The yeti, and his shambling, hairy cousins — Bigfoot, almasty, Sasquatch and migyur — may still be out there, high in the snowy peaks of the Himalayas, Rocky Mountains or Urals, but they have escaped a team of scientists who have been testing dozens of samples, all claimed to be genuine chunks of yeti fur.
They have turned out to be hairs from depressingly familiar animals, including cows, raccoons, horses, dogs, sheep, a Malayan tapir, a porcupine and, in the case of one sample from Texas, a human being. And also a blade of grass and a strand of fiberglass.
“Don’t give up yet; the yeti may still be out there,” Bryan Sykes said reassuringly.
The professor of human genetics at Oxford and an expert on ancient DNA said he launched the project, writing to museums and collectors all over the world, with only a 5 percent hope of success.
“That would normally be too slim a margin to launch a major study, but I did think there was just a chance we would uncover something extraordinary,” Sykes said.
What he hoped for was less the abominable snowman of legend than evidence for a surviving Neanderthal, which some say could be the origin of yeti stories.
He found neither.
However, the team, which publishes its findings in this week’s Proceedings of the Royal Society, has found something extraordinary, in two samples of bear fur from Bhutan and the Indian Himalayas.
Although one is reddish brown and the other golden brown, the bears’ closest relative turned out to be a precise match for DNA extracted from fossil remains of a polar bear that lived 40,000 years ago. The samples were quite unlike modern polar bears. This raises the intriguing possibility that descendants of a prehistoric polar bear are at large in the Himalayas.
The sample from Ladakh, India, is said to be from an animal shot 40 years ago by an experienced hunter, who said the creature’s behavior was very different from the brown bears he knew well.
He kept the pelt hidden and was very reluctant to hand over samples to the French explorer who brought them back to the West, Sykes said.
“Polar bears have some quite distinct behavior, including deliberately hunting human prey,” Sykes said. “It would be very interesting to go and see if this is a behavioral pattern which has endured in the Himalayan bears.”
The paper is the first such study in a peer-reviewed journal.
Sykes, who is also publishing a book on yetis this autumn said: “I wouldn’t have done this as a young man, before I had an established reputation as a scientist.”
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