The yeti? It’s a shaggy bear story, say scientists
DNA tests on ‘remains’ of mythical creature shatter dreams of Abominable Snowman hunters
THE yeti, or Abominable Snowman, has featured in the folklore of Nepal and Tibet for centuries, with countless reports of a mysterious shaggy-coated creature roaming the snowy Asian mountains.
Huge footprints, tufts of hair and strange elongated bones all seemed to point to a giant wild man living in the wilderness. Even the Nazis launched a secret expedition to find the monster in the Thirties, believing it may represent the origin of the Aryan race.
But now scientists have carried out the most thorough investigation of yeti “remains” to date, trawling museums and private collections for specimens to test their DNA. The results suggests the hair, bones, teeth and faecal samples all belong to Asian black bears, Himalayan or Tibetan brown bears.
“Our findings strongly suggest that the biological underpinnings of the yeti legend can be found in local bears,” said Dr Charlotte Lindqvist, associate professor of biological sciences at the University at Buffalo, New York. Dr Lindqvist and colleagues investigated samples such as a skin scrap from the paw of a “yeti” – part of a monastic relic – and a fragment of femur bone from a decayed “yeti” found in a cave in Tibet.
The skin sample turned out to be from an Asian black bear, and the bone from a Tibetan brown bear. Previous scientific studies suggested that “yeti” fur may have come from an ancient lineage linked to polar bears. In 2013, Bryan Sykes, a professor of genetics at Oxford University, discovered that two samples of hair were a match for polar bear DNA from 40,000 years ago.
One golden-brown hair sample came from an animal shot in Ladakh, India, 40 years ago. The other, reddish-brown hair, was recovered from a forest in Bhutan.
Prof Sykes claimed that the hairs were a 100 per cent match with a sample from an ancient polar bear jawbone found in Svalbard, Norway. However, the scientists said they had taken samples from the same Indian specimen as Prof Sykes and found it came from a brown bear.
“Sykes suggested that a previously unrecognised bear species or possibly a hybrid between brown bear and polar bear exists in the Himalayas,” the authors wrote in the journal Proceedings of The Royal Society B. “Here, we unambiguously show that this sample
‘Our findings suggest that the biological underpinnings of the yeti can be found in local bears’
is from a bear that groups with the Himalayan brown bear.”
Yeti-like creatures are said to exist in North America, where they are known as Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, while The Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui is said to haunt the UK’S second highest mountain. Scientific explanations for the Scottish creature include a meteorological phenomenon known as the brocken spectre, which causes a person’s shadow to be cast on low cloud.