I Don’t Think You’re Ready for This Yeti

And you thought the Abominable Snowman was just the stuff of myths.

The rumored Himalayan beast, also known as the Yeti, may in fact have been a real-life relative of the polar bear, according to a British scientist who found a DNA match between alleged Yetis and an ancient polar bear.

“I think this bear, which nobody has seen alive… may still be there and may have quite a lot of polar bear in it,” Oxford University genetics professor Bryan Sykes told BBC.

Sykes conducted a DNA test on hairs from two unidentified animals that have contributed to the legend — one from a beast killed by hunters in northern India, and another individual hair found in a bamboo forest in Bhutan — and entered the genetic information into an animal DNA database. He found they had a 100 percent match with an ancient polar bear jawbone found in Norway that dates back to between 40,000 and 120,000 years ago, when the polar bear and the closely-related brown bear were still diverging as species.

That means Asia’s Big Foot may be a descendant of the ancient polar-brown bear mutt, or a more recent creation of some inter-species mixing, Sykes told BBC.

science.time.com