THE RIVER TIMES
FALL 2012
Your Latest News
The
Yeti
Exists,
According
To
Geneticist
By Tatiana Franco
The legendary Abominable Snowman –
also known as the Yeti– is real, according to
British geneticist Brian Sykes.
The Yeti is said to be a Bigfoot-type
furry animal that lives in colder areas of the
world like Nepal. Just like Bigfoot the Yeti also
has its share of non-believers, but Sykes' recent
DNA research could prove them wrong.
Sykes studied two samples of hair that
are allegedly from Yetis that live in two
different areas in the Himalayas and compared
them with genomes of other animals. One of
the hair samples came from a mummified scalp
of a creature shot by a hunter 40 years ago, and
the other was a single hair found in a bamboo
forest 10 years ago by filmmakers.
What he found was that the genes
matched up 100 per cent with a 40,000 to 120,000year-old polar bear jawbone from Norway.
What does that mean? Yetis could exist as
a subspecies of an ancient polar or brown bear,
according to Sykes.
"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 course of the mystery and the source of
the legend," Sykes said. "This is an exciting and
completely unexpected result that gave us all a
surprise."
Between 40,000 and 120,000 years ago polar bears
and their close relatives brown bears began to
separate into different species.
Sykes isn't suggesting that ancient polar
bears are still alive and living in the Himalayas,
but he does think the Yeti could either be a
subspecies of brown bear that came from an
ancestor of the modern polar bear, or a hybrid of a
modern brown bear and a descendant of an
ancient polar bear.
"I think this bear, which nobody has seen
alive…may still be there and may have quite a lot
of polar bear in it," he said.
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