In
legend, Yeti is a huge and furry human-resembling creature also referred to as
the Abominable
Snowman, but in science, Yeti is just a bear.
Now
the question is: what kind of bear? A new study, published in the journal
ZooKeys, concludes that hair sample "evidence" for Yeti actually
comes from Himalayan brown bears.
The
finding refutes an earlier study that the hair belonged to an unknown type of
bear related to polar bears.
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At the
center of the controversy are DNA
analysis studies. Prior research, led by Bryan Sykes at the University of
Oxford, determined that hairs formerly attributed to Yeti belonged to to a
mysterious bear species that may not yet be known to science.
Sykes
told Discovery News that his paper "refers to two Himalayan samples
attributed to yetis and which turned out to be related to an ancient polar
bear. This may be the source of the legend in the Himalayas."
The
new study, however, calls this possibility
into question. The research, in this case, was authored by Eliécer E.
Gutiérrez of the Smithsonian Institution and Ronald Pine at the University of
Kansas.
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Gutiérrez
and Pine found that genetic variation
in brown bears makes it impossible to assign, with certainty, the samples
tested by Sykes and his co-authors to either brown bears or to polar bears.
Because
of genetic overlap, the samples could have come from either species, but
because brown bears occur in the Himalayas, Gutiérrez and Pine think there is
no reason to believe that the samples in question came from anything other than
ordinary Himalayan brown bears.
For
the new study, Gutiérrez and Pine also examined how the gene sequences analyzed
might show the ways in which six present-day species of bears — including the
polar bear, the brown bear, and the extinct Eurasian cave bear — might be
related.
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This
opened up a new mystery, as DNA from an Asian black bear in Japan indicated
that this bear was not closely related to the mainland members of that species.
The researchers believe that this unexpected large evolutionary distance
between the two geographic groups of the Asian black bear merits further study.
"In
fact, a study looking at the genetic and morphological variability of Asian
black bear populations throughout the geographic distribution of the species is
yet to be conducted, and it would surely yield exciting results,"
Gutiérrez concluded.
As for
Yeti, believers might point out that the studies only looked at hair samples,
and not the footprints, photographs, recorded sounds and other "evidence"
for the Abominable Snowman.
