A researcher responds 
 
 Still, the new study doesn't discount his 2014 finding, said Sykes, a professor of human genetics at the University of Oxford. "Once they had determined that two of their samples were a match to a polar bear, they should have run further analyses on the extracted DNA to look at other regions of the mitochondrial genome [DNA passed down by the mother] in order to double-check this controversial result," said one of the letter's authors, Ceiridwen Edwards, a researcher in ancient DNA studies at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. But now, scientists have found the hair samples used in that study didn't come from a mysterious animal, but rather from the Himalayan brown bear. He and a colleague looked up the genetic sequence of the two hair samples in GenBank, a database of publicly available DNA sequences. The scientists found that he had a 100% match with a sample from an ancient polar bear jawbone found in Svalbard, Norway, that dates back to between 40,000 and 120,000 years ago - a time when the polar bear and closely-related brown bear were separating as different species. "There is essentially no reason to believe that they [the hairs] belong to a species other than the brown bear," said one the new study's researchers, Eliécer Gutiérrez, a postdoctoral fellow of evolutionary biology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. 
 
 Gutiérrez and a colleague re-examined a finding reported in 2014 in which geneticist Bryan Sykes and his colleagues looked at two hair samples from the Himalayan region: One sample came from an aggressive animal walking on its hind legs that was shot by a hunter about 40 years ago in northern India; the other had been found in Bhutan in a high-altitude bamboo forest, according to that study, published in the journal the Proceedings of The Royal Society B. In fact, the species may have been a hybrid descendent of U. maritimus and the brown bear (Ursus arctos) of the Himalayas, the researchers said. The yeti, a legendary shaggy, bipedal beast from the Himalayas, made headlines last year when a geneticist said he had solved the mystery of its origins. Previously, it was believed that today's polar bears were most closely related to brown bears living on islands off the coast of Alaska.
– Research led by an Oxford scientist has suggested there could be something to legends of the yeti, even if it's not quite the creature legends would suggest. Bryan Sykes has argued, based on genetic analysis, that two hair samples collected by yeti enthusiasts in the Himalayas could indeed point to an animal we didn't know existed today, though it would be something like an ancient polar bear rather than something like Bigfoot. But Eliécer E. Gutiérrez of the Smithsonian Institution and Ronald Pine at the University of Kansas are now raining—or perhaps snowing—on Sykes' parade, NBC News reports. They write in a study at ZooKeys that there's not enough information to suggest the hairs were from an unknown species: "We have concluded that there is no reason to believe that the two samples came from anything other than Brown Bears." Gutiérrez and Pine were bothered by Sykes' use of just a "very short fragment" of the sequenced gene to arrive at his conclusion. LiveScience reports they determined the samples could have come from a brown bear or polar bear; based on the Himalayan location, the brown bear is the likely source, they maintain. Theirs is the second study to question Sykes' findings: The BBC reported in December that another group of researchers found that a brown bear subspecies was the source of the hairs. But Sykes isn't giving up just yet. He calls the new research "entirely statistical," noting "the only way forward is to find a living bear that matches the (genetic material) and study fresh material from it. Which involves getting off your butt, not an activity I usually associate with desk-bound molecular taxonomists," he tells NBC. Read more on where Sykes got his samples.