Bigfoot is Not Real: Oxford Researchers

Genetic analysis reveals that Yeti or Bigfoot is actually a myth.

University of Oxford researchers and colleagues examined several hair samples of the alleged Sasquatch. They found that the hair actually were of cows, pigs, humans and ancient polar bears.

The Abominable Snowman has been part of several folk tales, especially in the Himalayan regions. Researchers around the world are trying to find evidence that the Yeti exists. In 2011, the local administration of the Kemerovo region in the south of Siberia announced that the Snowman is real.

Now, researchers at the University of Oxford have analyzed the bits of hair that were considered to have come from the Yeti and have confirmed that the man-beast creature is just a myth.

"What happens a lot of the time is that somebody has what you might call a 'Bigfoot experience,'" said Bryan Sykes, a human geneticist at the University of Oxford, according to National Geographic. "They hear one howling, or throwing stones at them, or something like that. Then they see a clump of hair caught in a bush, and say 'Aha, that's come from the Bigfoot.'"

Sykes and team obtained 57 samples of "Yeti hair" from around the world, out of which one turned out to be fiber glass. The team then sorted out the most probable bits of Yeti hair and used genetic analysis methods to analyze the samples, Livescience reported.

Researchers compared mitochondrial DNA of the hair samples with the DNA in GenBank, which is an international database, covering over 300,000 organisms, National Geographic reported.

Researchers found that almost all of the hair samples were derived from known species such as cows, racoons, horses and even humans.

What's interesting about the study is that at least two hair samples that came from Himalayas - one from Bhutan and one from Ladakh, India - belonged to a relative of the polar bear. One of the animals was shot around four decades ago by a hunter, who claimed that the bear was being more aggressive than typical brown bears. The other hair sample came from a region that is considered as the home of the "migyhur," or the Bhutanese-version of Yeti, Livescience reported.

Not everyone is convinced that Bigfoot doesn't exist. Rhettman Mullis, a psychologist who runs the Bigfootology.com website, said that more research needs to be done to find Yeti, according to Livescience.