[Dion]

Scientist has linked "Yeti" hair samples to DNA from an ancient polar bear jaw.

Bryan Sykes, a respected geneticist at Oxford University in the U.K., this week reported the findings of a yearlong project that aimed to rigorously test hair and tissue samples that were claimed to have belonged to the elusive creature.

"I put out a call for Yeti, Bigfoot, and Sasquatch hairs in 2012, and I received a good response from all over the world," Sykes told NBC News.

One of the most promising samples that Sykes received included hairs attributed to a Yeti mummy in the northern Indian region of Ladakh; the hairs were purportedly collected by a French mountaineer who was shown the corpse 40 years ago. Another sample was a single hair that was found about a decade ago in Bhutan, some 800 miles (1,290 kilometers) away from Ladakh.

According to Sykes, the DNA from these two samples matched the genetic signature of a polar bear jawbone that was found in the Norwegian Arctic in 2004. Scientists say the jawbone could be up to 120,000 years old.

Sykes says he intends to publish his findings. "The project is still going on," he told NBC News, "and the idea is to publish these results in a scientific journal to bring it back into the realm of science."

Conceivable

"It is possible, as Asiatic black bears, brown bears, and even sun bears—or some odd combination—conceivably could or could have historically been in that general region. Since they are [bears], they too would share a lot of the DNA sequences found in the fossil cited," said Rockwell, who is at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

"Could something like that be in that area and not be seen clearly or captured or collected? It is a huge area, much of which is not densely populated, and except for increasingly habituated individuals, most [bears] are pretty shy. And if there are not many of them, it is even more conceivable."

Need for Peer Review

"The claim is based on a really small sample, and the DNA is likely degraded to some extent. Until the sequence data have been published, I am going to be rather skeptical," Rockwell said.

"So many critters share so much of their DNA that getting 'matches' can be an artifact of sampling and will certainly depend on precisely what region of DNA is being used."

Molecular biologist Charlotte Lindqvist expressed a similar sentiment. "I'd like to see the data published and scrutinized," said Lindqvist, who is with the State University of New York's University at Buffalo. She was part of the team that extracted DNA from the ancient polar bear jawbone that Sykes used in his genetic comparisons.

"Before that happens, it makes little sense to me to suggest any links between the 120,000-year-old polar bear and a bear (or Yeti) in the Himalayas," Lindqvist said in an email.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...cryptozoology/