Researchers say they have refuted recent claims that the yeti is actually just an unknown type of bear that lives in the Himalayas.
A team of researchers performed mitochondrial DNA sequencing on hairs that were believed to have come from "anomalous primates" such as yetis and bigfoots, Pensoft Publishers reported. They found that two samples from the Himalayas were an exact match with a fossil polar bear from over 40,000 years ago.
Another research team performed their own analysis, and concluded the hair samples were from a present-day Polar Bear from Alaska. However, further analysis by Eliécer E. Gutiérrez, currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, and Ronald H. Pine, affiliated with the Biodiversity Institute & Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas, suggests genetic variations in brown bears make it impossible to link the hair samples to either or polar bear or ancient bear species. Brown bears are known to occupy the Himalayas, and genetic overlap makes gene sequencing extremely tricky.
In the most recent analysis, the researchers looked at how the gene sequences examined in the study could be linked to six modern bear species. The results agreed in part with the past studies, but also made new revelations.
The findings showed the data set taken from studying this part of the bear's genome was insufficient to make a definitive conclusion on the source of the hairs, but could provide key insights if combined with other data. The researchers observed one sequence from the Asian black bear species from Japan was not closely related to the mainland species, and the two sets of black bears actually had a large evolutionary gap between them. The team said these findings suggests the ancestry of these species deserves 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.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal ZooKeys.
