The yeti: what the genetic testing actually found
Museums, monasteries and private collections held specimens said to be yeti. In 2017 researchers sequenced nine of them. Eight were bears. One was a dog.
Reports come from across the Himalaya and the Tibetan plateau, and long predate Western interest.
The yeti is the best-known cryptid outside North America, and unusually it has a testable evidence base: physical specimens, held in monasteries and collections, said to be remains of the animal.
That means it has been possible to do what almost no cryptid case allows — sequence the evidence and find out.
The evidence that existed
Footprints, most famously photographed by Eric Shipton on the Menlung glacier in 1951. The image is genuine as a photograph and the identification is the question — melting and refreezing enlarges and distorts tracks in snow, and a bear’s overlapping prints can produce a large composite shape.
And relics: a hand and a scalp at Pangboche monastery, hair and bone from other collections, samples gathered by expeditions.
What the testing found
A 2014 study analysed hair samples and reported matches to known bears, with one result initially suggested as an unknown bear lineage that later work did not support.
A more thorough 2017 study by Charlotte Lindqvist and colleagues sequenced nine putative yeti specimens from museums and private collections, including material from Pangboche.
Eight were bears — Himalayan brown bear, Tibetan brown bear and Asian black bear. One was a dog.
What that does and does not settle
It settles the specimens. Every physical item that has been tested and reported has come back as a known animal. There is no remaining sample in the public record that is unexplained.
It does not prove no animal exists, because you cannot prove that. But the position has changed: the yeti has moved from a claim with physical evidence to a claim whose physical evidence has been examined and found to be bears.
What the relics turned out to be about
Worth noting that the Pangboche relics were venerated objects in a monastery, not fraud. Their significance was religious, and the identification as yeti remains came substantially from Western expeditions arriving with an expectation.
Testing them was possible only because monasteries permitted it, which is a generosity rarely acknowledged in the coverage.
Join the discussion
Still open on this one:
- 01
Are there untested relics remaining?
Material is held in collections that have not been sampled. Each one is a testable question, which is more than most of this field offers.
Be the first to comment
Sources
Open them and check for yourself. Where a record is public, it is linked.
Natural History Museum collections
Natural History Museum, London
Evolutionary history of enigmatic bears in the Tibetan Plateau–Himalaya region
Lindqvist et al., Proceedings of the Royal Society B · 29 Nov 2017 · no public copy located
Related
Psychic Phenomena
The Nine: who — or what — were they?
On New Year’s Eve 1952, in a laboratory in Maine, a voice announced itself as one of nine. Over the next forty years it reached a credentialled scientist, a celebrity psychic, a bestselling book and the creator of Star Trek. This is what is documented, and what is not.
Psychic Phenomena
New Year’s Eve 1952: the first session with the Nine
The founding event of the whole Nine phenomenon happened in a Maine farmhouse on 31 December 1952. Here is what the record supports about that evening, and how much of the familiar account was written down much later.
Psychic Phenomena
D. G. Vinod: the man at the beginning of the Nine
Every version of the Nine story starts with Dr D. G. Vinod in a trance in Maine. He is also the person that story then almost entirely forgets. Why the first channel is the biggest hole in the record.
Psychic Phenomena
Andrija Puharich: the doctor who kept turning up
A qualified physician, an inventor with real patents, an army medical officer — and the constant in forty years of the strangest story in American parapsychology. Puharich is the reason the Nine keep touching institutions.
0 comments