Image of Big Foot by Steve Baxter. (Not an actual photo.)
Who doesn’t love a mystery?
Apparently, scientists.
Scientists are always trying to find the ‘answer’ to this or that ‘mystery’ — and occasionally, they seem to succeed.
Occasionally, they fail.
Like, with SARS-CoV-2, an invisible virus that has been blamed for causing ‘COVID-19’. At the beginning of 2020, it was a mystery disease, with no known cure, that came from God-knows-where.
Now that we’ve all had COVID, and most of us survived the experience, it’s still a mystery disease, with no known cure, that came from God-knows-where. (A virology lab in China, apparently?)
But the search for a cure made a few people really, really rich.
I doubt anyone is going to get rich, proving that Big Foot — Sasquatch — doesn’t exist. Nevertheless, an international collaboration of scientists apparently spent considerable effort performing a genomic analysis of hairs that people claimed came from a large, hairy primate. After weeks of hard scientific work in a laboratory at the University of Oxford, the scientists wrote a report, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, declaring that they had not found any evidence of Sasquatch.
They were also searching for evidence of the Yeti, the big guy who lives in the Himalayas. But in spite of their efforts, they failed to prove that the Sasquatch and the Yeti don’t exist.
Many of us believe that the Yeti and the Sasquatch are probably the same, identical primate. Or at least, close cousins. Science has, thus far, been unable to clear up that question for us.
But they may have found another mystery to solve.
In the first ever systematic genetic survey, we have used rigorous decontamination followed by mitochondrial 12S RNA sequencing to identify the species origin of 30 hair samples attributed to anomalous primates. Two Himalayan samples, one from Ladakh, India, the other from Bhutan, had their closest genetic affinity with a Palaeolithic polar bear, Ursus maritimus. Otherwise the hairs were from a range of known extant mammals.
In this situation, we might be dealing with a ‘null hypothesis’.
Scientists often try to find a explanation behind a mystery, and they often do. Or think they do. They tell us, for example, that an invisible virus, that travels through the air during casual conversation (or maybe, kissing) can cause a person to suffer severe respiratory distress. But there are other situations where scientists (perhaps out of frustration) try to prove the opposite — that there is no connection between a certain presumed agent and a certain outcome. This typically involves statistical analysis, which we’ve all come to suspect, with good reason.
If you can prove that a certain outcome is totally random and has no relationship to the suspected causal agent, you have successfully confirmed your ‘null hypothesis’.
But it’s not as simple as it might sound.
The international collaboration of scientist at the University of Oxford, for example, tested hairs collected in Asia and North America. Presumably, the hairs had been collected during sightings of Yeti or Big Foot. So maybe the hairs could provide proof that these primates actually exist?
We’ve lately been told that scientists can identify people and other biological life forms using DNA or RNA analysis. For all we know, the scientists are actually making the whole thing up and using a dart board. But the machinery involved is so complicated, no one can really tell what’s going on. (A dart board is easier to understand, and probably more fun.)
The scientists in the Big Foot study analyzed the 30 hair samples and determined that they were similar to hairs from ordinary, everyday animals. Porcupines, raccoons, cows, for example.
But two of the samples had mysterious RNA.
In the case of two samples gathered in the Himalayas, the only close match the scientists could find was with RNA extracted from a 40,000-year-old fossil of a (presumably extinct) polar bear. The RNA was not a match to any living polar bears’ RNA.
The report did not jump to the (very obvious) conclusion, which is: Big Foot is not a primate at all, but rather, a polar bear that was thought to have become extinct 40,000 years ago.
You have to be a non-scientist, I guess, to see the obvious explanation.
So what did we learn? That a careful analysis of 30 hair samples didn’t prove anything, one way or the other. Remind anyone of the Chinese virology lab problem?
Nevertheless, the Oxford scientists got their report published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, for which I presume they were paid handsomely. (RNA testing machinery is not cheap.)
Meanwhile, I’ll probably get no credit at all, for explaining the mystery of the not-extinct polar bear.
Like my dad used to tell me: Life isn’t fair.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.