Yetis are Bears (Again)

(Pandy Corona, Wikipedia)

Recently published: DNA analysis regarding samples of "yeti hair."

The Denver Post reports:

"The yeti, or abominable snowman, is one of the most sought-after animals that does not exist. A long line of explorers, including mountaineers Sir Edmund Hillary and Reinhold Messner, reported seeing strange figures and footprints in the Himalayas. Said to walk on two legs through the Tibetan Plateau, the yeti is described as a hairy and humanoid primate, partway between gorilla and David Letterman's beard.

"If you wish to hunt a yeti, there are just three rules to follow. If you find one, no talking to the press, not without permission from Nepali government officials. You can take the animal alive, but you cannot harm it: Shooting is to be done with camera's only, per a 1959 State Department memo (an exception is carved out for self-defense). And you must pay Nepal 5,000 rupees ($48.50) for a yeti permit.

"We would encourage you to spend those 5,000 rupees elsewhere. You won't find a yeti in yeti habitat. But, if you're lucky, you might stumble upon a bear.

"In a new genetic analysis, yeti bones, fur and other biological material turned out to be bear parts. 'All the samples that were supposed to be yetis matched brown and black bears that are living in the region,' said Charlotte Lindqvist, who studies bear evolution at the University of Buffalo in New York and Singapore's Nanyang Technological University.

"(There was just one exception. A yeti tooth kept at the Reinhold Messner Mountain Museum was a dog's.)

"Lindqvist and her colleagues, the authors of a report published Tuesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, extracted DNA from nine yeti samples and more than a dozen known bear specimens, collected in zoos and a national park in Pakistan.

"The connection between yeti and bear is an old one. Messner and Hillary eventually concluded what they had seen were bears. Biologists have made the link, too. In 2013, Oxford University issued a worldwide call for yeti samples. Oxford geneticists Bryan Sykes said that DNA from hairs revealed the yeti was similar to an ancient, extinct polar bear. For a moment, this biological curiosity revived hopes that an undiscovered animal loped through Tibetan snow.

"'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 in 2013.

"But other genetics experts, notably Ross Barnett at the University of Copenhagen, contested that finding. Sykes had made an error, partly due to degraded DNA, according to a re-analysis of the research by Barnett and University of Huddersfield bimolecular archaeologist Ceiridwen Edwards.

"It was as off 'Sykes had the letters Y-E-T and, searching for matches, he though he found YETI,' Barnett said. Sykes acknowledged the error but maintained that the yeti hair could have come from a polar bear or ursine hybrid.

"The new work is more robust, Barnett said, probably 'the most rigorous in terms of samples and sequence lengths.' Where snippets of DNA revealed YET, Lindqvist's deep genetic dive produced  'ALL THE SAMPLES ARE BROWN BEARS YET PEOPLE STILL BELIEVE,' Barnett said. 'Very little chance of matching that string to something else by chance.'

"Though Himalayan brown bears are neither abominable nor snowmen, they are still pretty unusual animals, the DNA analysis revealed.

"Brown bears hav conquered the Northern Hemisphere's forests, in Canada, Russia, the United States - grizzlies are a brown bear subspecies - and 42 other countries. (In the United States, sightings of bears on two legs have left observers wondering about the true nature of Bigfoot and Sasquatch, too.) Despite their wide spread across the globe, many brown bears have run into danger. 'There has been a lot of extinction of brown bears around the world,' Lindqvist said. 

"Himalayan brown bears are not exempt from bad news. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature lists the subspecies as critically endangered.

"That loss of life makes it tough for experts to unravel a tangled bear ancestry. But the DNA sequences produced by Lindqvist and her colleagues were sufficient to create a family tree for the Himalayan and Tibetan brown bears. Though it is unclear where brown bears first evolved, Lindqvist said, their evolutionary history 'certainly does suggest that they may come from an area in Asia.'

"The new genetics research indicates that the isolated bears are a 'relic population.' Put another way, these were the first brown bears, Lindqvist said, to split off form all the other subspecies, 600,000 years ago.

"Both researchers predicted that that yeti myth will survive this latest study. The yeti 'is very important to the local culture and folklore,' Lindqvist said. 'Perhaps the Western hype about the yeti, we can put that to rest.'"

Or will they?

It seems as though this new analysis may have its own flaws, just like the Sykes study.

Loren Coleman has mentioned the following on his blog CryptoZooNews:

"For decades, cryptozoologists have pointed to there being three kinds of Yetis - a small Yeti, a human-sized Yeti, and a quite large bear-like Yeti. Explorer Tom Slick investigated these three types in the Himalayas in the 1950s. Bernard Heuvelmans and Ivan T. Sanderson in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as modern researchers this century, including myself, Mark A. Hall, and Patrick Huyghe, called this variety the Dzu-Teh. The recent Bryan Sykes' study confirmed there were bear artifacts behind some of the so-called Yeti samples he studied and which were highlighted by Icon Films. Should we be surprised that 'bear' results are to be found if selections of those samples are retested?"

And…

"Two of the samples (tooth and fur) from Messner's so-called Nazi 'Yeti' were understood to be implanted teeth (Canis) and non-primate fur (Ursidae), already by investigators. Two other samples were misidentified by Sykes as at first ancient polar bear, then the hybrid brown-polar bear, and brown bear, nevertheless, were bear. Icon Films produced several films that funded Sykes to do DNA tests on dozens of samples, and via information from Sykes' book and in Icon's documentaries (also the Bigfoot one), bear results were detailed. If only 'nine' samples are sent along to Dr. Lindqvist, why only those?"

"Who Funded Dr Lindqvist's study, partially? Icon Films."

With Jeff Meldrum

Dr. Jeff Meldrum also had this to say: "…a casual viewing of their [Icon's] documentary makes it apparent that most of the sources were known bear specimens to begin with…"

Yeti?

If most of the "yeti" samples were known to be bears, and - believe it or not! - found to be bears, and then sent to another study and found again to be bears (because they are),  does this completely disprove the yeti? Not really. While some yeti sightings and legends most definitely are bears, there still seems to be, as Coleman noted, a few different "kinds" of yetis. I feel that this study could have been a bit more interesting if the new team examined new samples and not the ones that had already been examined, but it seems that Icon Films only wants to put out this explanation, and I think we can end with some words from Dr. Meldrum:

"The most compelling evidence of a relic hominoid species in the Himalaya remains the footprints documented by the McNeely-Cronin Expedition to the Arun Valley in 1972. The Icon Films producers were not interested in considering this evidence during my interview. Unraveling the bear and hominoid threads remains the challenge before serious investigators. But to ignore the evidence suggesting a possible hominoid, while making dismissive statements based on questionable 'yeti' evidence readily attributable to bears is hardly an objective approach."

Indeed, it is not.

Cronin's photo, 1972, Left foot

Right foot