All in the family

Archaeologists and paleontologists are up against the same problem; bones and other fossils only get you so far.

There are cases where fossil evidence can give you some hints about behavior -- patterns of tracks, for example, or the rare case where the positions of the fossils themselves give you a picture of what was going on, like the recent discovery of an opossum-sized mammal, Repenomamus, attacking a much larger dinosaur, Psittacosaurus.  The pair of fossil skeletons were preserved, locked in a battle to the death -- the death of both, as it turned out, because they were both engulfed mid-fight in a mudslide.

But such lucky finds are rare, and inferences of behavior from fossils are usually sketchy at best.  This is why the study of a group of Neolithic human skeletons found near Gurgy-les-Noisats, France, 150 kilometers southeast of Paris, was so extraordinary.

The level of DNA analysis now possible allowed the analysis of the genomes of 94 of the 128 individuals buried at the site, to the level that the researchers not only were able to construct a seven-generation family tree for them, but make a guess as to what each individual looked like.

The analysis found that the bodies were buried in family groups -- the more closely two people were related, the closer together they were buried -- and that women who were not descendants of the original couple were mostly completely unrelated, suggesting they'd come into the family from another community.  Just about all the males at the burial site, on the other hand, were related, leading the researchers to conclude that men in this community tended to stay put, and at least some women did not.

Another curious thing was that the study detected no half-sibling relationships.  All of the sibling groups were from the same mother and father.  In this family group, at least, monogamous relationships were the norm.

Of course, there's a lot we still don't know; while this is a stunning accomplishment, it still leaves a great many questions unanswered.  For example, were the "outsider" women brought in because of a custom of outbreeding, or by conquest/capture?  What were the religious practices and beliefs that led these people to bury family members near each other?  Was the monogamy shown in this family universal in this culture, or was this grouping an exception for some reason?

It's an intriguing piece of research.  "This type of work really breathes new life into our understanding of ancient peoples," said Kendra Sirak, an ancient-DNA specialist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who was not involved in the study.  "I'm especially curious about the man at the root of the family tree.  I would love to know what made this person so important."

And given that a significant percentage of my ancestry comes from central and western France, I have to wonder if anyone in this family tree is a direct ancestor of mine.  There's no way to find out, of course, but the thought did cross my mind.  It's kind of eerie to think when I look at those facial reconstructions, one of those faces looking back at me might be my great-great (etc.) grandparent.

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The last voyage of the doomed

On May 19, 1845, two ships -- the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror -- set sail from Greenhithe, Kent, England, bound for an exploration of the fabled Northwest Passage, the alleged shipping route that crossed from the Atlantic to the Pacific via the Arctic Ocean, saving a long and arduous voyage southwest and around Cape Horn (in South America) or worse still, southeast around the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa) and thence into the pirate-ridden, and at that time uncharted, waters of the Indian Ocean.

The ships carried a combined total of 134 men, including the 24 officers, under the leadership of Captain John Franklin.  They didn't enter the expedition blindly; they were hardly the first ships to undertake polar exploration, and they knew some of the hazards.  The ships had heavy iron cladding, steam engines both to provide drive when the wind died down and also to provide warmth for the crew, and three years' supply of food.  For the crew's entertainment, they had a library of over a thousand books, which was a good thing because one of the first things Franklin did was to ban swearing and drunkenness.

The problem, as you undoubtedly know, is that the Northwest Passage doesn't exist, at least in the sense of an ice-free route north of Canada.  There is water between Greenland and northern Alaska, but (at least back in the nineteenth century) it was never without a covering of ice, even in midsummer.  But the rumors of a Northwest Passage had grown so large in the imaginations of merchants looking for a cheaper route for transporting goods that finding (nonexistent) open water became a positive obsession.

So Franklin's team took off in May of 1845.  They made a brief stop in Stromness (in the Orkney Islands), then made a thirty-day voyage to reach the Whalefish Islands in Disko Bay, Greenland, where five of the sailors were discharged due to illness, reducing the officers and crew to 129.  In late June, 1845, the crew were instructed to write their last letters home, which many of them did, voicing hope for a successful conclusion to their expedition.

That was the last any of them were ever heard from.

Some time in the late summer of 1845, both ships became icebound off Beechey Island (in what is now the Canadian territory of Nunavut).  It rapidly became obvious that they would not be getting free before the end of the (sort of) warm season, so they prepared themselves to face the deep freeze of an Arctic winter.

