An elusive creature called "Yeti" or less formally 'the abominable snowman" has been terrorizing the Himalayan mountainside for years, but researchers may have finally solved the mystery of the monster's origin.
British scientist Professor Bryan Sykes said he used DNA evidence to show the Yeti may actually be cross between and ancient form of polar bear and a brown bear, Canada Now reported.
Sykes compared the DNA of a mummified creature that was discovered by an explorer about forty years ago with hairs left behind by a live creature a few years ago.
"I think this bear, which nobody has seen alive,... may still be there and may have quite a lot of polar bear in it," Sykes told the BBC.
"It may be some sort of hybrid and if its [behavior] is different from normal bears, which is what eyewitnesses report, then I think that may well be the source of the mystery and the source of the legend."
Sykes said he had found a 100 percent match with a jawbone from a 40,000 to 120, 000 year-old polar bear. During the ancient bear's era polar bears and brown bears were only first separating as species. The two species have also been known to interbreed from time-to-time.
These results were much more groundbreaking than the analysis of hairs given to the BBC in 2008, which turned out to belong to a Himalayan goat.
Mountaineer Reinhold Messner, the first man to climb Mount Everest without oxygen, claims to have encountered the yeti in 1986.
"Everything matches perfectly. They all say, for example, when the yeti is whistling, run away because it's becoming dangerous. It goes on two legs when it meets people, to show that he is big and strong and dangerous. It's telling you, Go away or you are a dead man," Messner said in an interview with National Geographic.
Sykes said a 300-year-old Tibetan manuscript was translated to read: "The yeti is a variety of bear living in inhospitable mountainous areas," Canada Now reported.
"Bigfootologists and other enthusiasts seem to think that they've been rejected by science. Science doesn't accept or reject anything, all it does is examine the evidence and that is what I'm doing," Sykes said.
