I was watching Season#1, episode#3 of Bigfoot files on Netflix and it was really good(youtube embedded below). They were investigating the myth of the Almasty, an alleged sasquatch or Neanderthal type creature thought to roam the deep wilderness of the former Soviet Union.

The show focused on Zana, a legendary wild “ape woman” discovered in the 1850s in the mountainous forests of Ochamchir. Zana was chased down by some local men, beaten to submission, and dragged down to a local village where she was kept as a sex slave for decades and offered up for sex at drunken parties.  Zana was described as an extremely tall (6’6″) and muscular woman covered in thick auburn hair who slept outdoors, could outrun a horse, and swim across the violent Moskva river at high tide.  It is said that she ran around naked like a wild animal until she died in 1890.

Zana had four children including a terrifying son named Khwit who was said to be so animalistic, he could lift an entire table with just his teeth.

Zana’s terrifying son Khwit

As part of the show, Khwit’s tooth along with the saliva of several of Zana’s living descendants were submitted to Oxford professor Bryan Sykes for DNA test while several Almasty enthusiasts who had been obsessing about Zana for decades, anxiously awaited the results.  For it was judgement day for their lifelong fascination.

First the bad news: Zana’s son and other descendants had the same amount of Neanderthal DNA as expected for modern humans in that region.  It was time to put the theory that Zana was a surviving Neanderthal to bed.

Then the surprising news: the DNA of Zana’s son and other descendants indicated that she was 100% sub-Saharan African!  It seemed Zana was just an escaped black slave, and because of the racism of the time period, was described as some kind of wild ape woman.

However upon further examining her son’s skull and the DNA of her descendants, Sykes began to think that Zana was not a modern African at all, but from a relict population who left Africa 100,000 years ago and hid in the Caucasus Mountains.

It’s very rare for a scientist as prestigious as Bryan Sykes to be open-minded enough to apply his considerable skills to such a marginalized and ridiculed area of research and we should all be very grateful.

But no good deed goes unpunished because anytime a scientists says anything provocative, people like science blogger PZ Myers are right there to call them incompetent, and even racist.

In a scathing attack, Myers calls Sykes’s idea “not only inane, but distressingly racist” and writes:

Look at what he’s claiming. An African woman was enslaved by 19th century racists, and she left some descendants. Sykes has analyzed DNA from people in that region and found evidence of an infusion of West African DNA into the population: you should be feeling zero surprise. A person lived, had children, died, and her descendants carry traces of her genome. That’s basic biology.

But then it goes off the rails. Sykes unquestioningly accepts the accounts of 19th century racists who regarded this woman as an animal to say that the evidence of West African ancestry somehow supports his contention that she was an ‘ape woman’ who was descended from some relic population of a Homo sub-species that had been hiding in the Caucasus Mountains for millennia, giving rise to legends of yetis and bigfoot and other beast-men in the wilderness.

That makes no sense. His own DNA analysis says she was 100 per cent African. You know “African” is not a synonym for “pre-human”, right? But he has written a whole book titled The Nature of the Beast (horrid title that also manages to suggest that an enslaved African woman was less than human), in which he advances this ludicrous theory, and the Times has obligingly fluffed it for him. At least it’ll appeal to all the UKIP voters.

It’s fine if Myers wants to be skeptical about the science, but playing the race card is irresponsible and will have a chilling effect on other scientists wanting to explore such fascinating topics.  Sykes is not implying that an enslaved African was sub-human; the whole point of his theory is that she may not have been a modern African woman at all, but one from 100,000 years ago.

Back in June 2015, Lion of the Blogosphere labelled the Dylann Roof massacre an example of low IQ white-trash beta-male rage and also stated that the primary difference between Roof and fellow spree killer Elliot Rodger is that “Rodger was pretty smart and wrote an excellent autobiography”.  Earlier Lion had pegged Rodger’s IQ at an above average 115-120, so he likely thought Roof was substantially below this.

Thus, when  a recent article claimed Dylann Roof has a 141 IQ.  Lion was predictably skeptical, writing:

I find it highly unlikely. The article, irresponsibly, gives no source for Roof’s alleged high IQ, just some hearsay. What test did he take? When did he take it? No info is given. So it’s probably not true.

