The 'abominable snowman', a relative of Polar Bear - The New Spain

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itemprop=”author”> The legendary Yeti , an alleged large animal that inhabit in the snows of the Himalayas, is actually a relative of the primitive polar bears , according to a genetic study developed at the University of Oxford (United Kingdom).

human genetics professor Bryan Sykes analyzed hair samples from two unidentified animals collected in Ladakh (India) and Bhutan, and determined that his DNA matches a hundred percent with that of a polar bear jawbone found in Svalband (Norway) between 40,000 and 120,000 years old.

fossil found in Norway dates back to a time when polar bears and grizzly bears were splitting into two distinct species.

“I think that bear, that no one has seen him alive, perhaps is still there and there are probably a lot of polar bear on it” , Sykes said the BBC.

Ladakh

sample came from the mummified remains of a creature that captured a hunter for about 40 years, while the second sample was a single hair was pulled back in a bamboo forest area by an expedition of documentary for a decade.

The scientist stressed that the myth of the Yeti, furry animal with which many mountaineers and Himalayan people have claimed to have met for centuries, could have a “biological basis”.

“There is still much work to do to interpret these results. That does not mean there early polar bears hanging around the Himalayas. It is possible that it is a subspecies of brown bear that descends from polar bears, “said the researcher.

Yeti legend became popular in Europe in 1951 after British climber Eric Shipton published a photograph of a huge footprint he had taken at the base of Mount Everest .

Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner , the first person who crowned the 14 peaks over 8,000, dedicated efforts to search for the Yeti after an alleged encounter with the creature in Tibet in 1986.

mountaineer brought to light a manuscript Tibetan 300 years in which we read that “Bigfoot is a variety of bear that lives in mountainous regions inhospitable” , a thesis in line with the study geneticist at the University of Oxford.

Those who seek the Yeti “and other enthusiasts seem to think that science has rejected them, but science does not accept or reject anything, all it does is to examine the evidence, and that’s what I’m doing,” said Sykes.