It appears that three of the crew died that winter and were buried on Beechey Island, and that as soon as there was a break in the ice, the ships attempted to move forward again, only to be trapped a second time off King William Island.  Some of them were still alive in 1847 -- Captain Franklin is recorded as having died in June of that year -- and when it became obvious that 1848 was going to be no different, the hundred or so survivors, under the leadership of executive officer Francis Crozier and second-in-command James Fitzjames, set out over the ice on foot to try to reach safety.

Ten years later, a subsequent (and luckier) expedition investigating the Arctic found a piece of paper under a cairn on the coast of King William Island, that said the following:

[25th April 1]848 H.M. ships 'Terror' and 'Erebus' were deserted on the 22nd April, 5 leagues N.N.W. of this, [hav]ing been beset since 12th September, 1846.  The officers and crews, consisting of 105 souls, under the command [of Cap]tain F.R.M. Crozier, landed here in lat. 69˚ 37' 42" N., long. 98˚ 41' W.  [This p]aper was found by Lt. Irving under the cairn supposed to have been built by Sir James Ross in 1831–4 miles to the Northward – where it had been deposited by the late Commander Gore in May June 1847.  Sir James Ross’ pillar has not however been found and the paper has been transferred to this position which is that in which Sir J. Ross’ pillar was erected – Sir John Franklin died on the 11th June, 1847; and the total loss by deaths in the expedition has been to this date 9 officers and 15 men. (

Signed) JAMES FITZJAMES, Captain H.M.S. Erebus.

(Signed) F.R.M. CROZIER, Captain & Senior Offr.

and start on tomorrow, 26th, for Back's Fish River.

None of them made it.  Thirty or forty are thought to have reached the northern coast of mainland Canada, but all of them died there, still hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement. 

The reason all of this grim stuff comes up is a fascinating paper in the journal Polar Record describing the discovery of the remains of one of the men from the doomed expedition, and the fact that it has been shown to be what's left of Warrant Officer John Gregory, engineer aboard the Erebus.

The DNA evidence from the corpse matched the DNA of one of John Gregory's direct descendants, Jonathan Gregory of Port Elizabeth, South Africa.  "Having John Gregory's remains being the first to be identified via genetic analysis is an incredible day for our family, as well as all those interested in the ill-fated Franklin expedition," said Gregory in a press release.  "The whole Gregory family is extremely grateful to the entire research team for their dedication and hard work, which is so critical in unlocking pieces of history that have been frozen in time for so long."

Dozens of other skeletal remains have been located, most of them from Erebus Bay, King William Island, but this is the first one to be conclusively identified.

Better still, facial reconstruction of Gregory's skull has given us an idea of what he looked like:

[Image courtesy of Diana Trepkov and the University of Waterloo]

I can't imagine what it must have been like for these 129 men to spend three years trapped in the ice.  At what point did they completely give up hope of being rescued?  That they retained at least some determination to survive is shown by Crozier and Fitzjames's last-ditch effort to reach safety.  But the whole story is as sad as it is inspiring.  

And now, we have a face to put to one of the men on that last voyage of the doomed.  It's a haunting image, a relic of one of the most tragic attempts to explore the world.  I wonder what else we will learn from the remains that have been discovered -- and if, one by one, we will get to gaze into the faces of those men who died in the frozen wastelands of northern Canada over a century and a half ago.

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Ever get frustrated by scientists making statements like "It's not possible to emulate a human mind inside a computer" or "faster-than-light travel is fundamentally impossible" or "time travel into the past will never be achieved?"

Take a look at physicist Chiara Marletto's The Science of Can and Can't: A Physicist's Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals.  In this ambitious, far-reaching new book, Marletto looks at the phrase "this isn't possible" as a challenge -- and perhaps, a way of opening up new realms of scientific endeavor.

Each chapter looks at a different open problem in physics, and considers what we currently know about it -- and, more importantly, what we don't know.  With each one, she looks into the future, speculating about how each might be resolved, and what those resolutions would imply for human knowledge.

It's a challenging, fascinating, often mind-boggling book, well worth a read for anyone interested in the edges of scientific knowledge.  Find out why eminent physicist Lee Smolin calls it "Hugely ambitious... essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of physics."

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

 

The Spanish replacement

It's strange to think about, but there is a point in human history at which you can divide all of the inhabitants into two categories: those who left no living descendants at all, and those who are the ancestors of every single person alive today.

