In the years before the Minnesota Iceman fiasco, when Bernard Heuvelmans was actively expanding his collection of press cuttings and correspondences, he was collecting evidence for the existence of ‘animals unknown to science’. Though he was desperately disappointed by the reaction of the scientific establishment to what he believed was the body of a new hominid or a genuine Neanderthal survivor, he took immense encouragement from the documented and widely accepted discoveries of new species that had been made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and which still continue in the twenty-first.
A coelacanth, the lobe-finned fish thought to have become extinct over sixty million years ago, was caught in 1938 off the Chalumna estuary in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. It was discovered in the catch of a local fisherman by Marjorie Courtney-Latimer, the curator of the museum, although it was a local chemistry professor James B.L. Smith who was the first to realise its importance as a modern survivor from an ancient genus. It was given the species name Latimeria chalumnae to recognise its discoverer and the River Chalumna where it was caught. Sixty years later, in 1998, a second species of coelacanth was discovered from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi after a tourist couple had managed to photograph a specimen on sale at a local market only moments before it was bought for someone's supper.
The okapi, a secretive and beautifully marked forest-dwelling relative of the giraffe, was only a myth in the West until parts of a carcass were sent to London in 1901 by Sir Harry Johnson, British Governor of Uganda, from what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Henry Morton Stanley's expedition to Central Africa in the 1870s heard about a mysterious animal with striped flanks living in dense forest, but he never saw one. There are estimated to be about twenty thousand okapis presently living wild in the forests of Central Africa. Appropriately, the okapi was adopted as the emblem of the International Society of Cryptozoology, of whom Heuvelmans was the founding president.
After being rescued, a sailor who was stranded on the Indonesian island of Komodo for several months told stories of a dragon that ate pigs, goats and even attacked horses. Of course, no one believed him, at least not until they were confirmed by a Dutch colonial administrator in 1910. An expedition in 1927 brought out two live specimens of ‘Komodo Dragons’ as they become known, one of which was the star attraction at the opening of the new Reptile House at London Zoo the following year.
Even an animal the size of a small buffalo remained ‘unknown to science’ until 1992 when the saola (Pseudoryx nghetinhensis), a forest antelope weighing up to 100kg, was defined from three sets of horns found in the huts of hunters in the jungles of Vietnam. Despite an intense search for a live specimen, it took more than twenty years before the first saola was photographed in the wild, by a camera trap in September 2013. Live saola have occasionally been captured by villagers but all have quickly died in captivity.
No one has seriously suggested that the yeti and Bigfoot are large hooved animals, but the following serendipitous discovery did provide a popular candidate for these mythical creatures. In 1935 the German paleoanthropologist Ralph von Koenigswald, based at the time in Java, was in an apothecary's shop in Hong Kong looking at the ‘dragon's teeth’ for sale as an aphrodisiac. It was not that von Koenigswald was in the market for performance-enhancing drugs. He was there because he knew that interesting fossils from China's abundant limestone caves sometimes made their way into such displays. Casually he picked out a molar tooth that caught his eye and, after purchasing and studying it more closely, concluded that it had probably belonged to a giant ape. Further finds in China, including jawbones, supported this and a new species was confirmed. Von Koenigswald named it Gigantopithecus blackii – the first part meaning ‘giant ape’ and the second in honour of his late colleague and friend Davidson Black. The assumption was that Gigantopithecus had died out between two hundred thousand to a million years ago. It is difficult to imagine a tooth that old making a palatable aphrodisiac. In my experience of drilling into fossil teeth to extract DNA, after a thousand years in the ground, the organic parts have been completely replaced by stone. It would have been a gritty mixture to convert into a medicine, even in an emergency.
