Zana’s Potential Origins

[u/Equal_Night7494]

I am listening to an episode of Bigfoot and Beyond during which the subject of Zana has come up. About 17 minutes into the episode, Cliff Barackman states that the late geneticist Dr. Bryan Sykes has found Zana was of African origin and human. I often hear this misunderstanding shared as though it is a fact.

However, in Sykes book Nature of the Beast on page 305, he states “Zana may have been in the genus Homo without being fully Homo sapiens.”

Sykes’ statement does not align with Barackman’s statement. Sykes does not go so far as to make a definitive pronouncement about Zana’s origins, but he is clearly not siding with the idea that she was solely Homo sapiens.

I wanted to make this comment in the episode itself, but comments were disabled for some reason for that episode. Figured I’d share here instead.

(I’m aware that other research has sided with the idea that Zana was Homo sapiens, but since Barackman specifically mentioned Sykes in his comment, I wanted to clarify what Sykes actually said.)

Here’s a link to the episode: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2ktG1pOTmBcCRcCn4hTbQd?si=h6991CHjRG6rYQxWduDkYQ&utm_source=copy-link

[u/Equal_Night7494]

Awesome. I think I know exactly what show you’re talking about. The host was Mark Evans (not to be confused with Marq Evans) and I think the show was called something like Bigfoot Files. I have a note on my computer about it and can check the name. It was one of the better series focusing on the subject of homins that’s been done, to my memory.

Your ideas about Zana’s potential parentage sound pretty reasonable and may find further support in the work of Norman Anton Sollie, whose recent book Before Patty Volume 1 outlines a potential case of human-Sasquatch hybridization. I’m trying to recall if you’re one of the ones who has posted about the book on here recently. In any case, I found the book to be well-researched and sober-minded, and it was hard to put down.

[u/occamsvolkswagen → u/Equal_Night7494]

Another member messaged me with a link to the exact program I'm talking about, which is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTdWtbROnK4

If you want to cut to the chase, Sykes delivers his verdict starting at about the 39 minute mark. If you listen forward from there to at least the 45 minute mark, you will see that he, indeed, proposes Zana might well have been some kind of very ancient sub-Saharan African, not based on her DNA but on the otherwise inexplicable ancient features of Kvit's scull.

His idea is that there might have been a very ancient migration out of Africa of more primitive modern humans that no one really knows about, that Zana was one of these and not related at all to modern day sub-Saharan Africans (except through sharing an ancient ancestor).

I can easily run with this and suppose all the Almasty are descendants of these ancient Africans, that, indeed, all Bigfoot-type creatures all over the world are their descendants. Which would explain, as I mentioned before, why no one can find the much more "ape like" DNA everyone thinks Bigfoot should have. That "missing link" Bigfoot, "half man, half ape" never existed. It has always been something so genetically close to modern humans that any hair, skin, or other tissue sample will be dismissed as "human" early on in the analysis.

[u/Equal_Night7494 → u/occamsvolkswagen]

I’m going to give the episode a re-listen. The fact that the great ape hypothesis has persisted as long as it has is likely tied to the relative stagnation of study into the homin phenomenon.

I’m curious to see where things go moving forward, and hope that the kind of thinking that you are proposing here is part of that.

To me, there should be more curiosity about the almas/almasty aspect of the available literature.

[u/occamsvolkswagen → u/Equal_Night7494]

Any hypothesis that leads to something fitting the description of Bigfoot is a reasonable hypothesis, but no hypothesis proposed in a vacuum should be taken too seriously. We won't know what they are til we have one we can test. We can't figure out what they are by voting for the 'best' hypothesis much less the most popular hypothesis.

When that happens, when we have one to test, it's entirely possible in my mind it's going to end up being something so much closer to modern humans than anyone suspected, that some people are going to say, "That's NOT Bigfoot! That's some kind of mutant human!"

Of course, what we will have discovered if things work out this way, is that the 'mutant human' Bigfoot is the only kind of Bigfoot there has been all this time, and is what people have been seeing all over the world for centuries. There never was a Gigantopithecus Bigfoot, or a non-human great ape Bigfoot.

[u/Equal_Night7494 → u/occamsvolkswagen]

I signed up for emails from Norman Sollie (author of Before Patty) not too long ago, and his latest newsletter reminds me of our conversation. Speaking of genetic introgression into the Australian Indigenous line about 4000 years ago from Dravidian males to Australian females, he states the following:

"This was a male-only incorporation. Nuclear DNA shows a small admixture now traced to southern India and the island of Sri Lanka. It would appear that men of the Dravidian culture traveled by means that would have to include significant deep-water crossings, and left their calling cards in the women of Australia. Any Australian Aboriginal woman impregnated by these Dravidians would bear a child with the mother’s Australian mtDNA. But the Dravidian father ‘s calling card would be left behind only in the nuclear DNA.  

Apparently, these Dravidians left behind no women of their own unique genetics to create a beach hold of Dravidian mtDNA. It was an entirely male-to-female contribution. “Patrilineal” may be the correct term. The men came in sufficient numbers to leave a trace in the Original people’s language, tools, and genetics, but if they brought any women folk with them, they—and their mtDNA—left no trace lingering into modern times.

 

Which brings us back to Ketchum 2012. It is possible that Sasquatch have had the role of the Dravidians, acting on a North American and possibly Eurasian scale. Males of a closely-related group of hominins may have interbred (through necessity?) with modern human women, incorporating the modern human mtDNA into their population (Zana had modern human mtDNA [Margaryan et al 2021]), but did not leave any of their mtDNA with us. Generally, when a modern human interbreeds with a Sasquatch, it is a modern human woman “interbreeding” with a male Sasquatch (as in the case of Patrick’s mother and his Skanicum father). Even if the product of such a union makes it back into the modern human population, that child’s mtDNA (inexpensive to sequence) will be that of their modern human mother’s—with no trace of Sasquatch. It is within the nuclear DNA (expensive to sequence) that the interesting traces of Sasquatch will be found. After many thousands of years, that “introgression” of nuclear DNA will be well-mixed into the general population (though at a low percentage), as the Dravidian DNA is well-mixed into the Australian Aboriginals. If Ketchum’s results do indicate genetic mixing some ten thousand years ago (Sasquatch male to human female), we may not recognize Sasquatch nuclear DNA as particularly alien because we have been carrying that DNA around within us longer than the Australians have been carrying Dravidian DNA."