Bigfoot DNA

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Not just any bear, some undiscovered species of bear, which is pretty cool.
 
Professor Sykes believes that the animals are hybrids – crosses between polar bears and brown bears. Because the newly identified samples are from creatures which are recently alive, he thinks the hybrids are still living in the Himalayas.
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What's so unusual about such hybrids?

I remember lots of talk about such some time ago.

I also remember at least one bear that had been killed that they were sure was a polar/brown hybrid, but turned out not to be.
 
Polar bears and and brown bears are known to hybridize and, as I understand, it's a problem when trying to date the separation between the two species:
http://news.ucsc.edu/2013/03/polar-bear-genomics.html
...Two studies published in 2012 sought to determine when the polar bear lineage diverged from the brown bear lineage using nuclear DNA data. The first, published in April in Science, put the split at 600,000 years ago and concluded that polar bears carry brown bear mitochondrial DNA due to past hybridizations. The second, published in July in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggested that brown bears, black bears, and polar bears diverged around 4 to 5 million years ago, followed by repeated episodes of hybridization between polar bears and brown bears...

The new study does not address the question of how long ago polar bears diverged from brown bears, but it may help sort out the conflicting results of recent studies. "It's a good step in the right direction of understanding what really happened," Shapiro said...

Green noted that efforts to understand the relationship between polar bears and brown bears has been complicated by the unusual case of the ABC Islands brown bears. "It's as if you were studying the relationship between humans and chimpanzees and your analysis included DNA from some weird population of humans that had hybridized with chimps. You would get very strange results until you figured that out," he said...
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Sykes' study (when pubished!) might be usefull in that context. (or not)
 
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Actually ancient polar bear makes the most sense to me. Perhaps following the Scandinavian or Siberian ice sheets during an ice age. As the ice receded, and climate at the base of the Himalaya's headed towards tropical, it isolated pockets of bears up in the colder mountain climates. Ancient residents see a huge white hairy thing that is not a brown bear, and the Yeti stuff is born.

I'm not saying it makes total sense, or even partial sense. Just the most sense.......... To me :)
 
Why? Because back then Polar bears weren't seal hunters, that lived on the ice sheets? Do you know if an ice sheet made it down to the Himalayas? It might have, but I can't find any evidence of this.
 
^Welcome, Furious. Your wit is always appreciated. We're discussing the Sykes/bear stuff in another dedicated thread, however.
~Saskeptic
 
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