Historical story

Abominable snowman turns out to be an Asian bear

He would look like a big monkey. The local population occasionally finds footprints and a few say they have seen him. But the Abominable Snowman is probably just an Asian bear. Scientists write this today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Former vet and now presenter Mark Evans scrambled for his program Yeti or Not (Animal Planet, 2016) across the Himalayas in search of stories and clues from people who might have seen the 'terrible snowman', or yeti. In total, he collected nine yeti items. A piece of bone, a tooth, a hair and even excrement that must have belonged to this mythical figure. He gave them all to biologist Charlotte Lindqvist of the University at Buffalo (New York, United States).

A dog and eight bears

Lindqvist analyzed DNA from the 'yeti' pieces and concluded that one sample comes from a dog. The rest are bits of Asian black bears (also called Collared bears), Himalayan bears (or Isabel bears) and Tibetan brown bears. It's not the first mythical animal to be brushed aside by science. At the beginning of the twentieth century, British scientists suggested that the 'African unicorn' must have been an okapi.

British geneticist Bryan Sykes previously investigated two suspected yeti samples in 2014 and concluded that they must have belonged to an extinct polar bear, a cross between a brown bear and a polar bear. However, that research has been widely criticized. When other scientists tried to replicate the study, they concluded that there was not enough DNA to draw firm conclusions.

That is why Linqvist took a more detailed approach this time. In addition to the nine 'yeti' samples, she also analyzed DNA from fifteen samples of various bears from the Himalayan region. This allowed her to immediately map the evolution of the different bear species. The Himalayan bear is on the red list of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) with a status of 'critically endangered' and the Tibetan brown bear is 'endangered'. The Asiatic black bears are "vulnerable". Linqvist writes in her article that it is important for the protection of these animals to map the genetic diversity.

Separated by a glacier

Her analysis shows that the Tibetan brown bear shares a common ancestor with the North American and European brown bears. The ancestor of the Asiatic black bear and the Himalayan bear split from the other brown bears nearly 660,000 years ago, according to Lindqvist. The Tibetan brown bear went its own way only 340,000 years ago, separate from the North American and European bears. 475,000 years ago, the Himalayan bear branch moved away from that of the other Asian black bears.

Lindqvist suspects the split is the result of glaciers that formed during that time. The Nyanyaxungla Ice Age occurred between 500,000 and 300,000 years ago. Both the split of the Himalayan bear and that of the Tibetan brown bear fall within that period. Glaciers probably drove the bears apart. Years of isolation have caused the bears to differ so much genetically from each other that they formed a separate species, even though they don't live very far from each other as the crow flies.