Bigfoot, Yeti, and the Last Neanderthal, page 27
From further north, in Washington State, I received a sample from Portage Island off the Lummi peninsula. Like the Lummi tribal lands on the mainland, Portage Island was reportedly full of sasquatch, with howling and growling regularly reported. The island is connected to the mainland by a causeway that floods at high tide. It is flat, heavily wooded and uninhabited, at least by humans. This sample had been located by an enthusiast who had spent several days camping on the island in the hope of seeing one of the resident sasquatch. After a night disturbed by crashing undergrowth, snapping trees and a lot of loud vocalisations, my donor found a bunch of hairs clinging to a piece of tree bark that he was certain had not been there the previous evening. He sent me one of the hairs for DNA testing. It was about 5cm long, of medium thickness and light brown in colour. This was the last one left in his collection as he had sent the others to Dr Ketchum. But one was enough and the lab found a DNA match for #25030 to Bos taurus, the cow. When I told the donor the result, he revealed that Portage Island was home to a herd of feral cows.
Inland from the Lummi peninsula lie the northern Cascade Mountains, from where, near Marble Creek, Lori Simmons' late father had collected a clump of hair he was sure had come from the family of sasquatch, which included the Big Guy he had befriended. He found the hairs lying on an overgrown logging road close to an old gold-mining trail that he and his brother used as a hunting route on that day. Her father had that sixth-sense feeling that something was watching them so he and his brother left in a hurry, followed by the sound of a large animal crashing through the forest in hot pursuit. Over the years when he lived nearby, he got to know the sasquatch family very well and often brought Lori to the area when she was a child. Of course it was Lori who introduced me to the Big Guy and accompanied me on the alarming return visit to his underground lair.
Hair sample #25069 was donated by Lori, though originally found by her father on the logging road fifteen years earlier. It had been kept in an envelope in the interim. Inside were thirty black hairs of medium thickness and about 12cm in length. Given the provenance and the association with the Big Guy, I sent the hair straight to the lab without a preliminary microscopic examination. When the results came back sample #25069 was identified as coming from either Odocoileus virginianus (white-tailed deer) or Odocoileus hemionus (mule/black-tailed deer). As the latter is found abundantly in the Cascades, and given that the clump of hair was black not white, that is probably what it was.
Sample #25081 reached me from east of the Rockies, from Michigan. Though the majority of Bigfoot/sasquatch sightings have come from the three Pacific states of California, Oregon and Washington, and from British Columbia, there have been sporadic reports of these creatures from almost every state of the Union. So to receive a sample from Michigan was not such a surprise as you might suppose. It was found in March 2012 near Shellenbarger Lake, following a spate of sasquatch sightings. It struck me as an unusual location as the lake is close to a country club and not much further away lies the town of Grayling. Nevertheless my correspondent assured me that the woodlands around Shellenbarger Lake were a well-known sasquatch hotspot, with many reports of close and sometimes alarming encounters. I was sent a clump of about a hundred fine, mid-brown hairs 12–15 cm in length that had been found in the middle of a forest track-way leading to a campsite close to the lake shore. The identity of the Shellenbarger sasquatch sample was revealed by the DNA analysis. Sample #25081 was from Erethizon dorsatum, a porcupine.
So far in this chapter I have given the results from what I call third-order samples. Hairs collected close to a site where a Bigfoot had been seen or otherwise ‘encountered’ with no certainty that the hair had come from the creature itself. A third-order sample may have come from another animal in the vicinity and been misattributed to Bigfoot. A sample becomes what I classify as second-order when a sasquatch has been observed to come into contact with something, perhaps a tree or a bush, from which the hair is subsequently recovered. Second-order samples are much rarer than third order and the attribution to the sasquatch is much stronger. Whenever I heard about a second-order sample, I made an extra effort to get hold of it. A case in point is #25212, which Peter Byrne told me about in October 2013. His Bigfoot ‘buddy’ John Cordell had heard about an incident in the 1960s that occurred close to Roseburg in central Oregon. The source was from a local resident, Betty Croft, whose parents' truck had crashed into a Bigfoot in the 1960s leaving a clump of hair with scraps of skin stuck on the trailer. Betty's mother had placed the hair and tissue in a bag and kept it as a souvenir of the mysterious encounter until her recent death. Her daughter Betty had kept all her things, and knowing I was interested, Cordell had discovered from a phone call that she had located the hair and would be very willing to contribute some of it to the project.