Anthropologists differ as to when that date is, but it's probably more recently than most of us would guess.  It certainly happened after the Toba bottleneck, a point about 74,000 years ago when there was a massive eruption of the Toba volcano (in the Indonesian archipelago) and a worldwide climate impact that may have reduced the entire population of ancestral humans to fewer than 7,000 total.  (Nota bene: scientists are still debating how big the bottleneck was, and whether it was the volcano that actually caused it; but I'm referring to the event by its most common nickname even so.)

What's cool is that with our current ability to do genetic analysis, we can narrow in on the answers to these sorts of questions.  Just last week, some research was published in Cell giving us an interesting lens into settlement patterns in Spain -- and that only 4,500 years ago, an influx of people from Eastern Europe and Russia resulted in the replacement of nearly all of the Y-chromosomal DNA that had been there for the previous forty thousand years.

This doesn't mean that the previous inhabitants left no descendants (although that could be true) -- all we can infer with certainty is that the men who had lived there prior to the invasion left very few patrilineal descendants.  As Y-chromosomal DNA is passed only father-to-son, any male descendants a man has through his daughters would share none of his Y-DNA.  (The same is true, but with the opposite genders, about mitochondrial DNA, which is only passed through the maternal line.)

In "Survival of Late Pleistocene Hunter-Gatherer Ancestry in the Iberian Peninsula," by Vanessa Villalba-Mouco, Marieke S. van de Loosdrecht. Cosimo Posth, Pilar Utrilla, Johannes Krause, and Wolfgang Haak, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History working with the University of Zaragoza, the authors write:

The Iberian Peninsula in southwestern Europe represents an important test case for the study of human population movements during prehistoric periods.  During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), the peninsula formed a periglacial refugium for hunter-gatherers (HGs) and thus served as a potential source for the re-peopling of northern latitudes...  Western and central Europe were dominated by ancestry associated with the ∼14,000-year-old individual from Villabruna, Italy, which had largely replaced earlier genetic ancestry, represented by 19,000–15,000-year-old individuals associated with the Magdalenian culture.  However, little is known about the genetic diversity in southern European refugia, the presence of distinct genetic clusters, and correspondence with geography.  Here, we report new genome-wide data from 11 HGs and Neolithic individuals that highlight the late survival of Paleolithic ancestry in Iberia, reported previously in Magdalenian-associated individuals.  We show that all Iberian HGs, including the oldest, a ∼19,000-year-old individual from El Mirón in Spain, carry dual ancestry from both Villabruna and the Magdalenian-related individuals.  Thus, our results suggest an early connection between two potential refugia, resulting in a genetic ancestry that survived in later Iberian HGs.  Our new genomic data from Iberian Early and Middle Neolithic individuals show that the dual Iberian HG genomic legacy pertains in the peninsula, suggesting that expanding farmers mixed with local HGs.

A different study, also published last week in the journal Science, added another piece to the puzzle.  "The Genomic History of the Iberian Peninsula Over the Past 8000 Years," by a team of scientists far too lengthy to list working at over a dozen research institutions, examined the DNA of 271 individuals and came to some fascinating conclusions about the settlement of Spain:

We assembled genome-wide data from 271 ancient Iberians, of whom 176 are from the largely unsampled period after 2000 BCE, thereby providing a high-resolution time transect of the Iberian Peninsula.  We document high genetic substructure between northwestern and southeastern hunter-gatherers before the spread of farming.  We reveal sporadic contacts between Iberia and North Africa by ~2500 BCE and, by ~2000 BCE, the replacement of 40% of Iberia’s ancestry and nearly 100% of its Y-chromosomes by people with Steppe ancestry...  Additionally, we document how, beginning at least in the Roman period, the ancestry of the peninsula was transformed by gene flow from North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.

This influx pushed the Iberian farmers, who before had occupied the entire peninsula, into the mountainous northeastern parts of Spain -- and they are, apparently, the ancestors of today's Basque people, who are not only genetically distinct but who speak a language thought to be unrelated to any other existing language.  "The Basque country is a really difficult place to conquer; there are quotes from French rulers in medieval times saying that this is a nasty place to get in an army," said population geneticist Mattias Jakobsson of Uppsala University in Sweden, who was not part of either of the present studies.

Iñigo Olalde, a postdoc in the lab of population geneticist David Reich at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who is himself Basque, and who participated in the second study, agrees.  "The present-day Basques look like Iron Age people from Iberia," Olalde said.

