A better understanding of the legends associated with the Yeti offers a study of the genetic history of the rare Himalayan bears.
Among the snowy peaks of Nepal and Tibet, there is a story about a mysterious ape-like creature called the Yeti. A huge human figure covered with furry fur continues to excite the imagination of many seekers of mysterious mysteries.
In 1951, English explorer Eric Shipton, looking for an alternative route to Everest, found footprints that looked like hominoid footprints. He took a picture, and the secret of the yeti (as the Sherpas call "wild man") penetrated and spread throughout the world. Daniel Taylor (author of The Yeti: An Ecology of Mystery, has been looking for signs of this "hideous snowman" in the high Himalayas since childhood.
Back at home in West Virginia, Taylor explained that the footprints themselves and their search ultimately led to the creation of the Makalu-Barun National Park in Nepal, and why, in an era when we are out of touch with nature, we must believe in its secrets.
In the summer of 2016, Mark Evans' documentary Yeti: Myth - Beast or Man was released, where he takes these conflicting arguments and forges an almost serious documentary about the existence of an ape-like creature from them.
In November 2017, Proceeding of the Royal Society B published DNA analysis studies of several alleged Yeti specimens, including hair, teeth, fur, and feces.
This analysis showed that the stories that were built on these samples are based on real animals roaming the high mountains. They are the best proof that the Yeti legend is rooted in the existence of the Himalayan and brown bears.
Study leader Charlotte Lindqvist of the University of Buffalo, New York, and her team examined nine specimens of Himalayan Yeti from museums and private collections. One of them was a tooth from a stuffed animal taken from the Reinhold Messner Mining Museum in Italy. There was also a piece of skin from the alleged hand of a yeti, which became a shrine in the monastery. Their detailed DNA work shows that the tooth was taken from a domestic dog, while the rest of the samples clearly belonged to the Himalayan and Tibetan subspecies of the brown bear and the Asiatic black bear. This "proof" of the yeti's existence has been used for a very long time.
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“Analyzing yeti samples and demonstrating that most of them come from bears provide a link between the myths of a rare wild man and a real creature that can also be dangerous,” says Ross Barnett, a biologist and ancient DNA expert at Durham University in the UK. …
The work also allowed the team to create a new family tree of vulnerable Asian bear subspecies that could prove useful in protecting rare animals. But even with more evidence and data from researchers, the legend of the Yeti is likely to live on.
"You cannot debunk the myth with mundane facts," says Ross Barnett. "As long as the stories are told and retelled, the footprints of the yeti will appear and melt in the snow, the stories about the yeti will exist!"
By John Pickrell. Translation - Marina Filippova
