WASHINGTON: The Abominable Snowman. The Missing Link. Big Foot. He goes by many names, but no matter what you call the Yeti, a new study of potential DNA evidence suggests that he shall remain a mystery for now.
The study, discussed in a new paper lists the results of DNA analysis of a hair speculated to belong to a yet-undefined species. While the hair has been degraded too much to identify specifically what it is, scientists suggest that it is probably a relative of the brown bear.
“Importantly, for the thrust of the paper as a whole, the conclusion that these Himalayan ‘yeti’ samples were certainly not from a hitherto unknown primate is unaffected,” explain the researchers. “We stressed in the original paper that the true identity of this intriguing animal needs to be refined, preferably by sequence data from fresh tissue samples derived from a living specimen where DNA degradation is no longer a concern.”
Smithsonian Institution postdoctoral fellow Eliécer E. Gutiérrez, an evolutionary biologist—comments that “What motivated us was that the original paper basically claimed that an undiscovered bear species was lurking in the Himalayas, and when we read the paper we thought it was interesting that such a tiny piece of DNA was being used to make this claim so confidently.”
Along with fellow researcher Ronald H. Pine, of the Biodiversity Institute & Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas, Gutiérrez notes that new species — even large ones, such as bears — are discovered frequently, so this is study doesn’t necessarily prove anything, especially since a single tuft of hair is not really enough to support such large claims.
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