If it survives, as some cryptozoologists believe it might, Gigantopithecus would certainly be big enough to match up with some of the more flamboyant descriptions of yeti and Bigfoot, with estimates putting an adult male standing at ten feet tall and weighing 1,000 to 1,200 pounds. Gigantopithecus is certainly the favourite among many yeti and Bigfoot hunters. The other primate in the frame is the orang-utan and, of course, our own hominid cousins. Of the three known great apes, only the orang-utan is found in Asia. The last surviving refuges of this arboreal ape are the forests of Sumatra and Borneo, but in the past the animal was far more widespread with a range extending, according to fossil evidence, through Malaysia and into China, where they were much larger than their modern extant counterparts farther south. John Napier, in his systematic review of the possibilities, considered that the orang-utan could well survive in the high forests of the Arun Valley and puts it at the top of his shortlist of yeti candidates. And then there are the hypothetical unknown primates whose characteristics are, by definition, unknown. But even a hitherto unknown species, as we shall see, cannot escape recognition by DNA.
While most of the evidence for the existence of yeti and Bigfoot has come in the form of eyewitness statements, and the casting and analysis of eponymous tracks, there have been some half-hearted attempts in the past to retrieve information from organic materials recovered from locations where these creatures are thought to have left them. There have also been investigations into relics removed, with or without permission, from Himalayan monasteries.
While some professional scientists, like John Napier and in more recent times Jeff Meldrum, absorbed these enquiries into their own research programmes, mainstream scientific involvement was more common in the days of the great expeditions, and before the Minnesota Iceman fiasco. Tom Slick, for example, assembled a panel of consultants to examine material brought back from his Himalayan expeditions. For the 1958 yeti-hunt he recruited a panel of twenty-one consultants including the eminent, if controversial, anthropologist Carleton S. Coon from Penn State University and his colleague Paul Baker, primatologist William Osman Hill from the London Zoological Society, hair expert George Agogino from the University of Wyoming along with Bernard Heuvelmans and Boris Porchnev. When consultant panels of such prowess are created it is often to add prestige to a prospectus, usually with the goal of raising financial support. Very few actually do any real work. This seems to have been the case with many of the Slick consultants, but some did at least glance at the materials that were brought back from the Himalayas. At that time forensic techniques for examining such organic material were in their infancy, meaning that conclusions were vague and often no more than personal opinions that were liable to differ between experts.
Take, as an example, the different conclusions reached about some yeti droppings brought back by Peter Byrne from the 1958 Arun Valley expedition. George Agogino, who was responsible for distributing samples of the droppings among the consultants, sent small portions to William Osman Hill at London Zoo and to Ralph Izzard, who led the 1954 Daily Mail yeti expedition. Izzard was primarily a journalist, so quickly replied that he did not have the skills to offer an opinion. Osman Hill looked at the droppings under a microscope and came to the conclusion that they came from a herbivore. Agogino, on the other hand, thought these were the droppings of a carnivore, perhaps a wolf.
Franklin G. Wallace from the University of Minnesota, who was a first-rate parasitologist, wrote that the droppings were ‘not human; most improbably primate; most probably from a sheep or other herbivore’.1 Wallace based his conclusion on three intestinal parasite eggs that he found in the faeces. Parasites are so well adapted to their hosts that they are usually completely restricted to one species of host. That doesn't mean, for instance, that we humans will never be bitten by a cat flea, but a cat flea will not survive for long in the face of competition from human fleas that are far better adapted to living on us and sucking our blood than their feline counterparts. To an expert like Wallace, the eggs of different parasites can be differentiated and the host species identified just by the eggs of the parasites found in the faeces. Wallace thought that the three eggs he located in the ‘yeti’ sample were not from a human parasite species but from a sheep – an opinion that was especially firm in the case of one particular egg.
Bernard Heuvelmans disagreed with Wallace and cited a separate examination of the droppings by the prolific Antwerp parasitologist, Dr Alex Fain, who, according to Heuvelmans, found the egg of a species in the genus Trichuris which he was unable to identify. Heuvelmans made much of this, inferring that a new species of parasite must therefore mean that the droppings belonged to a new and as yet unidentified host species. Heuvelmans' remarks have all the hallmarks of a man clutching at straws. It is also a good example of the irrational and irritating claim, often repeated by cryptozoologists, that if a sample is not positively identified it means it must have come from a new, unidentified species, ergo a yeti or Bigfoot. As far as I am aware, prolific author though he certainly was, Dr Fain did not publish his yeti findings.
