The legend of the Abominable Snowman, the secretive half-human creature that roams the Himalayas, has puzzled the world for more than a century.
Today, in an anticlimactic plot twist, scientists say the story has been debunked and the yeti is actually just a bear.
“Three different bears, to be precise,” says the AFP news agency. “The Asian black, the Tibetan brown and Himalayan brown.”
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According to scientists, who published their report in Proceedings of the Royal Society Journal B, “each of these sub-species inhabits different niches on the roof the world, and all of them have probably been mistaken at one time or another for the Wild Man of the Snows.”
Led by Charlotte Lindqvist, associate professor at the University of Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences, the researchers analysed 24 samples of bone, teeth, skin and hair, nine of which allegedly came from the Yeti. They discovered that one tooth belonged to a dog and the 23 other samples all belonged to bears.
Interest in yetis dates from the 1920s, when Lt-Col Charles Howard-Bury wrote about seeing tracks like those “of a barefoot man” near Mount Everest and a Royal Geographical Society member reported seeing a similar figure. In the 1950s at least two expeditions went in search of the mysterious creature, and sightings have continued since.
The evidence from the study has prompted a call for similar DNA analysis to evaluate other tall tales, like the Sasquatch, otherwise known as Bigfoot.
“To Sasquatch believers like Idaho State University anthropologist Jeff Meldrum, these results are promising,” CNET’s Eric Mack says. “He told me about future analysis he hopes to conduct using environmental DNA soil samples from ground nests found in Washington state that Meldrum thinks could have been constructed by Bigfoot.”
Yeti believers, meanwhile, are unconvinced.
Other users found it strange that the tale even needed to be debunked:
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