DNA links mysterious Yeti to ancient polar bear

[Buster's Uncle]

DNA links mysterious Yeti to ancient polar bear
Associated Press
By JILL LAWLESS 31 minutes ago


     
LONDON (AP) — A British scientist says he may have solved the mystery of the Abominable Snowman — the elusive ape-like creature of the Himalayas. He thinks it's a bear.

DNA analysis conducted by Oxford University genetics professor Bryan Sykes suggests the creature, also known as the Yeti, is the descendant of an ancient polar bear.

Sykes compared DNA from hair samples taken from two Himalayan animals — identified by local people as Yetis — to a database of animal genomes. He found they shared a genetic fingerprint with a polar bear jawbone found in the Norwegian Arctic that is at least 40,000 years old.

Sykes said Thursday that the tests showed the creatures were not related to modern Himalayan bears but were direct descendants of the prehistoric animal.

He said, "it may be a new species, it may be a hybrid" between polar bears and brown bears.

"The next thing is go there and find one."

Sykes put out a call last year for museums, scientists and Yeti aficionados to share hair samples thought to be from the creature.

One of the samples he analyzed came from an alleged Yeti mummy in the Indian region of Ladakh, at the Western edge of the Himalayas, and was taken by a French mountaineer who was shown the corpse 40 years ago.

The other was a single hair found a decade ago in Bhutan, 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) to the east.

Sykes said the fact the hair samples were found so far apart, and so recently, suggests the members of the species are still alive.

"I can't imagine we managed to get samples from the only two 'snow bears' in the Himalayas," he said.

Finding a living creature could explain whether differences in appearance and behavior to other bears account for descriptions of the Yeti as a hairy hominid.

"The polar bear ingredient in their genomes may have changed their behavior so they act different, look different, maybe walk on two feet more often," he said.

Sykes' research has not been published, but he says he has submitted it for peer review. His findings will be broadcast Sunday in a television program on Britain's Channel 4.

Tom Gilbert, professor of paleogenomics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, said Sykes' research provided a "reasonable explanation" for Yeti sightings.

"It's a lot easier to believe that than if he had found something else," said Gilbert, who was not involved in the study. "If he had said it's some kind of new primate, I'd want to see all the data."

Sykes' findings are unlikely to lay the myth of the Yeti to rest.

The Yeti or Abominmable Snowman is one of a number of legendary ape-like beasts — along with Sasquatch and Bigfoot — reputed to live in heavily forested or snowy mountains. Scientists are skeptical, but decades of eyewitness reports, blurry photos and stories have kept the legend alive.

"I do not think the study gives any comfort to Yeti-believers," David Frayer, a professor of biological anthropology at the University of Kansas, said in an email. But "no amount of scientific data will ever shake their belief."

"If (Sykes') motivation for doing the analyses is to refute the Yeti nonsense, then good luck," he said.

Sykes said he was simply trying "to inject some science into a rather murky field."

"The Yeti, the Bigfoot, is surrounded in myth and hoaxes," he said. "But you can't invent a DNA sequence from a hair."


http://news.yahoo.com/dna-links-mysterious-yeti-ancient-polar-bear-143452248.html

[Unorthodox]

Oh...lord...

I gotta see if the link is still around... this might take a while. 

[Buster's Uncle]

 

[Unorthodox]

Damn, the place has been cleaned out. 

Basically, I've been saying the yeti is a relation to this old bear for years now.  Back when one of the 'evidence' pieces a Russian expedition found was a mummified paw, that was very closely resembling a polar bear.  There's a species of cave bear known to have lived in the area that was known to walk 2 legged more than today's bears. 

[Buster's Uncle]

The Yeti: Has a Geneticist Solved the Mystery?
LiveScience.com
By Marc Lallanilla, Assistant Editor  2 hours ago



The mystery of polar bears' origins has long puzzled scientists


     
A geneticist believes he may have begun to solve the riddle of one of most enduring myths in all of cryptozoology: the yeti, or Abominable Snowman, of the Himalayas.

The mystery has swirled through the snows of the mountainous region for centuries, since Alexander the Great searched for a yeti on his eastward march across the Indus Valley. In the 1950s, even respected mountaineers such as Sir Edmund Hillary claimed to have seen footprints of the legendary beast, which reportedly walks upright and is covered with hair.

Now, using DNA analysis from two different hair samples — one from a strange animal shot by a hunter about 40 years ago in northern India's Ladakh region, and a second sample found in a Bhutan bamboo forest 10 years ago — geneticist Bryan Sykes of the University of Oxford claims to have linked those samples to the jawbone of an ancient polar bear found in Norway.


A rare bear?

In the early 1970s, a French mountaineer trekking through the rugged Ladakh region (at the western edge of the Himalayas) encountered a hunter who had saved the remains of a bizarre, bear-like animal — about the size of a human being — that he had recently shot. The mountaineer saved a sample of the hair, which he later passed to Sykes.

Sykes found the Ladakh hair sample especially intriguing. "The fact that the hunter … thought this one was in some way unusual and was frightened of it, makes me wonder if this species of bear might behave differently," he told The Telegraph. "Maybe it is more aggressive, more dangerous or is more bipedal than other bears."

Sykes began by comparing that hair sample, and the 10-year-old sample from Bhutan, against a database of collected animal DNA. "In the Himalayas, I found the usual sorts of bears and other creatures amongst the collection," said Sykes, as quoted in Phys.org.

"But the particularly interesting ones are the ones whose genetic fingerprints are linked not to the brown bears or any other modern bears, [but] to an ancient polar bear."

That polar bear lived in Norway between 40,000 and 120,000 years ago, and its DNA is a 100-percent match with the recent hair samples from Ladakh and Bhutan. "This is a species that hasn't been recorded for 40,000 years," Sykes said. "Now, we know one of these was walking around 10 years ago."


More research needed

Sykes — whose research has not yet been published in any peer-reviewed journal — stops short of saying that the Himalayas are home to an ancient breed of polar bear. "There's more work to be done on interpreting the results. I don't think it means there are ancient polar bears wandering around the Himalayas," he told the Telegraph.

"It could mean there is a subspecies of brown bear in the High Himalayas descended from the bear that was the ancestor of the polar bear," Sykes added. "Or it could mean there has been more recent hybridization between the brown bear and the descendant of the ancient polar bear."

Scientists recently discovered that polar bears and brown bears are more closely related than was previously thought. Mitochondrial DNA analysis from 2011 suggested that brown bears from Ireland may have given rise to the modern polar bear, but more recent research finds that — due to a long history of interbreeding — the genetic lines of polar bears and brown bears are muddled at best.

Though further study is needed to determine whether or not a yeti actually exists, Sykes' research is "much better science" than most other yeti investigations, Benjamin Radford, LiveScience's Bad Science columnist and deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, told LiveScience.

"What's different about the Sykes study is that he's using good science and genetic testing," Radford added. "It is certainly much more plausible that a bear was mistaken for a Yeti than that there exists a giant, bipedal hominid race that no one has discovered!"


http://news.yahoo.com/yeti-geneticist-solved-mystery-173015558.html