The Himalayan Yeti, if it exists, might be a relative of an ancient polar bear, according to research by a University of Oxford geneticist.
Bryan Sykes, a human geneticist at Oxford, analyzed the hairs from two alleged Yetis, one that came from an unknown animal mummy in the western Himalayan region of Ladakh and the other from an animal found 10 years ago in Bhutan.
Sykes sequenced the DNA from each and then looked for a match in a large database of other animal genomes. What he found surprised him. Sykes thinks he found a 100 percent match with a DNA sample from the jaw of a polar bear that lived tens of thousands of years ago.
“It could be there is a subspecies of brown bear in the High Himalayas descended from the bear that was the ancestor to the polar bear,” he said in a statement. Or, he said, the Yeti could be a more recent hybridization between brown bears and the descendant of the ancient polar bear.
