He was in my Boston Globe:
"Scientist says the Yeti like a polar bear; DNA suggests common ancestor" by Jill Lawless | Associated Press, October 18, 2013
LONDON — A British scientist says he may have solved the mystery of the Abominable Snowman, the elusive, purportedly apelike creature of the Himalayas. He thinks it is a bear.
DNA analysis conducted by Oxford University genetics professor Bryan Sykes suggests the creature, also known as the Yeti, is the descendant of an ancient polar bear.
Sykes compared DNA from hair samples taken from two Himalayan animals to a database of animal genomes. He found they shared a genetic fingerprint with a polar bear jawbone found in the Arctic that is at least 40,000 years old.
Sykes said Thursday that the tests showed the creatures were not related to modern Himalayan bears but were descendants of the prehistoric animal.
‘‘It may be a new species, it may be a hybrid between polar bears and brown bears,” he said. ‘‘The next thing is go there and find one.’’
Sykes put out a call last year for museums, scientists, and Yeti aficionados to share hair samples thought to be from the creature.
One of the samples he analyzed came from an alleged Yeti mummy in the Indian region of Ladakh, at the Western edge of the Himalayas. It was taken by a French mountaineer who was shown the corpse 40 years ago.
The other was a single hair found a decade ago in Bhutan, 800 miles to the east.
Sykes said the fact that the hair samples were found so far apart, and so recently, suggests the members of the species are still alive.
‘‘I can’t imagine we managed to get samples from the only two snow bears in the Himalayas,’’ he said.
Finding a living creature could explain whether differences in appearance and behavior to other bears account for descriptions of the Yeti as a hairy hominid.
‘‘The polar bear ingredient in their genomes may have changed their behavior so they act different, look different, maybe walk on two feet more often,’’ he said.
Sykes’s research has not been published, but he says he has submitted it for peer review. His findings will be broadcast Sunday in a television program on Britain’s Channel 4.
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I thought it was a perfect night to publish this post given the weather outside.
Fyi, I file the Abominable Snowman in the same category as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, and space aliens. There has simply been too much media and programming surrounding those things for far too long for me to believe they are anything but fictions.
I'm sorry if that offends the "conspiracist" in you, but you must always consider the pri$m through which we are being shown things.
