TV crew finds Yeti DNA, Destination Truth episode The Bhutan Yeti Options

[Sasquat.ch]

I really think that this is a major find and I'm really surprised that this isn't discussed here lenghtily. So I'm starting this new thread in the General Discussion area. For those who aren't up to date: A TV crew from the Syfy channel, Josh Gates and his Destination Truth team, found a clump of hair during their recent expedition in Bhutan. Back home the hairs got analyzed by an expert. Result: the DNA is from an unknown great primate.

I know that this isn't the first time that Yeti hair was analyzed and labeled "unknown primate": Some years ago a TV team from the BBC found hairs in the same general region. They let it test and it supposedly was from an unknown primate. They should compare those two samples.

Blogsquatcher made a transcript of Josh Gates interview with the expert:

Here is my transcript of Josh Gates' interview with Dr. Melba Ketchum, a forensic analyst with DNA Diagnostics, Inc., from the latest episode of Destination Truth:

Ketchum: I didn't think we would have anything to talk about here, to be honest. I was just going to rule out yeti and be done with it. I submitted the sequence that we obtained from this hair sample to a large international database that scientists use to deposit their sequence data. Well, at first I was very skeptical, because we've had these things come into our lab in the past, and they never panned out to be anything interesting. However, this sample did test very clearly on the human panel of markers. That makes it a primate, and it makes it a large primate.

Gates: And how are we sure that it isn't just human contamination or that it's just DNA from human hair?

Ketchum: The hair, visually, is not human. It's coarser than horse tail hair.

Gates: (voiceover) what she told me next seemed unbelievable.

Ketchum: Initial searches indicate that it's an unknown sequence. There are literally millions of sequences in this database. And we're really shocked that it didn't match any of the species, exactly, in the database.

Gates: What would be required in order for us to say, from a DNA standpoint, the yeti is a real animal.

Ketchum: If we're going to prove that there potentially is a new species, with this first hair sample, we really need more hair samples like it. And once you establish there is a group of animals, that will go a long ways towards proving that there is a new species indeed.

This post has been edited by Sasquat.ch: Nov 6 2009, 02:12 AM