And if the yeti of the Himalayas was a hybrid bear? - TF1

class=”title SZ11 c7″> A view of the Himalayas / Credits: F. Aubert

The enigma of the “Abominable Snowman” Has it been resolved? According to a British researcher at the University of Oxford, the legendary “Bigfoot” could be the result of a cross between a polar bear and a brown bear. The geneticist Bryan Sykes said Thursday it had submitted to a series of DNA tests of hair samples from animals found in the Himalayas. “We found a total genetic match between two samples from the Himalayas and an ancestor of the polar bear,” said he told the BBC.
DNA of two creatures unidentified from the region of Ladakh in India and Bhutan corresponded to 100% with a sample from the jaws of a polar bear found on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, where he lived in a period dating back at least 40,000 years and up to 120,000 years. “This is an exciting and completely unexpected result, which was a surprise to us all,” the scientist said in a statement. “There is still work to be done to interpret the results, he has said. But we can wonder about the possible explanations. This could mean that there is a subspecies of brown bear in the Himalayas that descends from the ancestor of polar “bear. “Or it means that there has been a recent hybridization between the brown bear and the descendant of the ancient polar bear,” said he added. “If the behavior is different from conventional bear, as reported by witnesses, it (the hybrid) may be the source of mystery and legend,” said the scientist.
The myth of “Yeti”, often described as a beast half-man half-ape, was fed by photographs of giant footprints in the snow, taken by the British mountaineer Eric Shipton during his expedition to Everest in 1951. The mountaineer Reinhold Messner, who has climbed many times peaks of the Himalayas in 1986 and believed to have seen the beast, concluded in 1998 in his book “My quest for the Yeti” that the animal existed in the imagination of people who confuse it with brown Himalayan bear.