominin hybrids: “Our data indicate that the North American Sasquatch is a hybrid species, the result of males of an unknown hominin species crossing with female Homo sapiens,” Ketchum said in a statement. The scientific community was rightly skeptical, partly because Ketchum’s research — which spanned five years — had not appeared in any peer-reviewed scientific journal.

Now the study has finally been published, kind of, and it raises more questions than answers. The piece, written by a team of researchers led by Ketchum, is titled “Novel North American Hominins: Next Generation Sequencing of Three Whole Genomes and Associated Studies” and published in the “DeNovo Scientific Journal.”

The study, which used 111 samples of alleged Bigfoot hair, blood, mucus, toenail, bark scrapings, saliva and skin with hair and subcutaneous tissues attached, were collected by dozens of people from 34 sites around North America. Hairs were compared to reference samples from common animals including human, dog, cow, horse, deer, elk, moose, fox, bear, coyote, and wolf, and were said not to match any of them. [Rumor or Reality: The Creatures of Cryptozoology]

The report concluded, “we have extracted, analyzed and sequenced DNA from over one hundred separate samples… obtained from scores of collection sites throughout North America. Hair morphology was not consistent with human or any known wildlife hairs. DNA analysis showed two distinctly different types of results; the mitochondrial DNA was unambiguously human, while the nuclear DNA was shown to harbor novel structure and sequence … the data conclusively proves that the Sasquatch exist as an extant hominin and are a direct maternal descendent of modern humans.” —->Continued