Another blow to the legend of the "bigfoot"
Geneticists have exposed the Yeti
Kirill Stasevich, "Science and Life"
Yeti, bigfoot, bigfoot, sasquatch – all these are names for a mysterious humanoid creature of large stature, covered with thick fur and moving on two legs. He has been seen in forests and mountains, in the Himalayas, Altai and North America, and, according to eyewitnesses, he looks either like a giant ape from gigantopithecus (which died out a million years ago), or as a hybrid of Neanderthal and Denisov man, two extinct species of ancient people.
Despite the colossal number of stories about bigfoot, science almost does not deal with them (not counting cryptozoology, the scientific nature of which is in great doubt). Usually scientists dismiss bigfoot as an ordinary fake, and they have every reason to do so. What is worth, for example, the case of 2008, when a man-made mixture of possums and gorillas was recognized in another yeti from the state of Georgia. On the other hand, fans of bigfoot believe that there are "real" samples among the fakes, and that serious science simply does not pay due attention to this issue.
And so Bryan Sykes from Oxford, together with colleagues from Switzerland, Germany, France and the USA, finally decided to close the question of the authenticity of the bigfoot. To begin with, they collected wool samples attributed to the Yeti – there were 57 of them. Samples were sent by both museums and individual enthusiasts from all over the world, including from Russia and India. The age of the samples was very different, some had been stored for 50 years.
At the first stage of the work, the researchers immediately discarded what was simply not wool, that is, all sorts of vegetable and artificial fibers. The remaining 37 samples were subjected to genetic analysis. A particular difficulty was that the yeti's coat was heavily contaminated with ordinary human DNA. (The reason for the contamination is quite clear, the samples were simply captured by hand.) Not all DNA was analyzed, but only the one that encodes the ribosomal RNA of mitochondria – it is often used to identify biological species.
Seven samples again had to be discarded, it was impossible to get enough DNA from them to identify the species. The remaining thirty, as the authors of the work Genetic analysis of hair samples attributed to yeti, bigfoot and other abnormal primates, published in the open access in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, belonged to anyone, but not to an "unknown humanoid primate." Among those whose wool passed as yeti wool were cows, horses, raccoons, humans, deer, coyotes, porcupines and even the black–haired tapir - the only one of the tapirs living in Asia. Two samples, however, turned out to be quite curious. The DNA of polar bears was found in them, but the samples were from Bhutan, and one of them definitely belonged to a real bear killed 40 years ago. Perhaps the current Himalayan bears (or some of their populations) have among their ancestors ancient polar bears, which then completely disappeared here. (By the way, people living in the Himalayas use as many as three words to refer to different types of bigfoot, and one means a bear at the same time.) ScienceNOW writes briefly about the results of the study: 'Bigfoot' samples analyzed in lab.
Of course, one should not assume that such "yeti samples" are the result of deliberate fraud. Our psychology is a complicated thing, and belief in a mythical creature can greatly influence a person's perception: it may really seem to us that we have seen something like this, so then we will give the wool found at the scene as proof of the existence of a yeti. Well, in this case, the latest methods of genetic analysis turn out to be very useful; the fact that the results of the work were published in a respected scientific journal adds weight to them.
However, real Bigfoot fans are unlikely to be fooled by molecular genetics. Firstly, some samples, as it was said, were left without analysis due to their poor condition, "and maybe they are just..." – well, and so on. Secondly, and most importantly, for a real paranientific fan, scientific methods and respected journals have no meaning. So the search for the Yeti is likely to continue.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru04.07.2014