My New Book is out on Amazon.com 

Finally, more than seven years after the publication of Melba Ketchum et al.'s famous paper, Novel North American Hominins: Next Generation Sequencing of Three Whole Genomes and Associated Studies," I have consolidated my posts and other studies on this topic in one book, The Sasquatch Genome Project: A Failed DNA Study, which is available on Amazon.com as a Kindle ebook or a paperback.  Kindle books can be read on a cell phone, tablet or PC with free software downloaded from Amazon.  You do not need a Kindle tablet.  

About this Book (from the book)

Because of the extraordinary claims in Novel North American Hominins, Next Generation Sequencing of Three Whole Genomes and Associated Studies (Ketchum et al., 2013) the Bigfoot Community has been debating it ever since.  This book is the result of research over seven years (more than the original study) in understanding the Sasquatch Genome Project and its published paper.  Dr. Haskell Hart tells the story of his increasing involvement and understanding of the paper as he presents his own results and conclusions, which are at odds with the Ketchum et al. paper.   He first explains the structure and function of DNA as background. With 45 figures and 29 tables of data (more than in the original paper), all carefully explained to the layman, this extensive scientific critique of the paper is the only one of its kind.    

Whereas this blog is a chronological report of my findings, the book is better organized by topics and includes more background for the reader, including supplementary figures and tables and 65 footnotes.

I created the book, my first, with Kindle Create, a free download from Kindle Direct Publishing.  I highly recommend this method of self-publishing.  The books are only printed and sold through Amazon.com when there are orders, and you have absolutely no upfront costs except to register a copyright, if you so choose.  There is no warehousing of books which may not be sold.

I have a few suggestions which I learned the hard way.

1.  Try to complete your book in Word with all the details, including footnotes, figures, tables (if you have any) and page breaks, which are not possible to do in Kindle Create.

2.  Include your Figure and Table Titles and Captions in the JPEG file with the figure or table, not as a separate text, which may not be on the same page after final formatting and preparation. 

3.  Be prepared to redo itallcs and bolds in Kindle Create.  These do not carry over on uploading from Word.

4.  Line Spacing, indentation, and paragraph separation will need to be redone after uploading to Kindle Create.  

5.  Footnotes cannot be edited in any way after uploading, and must be linked to text in the ebook version.  So, get it right in Word.

6.  You will need to format and possibly redesign your covers (front and back) using their templates.  There are very precise requirements in order to keep the front cover, spine, and back cover properly separated in a single print page.  DO NOT attempt this until you know how many pages are in your final print version, which is different from the Word or Kindle Create versions before final formatting and pagination.

I am answering questions and rebuttals here and on The Bigfoot Forums:

https://bigfootforums.com/?gclid=CjwKCAjwkdL6BRAREiwA-kiczAoRMr40kuN2206tNbc947bm1NXIg_HNcuGDZOyo7qUgNAH6J1p9dxoCmL8QAvD_BwE

Visit the book's Facebook page for updates.

At Last a Black Bear Genome in GenBank and it Matches Sample 26 100%ID

“If it were a black bear it would have matched 100%.”  Melba Ketchum in Die Tiefe

Finally, in 2018, a complete black bear genome was sequenced and submitted to GenBank as accession ASM334442v1 in the “Assembly” database.  I had been checking regularly with NCBI to see whether a black bear whole genome had been submitted.  I was thrilled.  It would now be possible to query the Sample 26 sequence against this massive genome of 2.5 billion bases, in 231,673 contigs and 111,495 scaffolds.


The top six hits by score were (Table 1):

Table 1.  Sample 26 vs. Black Bear Whole Genome
Accession#		%ID	Length	Score
LZNR01001132.1	100		1237	2285
LZNR01003708.1	100		1157	2137
LZNR01005486.1	100		1114	2058
LZNR01000516.1	100		1103	2037
LZNR01074398.1	100		1093	2019
LZNR01003247.1	100		1043	1927

Table 1.  #These are scaffolds.

There were 1725 hits above 200 bases in length with 100%ID. This is an excellent match, even better than the dog in Sample 140. Based on previous matches in other databases, I was not surprised at this result, but it was gratifying. As mentioned previously, GenBank is a moving target. Fortunately, it gets bigger with time. With the rapid advances in sequencing technology, the databases are growing exponentially. If you don’t find a species that you want or to the extent that you want, just wait awhile (Five years in this case).

Fig. 1 shows the plot of all hits above 99.5%ID and 200 bp. As mentioned above, the solid line at 100%ID contains 1725 hits. There are 849 other hits above 99.5%ID in this figure.

Figure 1.  Each diamond represents a hit > 200bp and 99.5%ID.  Abscissa is hit starting point on Sample 26 sequence.  Most of the data are in the 100%ID solid line of overlapping points.

And Melba, bears have mutations too, so 100%ID is not required for a species match.  Depending on the phylogeny, above 99-99.5% is considered a good species match. The whole system of human haplogroups is based on mutations and slight mismatches of mtDNA.  We don't always match each other 100% either.