Finally in 1979, the same faeces were re-examined by Dr Anne Porter, an associate of Osman Hill. She identified mammalian hairs, probably from a small rodent, parts of a caterpillar and a grasshopper, from which she concluded that the donor of the droppings probably ate frogs. Again, as far as I can find, this was never published and the only reason we know about it at all is a postcard she sent to Tom Slick.
The ways in which the yeti droppings were examined and the results reported are very familiar. This is not the careful work of scientists committed to finding an answer, but has all the signs of someone having a quick look at a sample with dubious provenance. No publications resulted and the results themselves, or rather opinions, varied from sheep, to wolf, to an animal with a penchant for frogs, to the best they could hope for, an ‘unknown’ species. As usual, all contrary evidence was ignored and the ‘unknown’ species hinted at by Dr Fain's interpretation of a parasite egg was triumphantly presented to the world as proof that the yeti was alive and well and defecating somewhere in the Himalayas. It strikes me as ironic in the extreme that this proof, as Heuvelmans claimed it to be, of a gigantic primate roaming free in the wilderness rested on a single parasite egg smaller than a pinhead.
On the positive side, animal droppings have been used successfully as a source of DNA, for example in studying the movement of grizzly bears in North America on both sides of the Rockies. I used droppings myself back in the 1990s to see if the unlikely story that all golden hamsters are descended from a single female was true. It was. However, there are drawbacks when it comes to trying to identify the depositor of the droppings. The bear and hamster work used a genetic protocol based on knowing details of their genomes. The technique was tweaked to selectively target bear or hamster DNA and ignore the rest. So it didn't matter what the bear was eating as only bear DNA from cells lining the intestines that had been sloughed off and appeared in the droppings was targeted. So the DNA from grubs, berries, rodents or even elk in the bear's diet is never picked up by the reaction. But if you don't know the animal, then you can't design the reaction to suit the sample, and therefore risk picking up DNA from the food eaten and the resident parasites, rather than the animal itself. Applied to the same droppings that were tested from the Slick expeditions, there's a risk the yeti would be identified as a frog or even a giant grasshopper.
This problem disappears when hair is used as the source material instead of droppings. Only mammals have hair, so that's a good start. We will go on to see why hair was the first choice for my genetic analysis, but hair also has several anatomical features that can be used to identify the species of the owner. Hair is made in the root, or follicle, and extruded through pores in the skin. Each strand is roughly cylindrical in most animals and comprises three concentric layers, which can easily be distinguished under a light microscope. The central core of a hair shaft is the medulla, surrounded in the next layer by the cortex, and finally, on the outside, by the cuticle. Each layer has its own characteristics that vary between species, or at least between different families of mammal. Sometimes, for example, the hair may have a very small or even non-existent medulla, in which case the cortex will make up the major part of the hair's overall thickness. In other species the medulla takes up most of the space. The appearance of these two components also varies between species. It is the cortex that contains the melanin pigment granules and their appearance – rough, circular, streaky and so on – are additional signs that help identify the species. The medulla too can have a characteristic appearance in different animals. For instance, deer are very easy to identify from the appearance of their very cellular medullas, which look as if they are full of air bubbles. The outermost layer, the cuticle, is made up of overlapping cell remnants that resemble scales. The pattern of the cuticle scales is also part of the diagnostic analysis. Although the general scale pattern can be seen under an ordinary light microscope, it is hard to catch the detail without using a scanning electron microscope with much higher magnification and only after the cuticle has been coated with gold particles to produce the exquisite contrast.
However, the one major drawback of these techniques is that getting a firm species identification just by the appearance of a hair is extremely difficult and requires a very high level of skill and experience in the microscopist. Another complication is that hair differs a lot depending on where on the body it's from. I realised this when I spent time with the US Fish and Wildlife hair morphology experts Bonnie Yates and Cookie Smith at their forensic laboratory in Ashland, Oregon. Both at the top of their profession, they told me that they would never give a firm species identification on the basis of a single hair. Bonnie explained that many animals have at least two different types of hair. In bears and deer, for example, one in a hundred or so hairs is much longer and thicker than the rest. These are the guard hairs that protrude beyond the main pelt and are there to protect the finer and more densely packed underhairs from damage. When they are moving through the forest at night these animals can feel when the guard hairs touch an obstacle like a tree trunk and can move aside to avoid it.
