December 18, 2014
From Loren Coleman’s CryptoZooNews:
Bryan Sykes’ team was in error matching “Yeti” hair samples with a Pleistocene polar bear DNA. It was modern polar bear, instead. The information was published in the following comments to the original paper.
Himalayan ‘yeti’ DNA: polar bear or DNA degradation? A comment on ‘Genetic analysis of hair samples attributed to yeti’ by Sykes et al. (2014)
C. J. Edwards and R. Barnett
Proc. R. Soc. B February 7, 2015 282 20141712; doi:10.1098/rspb.2014.1712
A significant finding, they point out, is “that the two [Yeti] sequences” were incorrectly matched to “a Pleistocene fossil more than 40,000 BP of U. maritimus (polar bear).” Instead, the correct match is with “a modern U. maritimus individual from Diomede, Little Diomede Island, Alaska.”
For clarification, brown bears are Ursus arctos, polar bears are Ursus maritimus, and Himalayan brown bears are Ursus arctos isabellinus.
Sykes’ and his associates then replied:
Response to Edward and Barnett
Terry W. Melton, Michel Sartori, and Bryan C. Sykes
Proc. R. Soc. B February 7, 2015 282 20142434; doi:10.1098/rspb.2014.2434
In response, Sykes, et alii, agreed that their Yeti samples were not from the “jawbone of a Pleistocene polar bear Ursus maritimus, after all. They acknowledged the “matches were instead to a modern specimen of U. maritimus from the Diomede Islands in the Bering Sea reported in the same paper.”
Therefore, the entire conclusion that the two Yeti DNA samples were a 100% match to the possible polar bear-brown bear hybrid, the 40,000 year before present Pleistocene polar bear is wrong. That conclusion has to be thrown out.
Read the entire article here.
Read about the Sykes findings here on Cryptomundo.
Co-founder of Cryptomundo in 2005.
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