I made sure that I passed by Roseburg on my way back from Pacific City, Byrne's home town on the Oregon coast, to San Francisco. Betty met me at the Apple Peddler diner just off the I-5 where, over a light salad and a glass of water, she told me the full story. In 1967, her parents had bought a parcel of land near Sutherlin, a little north of Roseburg. At weekends they would take their Volkswagen and trailer down to the plot to clear it ready for the house construction. One evening they were heading home, with the small trailer on the back carrying the tools they were using on the property. Almost as soon as they turned onto the road, they both saw a Bigfoot cross right in front of them and felt an impact as the trailer swung out and hit it hard. The creature was about seven feet tall, very muscular and hairy with long arms by its side – a classic sasquatch. Her parents had seen very clearly that it had walked across the road on two legs. After the collision, Betty's parents stopped to see if the injured creature was by the roadside, but there was nothing. When they got back home, they leaned the trailer against the house and the following morning Betty's dad noticed a strip of skin, some blood and a bunch of hair snagged on the corner of the trailer.
Betty's late mother, who never threw anything away, kept the material in an envelope, which Betty took out of her handbag and placed on the table between us. She told me that about ten years ago her mother had sent about half of the sample to Montana State University but the labs there were unable to recover any DNA. With great care I removed about half of the hairs that remained in an envelope, including a small piece of attached skin, and slipped them into an evidence bag.
Each hair was about 18cm long, red-brown and fine. Some were largely straight, while others were faintly wavy. By the time I met Betty, I had spent enough time with the hair experts at the Fish and Wildlife lab in Oregon to know that this regular wave was a common feature of bear underfur. I thought that bear would be the likely species identification, but I was wrong. The lab identified sample #25212 as another canid, either a wolf, coyote or domestic dog. I asked the lab to double-check as I was surprised at the result, but Terry told me that dogs too sometimes have a wavy underfur. With mixed feelings I told Betty about the results of the DNA analysis. She took it well and was relieved that after more than forty years the mystery was now solved. She didn't see how her parents could have mistaken a dog for a bipedal sasquatch, but she suggested that perhaps what they had seen was a man and what they had hit was his dog. Was this another case of man in a monkey suit? Perhaps so, I thought, and left it at that.
One result I did have before meeting the donor again was from Marcel, the Lummi Indian. I had news of the identity of the sasquatch hair attached to the stick the creature had thrown into Marcel's back yard. Sample #25113 was a single hair, light red and straight. The lab had identified that sample too as having come from a canid. Marcel's reaction to the news was very relaxed. He then told me that next door lived a golden retriever. He had always thought of it as ‘an indoor dog’ but had recently found it running around in his back garden. I winced when I thought of the technical refinement of the DNA extraction, the enormously expensive equipment and the sophisticated bioinformatics required to obtain the sequence, not to mention the billions spent on the GenBank database, that had in this instance all been harnessed to identify the hair of the dog next door.
Sample #25093 came from Derek Randles, the landscape gardener and sasquatch-hunter from the Olympic Peninsula that we met in an earlier chapter. He donated two samples, one from Harstine Island in Puget Sound on the landward side of the Olympic Peninsula, which also turned out to be from a canid, while his other sample (#25086) collected near Gray's Harbor, Washington on the Olympic coast was from a cow.