Though primates do not have guard hairs, the hairs vary a lot depending where they are growing on the body. In men, for example, beard hair is much thicker than head hair. Pubic and underarm hairs are different again. And, of course, there is a huge variation between individuals, which may or may not reflect their ethnic origin. On the whole African hair has a flatter cross section and the result is a tight curl. Asian hair, on the other hand, has an almost perfectly round cross section and is very straight. European hair is somewhere in between, but with enormous variation between individuals.
With all these provisos and complexities, it is no surprise that identifying a new species, like a yeti, from the appearance of a hair sample is a tough call. In fact, without a ‘type specimen’ to compare, it is impossible. All that can realistically be expected is an indicative diagnosis such as ‘the hair has primate characteristics’ or ‘it is from an unknown species’. The last conclusion is the most fallacious, especially when it is a distortion of a professional judgement that, on the available evidence (often just a single hair), a positive identification simply cannot be made. There is a danger that this cautious professional conclusion undergoes the slippery transition to become the hair of ‘an unidentified animal’. Bonnie Yates, for one, has had quite enough of this sleight of hand and no longer accepts samples for identification from cryptozoologists.
Dr Henner Fahrenbach, on the other hand is more sympathetic. A biomedical scientist originally from Oregon, now living in Arizona, he has studied sasquatch hairs for many years and has compiled a list of features to aid their identification by microscopy, though understandably without the benefit of a type specimen. These are his thoughts, written for the International Society of Cryptozoology:
Generally, sasquatch hair has the same diameter range as human hair and averages 2 to 3 inches (5–8cm) in length, with the longest collected being 15 inches (38.1cm). The end is rounded or split, often with embedded dirt. A cut end would indicate human origin.
Sasquatch hair is distinguished by an absence of a medulla, the central cellular canal. At best, a few short regions of a fragmentary medulla of amorphous composition are found near the base of the hair. Some human hairs also lack a medulla, but the current collection of 20 independent samples with congruent morphology effectively rules out substitution of human hair.
The cross-sectional shape and color of sasquatch hair is uniform from one end to the other, in keeping with the characteristics of primate hair in general. There are no guard hairs or woolly undercoat and the hair cannot be expected to molt with the seasons. Hence, hair collections are invariably sparse in number.
Despite a wide variety of observed hair colors in sasquatch, under the microscope they invariably have fine melanin pigmentation and a reddish cast to the cortex, presumably a function of the pigment pheomelanin.
I contacted Dr Fahrenbach to ask if I could carry out a DNA analysis on those hairs in his collection that had satisfied his own criteria and which, in his opinion, were most likely to have come from a sasquatch. As we will see later, he was happy to oblige.
The few hairs from the Slick expeditions that were examined were either immediately dismissed as irrelevant, in that they clearly didn't come from primates, or fell into the category of ‘perhaps primate’. Very unfortunately, neither the yeti-hunters who collected the hairs nor the scientists who examined them realised the potential for unambiguous species identification beyond the ‘perhaps primate’ limit. No one thought about DNA then. The hairs were not treasured as the key witnesses they have now become, and they are mostly lost. I have tracked down a few, but not as many as I would have liked.
No such ‘perhaps primate’ category is possible with a well-conducted DNA analysis. This point was clearly not appreciated by either the speaker or the audience of cryptozoologists at ‘Weird Weekend’ when I listened to the astonishing adventures of Adam Davies and his companions in search of the elusive orang-pendek in the jungles of Sumatra. On his latest expedition, Adam had found a short hair close to a site where one of his companions had spotted the diminutive primate. He included in his talk the results of a DNA analysis which he told the audience had shown characteristics of both human and non-human primate DNA, putting it straight into the ‘perhaps primate’ category, just like the hair morphology studies of yesteryear. I had to restrain myself when it came to question time, as this was patently impossible. He was reporting a study using mitochondrial DNA which gives a precise sequence that can be unambiguously assigned to an extant species, or, as we will discover, an unknown one. It cannot share the characteristics of two species. ‘Weird Weekend’ was not the right forum to have this out in the open, but it did show me that cryptozoologists were not sufficiently versed in genetic analysis to realise that what was being said about the DNA result was quite impossible.