Merged Sykes: Yeti is a hybrid bear

[LTC8K6]

Yeah, what's with the 100% match? The ancient polar bear was also a hybrid?

 

[LTC8K6]

Provenance of the samples?

This was also touted as significant to human history...

 

[Resume]

Don't be silly.

I propose giant dragonflies nesting at the mountain rooftops.

They grab the bears, suck their blood, store the blood on the wings and drop the dry bodies.

Putting the E in JREF.

 

[angrysoba]

The sample from Ladakh came from the mummified remains of a creature shot by a hunter around 40 years ago. He considered the animal so unusual, and so alarming, he kept some of its remains. A sample of the hair was passed to Professor Sykes by a French mountaineer who was given it by the hunter around a decade ago. The second sample was in the form of a single hair, found in a bamboo forest by an expedition of filmmakers, also around ten years ago.

The first one sounds a bit iffy to begin with. Given that Abominable-Snowman-ology is something that has been raked over with a fine-tooth-comb-rake, I would presume that many people here will have heard of the case before. Not me, I tend to steer clear of these Big-Foot-Yeti threads.

The second sample came from "a single hair"??? Sounds pretty slender evidence to me.

What do we know about these hunters and film-makers? Do we have any background on them or their claims?

 

[dafydd]

The first one sounds a bit iffy to begin with. Given that Abominable-Snowman-ology is something that has been raked over with a fine-tooth-comb-rake, I would presume that many people here will have heard of the case before. Not me, I tend to steer clear of these Big-Foot-Yeti threads.

The second sample came from "a single hair"??? Sounds pretty slender evidence to me.

What do we know about these hunters and film-makers? Do we have any background on them or their claims?

So nobody knows where the hair came from.

 

[angrysoba]

Doesn't the Telegraph link (the only one I have looked at) look remarkably like a press release for a new documentary series on Channel 4?

Well, then. It says the research "has been submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed science journal" but it obviously has not been published in the time it took to actually make the documentary series "Bigfoot Files".

Smells like Abominable BS to me.

 

[Resume]

I'm assuming we'll find out for sure once the paper is published.

I assume the same. Should be cool.

 

[LTC8K6]

So nobody knows where the hair came from.

And they 100% match a polar bear...

 

[angrysoba]

So nobody knows where the hair came from.

The article says "The second sample was in the form of a single hair, found in a bamboo forest by an expedition of filmmakers, also around ten years ago."

But I would like to see the response from the peer-reviewed journal before I take these press articles seriously.

 

[carlitos]

Perhaps this is a silly question, but how would a species of bear explain the legend of the Abominable Snowman / Yeti? Oxygen-deprived climbers saw something they couldn't identify, and it's a bear? Big whoop.

 

[dafydd]

The article says "The second sample was in the form of a single hair, found in a bamboo forest by an expedition of filmmakers, also around ten years ago."

But I would like to see the response from the peer-reviewed journal before I take these press articles seriously.

So it could have fallen out of a camera case. A single hair? 'Look chaps, there's a single hair there, amongst the bamboo. It looks like any other strand of hair, but let's pick it up and keep it.'

 

[William Parcher]

And this is the footprint of the rare hybrid bear?

 

[LTC8K6]

So it could have fallen out of a camera case. A single hair? 'Look chaps, there's a single hair there, amongst the bamboo. It looks like any other strand of hair, but let's pick it up and keep it.'

Had they been filming bears earlier? Polar bears, perhaps?

 

[angrysoba]

So it could have fallen out of a camera case. A single hair? 'Look chaps, there's a single hair there, amongst the bamboo. It looks like any other strand of hair, but let's pick it up and keep it.'

Well, maybe the film-makers were making a documentary about the Yeti and got extremely lucky!

Do we know anything about these film-makers?

It seems the Asian Black Bear lives in the Himalayas:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiatic_Black_Bear

 

[William Parcher]

Well, maybe the film-makers were making a documentary about the Yeti and got extremely lucky!

Do we know anything about these film-makers?

It's possibly from the cable TV show Destination Truth with Josh Gates. They did go to Bhutan in 2008 and found a single hair suspected to be from the Yeti. That is Josh in the picture I attached with him displaying a "Yeti track". The article says the sample was from ten years ago so maybe it isn't the 2008 DT Gates thing.

 

[William Parcher]

The sample from Ladakh came from the mummified remains of a creature shot by a hunter around 40 years ago. He considered the animal so unusual, and so alarming, he kept some of its remains. A sample of the hair was passed to Professor Sykes by a French mountaineer who was given it by the hunter around a decade ago.

Unusual and alarming how? Did that hunter not know if he had killed an unusual bear or a primate? Why is it described with such vague terms? Is this actually a Yeti hoax and the hunter character is part of the hoax?

 

[MikeG]

And they 100% match a polar bear...

....but not a modern polar bear. The ancestor of the modern polar bear. 40,000 to 120,000 year old version. The samples match no living catalogued species.

-

Those thinking up all sorts of tenuous explanations for the amazing DNA result (fell out of a bag, hunter's jacket etc) will have to explain how two samples, one from from either end of the Himalayas, come to match each other, but match no extant species. That's going to be one convoluted story.

 

[LTC8K6]

http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/morons.htm

 

[LTC8K6]

....but not a modern polar bear. The ancestor of the modern polar bear. 40,000 to 120,000 year old version. The samples match no living catalogued species.

-

Those thinking up all sorts of tenuous explanations for the amazing DNA result (fell out of a bag, hunter's jacket etc) will have to explain how two samples, one from from either end of the Himalayas, come to match each other, but match no extant species. That's going to be one convoluted story.

First, we will have to know the provenance of the samples.

Would the 120K year old Polar bear be genetically different?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_bear#Taxonomy_and_evolution

 

[LTC8K6]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2841953/

Complete mitochondrial genome of a Pleistocene jawbone unveils the origin of polar bear