In attempting to break down the legend of the Yeti, two teams of scientists may have only grown it further.
According to Live Science, authors of a study published in the journal ZooKeys analyzed two hair samples suspected to belong to a Yeti and concluded they came from a Himalayan brown bear. However, a study from about a year ago suggested the legendary "Abominable Snowman" was a now-extinct polar bear from Norway.
One hair sample came from a bipedal bear-like animal a hunter shot 40 years ago. The previous study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, examined a sample found in a bamboo forest in Bhutan, India.
Both matched the description of the Yeti, though the two studies' findings did not exactly agree with one another.
"There is essentially no reason to believe that they [the hairs] belong to a species other than the brown bear," study co-author on the ZooKeys paper Eliécer Gutiérrez, a postdoctoral fellow of evolutionary biology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., told Live Science. "We made this discovery that basically that fragment of DNA is not informative to tell apart two species of bears: the brown bear and [modern-day Alaskan] polar bear."
Bryan Sykes, a genetics professor at Oxford University, was a researcher on the previous study that linked the Yeti hair sample to an ancient polar bear. His team recently acknowledged the new study and said there were some errors in their analysis.
"Importantly, for the thrust of the paper as a whole, the conclusion that these Himalayan 'yeti' samples were certainly not from a hitherto unknown primate is unaffected," his team told BBC News in a statement. "We stressed in the original paper that the true identity of this intriguing animal needs to be refined, preferably by sequence data from fresh tissue samples derived from a living specimen where DNA degradation is no longer a concern."
