The Unassigned Percentage

I am not a cryptozoologist. I don’t moderate late-night subreddits about the paranormal, I’ve never watched a Bigfoot documentary all the way through, and the one time I clicked on a ghost-hunting show on a hungover Sunday, I turned it off within ten minutes because the host’s voice grated on my nerves. I work in digital marketing, sitting in a climate-controlled office building in downtown Brisbane, worrying about click-through rates and campaign ROIs. My life is deliberately, comfortably ordinary.

I’m telling you this because I need you to understand that I wasn’t looking for a mystery. I didn’t want a sensational story to tell at dinner parties. If anything, I am someone who desperately prefers the world to be neat, logical, and fully explained by science.

It started in March of last year. My friend Beck, a research geneticist who spends her days sequence-mapping and looking at things under high-powered microscopes, came over to my apartment with a bottle of Pinot Noir and two plastic collection kits.

“We’re doing this for fun,” Beck said, dropping the boxes onto my kitchen island. “Don’t look at me like that, Steph. It’s just ancestry testing.”

“I know exactly where I’m from,” I told her, pouring the wine. “My family is a walking billboard for Anglo-Celtic migration. We are pale, freckled, and sunburned by a passing headlight. Save your money.”

“Oh, come on. My cousin did one and found out our grandfather wasn’t actually our grandfather,” Beck said, her eyes gleaming with the manic energy of a scientist off the clock. “It completely rewrote our family tree. Plus, the lab I work with is testing a new, highly precise sequencing platform. I can run the samples myself for free. Just spit in the tube.”

I laughed, shook my head, and eventually yielded to the peer pressure. I filled the small plastic vial with saliva, snapped the cap shut, and watched Beck label it with a barcode. I didn’t think about it again for six weeks.

When Beck finally called me back to her apartment, she didn’t sound like her usual, energetic self. Her voice on the phone was clipped, quiet, and strangely formal. She asked me to come over after work, emphasizing that I shouldn’t stop to grab food or run errands.

When she opened her apartment door, she looked exhausted. Her laptop was open on her dining table, surrounded by pages of printed genetic charts and line graphs that looked like a foreign language to me.

“Are you okay?” I asked, setting my bag down. “Did you find out your family is secret royalty or something?”

“Sit down, Steph,” she said, not returning my smile.

I sat. She turned the laptop toward me. The screen displayed a pie chart breakdown of my DNA.

“The initial sweep is pretty much what you expected,” Beck began, tracing a line on the screen with her finger. “You are roughly sixty-four percent English and Irish. You’ve got a slice of Northern European, mostly German, and a tiny sliver of Scandinavian. That all tracks perfectly with your maternal and paternal family trees.”

“Great,” I said, leaning back. “So I’m exactly as boring as I thought. Can we order Thai food now?”

“Look at the rest of the chart,” Beck said.

I leaned back in. A massive wedge of the circle, nearly a third of the entire chart, was shaded in a flat, neutral gray. The label next to it read: Unassigned.

“Okay,” I said, frowning. “What does that mean? The sample got contaminated? You dropped a crumb of your sandwich in it?”

“No,” Beck said flatly. “When commercial DNA kits return an ‘unassigned’ result, it’s usually a tiny fraction—maybe one or two percent—where the markers are too muddy or ambiguous to pinpoint a specific region. Yours isn’t a glitch. It’s an enormous, clean block of genetic data. The sequencing worked perfectly. The machine reads it clear as day. It’s just that the database has absolutely nothing to compare it to.”

She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table and looking at me with an intensity that made me deeply uncomfortable.

“As a geneticist, there are only three mathematical explanations for what I’m looking at,” she explained, her voice dropping to a whisper. “First, there is a completely unknown, entirely unsampled modern population of human beings living in total isolation somewhere on Earth, and you are directly related to them. Second, it’s a completely unprecedented, one-in-a-billion systemic software error that I have spent three weeks trying and failing to replicate. Or third…”

She hesitated, looking at her notes.

“Third what, Beck? You’re creeping me out.”

“Third, there has been a recent interbreeding event in your direct lineage with a hominid species that is not currently represented in human genetic databases.”

I stared at her for a beat, waiting for the punchline. When she didn’t laugh, a nervous chuckle escaped my own throat. “Right. Like Neanderthal DNA. I read an article about that. Everyone has a little bit of caveman in them, right?”

“No, Steph. You don’t understand,” Beck said, her voice tight. “Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA are well-documented. We have their genomes mapped. When someone has Neanderthal ancestry, it shows up as a tiny fraction of a percent because that interbreeding happened forty thousand years ago. The genetic signatures have been diluted through hundreds of generations of human-to-human reproduction.”

She tapped a printed sheet of paper covered in complex, repeating bar patterns.

“This gray block isn’t ancient. It isn’t diluted. The chromosomal segments are long, unbroken, and perfectly preserved. This isn’t forty thousand years old. Steph, according to the mathematical decay of the genetic variance, this interbreeding happened recently. Like, two or three generations ago recent.”

The air in the room suddenly felt very thick. “What are you talking about? Are you saying my grandfather was an alien?”

