The mystery surrounding the legendary Himalayan Yeti, aka the Abominable Snowman, may have finally been solved as a British scientist claims that the creature is indeed real!
Oxford University professor Bryan Sykes may have finally cracked the conundrum pertaining to the existence of the fabled Yeti, which is believed to reside in the Himalayas.
Sykes, a genetics professor, carried out advanced DNA tests on hair samples and discovered that they tallied with those from an ancient polar bear. The researcher concludes that the Yeti could possibly be a sub-species of the brown bear.
Per Sykes, a strong likelihood exists that the creature is a hybrid of the brown and polar bears.
"I think this bear, which nobody has seen alive,... may still be there and may have quite a lot of polar bear in it," said Syeks to BBC."It may be some sort of hybrid and if its behaviour is different from normal bears, which is what eyewitnesses report, then I think that may well be the source of the mystery and the source of the legend."
Sykes' DNA tests were conducted on hairs from two unnamed animals. One of the animal hairs was from Ladakh, India, which is west of the Himalayas. The second from Bhutan, which is 800 miles east of India.
So how did Sykes get the hairs?
"I put out a call for Yeti, Bigfoot, and Sasquatch hairs in 2012, and I received a good response from all over the world. Of the two samples in this study, one came from a Yeti mummy in Ladakh. It was from the mummified body that was shot 40 years ago by a local hunter. He kept it because he did not think it was a bear from its behavior. To him it was a Yeti. The other sample was a single hair from the other end of the Himalayas, from the Kingdom of Bhutan. It was found by the king's own personal Yeti guards," said the professor in an interview to NBC News.
The DNA from the two sample hairs were a 100 percent genetic match with a 40,000-year old ancient polar bear jawbone from the Norwegian Arctic.
Sykes believes that his results are "completely unexpected"; however, more work needs to go in the area of interpreting the findings.