What I find most fascinating about this is how we can use genetic analysis as a lens into a time period from which we have no written records at all, and make inferences about the movements of people who before had been entirely a mystery.  There's a lot we still don't know, of course, including how this genetic replacement took place.  "It would be a mistake to jump to the conclusion that Iberian men were killed or forcibly displaced," Olalde said, "as the archaeological record gives no clear evidence of a burst of violence in this period."

This opens up the potential for using this technique to study other time periods that are historical enigmas -- like the European "Dark Ages," between the Fall of Rome and consolidation of the Holy Roman Empire with the crowning of Charlemagne in 800 C.E.  Amazing that genetics, which tells us about who we are here and now, can also be seen as a history of where we came from -- a continuous record of information back to our earliest ancestors.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a look at one of the most peculiar historical mysteries known: the unsolved puzzle of Kaspar Hauser.

In 1828, a sixteen-year-old boy walked into a military station in the city of Ansbach, Germany.  He was largely unable to communicate, but had a piece of paper that said he was being sent to join the cavalry -- and that if that wasn't possible, whoever was in charge should simply have him hanged.

The boy called himself Kaspar Hauser, and he was housed above the jail.  After months of coaxing and training, he became able to speak enough to tell a peculiar story.  He'd been kept captive, he said, in a small room where he was never allowed to see another human being.  He was fed by a man who sometimes talked to him through a slot in the door.  Sometimes, he said, the water he was given tasted bitter, and he would sleep soundly -- and wake up to find his hair and nails cut.

But locals began to question the story when it was found that Hauser was a pathological liar, and not to be trusted with anything.  No one was ever able to corroborate his story, and his death from a stab wound in 1833 in Ansbach was equally enigmatic -- he was found clutching a note that said he'd been killed so he couldn't identify his captor, who signed his name "M. L. O."  But from the angle of the wound, and the handwriting on the note, it seemed likely that both were the work of Hauser himself.

The mystery endures, and in the book Lost Prince: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, author Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson looks at the various guesses that people have made to explain the boy's origins and bizarre death.  It makes for a fascinating read -- even if truthfully, we may never be certain of the actual explanation.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Cherry-picking DNA

It is a frequent source of perplexity for me when people read about scientific research, and because of their own biases (1) claim that it says something it clearly doesn't say, or else (2) deny it completely.  After all, as eminent astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson put it, "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."

I ran into a particularly good (or appalling, depending on how you look at it) example of this yesterday over at Science Online, the news outlet for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in article by Michael Price, entitled, "‘It’s a Toxic Place:’ How the Online World of White Nationalists Distorts Population Genetics."  Price interviewed Jedidiah Carlson, a graduate student in bioinformatics at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, about how the recent explosion in personal DNA analysis had been hijacked by white supremacists.

Carlson discovered the problem when he was looking online for a 2008 paper in Nature that analyzed hundreds of thousands of point mutations in people of various ethnic groups, and found that the paper had been linked in the notorious neo-Nazi site Stormfront.  Shocked but curious, he clicked the link, and found himself in a darker realm of genetic research -- using DNA evidence to support the bogus ideas that (1) races are little water-tight compartments except for cases of deliberate "race mixing," and (2) that people of western and northern European descent are superior to everyone else on the planet.

Norman Rockwell, The Golden Rule (1961)

Carlson started searching through Stormfront and other white supremacist sites, and found that this is an increasingly common phenomenon.  "People will grab figures from scientific papers and edit them in several different ways to make them look like they support the white nationalist ideology," Carlson said.  "For instance, in [the] 2008 Science paper, researchers published a figure with a plot inferring regional ancestry of dozens of different populations around the world.  Based on the genetic compositions of hundreds of individuals, the figure divided the populations into clusters that revealed patterns in their ancestral population structure.  So [people on the forums] take this plot and add some subtle text like 'The genetic reality of race,' with no context showing what the scientists were actually looking at, and ignoring the fact that there’s a continuum among the individuals.  Then they turn these images into memes and try to make them go viral."

They don't just cherry-pick data; they cherry-pick entire studies -- as long as there's some conceivable way to twist them around to support their ideology.  "They’re interested in anything that would reinforce traditional, discrete racial categories. Intelligence is probably the number one topic that they gravitate toward," Carlson said.  "And anything pertaining to history of human migrations, or things that play into traditional classifications of racial phenotypes like facial morphology or skin color.  There was a paper on lactose tolerance in Europeans and that turned into this weird viral YouTube trend where white nationalists were chugging bottles of milk, presumably to flaunt their European heritage."

