In the fall of 2013, Charlotte Lindqvist got a call from a film company making an Animal Planet documentary about the yeti, the mythical apelike creature that roams the Himalayas.
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Lindqvist said yes because she is a geneticist who studies bears, and the rare Himalayan brown bear is one possible origin of the yeti legend.
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The results of that unusual collaboration were published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Lindqvist and her colleagues used DNA to identify nine “yeti” samples. These include: a thigh bone found by a spiritual healer in a cave that turned out to be from a Tibetan brown bear; hair from a mummified animal in a monastery that turned out to be from a Himalayan brown bear; a tooth from a stuffed animal collected by Nazis in the 1930s that turned out to be from a dog. The rest of the samples turned up five more Tibetan brown bears and an Asian black bear.
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“When I had to reveal to them that okay, these are bears, I was excited about that because it was my initial motive to get into this,” says Lindqvist. “They obviously were a little disappointed.”
Read full, original post: DNA Reveals the Yeti Is Actually a Bunch of Bears
