by Kilgore Trout
Staff Writer
March 15, 2010
Recent research done for the PBS series "Faces of America" has revealed that there is a surprising genealogical link between sasquatches and humans, particularly Canadians whose ancestors lived in the Lake Winnipeg area between 1890 and 1918. This finding both confirms theories that Sasquatches can indeed mate with humans and that the presence of Sasquatches may have been widely known prior to their discovery in Cooper in 2008.
Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., host of "Faces of America" began researching the genealogy of northern Minnesota and southern Manitoba natives after his work with writer and Little Falls, MN native Louise Erdrich on "Faces of America".
"We found something that we couldn't quite explain," said Gates. "When we went back a few generations in her family, the DNA just didn't show what we expected. The best we could figure was that one of her parent's siblings was illegitimate. The mitochondrial DNA (the DNA coming from the mother) was the same, so we assumed that there was a different father. The really amazing revelation came when doing a DNA search in our data banks for the possible identity of the father, Mabus the sasaquatch politician from Cooper, MN came up as the closest match. From that we drew the conclusion that Louise Erdrich's grandmother had an affair with a sasquatch in 1894, which resulted in a birth in 1895."
Once Gates and his team knew what to look for they began to find many sasquatch-sired births hidden within family trees. "Of 1200 families we studied that lived in the area around Lake Winnipeg in southern Manitoba, nearly 300 showed a sasquatch-fathered birth. The illicit cross-species breeding seems to have peaked from 1915-1918, years when much of the young male population of Canada was in Europe fighting in WWI. The earliest one we found was from 1891, and the last documented sasquatch/human birth was 1920. We never found a case where the mother was a sasquatch, only the father. And our DNA tests have shown that of the nearly 300 cases of sasquatch/human births, they came from no more than 17 sasquatch males."
Photographs of those suspected to be half-sasquatch show no evidence of their breed. There is just a slight increase in average height, with the half-sasquatch offspring averaging about 2 inches taller than their all-human contemporaries. There is also a slight increase in the hairiness of the sasquatch offspring, which is more noticeable in men than women, thankfully. Those half-sasquatch offspring would have had no trouble fitting in with society, their differences would have been quite unremarkable.
The revelation has raised many questions. If so many interactions took place between humans and sasquatches why was there never a report of sightings in the press at that time? One possible reason is that the women who had contact with the sasquatches enjoyed the encounters and did not wish to ruin a good thing with the publicity such a revelation would generate. It may also be confirmation that one's foot length is indeed an indicator of other things. This revelation may also explain the popularity of hockey in Canada. It may very well be that one quarter or more of all Canadian born hockey players in the NHL are part sasquatch.
Gates' research had opened up a potential can of worms. If sasquatches and humans can inter-breed, than can inter-marriage be too far off? And can the NHL make a rule against the participation of non-humans? It looks more and more like sasquatches will some day soon enjoy all the rights and priviledges that humans enjoy. And what a day that will be!
