Sometimes in science, you solve one

Sometimes in science, you solve one mystery just to create another. So it goes with Bigfoot.

After creating a stir last October with preliminary results, an international research team has published an analysis of dozens of hair samples from mystery animals around the world. None reveal the existence of a yeti or Bigfoot, reports Bryan Sykes, an Oxford University geneticist well-known for his research on human evolution. But two hair samples point to a possible new and (you guessed it) mysterious species: a bear roaming the Himalayas that may be related to ancient polar bears.

Some Bigfoot hunters are thrilled anyway. “It’s quite exciting,” says Loren Coleman, director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine. “This definitely shows there’s DNA in the Himalayas area of an unknown bear,” says Coleman, who embraces the use of a scientific approach to identifying creatures known only from legend. In 2013 his museum even named Sykes cryptozoologist of the year. (Crytozoologists search for animals unknown to science.)

Sykes says he started the project because he was “slightly irritated” that cryptozoologists kept saying they’ve been rejected by mainstream science. At the time, he was perfecting a technique for extracting mitochondrial DNA from a single hair shaft. “I realized I could do a proper scientific study,” he says. “I wasn’t looking for a yeti or anything like that. I was just going to do a scientific review of the evidence.”

And a less mainstream question lurked at the fringes of Sykes’ thoughts: “I’ve always been interested to know whether the Neanderthals and other types of humans became extinct,” he says. Having studied the DNA of ancient human relatives, he was fascinated by the idea that mysterious large mammals reported around the world might be tiny remnant pockets of some human relative. He decided to analyze the DNA of purported yeti samples, thinking there was maybe a 5 percent chance that he would find something interesting, maybe a new mammal species. And maybe a tiny sliver of a chance he’d find something even more surprising.

So in 2012 Sykes and his colleague Michel Sartori of the Museum of Zoology in Lausanne, Switzerland, posted a call for hair and other samples thought to be from yetis, Bigfoot or any other “cryptid” species unknown to science. The researchers would compare stretches of DNA to known species in the GenBank database, which catalogs thousands of species.

In came the hairs. There were hairs from famous expeditions, including a trek by Sir Edmund Hillary, hairs from museums, Buddhist relics, and, Sykes says, “quite a lot of material from Bigfoot enthusiasts in the United States.” Sykes whittled down 95 samples to 37 that were most interesting based on the circumstances of their collection.

Of those 37, the team was able to extract DNA from 30. “A lot of them turned out to be very ordinary animals in their natural habitats,” Sykes says. As the team reports July 1 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, supposed yeti and bigfoot samples turned out to come from bears (brown, black and polar), horses, raccoons, one human, some canines (the test didn’t narrow down if they were wolves or dogs), cows, sheep, a North American porcupine, a Malaysian tapir and a serow, which is a known animal similar to a goat or antelope.

But two hair samples from the Himalayas were a surprise. These hairs, both brownish in color, perfectly matched a short stretch of DNA once extracted from the jawbone of a 40,000-year-old polar bear. The hairs did not match modern polar bears. One hair came from an animal shot 40 years ago in Ladakh, India, by a hunter who reported that it behaved differently from typical brown bears. The other was collected about 10 years ago in Bhutan, 600 to 800 miles from Ladakh.

The researchers’ best guess is that the hairs are from either an unknown bear species or a hybrid of a brown bear and a polar bear. Such hybrids are known in the Arctic, but genetically resemble modern, rather than ancient, polar bears. If there’s a Himalayan hybrid, it might have descended from a different, long-ago liaison between the species. But since the match between the two hairs and the ancient polar bear resulted from a fragment just 104 DNA letters long, the result is preliminary, and the team hopes to do further analysis. Sykes is even planning an expedition to Ladakh to search for live bears.

“They’re from opposite ends of the Himalayas, so it’s reasonable to imagine that there might be some still alive in between,” Sykes says. He doesn’t think the samples are a hoax, since they were collected decades and hundreds of miles apart and were provided to Sykes by different sources. Plus, only the ancient jawbone is a genetic match.

