Yeti Hair Matches Ancient Bear

In 2013, a British geneticist named Bryan Sykes, a professor at the University of Oxford, analyzed two hair samples from the Himalayas that people believed came from Yetis. One came from Ladakh, while the other came from Bhutan, 800 miles east. After comparing their DNA with animal genomes in GenBank, Sykes found a 100% match with a polar bear jawbone from Svalbard, Norway, dated between 40,000 and 120,000 years old. He proposed that the unknown animals might have been polar bear-brown bear hybrids, although he said researchers needed further work to interpret the results.

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