You know that feeling you get when you come back from a really good holiday? That ‘same shit, different day’ aura that envelops you? That. Well… this actually… Yeti Hair Story The legends surrounding the existence of a large bipedal creature resembling a very hairy human appears to date back centuries and are pretty widespread. This particular brand of Hagrid-esque beast gained most of its popularity after Eric Shipton took a photo of a huge footprint somewhere on or near Everest in the 1950, spawning a mass of expeditions to track down this curly cryptid – though God only knows what we’d do with it – and various sightings and bits of dodgy evidence. I say ‘dodgy’ evidence because if it was real substantial evidence folk wouldn’t still be debating whether or not the Yeti, Bigfoot or whatever you want to call it exists or not. So, anyway this guy Brian Sykes, professor of Human genetics at Oxford has taken it upon himself to collect and analyse evidence to, presumably, put the mystery to rest once and for all. It’s not clear from the article if the Prof actually travelled to Nepal to collect the samples himself. I kinda like to think he did, but I don’t know the policies of Oxford regarding funding of what could be termed by many as a… well, a hair-brained scheme. So of he went, or didn’t go, and managed to bag himself two hair samples. Or maybe somebody else did the bagging, I don’t know. Do professors in Genetics bag their own samples or do they have sample baggers? Enquiring minds want to know… Anyway, I digress.. In particular, he analysed hairs from two unknown animals, one found in the western Himalayan region of Ladakh in India and the other from Bhutan, 800 miles to the east. I don’t want to seem picky here, but does this mean the samples were taken from the body of animal that was unidentifiable, or that the samples were of unknown origin altogether? Details like that are kind of important. I like to know where samples are from. I have a wool rug at home and the fact that I could lift human, cat, dog. horse and sheep DNA from the various hair samples on it doesn’t mean it’s not still a wool rug. It just means I havent cleaned it today. Dont judge me. He subjected the hairs to the most advanced DNA tests available and compared the results with other animals’ genomes stored on the GenBank database. Professor Sykes found that he had a 100% match with a sample from an ancient polar bear jawbone found in Svalbard in Norway, that dates back at least 40,000 years – a time when the polar bear and closely related brown bear were separating as different species. A 100% match. That is pretty conclusive. There is (or was), without a doubt, bear hair in them there hills. It doesn’t explain the alleged sightings of an animal that doesn’t actually resemble an ancient polar bear, but it does conclusively determine the origins of that particular hair sample. This is the point where the article kinda goes a bit odd.. Prof Sykes believes the most likely explanation is that the animals are hybrids – crosses between polar bears and brown bears. The species are known to interbreed where their territories overlap. The Professor has access to the GenBank database. He didn’t get a 100% match with a hybrid. If the species are known to interbreed, why isn’t there a hybrid sample in the database? “I don’t think it means there are ancient polar bears wandering around the Himalayas.” I’d say there were three explanations why one would find ancient polar bear DNA in the Himalayas. The most obvious being that an ancient polar bear left it there. The second that ancient polar bears and some other species have identical DNA. The third would be some fault in procedure. It happens. But no… “It could mean there is a sub-species of brown bear in the High Himalayas descended from the bear that was the ancestor of the polar bear. Or it could mean there has been more recent hybridisation between the brown bear and the descendent of the ancient polar bear.” Awesome. I love the fact that there’s the possibility that there are other species still undiscovered by humans, but this article fails to shed light on the mystery surrounding the Yeti legend. In fact, it actually highlights the fact that no matter how advanced we are scientifically, we still don’t hold all the answers. The Yeti Mystery lives on..