Of those 37, the team was able to extract DNA from 30. “A lot of them turned out to be very ordinary animals in their natural habitats,†Sykes says. As the team reports July 1 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, supposed yeti and bigfoot samples turned out to come from bears (brown, black and polar), horses, raccoons, one human, some canines (the test didn’t narrow down if they were wolves or dogs), cows, sheep, a North American porcupine, a Malaysian tapir and a serow, which is a known animal similar to a goat or antelope.
But two hair samples from the Himalayas were a surprise. These hairs, both brownish in color, perfectly matched a short stretch of DNA once extracted from the jawbone of a 40,000-year-old polar bear. The hairs did not match modern polar bears. One hair came from an animal shot 40 years ago in Ladakh, India, by a hunter who reported that it behaved differently from typical brown bears. The other was collected about 10 years ago in Bhutan, 600 to 800 miles from Ladakh.
The researchers’ best guess is that the hairs are from either an unknown bear species or a hybrid of a brown bear and a polar bear. Such hybrids are known in the Arctic, but genetically resemble modern, rather than ancient, polar bears. If there’s a Himalayan hybrid, it might have descended from a different, long-ago liaison between the species. But since the match between the two hairs and the ancient polar bear resulted from a fragment just 104 DNA letters long, the result is preliminary, and the team hopes to do further analysis. Sykes is even planning an expedition to Ladakh to search for live bears.
