Sasquatch DNA identified as human’s
Bobbie Short presented some parts from Will Duncan’s letters to her about analyzing a huge pile of scat found in a loft on the Janice Carter-Coy farm in Tennessee.
Will Duncan wrote:
Right. It was initially unclear to me, too. Like everybody else, I expected BF to have some unique sort of DNA which had never been seen before, or whatever. I had the first DNA studies of Carter Farm hair and scat performed by a world class lab with a background in identifying animal traces through DNA, by a scientist with a major reputation and a background in gorilla DNA studies. Surprisingly, he found dog and bat DNA in the scat, and mentioned human DNA which he said was contamination.
The problem with these results were:
A scientist of my acquaintance suggested that dogs have been known to jump surprisingly high, but for a dog, or dogs, to repeatedly manage to find a way into this loft by jumping, and then to deposit such a large amount of scat, strains credulity beyond the reasonable. The scat was obviously too large to be from bats. So we are left with people. Would people eat dogs and possibly bats and then, time after time, climb up into a remote barn loft and defecate? There were definitely dead dogs in evidence around the Carter Farm, including a skeletonized one hanging in a tree.
Other researchers were also finding human DNA "through contamination" on various bits of BF physical evidence. In "Legend Meets Science" the DNA scientist is disappointed to find human DNA on the BF physical evidence. But was it really contamination? A scientist in Michigan began to independently suspect that the human DNA he was getting from various purported BF hair samples was, in fact, not contamination but from BF. He analyzed a sample of Carter Farm hair which had been verified by Dr.Fahrenbach as meeting his standard for probably BF hair and again got human DNA. So he tried an experiment: he deliberately contaminated dog and cat hair with human DNA and tested it. They tested to be dog and cat hair.
Dr. Fahrenbach says that BF hair, like some human hair, doesn't yield DNA well. But part of his opinion is based on the fact that his previous attempts to get DNA from BF hair never came up with anything but human DNA, which he and his associates assumed was due to contamination. He was rethinking this the last time I discussed it with him.
It is thought that our close relatives, meaning other members of the species Homo, and perhaps other closely related hominids of unknown types, would have nuclear DNA matching the human pattern. Without having knowledge of what differences would be there, and at which point of the genome to look for them, we don't presently know how their DNA would differ from ours. A matching program would most likely just assign it to "human". At least one scientist is examining this DNA for likely sites on the genome which may decisively show differences from our own.