Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff, I'm Lauren vogel Bomb, and you know everybody loves a
good cryptid. If the classic creatures of legend and hearsay, well, the Locknus monster, for example, or sasquatch are too campy for your tastes, perhaps your interest would be piqued by the groot slang a giant snake with an elephant's head said to hang out in caves of northwestern South Africa, or the Yahwi, basically the big foot of the Australian outback, or the Mapingaree, a giant sloth like ape reportedly lurking in the Amazon rainforest on the border between Brazil and Bolivia.
If your game to dive into the waters of cryptozoology, you'll be there, awhile because they are fathomless. Science, however, will rarely dive in there with you, but it has on occasion made an exception for the yetty. If you were to ask, hey, are the Yetti just a bunch of bears, genetics would say yes. The Yetti, or the great white abominable snowman of the Himalayas, is one of
the world's most beloved cryptids. It's a major figure in the folklore of Nepal, and hikers are constantly reporting to have seen a giant, white, ape like creature stalking around the mountains. Some even claim to have brought home a piece of one of these beasts, a tuft of hair, a bone, some skin, a tooth, or some abominable dung.
These Yetty souvenirs have made their way into museums and private collections over the years, and now nine of them formed the basis for a study investigating the reality behind the folk tales. The study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society b finds that of the alleged yetty bits genetically sequenced by the international team of researchers, all revealed themselves to be of very commonplace origin, eight bears and a dog. There was diversity in the species of bears.
One Asian black bear was represented, one Himalayan brown bear, and six Tibetan brown bears. The researchers suggest that similar genetic studies should be able to help unravel other cryptid legends. Where previous genetic studies of possible cryptids looked only at mitochondrial DNA, this research team gave those cave bones and wads of hair. The full works applied PCR amplification, mitochondrial sequencing,
mitochondrial genome assembly, and phylogenetic analysis. According to the researchers, this makes it the most rigorous analysis of anomalous or mythical hominid like creatures to date. The team also sequenced mitochondrial DNA of twenty three Asian bears and compared them with bears around the world. They found the Tibetan brown bear to be more closely related to American bears than
they are to their neighbors, the Himalayan bear. In fact, the two species probably split along two separate evolutionary lineages around six hundred and fifty thousand years ago during a major ice age. And just in case you were wondering, who compiled the bear parts that the team used for their research, they were assembled by a Animal Planet team for a special titled Yetti or Nut, which explored the myths behind the monster. Today's episode was written by Jesplyin
Shields and produced by Tyler Claang. For more on this and lots of other mythic topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.