Who believes in Bigfoot?

Princess Peach wrote: »

I believe! Some forests in north America are mahooooosive, and I think the Sasquatch are very small in numbers, and afraid of humans, and also intelligent enough to hide when they feel threatened.

endacl wrote: »

So where do the Easter bunny and the tooth fairy live?

:-)

Who were the Denisovans?
Unfortunately, the Denisovan genome doesn't provide many more clues about what this hominin looked like than a pinky bone does. The researchers will only conclude that Denisovans likely had dark skin. They also note that there are alleles "consistent" with those known to call for brown hair and brown eyes. Other than that, they cannot say.

Yet the new genetic analysis does support the hypothesis that Neandertals and Denisovans were more closely related to one another than either was to modern humans. The analysis suggests that the modern human line diverged from what would become the Denisovan line as long as 700,000 years ago—but possibly as recently as 170,000 years ago.


The Denisovans might be the first non-Neandertal archaic human to be sequenced, but they are likely not going to be the last. The researchers behind this new study are already at work using the new single-strand sequencing technique to reexamine older specimens. (Meyer said they were working on reassessing old samples but would not specify which specimens they were studying—the mysterious "hobbit" H. floresiensis would be a worthy candidate.) Pääbo suggests Asia as a particularly promising location to look for other Denisovan-like groups. "I would be surprised if there were not other groups to be found there in the future," he said.

“Our study has sequenced 20 whole mitochondrial genomes and utilized next generation sequencing to obtain 3 whole nuclear genomes from purported Sasquatch samples. The genome sequencing shows that Sasquatch mtDNA is identical to modern Homo sapiens, but Sasquatch nuDNA is a novel, unknown hominin related to Homo sapiens and other primate species. 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.

Hominins are members of the taxonomic grouping Hominini, which includes all members of the genus Homo. Genetic testing has already ruled out Homo neanderthalis and the Denisova hominin as contributors to Sasquatch mtDNA or nuDNA. “The male progenitor that contributed the unknown sequence to this hybrid is unique as its DNA is more distantly removed from humans than other recently discovered hominins like the Denisovan individual,” explains Ketchum.

“Sasquatch nuclear DNA is incredibly novel and not at all what we had expected. While it has human nuclear DNA within its genome, there are also distinctly non-human, non-archaic hominin, and non-ape sequences. We describe it as a mosaic of human and novel non-human sequence. Further study is needed and is ongoing to better characterize and understand Sasquatch nuclear DNA.”