Samples of hair believed to be from the abominable snowman (also called Yeti) are actually from an ancestor of the polar bear. The discovery raises the possibility that stories of an undiscovered giant primate living in the Himalayas may be based on large and aggressive, but reclusive, bears.
The samples closely matched the DNA from a polar bear fossil found on Svalbard, an island in the Russian Arctic, dating back 40,000 years to the Pleistocene period. Although the Himalayan ice field did not connect with the southern-most extent of the polar ice cap, it is conceivable that an ancestor Ursus maritimus could have crossed the gap in winter.
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