Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: I'm Lauren vogel Bomb, and you know everybody loves a
Speaker 1: good cryptid. If the classic creatures of legend and hearsay, well,
Speaker 1: the Locknus monster, for example, or sasquatch are too campy
Speaker 1: for your tastes, perhaps your interest would be piqued by
Speaker 1: the groot slang a giant snake with an elephant's head
Speaker 1: said to hang out in caves of northwestern South Africa,
Speaker 1: or the Yahwi, basically the big foot of the Australian outback,
Speaker 1: or the Mapingaree, a giant sloth like ape reportedly lurking
Speaker 1: in the Amazon rainforest on the border between Brazil and Bolivia.
Speaker 1: If your game to dive into the waters of cryptozoology,
Speaker 1: you'll be there, awhile because they are fathomless. Science, however,
Speaker 1: will rarely dive in there with you, but it has
Speaker 1: on occasion made an exception for the yetty. If you
Speaker 1: were to ask, hey, are the Yetti just a bunch
Speaker 1: of bears, genetics would say yes. The Yetti, or the
Speaker 1: great white abominable snowman of the Himalayas, is one of
Speaker 1: the world's most beloved cryptids. It's a major figure in
Speaker 1: the folklore of Nepal, and hikers are constantly reporting to
Speaker 1: have seen a giant, white, ape like creature stalking around
Speaker 1: the mountains. Some even claim to have brought home a
Speaker 1: piece of one of these beasts, a tuft of hair,
Speaker 1: a bone, some skin, a tooth, or some abominable dung.
Speaker 1: These Yetty souvenirs have made their way into museums and
Speaker 1: private collections over the years, and now nine of them
Speaker 1: formed the basis for a study investigating the reality behind
Speaker 1: the folk tales. The study, published in the Proceedings of
Speaker 1: the Royal Society b finds that of the alleged yetty
Speaker 1: bits genetically sequenced by the international team of researchers, all
Speaker 1: revealed themselves to be of very commonplace origin, eight bears
Speaker 1: and a dog. There was diversity in the species of bears.
Speaker 1: One Asian black bear was represented, one Himalayan brown bear,
Speaker 1: and six Tibetan brown bears. The researchers suggest that similar
Speaker 1: genetic studies should be able to help unravel other cryptid legends.
Speaker 1: Where previous genetic studies of possible cryptids looked only at
Speaker 1: mitochondrial DNA, this research team gave those cave bones and
Speaker 1: wads of hair. The full works applied PCR amplification, mitochondrial sequencing,
Speaker 1: mitochondrial genome assembly, and phylogenetic analysis. According to the researchers,
Speaker 1: this makes it the most rigorous analysis of anomalous or
Speaker 1: mythical hominid like creatures to date. The team also sequenced
Speaker 1: mitochondrial DNA of twenty three Asian bears and compared them
Speaker 1: with bears around the world. They found the Tibetan brown
Speaker 1: bear to be more closely related to American bears than
Speaker 1: they are to their neighbors, the Himalayan bear. In fact,
Speaker 1: the two species probably split along two separate evolutionary lineages
Speaker 1: around six hundred and fifty thousand years ago during a
Speaker 1: major ice age. And just in case you were wondering,
Speaker 1: who compiled the bear parts that the team used for
Speaker 1: their research, they were assembled by a Animal Planet team
Speaker 1: for a special titled Yetti or Nut, which explored the
Speaker 1: myths behind the monster. Today's episode was written by Jesplyin
Speaker 1: Shields and produced by Tyler Claang. For more on this
Speaker 1: and lots of other mythic topics, visit our home planet,
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works dot com.