“I’m saying,” Beck whispered, “that according to your DNA, you are part human, and part… something else. Something closely related to us on the evolutionary tree, but distinctly separate. A hominid species that science hasn’t classified. And based on how the X chromosome is structured—which you inherit entirely from your mother—this comes directly through your maternal line. If you carry this much, your mother would carry roughly double. Around twenty-eight percent.”

I stood up so fast my chair scraped loudly against the hardwood floor. “This is ridiculous. You’re pulling a prank on me because I said the test was stupid.”

“I ran the sequencing four times, Steph,” Beck said, her eyes shining with a terrifying mixture of scientific awe and genuine concern. “I used different machines. I checked for contamination. The data doesn’t lie. Look at the maternal markers. It’s right there.”

I couldn’t look at the screen anymore. The graphs, the percentages, the cold reality of the numbers—it felt like a physical weight pressing down on my chest. I grabbed my car keys from the counter.

“I have to go,” I muttered.

“Steph, wait—”

I didn’t wait. I left her apartment, took the elevator down to the garage in a complete daze, and got into my car.

The drive back to my side of the city was a blur of neon taillights and the steady, rhythmic thrum of the tires against the asphalt. My mind was spinning at a terrifying velocity. A hominid. Not human. Two or three generations ago.

The math was simple, brutal, and unavoidable. If it wasn’t my mother, it was her mother.

My grandmother. Nan.

Joan had passed away in 2014 at the age of seventy-seven. To the rest of the world, she was a quiet, unassuming woman who lived out her final decades in a small, weatherboard house filled with knitted doilies and porcelain teacups. She was gentle, slow-moving, and spoke in a soft, melodic murmur that required you to lean in close to hear her.

But as I drove through the Brisbane dark, the memories of my childhood didn’t come back as a neat, comforting album. They came rushing over me like a breaking dam.

Nan had grown up in the 1940s in a remote area near Maidenwell, a tiny dot of a town nestled in the foothills of the Bunya Mountains in Queensland. The Bunyas are an ancient, primeval place—a range of steep ridges covered in dense, dark rainforest and dominated by massive, prehistoric Bunya pines that look like leftovers from the Jurassic era. It is a landscape defined by deep, shadowed gullies, misty peaks, and a heavy, suffocating silence that settles over the bush the moment you step off the cleared roads.

When I was a kid, my parents would drop me off at Nan’s place for two weeks every summer. We would drive up into the mountains, away from the heat of the coast, into that cool, green shadows.

Nan didn’t have a television. Instead, we would sit on her back veranda as the sun dipped below the ridges, drinking sweet black tea, and she would talk. She didn’t tell fairy tales or stories about cartoon characters. She told me about the land. She spoke about the old people, the gatherings that used to happen in the peaks when the Bunya nuts were ripe, and how the mountains held memories long after the people who made them were gone.

But most of all, she told me about the hairy man.

“He lives in the deep gully on the other side of the ridge, Stephie,” she would say, her voice barely louder than the rustle of the wind through the gum trees. “He’s an old soul. Very quiet. Very gentle. He comes down to the natural spring at dusk to drink when the air gets cool.”

As an eight-year-old boy raised on Saturday morning cartoons, I had immediately pictured a monster—a roaring, terrifying beast like the ones in the comic books. “Is he scary, Nan? Will he eat us?”

Nan had laughed, a soft, dry sound, and reached out to stroke my hair with her rough, calloused hand. “Oh, no, sweetheart. Not scary at all. He’s just private. He doesn’t want to trouble anyone, and he doesn’t want anyone troubling him. If you go down by the creekbed after a heavy rain, you’ll see where he’s been. His feet are like ours, but wider, with short, heavy toes. He steps so lightly for someone so big. You have to look closely at the mud, or you’ll miss it entirely.”

I remembered sitting on that veranda, looking out into the wall of black trees as the twilight faded into a dense, impenetrable night. I remembered the distinct, persistent feeling of being watched. It wasn’t a hostile feeling—it didn’t make the hairs on my arms stand up with panic. It was just a heavy, conscious presence, like sitting in a dark room with someone you know intimately, even if you can’t see their face.

“He knows we’re here,” Nan would whisper, looking out into the dark with a strange, peaceful look in her eyes. “He knows our faces. We just have to give him his space.”

I pulled my car into my driveway, but I couldn’t get out. I sat in the dark garage, the steering wheel cold beneath my hands, as more fragments of memory began to realign themselves under the terrifying light of Beck’s genetic data.

I remembered one summer night when I was ten years old. I had woken up in the middle of the night in the spare bedroom of Nan’s cottage. The house was old, settled, and completely silent. But through the open window, carried on the cool mountain air, came a sound I had never heard before and have never heard since.

It wasn’t a howl, and it wasn’t a roar. It was a long, low, rhythmic breathing—a deep, resonant sound that seemed to vibrate through the floorboards of the house rather than travel through the air. It sounded like a massive chest expanding and contracting, a heavy, peaceful sigh that repeated every few seconds from the edge of the tree line just twenty yards from my window.