If there is a previously unknown bear species living in the Himalayas, it may be what people there have seen and reported as a yeti. Coleman says that would be consistent with those reports. “They’re always brown,” he says. The idea o

Kết quả (Việt) 1:

Sometimes in science, you solve one mystery just to create another. So it goes with Bigfoot.After creating a stir last October with preliminary results, an international research team has published an analysis of dozens of hair samples from mystery animals around the world. None reveal the existence of a yeti or Bigfoot, reports Bryan Sykes, an Oxford University geneticist well-known for his research on human evolution. But two hair samples point to a possible new and (you guessed it) mysterious species: a bear roaming the Himalayas that may be related to ancient polar bears.Some Bigfoot hunters are thrilled anyway. “It’s quite exciting,” says Loren Coleman, director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine. “This definitely shows there’s DNA in the Himalayas area of an unknown bear,” says Coleman, who embraces the use of a scientific approach to identifying creatures known only from legend. In 2013 his museum even named Sykes cryptozoologist of the year. (Crytozoologists search for animals unknown to science.)Sykes says he started the project because he was “slightly irritated” that cryptozoologists kept saying they’ve been rejected by mainstream science. At the time, he was perfecting a technique for extracting mitochondrial DNA from a single hair shaft. “I realized I could do a proper scientific study,” he says. “I wasn’t looking for a yeti or anything like that. I was just going to do a scientific review of the evidence.”Và một ít câu hỏi chính lurked ở rìa Sykes' suy nghĩ: "Tôi đã luôn luôn được quan tâm để biết liệu những người Neanderthal và các loại khác của con người đã tuyệt chủng," ông nói. Có nghiên cứu ADN của người thân của con người cổ xưa, ông đã bị cuốn hút bởi những ý tưởng rằng bí ẩn động vật có vú lớn báo cáo trên thế giới có thể là túi nhỏ tàn tích của một số tương đối của con người. Ông quyết định phân tích DNA của yeti đích xấu mẫu, suy nghĩ có lẽ là một cơ hội 5 phần trăm mà ông muốn tìm một cái gì đó thú vị, có lẽ một loài động vật có vú mới. Và có lẽ một mảnh nhỏ của một cơ hội ông sẽ tìm kiếm một cái gì đó thậm chí còn đáng ngạc nhiên.Vì vậy vào năm 2012 Sykes và các đồng nghiệp của ông Michel Sartori Museum of Zoology tại Lausanne, Thụy sĩ, đăng một cuộc gọi cho mái tóc và các mẫu khác được cho là từ yetis, Bigfoot hay bất kỳ "cryptid" các loài khác không biết đến khoa học. Các nhà nghiên cứu sẽ so sánh trải dài của DNA để loài được biết đến trong cơ sở dữ liệu GenBank, những catalog hàng ngàn loài.Trong đến các sợi lông. Có các sợi lông từ thám hiểm nổi tiếng, bao gồm cả một trek bởi Sir Edmund Hillary, lông từ viện bảo tàng, di tích Phật giáo, và, Sykes nói, "khá nhiều tài liệu từ những người đam mê Bigfoot ở Hoa Kỳ." Sykes whittled xuống 95 mẫu 37 đã được thú vị nhất dựa trên hoàn cảnh của bộ sưu tập của họ.Of those 37, the team was able to extract DNA from 30. “A lot of them turned out to be very ordinary animals in their natural habitats,” Sykes says. As the team reports July 1 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, supposed yeti and bigfoot samples turned out to come from bears (brown, black and polar), horses, raccoons, one human, some canines (the test didn’t narrow down if they were wolves or dogs), cows, sheep, a North American porcupine, a Malaysian tapir and a serow, which is a known animal similar to a goat or antelope.But two hair samples from the Himalayas were a surprise. These hairs, both brownish in color, perfectly matched a short stretch of DNA once extracted from the jawbone of a 40,000-year-old polar bear. The hairs did not match modern polar bears. One hair came from an animal shot 40 years ago in Ladakh, India, by a hunter who reported that it behaved differently from typical brown bears. The other was collected about 10 years ago in Bhutan, 600 to 800 miles from Ladakh.The researchers’ best guess is that the hairs are from either an unknown bear species or a hybrid of a brown bear and a polar bear. Such hybrids are known in the Arctic, but genetically resemble modern, rather than ancient, polar bears. If there’s a Himalayan hybrid, it might have descended from a different, long-ago liaison between the species. But since the match between the two hairs and the ancient polar bear resulted from a fragment just 104 DNA letters long, the result is preliminary, and the team hopes to do further analysis. Sykes is even planning an expedition to Ladakh to search for live bears.“They’re from opposite ends of the Himalayas, so it’s reasonable to imagine that there might be some still alive in between,” Sykes says. He doesn’t think the samples are a hoax, since they were collected decades and hundreds of miles apart and were provided to Sykes by different sources. Plus, only the ancient jawbone is a genetic match.If there is a previously unknown bear species living in the Himalayas, it may be what people there have seen and reported as a yeti. Coleman says that would be consistent with those reports. “They’re always brown,” he says. The idea o