It's 2008. You're a paleontologist deep in some cave in Siberia. You're looking for clues

that Neanderthals had once lived there, pain stakingly combing through dirt and rock, and

you find one tiny single solitary bingerbone. On its own, it's kind of nondescript and interesting

find, but it doesn't jump out as ground breaking. You send it off to get analyzed and then, well,

everything changes. Turns out you just made the discovery of a lifetime because that tiny nondescript

fingerbone actually belonged to a previously unknown ancient human relative known as Denisobens.

Forty years ago, that fossil would have just been another bone, in a collection of bones, in a

drawer full of bones. But with the magic of DNA analysis, that same fossil uncovered a long lost

cousin, one whose genes we still carry today. And that's just the beginning of the DNA revolution.

Scientists have developed seriously powerful tools and they keep getting better. So good, in fact,

that now you don't even need any bones, just a few skin cells will do. Like maybe out of an

abandoned nest. This technology could be the key, the thing that provides us with the physical

big-foot evidence we've been lacking. I'm Laura Kranz and this is Wild Thing, a series about

Sasquatch, Science, and Society, the search for big-foot and why we want so badly for it to be real.

Before the 1980s, scientists could extract DNA from cells by using chemicals. But it came out in

fragments and they couldn't easily put it back together. It was all mixed up. It was out of sequence.

Sequencing is taking the four basic units of DNA, the A's, C's, T's, and G's, and putting them in

order. Figuring out that order was a process that once took years, it can now be done in an afternoon.

So DNA analysis was something my cousin Grover knew about, but he didn't have access to it.

And I don't think he could have imagined what it would become.

But very recently, there's some new techniques where I'm assured that they can extract the DNA of the

animal that left the piece. And distinguish it from the DNA of anything that was eaten. How they do

...