Along with the sound came a smell. It wasn’t the foul, rotting stench of garbage or decay that you read about in modern cryptid forums. It was a dense, heavy odor of wet earth, crushed eucalyptus leaves, and thick, wild animal musk—like a horse that had been running through the rain, but deeper, older.

I had been frozen with fear, staring at the window screen, waiting for a monster to tear it away. But then I heard the floorboards creak in the hallway. The door to my room opened an inch, and Nan’s silhouette appeared in the dim light.

She didn’t come in to comfort me. She didn’t tell me it was just a possum or an owl. She just stood in the doorway, looking past me toward the window, her face illuminated by the moonlight. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath of the musky air, and let out a soft, low whistle—just two notes, rising and falling like a bird call.

Outside, the heavy breathing stopped. There was a faint, heavy thud of a footstep against the soft earth, the sound of a large branch brushing against another, and then nothing but the wind.

Nan had looked at me, her eyes dark and unreadable. “Go back to sleep, Stephie,” she had said softly. “Everything is exactly as it should be.”

The next morning, I had run out to the edge of the yard where the grass met the thick scrub. The ground was covered in leaf litter, but right at the boundary line, in a patch of soft loam near Nan’s vegetable patch, there was a depression. It was twice the size of my stepfather’s work boot, broad across the ball of the foot, with no distinct shoe tread—just a smooth, heavy imprint that had pressed the grass flat into the dirt.

When I brought Nan out to see it, she didn’t seem surprised. She simply knelt down, took a handful of soil from the edge of the print, and let it sift through her fingers.

“The old ones have a society of their own,” she told me that morning, her voice steady and solemn. “They move through the bush unseen because they know how to listen to the land. They were here before the roads, before the towns, before our people ever crossed the water. They don’t want our world, Stephie. They just want their own.”

“Why don’t they talk to us?” I asked.

“They do talk,” she said, looking up at the high ridge. “But they don’t use words like we do. They use footprints. They use smells. They leave signs in the bent branches and the broken bark. And if you meet one, you don’t scream, and you don’t run. You just acknowledge them. You look down, you show respect, and you walk away slowly. That’s the contract we have with them.”

Sitting in my car in Brisbane, twenty years later, the full weight of that “contract” finally broke over me.

My grandmother hadn’t just been telling me local folklore. She wasn’t indulging a child’s imagination. She was describing a neighbor. A presence. Someone—or something—that lived on the periphery of her life with a degree of intimacy that I was only now, through the cold lens of molecular biology, beginning to comprehend.

I thought about my mother. I thought about her quiet nature, her thick, unusually dense hair, her incredible physical strength for a woman of her stature, and her lifelong aversion to cities. She had always preferred the isolation of the rural fringe, spending hours walking alone in the state forests, never taking a map, never getting lost. Whenever I asked her how she always knew her way back, she would just shrug and say, “The trees tell you where the slopes go. You just have to listen.”

Was it possible? Could a population of relict hominids—the beings the Indigenous people called the Yowie, the creatures the Americans called Bigfoot or Sasquatch—be living so quietly in the shadows of our world that their existence was maintained not by physical distance, but by a mutual, unspoken agreement of silence? And more terrifyingly, more beautifully, had that silence ever been broken?

The genetic data didn’t provide details. It didn’t tell a love story, and it didn’t describe a tragedy. It just offered raw, unfeeling percentages. Twenty-eight percent for my mother. Fourteen percent for me. A permanent, biological record of an encounter that occurred in the misty gullies of the Bunya Mountains some eighty years ago, preserved in the very code that built my heart, my bones, my eyes.

I finally got out of the car and walked into my dark apartment. I didn’t turn on the lights. I walked over to the window and looked out at the city—at the streetlights, the concrete, the thousands of people living their orderly, mapped-out lives, entirely convinced that the world had been completely tamed, cataloged, and conquered.

They are wrong.

I’m not writing this to convince you. I’m not going to upload my genetic files to a public forum for anonymous skeptics to dissect, and I’m not going to lead an expedition into the Queensland bush with cameras and audio recorders. The scientific community can keep its blank spaces, and the databases can leave that fourteen percent labeled “unassigned” forever. Some things do not belong to science. Some things belong to the land.

But I will give you the same advice my Nan gave me on that windy veranda all those years ago.

If you ever find yourself out in the deep bush, past the point where the cell service cuts out and the noise of the highway fades to nothing, pay attention. If the birds suddenly go quiet, if the air grows thick with a heavy, wild musk, and if you feel an inexplicable, crushing weight of a pair of eyes watching you from the shadows of the ferns—don’t panic. Don’t run, don’t pull out your phone to take a picture, and don’t shout into the dark.

Instead, take a deep breath. Reach into your pocket or your pack. Leave something small on a flat stone or a fallen log—an apple, a smooth pebble, a piece of bread. Look down at the ground to show you mean no harm. Acknowledge that you are a guest in a home that was built long before your ancestors ever dreamed of concrete.

Then, turn around and walk away slowly, quietly, and with respect.

Because they are out there. They have always been out there, moving silently through the shadows of the ridges, keeping their side of the bargain. And if you listen closely enough, you might just realize that the blood in your own veins beats to the exact same ancient rhythm.