In the autumn of 1958, Tintin heads to the snow-capped mountains of Tibet, accompanied by the faithful Snowy, a harried Captain Haddock and a fearful Sherpa. Looking for their friend Chang, who disappears after a plane crash, they encounter the “abominable snowman”, the “pithecanthropic pickpocket” who purloins the good captain’s flask of whiskey. After a few such run-ins, they find that the Himalayan terror is just a misunderstood creature with a heart that’s as big as his hairy head.
A new research on the genetic roots of the Yeti has found the most credible evidence so far from Ladakh, which borders Tibet, and cites Captain Haddock’s “ungulate” classification of the Yeti in its footnotes.
The legends of the Yeti, the North American Bigfoot, the Russian Almasty or the Sasquatch cryptid have been around since the 19th century. But cryptozoology, which is the search for animals whose existence is not proven, such as the Yeti, the Chupacabra and phantom cats, has never been accepted as a proper scientific discipline. And so far, only two ambiguous researches have speculated on anomalous primates or the Yeti. In what is the “first ever systematic genetic survey”, a team of researchers led by geneticist Bryan C Sykes of Oxford University have traced the origin of 30 hair samples attributed to anomalous primates. Two of these 30 samples discovered, from Ladakh and Bhutan, belong to a long-lost Paleolithic polar bear, Ursus maritimus.
The project began in 2012, when people were invited to submit hair samples of unknown primates that could be the Yeti. Of the 57 samples received, 20 were discarded after an initial macroscopic, microscopic and infrared examination. The remaining 37 samples were subjected to a genetic analysis, and 30 of them yielded DNA evidence. These were traced back to known species of mammals — cows, horses, raccoons, dogs, wolves and even one human “of likely European matrilineal descent”.
While there is no sign of the mythical Yeti yet in the findings, in two of the samples from Ladakh and Bhutan, there is evidence of DNA sequences from polar bears that match samples taken earlier 6,400km away on the Arctic island of Svalbard, and have no resemblance to modern examples of the species. The Ladakh sample came from an animal shot 40 years ago by a hunter, who reported that its behaviour was very different from the brown bears, a familiar species in those parts. The Bhutan sample was recovered from a bamboo forest, identified by locals as the nest of a migyhur, the Bhutanese version of the Yeti. Surprisingly, the Ladakh strands were golden-brown and the Bhutanese hair was reddish-brown. This discovery has produced a complicated puzzle; as The Guardian reported, “It’s a dim memory of improbable sexual encounters in the Siberian past”.
Despite the lack of hard evidence, the research, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B last week, claims that the two Himalayan samples could “contribute to the biological foundation of the Yeti legend, especially if, as reported by the hunter who shot the Ladakh specimen, they behave more aggressively towards humans than known indigenous bear species.” Predictably, the scientific community has made light of such preliminary findings, but as Sykes, who will release a book on the Yetis this fall and head to the Himalayas after, writes in the paper, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.