This is a

is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Karen Hopkins.

The Yeti, also known as the abominable snowman.

It's a legendary primate some people believe exists in the Himalayas and adjacent frozen lands.

But what do you get when you use modern DNA techniques to analyze bodily samples allegedly left by Yetis?

Well, eight times out of nine, you wind up with the genetic signature of your non-abominable

neighborhood bear.

These unmysterious results are revealed in the proceedings of the Royal Society B.

This new study is not the first to examine DNA extracted from samples allegedly derived from

Yetis.

Analysis of short DNA fragments from a pair of samples collected in India and Bhutan

matched that of an ancient polar bear bone.

That 2014 finding raised the possibility that the abominable snowman could actually be a previously unrecognized bear species,

or even some sort of hybrid brown bear polar bear that wanders the Tibetan plateau.

In the current study, researchers conducted a more comprehensive comparison of DNA from 24 samples, including 9 that supposedly came from Yetties.

These specimens collected from the field or borrowed from museums,

included bits of hair, bone, skin, and scat. Eight of these nine Yeti samples

were identified as actually coming from the Asian black bears, Himalayan brown bears, and Tibetan brown bears that call this remote region home.

But what about that ninth sample?

Yeah, it was from a dog, the abominable phido, maybe. On the serious side, the analysis

did address a mystery of a more scientific nature regarding the evolution of these local bear populations.

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