Samples of hair believed to be from the abominable snowman are actually from an ancestor of the polar bear.
The discovery raises the possibility that stories of an undiscovered giant primate living in the Himalayas may be based on large and aggressive, but reclusive, bears.
Bryan Sykes, a human genetics professor at Oxford University, and Michel Sartori, director of the Lausanne Museum of Zoology, formed the Oxford-Lausanne Collateral Hominid Project to test the stories of 'anomalous primates' from around the world.
They and their colleagues analysed 57 samples of hair allegedly from creatures including the Himalayan yeti, sasquatch (Bigfoot) from North America, almasty from Russia, orang pendek from Sumatra, and migyhur from Bhutan, submitting 36 of them to DNA testing.
Is this what a Yeti really looks like? (Credit Eric Berger)
But, as they report in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, most were from horses, dogs and in one case a human, or were not hair at all.
Two of them, however, closely matched the DNA from a polar bear fossil found on Svalbard, an island in the Russian Arctic, dating back 40,000 years to the Pleistocene period, when much of continental Asia was covered with glaciers.
Although the Himalayan ice field did not connect with the southern-most extent of the polar ice cap, it is conceivable that an ancestor Ursus maritimus could have crossed the gap in winter.
One of the samples, a golden-brown tuft, came from an animal shot in Ladakh, India, in the 1970s, the other, reddish-brown hair was found in a bamboo forest high in Bhutan described as a migyhur nest.
The hairs are either from a new bear species, a colour variant of polar bears or a hybrid of polar bears and brown bears, the researchers concluded.
The next logical step is to mount an expedition to the Himalayas to look for the animals, with the ultimate goal of catching a live specimen, said Professor Sykes.
It should also encourage “Bigfoot enthusiasts to go back out into the forest and get the real thing,” he told NBC.
‘If these bears are widely distributed in the Himalayas, they may well contribute to the biological foundation of the yeti legend,’ Professor Sykes said, ‘especially if, as reported by the hunter who shot the Ladakh specimen, they behave more aggressively towards humans than known indigenous bear species.’
The discovery is the first scientific success for cryptozoology, literally ‘the study of hidden animals’ (such as the Loch Ness monster), which is often derided as a pseudoscience because of its reliance on anecdotal evidence.
The story of the Yeti entered Western consciousness when mountaineer Eric Shipton returned from Mount Everest in 1951 with photographs of enormous, human-looking footprints, shown next to an ice axe for scale.
Many of the reports of similar creatures have since been proven to be hoaxes.
“Bigfootologist and other enthusiasts seem to think that they’ve been rejected by science, but science doesn’t accept or reject anything,” said Professor Sykes. “All it does is examine the evidence and that’s what I’m doing.’
He is writing a book about his research entitled The Yeti Enigma.
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