How could it have happened that Zana, living wild in the forest of the Caucasus, had DNA from thousands of miles away on another continent (part 2)?
From the Newsweek Special Edition: "BIGFOOT: The Science, Sightings and Search for Americas Elusive Legend":
Two developments turned Zana's story from an intriguing folk tale, albeit substantiated by several eyewitnesses, into a case with potential for real scientific investigation. The first of these was that in 1971 Igor Burtsev located the grave of Khwit, the younger of Zana's two sons, in an overgrown graveyard in Tkhina and exhumed his body.
The second was that Burtsev, and also lately Dmitri Pirkulov, have managed to trace six of Zana's living descendants. When Khwit's skull arrived back in Moscow, it was examined by two anthropologists, M.A. Kolodieva and M.M. Gerasimova. As reported in Dmitri Bayanov's 1996 book In the Footsteps of the Russian Snowman, Gerasimova pointed out several peculiarities in the skull, including its very large dimensions, while Kolodieva saw a mixture of modern and archaic features, the implication being that Zana had contributed the archaic elements of Khwit's skull while his father, whoever he was, was responsible for the modern ingredient. When I examined and measured the skull during my visit to Moscow in the summer of 2013, it certainly was unusually large and a multivariate analysis of 29 standard skull dimensions put the skull outside the range of modern human variation.
I could see a way of obtaining direct genetic information about Zana from her son's skull undiluted by his father's input. If I could recover mitochondrial DNA from Khwit's skull, the strict matrilineal inheritance would mean that its sequence was identical to Zana's. I could also see a way of discovering even more about Zana's genetic make-up through her living descendants. Somehow Dmitri Pirkulov used his abundant charm to persuade the skull's owner to allow him to remove an incisor tooth, which he handed to me when we met in London in late 2012. Though it was not easy, Terry Melton and I did manage to recover and sequence mitochondrial DNA from Khwit's tooth. We used a modification of the hair decontamination protocol to clean the surface of the tooth then powdered it in a liquid nitrogen mill and extracted the DNA from the residue. The tooth was 50 years old, but despite that it gave a yield of high quality DNA from which in a matter of days we were able to obtain a good mitochondrial control region sequence.
As soon as Khwit's sequence came through from the lab, I set about comparing it to the dozen or so Neanderthal sequences that have been published. It was very soon clear that Khwit's, and thus Zana's, mitochondrial DNA was not Neanderthal. Zana may not have been a Neanderthal but when I compared her detailed mitochondrial DNA sequence with my database of hundreds of thousands of records from all over the world, there was a major surprise. The detailed sequence from Khwit's tooth showed beyond any doubt that his mitochondrial DNA, and therefore Zana's, was not from the Caucasus or anywhere close. It was from sub-Saharan Africa. I was stunned. Just like the genetic connection revealed in the last chapter between the Himalayas and the Arctic islands of Svalbard, here was DNA that was completely out of place. How could it have happened that Zana, living wild in the forests of the Caucasus, had DNA from thousands of miles away on another continent?
A descendant of Zana, Natalia.
There had been a few African slaves in Abkhazia in earlier centuries when it was part of the Ottoman Empire and, theoretically at least, Zana could have been an escaped slave. The difficulty with this most prosaic of explanations is that although the slave theory might explain her African DNA, it certainly does not account for her remarkable appearance. For a start, she was nothing like a modern African in her looks or her behavior: According to Bayanov's book, "Zana had all the characteristics of a wild animal...the most frightening feature was her expression which was pure animal, not human.... She dug herself a hole in the ground and slept in it...she walked naked even in winter, tearing dresses that she was given into shreds...her athletic power was enormous." Feral children and adults are rarely healthy and are usually discovered on the verge of starvation, yet Zana possessed superhuman strength and athleticism. Is it likely that an escaped slave girl could have sustained herself in the wild, and so well that she developed her remarkable physical attributes? Almost certainly not. Even a community of escaped slaves living wild in the forest would have conversed with one another and Zana would surely have made some attempt at doing so with her captors. Even if she did not know Abkhazi, there is always scope for some sort of verbal communication, and in time she would surely have picked up a few words of the language of her captors. But there was nothing. Not a word, not a gesture, not even the smallest attempt at communication.
The well-researched contemporary descriptions suggest to me that Zana had nothing to do with the modern world. Porchnev and Heuvelmans were quite reasonable in their hypothesis that Zana was a surviving Neanderthal but we now know from the mitochondrial DNA analysis of her son's tooth that she was not. But if not a Neanderthal, was she fully human? She was certainly a member of the genus Homo. I am hard at work making sense of it, and I hope to know soon whether Zana was indeed a survivor of an antique race of humans. If Zana's people were in the Caucasus during the 19th century when she was captured, they might well be still there to this day, living as they have for millennia somewhere in the wild valleys that radiate from the eternal snows of Elbrus.
Reprinted and edited with permission from Disinformation Books Bigfoot, Yeti, and the Last Neanderthal © 2016 by Bryan Sykes is available wherever books are sold, directly from the publisher at 1-800-423-7087 or at www.redwheelweiser.com.
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