I don't know about you, but that strikes me as a weird thing to be proud of.  "Look how well I digest milk" is not something you often hear people say.  I mean, my Louisiana heritage is probably why I love Cajun cuisine, wherein the Four Major Food Groups are onions, garlic, hot peppers, and grease,  but I have no desire to video myself eating a bowl of gumbo, and doing the Fists In The Air Of Victory afterwards.

Carlson himself has become something of a target, after his observations about the use of genetic research by white supremacists was the subject of an interview in The Atlantic.  It was a shock to him, however, to find how virulently they responded to his central claim, which was that the supremacists were warping the conclusions of the research to support their bigoted worldview, and ignoring any evidence to the contrary.  "When they finally saw it, the first few comments were actually rather celebratory, as they saw the article as evidence that the 'liberal, biased, Jew-controlled media' are nervous about the growth of white nationalism.  About me, there were comments like, 'He says he’s a grad student, but he’s probably never even seen a principal component analysis plot,' which is ironic because that’s about half of my dissertation.  And it was pretty alarming seeing my name on the site.  After that, I took a break from doing this work for a while for my own mental health."

His alarm is understandable.  These people are unstable, prone to violence, and usually well-armed.  It's not stopping Carlson, however, although he does acknowledge that fighting this kind of bias is an uphill battle at best.  "I don’t think engaging them directly will work," he says.  "In an argument between a logical person and illogical person, the logical person is always going to lose because the illogical person isn’t playing by the same rules.  The misappropriations and misinterpretations run so deep that you’ll just get shouted down and personally attacked, and you’re not going to change anyone’s mind.  But I think there’s growing recognition that we as scientists bear some responsibility for guiding the public interpretation of our work."

Of course, that's not easy.  You put the data out there, analyze it as rigorously as you can, state your conclusion as clearly as you can, and hope for the best.  The science deniers of the world will always find a way to get around it, either by claiming the data is faulty, the analysis is in error, the scientist(s) who did the research were paid shills and are trying to fool everyone for their own nefarious purposes, or (if none of these work) simply by ignoring the study entirely.  We've seen it over and over with climate change deniers and young-Earth creationists, both fundamentally anti-scientific views of the universe.  The same is true here; the white supremacists have their conclusion already figured out -- that they're better than everyone else based on their ancestry and skin color -- and the research needs either to fit that model, or it's rejected as "liberal, biased, [and] Jew-controlled."

The funny postscript to all of this is that when I did 23 & Me a few months ago, purely out of curiosity, I was honestly disappointed that my DNA didn't have any particular surprises.  My ancestry is primarily French, Scottish, Dutch, German, and English, and my DNA said that my ancestry is... French, Scottish, Dutch, German, and English.  I'd have been delighted if there'd been a random West African or Southeast Asian in there somewhere, as unlikely as that seems given my appearance.  Race is primarily a social, not a genetic, construct, as research by groundbreaking population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza showed decades ago.  We're all mixtures, and if you go back far enough, we're all related.

So if you like to see races as neat little compartments with hard-and-fast boundaries, that's up to you.  But the bottom line is that you're wrong.  The view supported by science -- that the boundaries between ethnic groups are fluid, and almost all of us have diverse ancestry -- is true, as Tyson said, whether or not you believe it.

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This week's book recommendation is a brilliant overview of cognitive biases and logical fallacies, Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly.  If you're interested in critical thinking, it's a must-read; and even folks well-versed in the ins and outs of skepticism will learn something from Dobelli's crystal-clear prose.

The skulls speak

Given that everything in the news yesterday made me want to turn off the lights, curl up in a ball in the corner of my office, and whimper softly, today I'm taking a day off from more serious topics.  Ergo: we're going to look at: alien skeletons, and the DNA evidence thereof.

For years there has been buzz in the woo-woo world about the Nazca skulls -- a set of humanoid skulls with frontally-flattened foreheads and elongated craniums.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

To be sure, they're weird-looking, and demand an explanation.  The stick-in-the-mud, fuddy-duddy old scientists have claimed for years that they're humans that were practitioners of (or victims of) artificial cranial deformation, which is known to have been relatively common amongst the natives of Central and South America.