Other than these domestic animals or their feral analogues, the lab list also showed me that several hairs had come from Ursus americanus, the black bear. These included, rather to my surprise, the bunch of hairs in sample #25104 collected by Vietnam veteran Dan Shirley and his buddy Garland Fields from the Sierra Nevada. They had been collected in winter, when bears were supposed to be hibernating. However, I was later told that black bears never really hibernate, they just doze and do venture forth from time to time. Certainly when I examined the hairs at the Fish and Wildlife Forensic lab at Ashland they didn't look like bear hairs to me. They were very pale, though I knew black bears could vary enormously in the colour of their fur. Neither did they have the characteristic wave that I associated with bear underhairs – though mistakenly so in the case of Betty Croft's trailer sample. Nonetheless, the DNA result was unambiguous. Sample #25104 was from a black bear. When I asked Bonnie Yates, Ashland's most experienced hair specialist, to have a look at Dan's sample she focused the microscope up and down, moved the stage so she could examine the hair from the root to the tip, thought about it for a few minutes then gave her opinion. It was, she thought, probably from a bear.
Another sample for which I had high hopes came from Dr Mike Amaranthus. He had left it with Peter Byrne for me to collect when I visited him in Oregon. Dr Amaranthus worked as a field scientist at the Oregon National Primate Research Center at Beaverton for many years. In 1984 he was working in the woods on the Little Chetco River, about thirty miles from Brookings on the Pacific coast of southern Oregon, when he came across a round depression of interwoven branches at the base of a giant Douglas fir. Obviously some kind of nest, he thought. Giant footprints surrounded the tree and a lot of hairs were caught on the trunk of the fir, which he collected. He and his buddy hung up engineering flags to mark the spot. When they returned the next day, the flags had been torn to shreds. At first he thought it might have been a bear, but concluded that a bear would not have had the dexterity to interweave the branches so intricately to make the nest. He sent all the hairs but one to the University of California in Berkeley but they couldn't identify them. From a microscopic examination the main suspects, bear, wolverine, coyote, even human, were excluded.
The only remaining hair had been mounted on a microscope slide under a thin glass coverslip. When Peter gave it to me, and I saw it was on a slide, I hesitated. I was reluctant to risk damaging or destroying the last remaining hair in the process of releasing it from the cement that held it under the coverslip. Fortunately my colleagues in the pathology department back in Oxford knew exactly what to do. They gave me some xylene, organic solvent, and told me to soak the slide in it overnight. The next morning the cement had dissolved, the coverslip had fallen off and the hair, about two inches long, of medium thickness and a deep red-brown, was floating free in the xylene. I already knew that xylene would not interfere with the DNA extraction as it is one of the treatments the lab uses to clean up the hair shafts. I sent the hair off straight to the lab that day and within the week the report was back. Sample #25202 was from Ursus americanus, a black bear after all, but one with remarkable construction abilities judging by Dr Amaranthus's description of the nest.
The other Bigfoot result that I was very keen to see was from Justin Smeja's ‘Steak’, which was our sample #25106. ‘The Steak’, you may recall, was a piece of tissue that Justin dug up at the site where he had earlier buried the young sasquatch that he shot and killed. I would class this as a second-order sample only, in that he had seen the creature at that spot, but could not be sure it was from the creature he killed. It was not a first-order sample, which the blood on his boot would have been, had we been able to identify it. ‘The Steak’ did not look like a bear sample to me. The hair was short, though I later discovered it may have been cut, and very light in colour. Nonetheless Ashland's other hair expert, Cookie Smith, thought this probably was from a bear, but couldn't say with much confidence. But that was what the lab result showed as well. Sample #25106 was another Ursus americanus. Another black bear.
A portion of ‘The Steak’ had previously been sent to Dr Melba Ketchum's Sasquatch Genome Project with, as noted earlier, mixed reports being fed back to Justin Smeja. Nonetheless, she does identify the mitochondrial DNA from ‘The Steak’ in her on-line publication as human. The issue circulating in the Bigfoot world was whether the human DNA she found on ‘The Steak’ had come from the sample, in which case Justin may have shot a person, or was it just contamination once again. Bear DNA had been found on ‘The Steak’ by another lab, but they had not used such a careful decontamination protocol as ourselves. It left the question open whether the bear DNA might have come from saliva left by a black bear as it scavenged the sasquatch carcass. Now the result was clear. ‘The Steak’ was from a bear and the human DNA recovered by Dr Ketchum was most probably the result of contamination.
