Professor Bryan Sykes' tests on putative sasquatch and yeti DNA samples sent from around the world has yielded... not a lot. Even the specimens he thought most unusual are, it appears, brown bears.
You might say it's a little more interesting than that, given that the specimens most precisely matched a polar bear, which harkens back to when the two species were one. That's odd, given there haven't been any polars in the Himalayas forever (as in, never), and Sykes suggests there might be a subspecies that branched off just at the brown/polar split and has remained basically unchanged. So maybe there's something of real zoological interest. I hope so. But no yetis, no sasquatches, no new primates at all. That's kind of depressing, really.
Update: Here's a good recap of the latest by Loren Coleman. More information has come out about how and where these specimens were obtained.
I think we should wait for the paper to be released before making any conclusions. Rhettman Mullis is cautioning that we should wait, and he had assisted Sykes with the sample collection process.
ReplyDeleteYou should watch the documentary, it gives more info. He said it's not a brown bear or black bear or polar bear, it matched an ancient polar bear. Also that the yeti doesn't act like a bear so he thinks it might have unusual behavior. Like being more aggressive than the bears that root through your garbage. Perhaps with more of a tendency to walk on 2 feet - this might be intended to intimidate.
ReplyDeleteThe documentary is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc9uwhn2bdE