The long-debated mystery of the legendary Himalayan Yeti and other versions of the mythical creature such as the "Bigfoot" may have been solved by a British scientist.
Brian Sykes, a genetics expert and a professor at Oxford University, said that the legendary creature is a relative of the ancient polar bears, concluding that there may be real animals behind the Yeti mystery.
"I think this bear, which nobody has seen alive, may still be there and may have quite a lot of polar bear in it. It may be some sort of hybrid and if its behavior is different from normal bears, which is what eyewitnesses report, then I think that may well be the source of the mystery and the source of the legend," Sykes said in an interview with BBC News.
Sykes conducted a thorough study in which he analyzed hair samples that allegedly came from two yetis with one of it coming from the Western Himalayan region and the other one from Bhutan. He then sequenced the DNA from the two hair samples, which led him to conclude that the samples perfectly matched with a DNA sample from a polar bear, which lived on earth more than ten thousand years ago.
Sykes knows that his discovery will not be accepted by experts who are studying the "Bigfoot" theory, but he strongly believes that the "exciting and unexpected" results that he obtained shed light on the popular Yeti mystery.
"There's more work to be done on interpreting the results. I don't think it means there are ancient polar bears wandering around the Himalayas," Sykes said in a Channel 4 interview. "But we can speculate what the possible explanation might be. It could be there is a subspecies of brown bear in the High Himalayas descended from the bear that was the ancestor to the polar bear."
Sykes' discovery has already been submitted to scientific journals for peer review and it will be featured in a TV series titled "Bigfoot Files" on Britain's Channel 4, which starts Sunday.
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