Although I too am extremely skeptical of high IQ claims, the fact that Roof’s competency to represent himself in trial was questioned makes it likely that he was in fact evaluated by a psychologist and probably took the latest Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-IV), just as Ted Kaczynski had taken an earlier version of the Wechsler (WAIS-R) around the time he was on trial.

I started searching the web for evidence that Roof was evaluated for competency, and found  more specifics:

His overall intellectual function was a score of 125, which placed him in the 96th percentile. His verbal compression score was 141, which placed him in the top 99.7th percentile. However, his processing speed was 100, which placed him in the 50th percentile

So 141 was just his score on the verbal comprehension subtests of the WAIS-IV, but because other brain functions like processing speed were much lower (no mention of his scores on working memory and perceptual organization) his overall IQ was 125 (U.S. norms);123 (white norms) [UPDATE May 6, 2017: These scores might be 3 points too high because the WAIS-IV norms were about a decade too old when Roof was tested & thus may give slightly inflated results]

So Lion was right about the 141 IQ being bogus (it was just a sub-score) however Roof’s overall IQ is still higher then Lion’s estimate for Rodgers, who Lion considered smarter.

But why was Roof’s score reported to be 141 in the first place?

Sometimes when one has too big a discrepancy on the subsections of IQ tests, the overall score is considered unreliable so perhaps the psychologist took Roof’s verbal comprehension score of 141 as reflective of his true intelligence, and dismissed the overall score as compromised by his cognitive weaknesses.  However the great David Wechsler would have had none of this.  He felt that all of the subtests on his scales were needed for the fuller appraisal of intelligence, and would not tolerate such cherry-picking.

Elaborating further on Roof’s intelligence, Lion writes:

…his crime shows a sort of stupidity that belies the idea that he’s especially smart. He supposedly wanted to make some sort of dramatic response to black crime, but then why kill a bunch of old church people? He could have at least gone into the ghetto and killed some gangbangers. He has to be pretty stupid not to realize what a dumb idea it was.

While Roof’s overall IQ is much lower than 141, it’s still higher than 96% of America’s.  So why didn’t he realize how dumb his crime was?  The psychologist’s evaluation showed that not only does Roof have a high IQ, but was also possibly autistic.  Autistics tend to lack social cognition, even when their overall IQs are high, so Roof may simply have been too politically obtuse to realize that killing people as sympathetic as churchgoers would not advance his cause.

Patty, the alleged sasquatch in the legendary 1967 Patterson footage

This October will be the 50th anniversary of the legendary Patterson footage, widely considered the single best evidence for the existence of Sasquatch (a bipedal ape believed to live in the Pacific Northwest).  The Patterson footage is a piece of video captured by Roger Patterson, a rodeo cowboy in his 30s who headed out to the Pacific Northwest with his buddy Bob Gimlin to make a documentary about Sasquatch, and returned with footage that has fascinated the World for the last half century.

To skeptics,  the film is just a man in a monkey suit, but to believers, it’s indisputable proof that Sasquatch exists.  Supporters cite the extreme height, powerful muscle movements, and non-human limb proportions and walk, and the fact that it was much harder to find a realistic costume in the 1960s, as proof that the video is authentic. Watch the video and judge for yourself.

I must admit I’m a skeptic, and it’s mostly because what are the odds that the very people who were trying to get sasquatch on tape would be lucky enough to do so.  Much more likely that this was a scam to get publicity by some self-promoting aspiring film makers.

I also think that believing in Sasquatch (as some HBDers do) is somewhat inconsistent with believing in racial differences in intelligence, because if high intelligence did not evolve until humans migrated North (a major tenet of HBD), how could something as dumb as an ape have walked to North America?

Indeed the strongest evidence that mainstream science marshals against Sasquatch is the fossil record’s remarkably consistency in showing no apes have ever been indigenous to North America.

None.

Or have they?

The scientific consensus is that modern humans did not leave Africa until about 70,000 years ago and did not colonize North America until about 15,000 to 24,000 years ago, however as commenter Melo informed me, there’s shocking evidence that someone or something was making stone tools in California, 130,0000 years ago!

However MeLo cautioned:

While it is a very interesting discovery the evidence isn’t really strong. From what i’ve read they didn’t find any hominin fossils or tools, just rocks that could have been tools and a mastodon fossil that has wear and damage similar to other prey of archaic humans.

