The mystery that is known as yeti and migoi in the Himalayas—and Sasquatch and bigfoot in the Americas—now has a bunch of new names, according to scientists. Those names? Bear, raccoon, horse, cow, sheep, canine, deer, and many others. That's according to the first systematic genetic survey of hairs credited to these cryptozoological creatures.
Although numerous eyewitness reports and footprint evidence have led many to claim such "anomalous primates" are real, mainstream science remained unconvinced, given the lack of testable bodies or fossils. To address this controversy, in 2012 scientists proposed analyzing organic remains of alleged anomalous primates that researchers have accumulated for decades.
"The search for anomalous primates is, in principle, no different from the search for other species unknown to science, and is susceptible to the same recently developed discovery techniques based on DNA barcoding," says paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Norman MacLeod at the Natural History Museum in London, who did not participate in the study.
The scientists tested a total of 30 DNA samples. One came from a modern human, not a Neanderthal or another extinct human lineage. Others mostly came from known mammals living in the areas from which the samples came, and often a domesticated species.
Intriguingly, two Himalayan "yeti" samples matched DNA from a fossil of a more than 40,000-year-old polar bear but not modern polar bears. One sample, with golden-brown hairs, came from an animal shot by an experienced hunter in India, who said its behavior differed greatly from the brown bears with which he was very familiar. The other sample of reddish-brown hairs was recovered from a place in a high-altitude bamboo forest in Bhutan identified as a nest of a migyhur, the Bhutanese equivalent of the yeti. The researchers suggest these hairs might come from a previously unrecognized bear species—unusually colored polar bears—or from hybrids of polar bears and brown bears.
"The techniques described here put an end to decades of ambiguity about species identification of anomalous primate samples and set a rigorous standard against which to judge any future claims," the researchers write in their paper in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
But don't take these results as an absolute, warns MacLeod.
"While these results clearly do not demonstrate the existence of anomalous primates, neither do they rule it out," he wrote in a commentary on the new findings. "I'm open-minded on the question—scientists have to be. The history of science is littered with many examples of 'impossible' things that turned out to be true. That's one of its core attractions."