I met Professor Sykes when he came to talk at the CFZ's annual convention, the Weird Weekend. I found him to be a delightful man with an excellent sense of humour, something that can be sorely lacking in some academics. I gave surreal, non-sequitur introductions to our speakers and introduced Bryan as the eminent scientist who in 1974 invented the bag (prior to this we all had to carry things on wooden boards). Bryan took this piece of silliness and ran with it, showing us his latest model.
A human geneticist, Professor Sykes held a chair at Oxford University and his work pushed forward the analysis of inherited conditions such as brittle bone disease and double-jointedness. He also extracted DNA from ancient bone samples dating back 12,000 years.
In his ground breaking 2001 book, The Seven Daughters of Eve he proposed that all Europeans could trace their ancestry back to just seven women living between 8500 and 45,000 years ago. In turn all seven of these could be traced back to one ancient ancestor living in Africa.
In a savvy move Bryan gave each of these ancestral women names and called their descendants ‘tribes.’ The same he year set up the first direct-to-consumer genetic testing company Oxford Ancestors.
Bryan's work focused on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Mitochondria are organelles within cells. The mtDNA is inherited form the female line. Mitochondria are found between the cell wall and nucleus of each cell and release energy, ergo they are relatively abundant. Simply put, the professor perfected a technique that examines a DNA segment called 12S RNA, part of a gene that helps mitochondria assemble the enzymes required for aerobic metabolism. This sequence is known for all known species of mammal. Hence there could be no confusion in any sample sent to the Project; they would be from one of the known species or from something new. A hypothetical new species could have its place on the genetic tree revealed by its closeness to other species. This meant that human contamination could be avoided. Even Neanderthal 12S RNA differs from modern man.
Together with Michel Sartori, the Director of the Museum of Zoology in Lausanne, Switzerland, Professor Sykes instigated The Oxford-Lausanne Collateral Hominid Project. The idea was to bring hard science into the search for man-like monsters. Sykes and Satori invited people to send them supposed hair samples from unknown primates such as the yeti, sasquatch, almasty and orang pendek. His findings were written up as a book, Nature of The Beast.
The book was the result of the analysis of thirty samples sent to the project and the Professors’ own travels and personal researches. Sykes found himself in the wilds of the American North West listening to what may or may not be an unseen sasquatch banging the walls of a tunnel beneath a tree. He ventured to Russia, home of the Snowman Commission, an official government-backed project to hunt hominins in the former Soviet Union. Set up in the 1950s, it only lasted three years but has recently been re-formed. The Russian scientists he met are all confirmed believers and oddly seem to think it important that Bryan only published positive results from his work and not negative. At the museum in Lausanne he examined the massive wealth of information, clippings, letters and writing bequeathed by Dr Bernard Heuvelmans, the man widely accepted to have created the discipline of cryptozoology in its modern form. There is a highly interesting chapter on the Minnesota Iceman debacle where Heuvelmans and his friend the Scottish zoologist Ivan T. Sanderson seem to have been duped by a clever fake, a faux ape-man in a block of ice.
The Professor met modern explorers and cryptozoologists such as Jon Downes and myself at the Centre for Fortean Zoology, Loren Coleman, Dr Jeff Meldrum and the mountaineer Reinhold Messner. He became involved in our hunt for the almasty in Russia. Sadly the hair we brought back turned out to be from modern man not relic hominids.
The hair samples were collected from all across the world and sent in to the Project. Each and every one turned out to be from known species. Bears, horses, humans and goats were among the creatures found to be the former owners of the hairs.
The book was completely honest and open in its treatment of the subject. The Professor was clear in pointing out that just because these samples turned out to be from known species this does not mean that anomalous primates do not exist. Sykes criticized some cryptozoologists for not being rigorous enough and going through the right channels in the analysis of samples. He equally lambasted some scientists for rejecting the notion of large unknown creatures out of hand.
Despite the negative results of
the hair analysis the Professors personal view was more positive.
“Funnily enough, even though there were no anomalous primates in among the hairs I tested, I think my view has altered more to something out there than the reverse. The change of heart comes from speaking to several people, some not even mentioned in The Nature of the Beast, who have nothing to gain but who have seen things in good light while in the company of other witnesses, that are hard to explain otherwise. To automatically reject these accounts is just as blinkered as accepting that every broken branch has been snapped or twisted by a sasquatch.”
In the book’s postscript the Professor's optimism may just have been proven well founded. This section of the book astounded me so much I had to re-read it in order to make sure I had not been mistaken. The Professor seemed to be on the edge of a jaw-dropping discovery
Whilst in Russia he was able to secure a tooth from a remarkable skull once owned by the Darwin Museum in Moscow but subsequently sold to a private collector. The skull was from a man named Khwit. Khwit, who died in the early 1950s was said to be one of several hybrid children born from an almasty mother and a human father. The almasty are said to be large, powerfully built, hair-covered wild people reported from the mountains of Russia and the former USSR. They are more man-like than the yeti but clearly not modern humans.
In the 1850s a female almasty was captured in a forested
region of what is now Abkhazia in the Caucasus. Tall, muscular with an ape-like
face and covered in reddish black hair she was named Zana. Zana was taken to
the farm of a local nobleman in the village of T'khina. She finally became tame
and could do menial tasks around the farm with her immense strength. She never
learned speech but made inarticulate noises. Zana became the mother of a number
of hybrid children via a village man Edgi Genaba. The first two children died
after their mother tried to wash them in a cold river. Subsequent children were
taken from her and raised by villagers. The two boys, Dzhanda and Khwit Genaba
(born 1878 and 1884), and the two girls, Kodzhanar and Gamasa Genaba (born 1880
and 1882), were assimilated into normal society, married, and had families of
their own. Zana herself died in 1890. Russian researchers located the grave of
Khwit and recovered his skull.
Extracting mitochondrial DNA from the tooth, Professor Sykes found that it was 100% sub-Saharan African. This was confusing as Zana was clearly no kind of modern human. Her behaviour and appearance seemed to be far more primitive than a Neanderthal. Further work showed the DNA was from an exceptionally ancient lineage from Western Africa and furthermore it may have been pre-Homo sapien. Sykes thought that this lineage may have left Africa over 150,000 years ago, before modern man. If he is correct then Zana may have been an unknown species of pre-human hominin, a species still lurking in the Caucasus and other areas today.
I was in e-mail contact with Professor Sykes. He and another geneticist were still working on the sample. He likened Zana's DNA to old fragments of old photographs that have filtered down through time.
I can only hope somebody continues
his important work.
Richard Freeman
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