It’s very possible that the mastodon died 130,000 years ago, but was “dug up” and then broken and butchered by native north american homo sapiens. Further studies need to be constructed in order for a more clear picture to resonate within the details.

However if this really is evidence of 130,000 year-old tool making in North America, then who, or what, made them, since modern humans were confined to Africa at that time?  Is it possible that some sub-human hominin made it to North America before we did, and that Sasquatch are the descendants of these things?  If sub-human hominins only went extinct because they were replaced by modern humans, and modern humans didn’t arrive in the Americas until relatively recently, and only in small numbers in places like Canada, then perhaps such a creature could have survived.

An ancient legend

If you get some Native Americans drunk enough, they’ll tell you that he’s still out there.  Some kind of demented creature, half-man, half-beast, surviving in the wilderness, raping Native American women for centuries.  The hybridized offspring of these unwanted sex acts were said to be very slow, and have trouble learning Native American language and customs.

The skeptics

Scientists dismiss sasquatch as just a myth because such a large creature (2 to 3 meters tall and weighing over 500 lbs) could not possibly have gone undetected all this time, especially given the large population such a creature would need to be reproductively viable.

However believers note that the mountain gorilla wasn’t discovered until 1902 and the Komodo dragon wasn’t discovered until 1912, and probably in both cases, they were also dismissed as myth until a white scientist saw one, although admittedly, nothing big has been discovered lately.  About decade ago there was talk of a giant new ape being discovered in the Congo, but this turned out to just be another type of chimp.

Finding undiscovered large land animals is a bit like finding undiscovered multi-billionaires.  In the first few years Forbes magazine began tracking the richest people, there were many super rich people who had evaded detection, but now, almost all have been found.

Still, extinct hominins are increasingly being discovered, and some having existed more recently in time than thought.  If there is currently only one extant hominin (us) then this is perhaps the first time in millions of years that this has occurred.

Especially interesting is Homo floresiensis, an extremely short bipedal hominin thought to have lived as recently as 12,000 years ago.  If such a creature could have lived so recently, perhaps it’s still alive, and this has created much speculation that it is Orang Pendek, an alleged bipedal sub-human primate less than 5 feet tall that Indonesian locals have long claimed to have seen.  However the idea that floresiensis could still be alive took a hit when it was discovered that their remains were not only 12,000 years old, as originally thought, but over 50,000 years old.

And of course Sasquatch is vastly larger than Orang Pendek, and thus should be much easier to detect.  On the other hand the Pacific Northwest is huge.  As a Canadian I can tell you there’s nothing scarier than flying solo over British Columbia’s 62 million acres of century old forest, and an astonishing 73 aircrafts flying from California to Alaska simply vanished, never to be recovered from the utter vastness of the forest.

If 73 aircrafts can hide in the Pacific Northwest, then why not sasquatch, especially if it’s an endangered species with only a few dozen individuals left?

The perfect hoax

If I was going to attempt one of the many sasquatch hoaxes that have been tried over the decades, there would be two people I would contact. First, Sun Fang, the tallest woman in the World, with an astonishing height of 7’3″.

I would try to pay her to put on an authentic looking monkey mask and then place fake hair all over her naked body and then run through the Pacific North West as I filmed.  No one would believe a woman could be that tall and so it would be assumed to be a man in a monkey suit, but what monkey suit could have such realistic naked breasts (since it would be an actual woman), and thus the film would be judged authentic.

But to please even the hard-core skeptics, I would need DNA evidence and for this I would need a second person.  If Albert Perry, a recently deceased African American who lived in South Carolina,  has a living male descendant, I would try to pay him for a sample of his hair, since it’s known that Perry had an extremely rare Y chromosome.  Unlike virtually all other men, who trace their male heritage back to a man who lived about 100,000 years, ago, Perry’s male lineage diverged 338,000 years ago.

I would tell the scientists that prior to getting the female sasquatch on video, there had been a male, but he ran too fast for me to film but I got a hair sample.  When the scientists would DNA test it, they probably wouldn’t remember Albert Perry (if they heard of him at all), and would be stunned that the hair sample’s Y chromosome diverged 338,000 years old, and see this is as evidence of an archaic proto-human.

Further, when CNN came to interview, I would talk like a country bumpkin so no one would suspect I’d have the sophistication to pull off such an elaborate hoax.

Too bad I’m not a sociopath. I could have been really, really rich 🙂