New DNA tests may have solved the mystery of yetis, proving that they may just be a big brown bear, rather than a giant, mythical monster.
Tests on hair samples found a genetic match with an ancient polar bear, and Sky News reports researchers believe that there could be a subspecies of brown bear in the High Himalayas that are being mistaken for creatures such as the "Abominable Snowman," "Big Foot," and yetis.
A human genetics professor at Oxford University, Bryan Sykes, collected samples of "yeti" hair to find out what they actually were. After analyzing hairs from unknown animals and comparing them with other animals' genomes from the GenBank database, Professor Sykes found a 100% match with a sample from an ancient polar bear jawbone from Norway that dates back over 40,000 years, when polar bears were closely related to brown bears.
So, it looks like Yetis might not be real after all...
To the Bigfoot believers out there, professor Sykes added:
"Bigfootologists and other enthusiasts seem to think that they've been rejected by science. Science doesn't accept or reject anything, all it does is examine the evidence and that is what I'm doing."
In the United Kingdom, a three-part Channel 4 documentary series on professor Syke's research called Bigfoot Files starts Sunday, Oct. 20.