On the other hand, there are lots of people who think they're not human at all, that this is the best evidence we have for aliens.  An advanced extraterrestrial race, they tell us, visited the Nazca area centuries ago, leaving behind not only these skulls but the "Nazca lines," a set of elaborate and huge drawings, the designs of which are really only clearly visible from the air, that some woo-woos (for example Erich von Däniken) think are ancient landing strips for alien spacecraft, even though it's hard to see how you'd land a spacecraft on a landing strip shaped like a monkey.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But as far as the skulls go, scientists now have a way of settling these kinds of questions -- DNA analysis.  So last month they got samples from the Nazca skulls, and also from a mummified body from the same area, studied the DNA, and found out...

... it's human.

We skeptics are absolutely reeling with shock, let me tell you.  The woo-woos, on the other hand... well, let me put it this way: the link I posted, from Disclose.TV, gives you the impression that they were extremely reluctant to tell us the outcome of the tests.  Nigel Watson, a British UFO researcher, still thinks they're aliens, just "extremely closely related to humans."  Dr. Konstantin Korotkov, who made a name for himself a few years ago for claiming that he'd photographed a soul leaving the human body (he hadn't), also weighed in, said that "the DNA didn't come from a chimpanzee or a monkey, but it may not be human, only human-like."

Whatever that means.

The problem with taking that stance is that it fails the test of falsifiability.  A fundamental rule of science is to consider what it would take to prove your claim wrong.  If the answer is "there's nothing that could prove it one way or the other," or -- as in this case -- that any contrary evidence you get, you immediately brush aside as sorta kinda supporting your claim if you tilt your head and squint at it real hard, then you're not looking at a falsifiable claim.

In other words, it's not science, it's confirmation bias and hand-waving speculation.

In any case, for most of us, this conclusively settles the point -- the Nazca skulls, and other frontally-flattened skulls, are 100% certain to be humans whose skulls were squashed as infants, for some unknown reason.  The UFO and extraterrestrials cadre, including the devotees of wingnuts like von Däniken, are going to have to look elsewhere for evidence.

Although given their rather loose definition of the word "evidence," I'm sure they'll find something to fall back on.  They always do.

Bigfoot exists!... or, how science is not done

Well, the cryptozoological world has been buzzing the last few days about a press release from (in)famous Dr. Melba Ketchum, who has announced that her team has proven that DNA from a hair sample is from a non-human hominin species:

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.

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.

Well, that's just fine and dandy, but it's not really going to convince anyone who wasn't already convinced.  Because this, unfortunately, is not how good science is published.

This is, perhaps, the biggest misunderstanding about science on the part of the general public.  People have this sense that scientists go out and make discoveries, write them up, and the next thing you know, it's all over the "Science" section of Time magazine.  In fact, the first thing that should happen is peer review -- the data, methodology, and conclusions should be spread out for others in the field to take their best shots at.  Were the techniques used appropriate to the study?  Does the data unambiguously support the conclusion, or is there another conclusion (or more than one) that could be drawn?  Were reasonable controls in place to guard against bias, false positives, or sample contamination?

At that point, assuming that all went well with the peer review process, you trumpet your results to the public.  But not before.  In fact, that's been the problem all along with this study; hints and allegations were being made almost a year ago that the team had found something amazing, but the hard facts -- the actual data -- were shrouded in secrecy.  Months went by, and all we got were further teasers.  The whole thing was handled so as to maximize public hype -- rather like the whole kerfuffle over the "Baltic Sea Anomaly" (and notice how we haven't heard anything more about this non-story?).

Now, I'm not saying they haven't discovered anything; Melba Ketchum is a geneticist of excellent credentials, apparently, and it's hard to fathom why a reputable scientist would risk her career if there wasn't something real here.  (Although I am, reluctantly, reminded of the debacle over "cold fusion" that was handled in much the same way -- and the resultant irreparable damage done to the reputations of the two physicists responsible, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann.)  What I am saying is that what has been released thus far isn't going to convince anyone who holds support of scientific discoveries to any usual standard of rigor.  So, predictably, the main ones who are greeting this press release with joyous shouts of acclamation are the ones who already believed Bigfoot was real before the study was even done.  Most of the rest of us are still sitting here, saying, "Okay, Dr. Ketchum, that's nice.  Now show us the goods."

This will, of course, earn more criticism for scientists and skeptics as being "closed-minded."  Actually, closed-minded is exactly what we're not; we haven't made our minds up at all, not until we've seen how the conclusions were reached, and whether the data support them.  It is to be hoped that Dr. Ketchum et al. will release more of their results into the peer-review system soon -- because until then, I'm afraid the response on the part of the rest of the scientific world will be lukewarm at best.