Next, I had the uneasy task of conveying the lab result to Justin in front of the cameras. I had reminded him that he was under no obligation to do this, but he agreed all the same. The location was a jolly bar, the Red Frog, near Colfax, California and I broke the news as gently as I could. His reaction was enormous disappointment, which was only to be expected, but not primarily because he would no longer be credited with obtaining the first genuine proof of sasquatch. What really upset Justin was that he thought everyone would now assume he had lied. That was an overreaction. Given that the animal he shot had been buried for over a month and had probably been found and eaten by forest scavengers long before he returned in an attempt to locate the body, the DNA result had not shown he had lied at all. It only showed that ‘The Steak’ was from a bear. I pointed this out to Justin on camera, but it was cut.
Reaching now the bottom of the list of lab results, it was clear that the North American hair samples had come from very ordinary animals living within their customary geographic range. Out of the eighteen hair samples attributed to Bigfoot, five had come from black bears, four from canids, either wolf, coyote or domestic dog, three from cows, and one each from horse, deer, raccoon, porcupine, sheep and human.
All the other hair samples contributed to the project had come from Asia, mostly from the Himalayas or Russia, but with one exception. At the ‘Weird Weekend’ in Devon before I started the project, I had listened to a talk by Adam Davies, who I later got to know well. It was Adam who joined Lori Simmons and me on our nerve-racking mission to tempt the Big Guy out from under his tree. In his day job Adam is a local government officer in Manchester, where he works for the UK Border Agency. I was amazed to hear that he and a handful of friends use their holidays and their savings to go off on adventures to find ‘animals unknown to science’. That sounded terrific. I could picture Adam returning to work after one of these trips and comparing notes with his workmates.
‘Where did you go for your holidays?’ I can hear him enquiring.
‘Oh, you know, we went to Devon again. We always stay in the same place. It's comfortable and we can take the kids to the beach, when it's not raining that is. How about you?’
‘Actually, I've just come back from Sumatra. I was there in the jungle looking for the orang-pendek. It was very hot and humid, and one of my mates went down with dysentery, but overall it was great.’
The orang-pendek was the subject of Adam's talk at ‘Weird Weekend’ and it was listening to him that made me realise that he and other cryptozoologists could really do with some help with their DNA research. Adam had sent orang-pendek samples off to a lab in the US but he never received any proper reports. On the face of it, the orang-pendek is the most plausible of the anomalous primates. It is quite small, standing about three feet tall, comfortable walking on two legs and covered in long, grey fur. As with other anomalous primates, there is a wealth of folklore surrounding the orang-pendek. Like the Nepalese yeti or the migoi of Bhutan, the indigenous Sumatrans take its existence as a given. What makes the orang-pendek attractive as an anomalous primate is its plausible link with a small hominid that lived in the island of Flores, not far away to the east.
In 2003 an excavation in Liang Bua cave on Flores by the Australian archaeologist Mike Morwood found the remains of a small hominid, which instantly attracted the nickname of ‘the Hobbit’. There was the usual agonising, reminiscent of the first Neanderthal discovery in 1856, as to whether these fossil remains were those of a new human species or merely a stunted Homo sapiens. However, the present consensus among palaeontologists is that ‘the Hobbit’ is a genuinely new species of hominid and it has been given the scientific name Homo floresiensis. The fossils were carbon-dated to 19,000 years BP, so they would have been contemporary with modern humans and may have encountered them en route to Australia. Unfortunately, the remains are not well preserved, having been poaching gently in the tropical heat for thousands of years, and no DNA has yet been recovered. The two unsuccessful attempts were several years ago and I would have thought it was time for another try using the lessons learned from the Neanderthal and Denisovan work we encountered earlier.
