Thursday, October 17, 2013

Yetis are Real

It's official - the yeti, mythical monster of the Himalayas, is a real animal. It's just not an ape or any other sort of large primate. According to a recent analysis of genetic samples, the yeti is apparently a species of bear that may be a cross between polar and brown bears. Reinhold Messner published My Quest for the Yeti back in 2000, in which he concluded the idea that the yeti was some kind of ape was based on a misunderstanding of the Tibetan language by westerners. In fact, when shown pictures of Himalayan bears, locals immediately identified them as yetis. And now the DNA evidence has caught up and confirmed Messner's hypothesis.

Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes performed DNA testing on 27 suspected yeti samples that had been sent to him from around the world, and got a big hit, reports PhysOrg. Two brownish hair samples found in opposite ends of the Himalayas were a perfect match with the DNA of an ancient polar bear species that lived 40,000 to 120,000 years ago, the Telegraph reports. His conclusion? That yeti is a cross between a polar bear and brown bear—and "may still be there."

One of the "yeti" hair samples is 40 years old and came from a hunter in India's western Himalayas; the second was found in a Bhutan bamboo forest 30 years later, so "we know one of these was walking around 10 years ago," Sykes says. In the former case, the hunter who shot the animal described being unusually frightened by it, Sykes says. "If its behavior is different from normal bears, which is what eyewitnesses report, then I think that may well be the source of the mystery," he tells the BBC, adding the species may be "more aggressive, more dangerous."

Looking at the mythologized yeti in the picture above next to the Himalayan brown bear standing, it's easy to see how eyewitness accounts of the latter could produce an image of the former. This is especially true if the bear feels threatened; it will remain upright and extend its "arms" to look even bigger and scarier. And cross-breeding with polar bears could explain the lighter coat that is sometimes reported in yeti sightings. While it would have been fascinating to identify a new large primate, a new subspecies of bear would be just as legitimate a discovery.

UPDATE: Slate has an article up today that argues there's "no such thing" as a yeti on the grounds that the DNA is more likely to have come from regular Himalayan brown bears rather than a new subspecies of them. But that's the point I'm making here - as Messner argued quite convincingly and the DNA evidence supports, yetis are indeed bears. That doesn't mean yetis don't exist; on the contrary, it means that they're real animals.

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