Dr. Bryan Sykes’ paper on the results of his wide-ranging “Yeti hairs study” were released from embargo at 7 pm Eastern, Tuesday night, July 1. Various mainstream media reporters, who had done their homework, were ready with thoughtful releases on the news.
What some of the early stories are revealing is a notable depth of respect for the work of cryptozoologists. Let me share a few extracts from these articles.
Serena Altschul and Loren Coleman discuss cryptozoology on CBS Sunday Morning.
Alan Boyle’s “Was It a Yeti? Bigfoot? Hair DNA Reveals Monsters’ True Identity,” from NBC News, notes:
Loren Coleman, director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine, said he wasn’t disappointed that Sykes failed to confirm Bigfoot. In an email to NBC News, Coleman said Sykes’ method was “the correct way to do cryptozoology science.”
“Gone are the Victorian days of stomping about jungles and forests to shoot animals to prove they exist,” Coleman said. “We can do verifications through testing for the DNA in hair, fecal and other physical samples found in conjunction with sightings of and encounters with possible new animals. Follow-ups then can be made in the field to obtain photographic evidence and further blood samples from living animals.”
Norman MacLeod, a paleontologist at London’s Natural History Museum, struck a similar tone in a commentary published by the Proceedings of the Royal Society B — and in an email sent to NBC News.
“Science is not biased against the identification of cryptid species,” MacLeod said. “It simply suspends judgment until unambiguous positive evidence is produced.”
For his part, Sykes said he hoped Coleman and other cryptozoologists would be taken more seriously. “They have been, I think, quite badly treated by scientists over the past 50 years,” he said.
Sykes took it as an honor that he was named Cryptozoologist of the Year as well as Bigfooter of the Year for 2013, thanks to his Yeti report. “The next step is the Nobel Prize,” he joked.
Traci Watson in “Bigfoot claims stepped on by new hair analysis,” for USA Today, despite the headline writer’s sarcasm, shares that
[Derek] Randles and foremost “cryptozoologist” Loren Coleman, director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine, say they’re happy to have reputable scientists looking at the evidence. And scientists who aren’t involved with the research don’t necessarily scoff.
“The proper scientific point of view is not to dismiss any hypothesis out of hand but simply to subject it to testing,” says Norman MacLeod of The Natural History Museum in London, author of an accompanying commentary on the research. He says it’s still possible that something is out there, a view shared by Sykes.
“Rather than thinking ‘I’ve disproved the yeti and Bigfoot and it’s all a load of nonsense,’ … I was convinced (eyewitnesses) had seen something, more than I was when I started,” he says.
Erika Engelhaupt in “Finally, some solid science on Bigfoot,” in Science News, strikes a similar theme, when she writes,
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.)
And later,
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 of a white “abominable snowman” came from TV shows like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
Publishing data in a respected, peer-reviewed journal is a big step for cryptozoology, even if it means finding out that yetis don’t exist. In fact, especially if it means finding out that yetis don’t exist. By subjecting samples to genetic testing, Bigfootologists risk dashing their hopes. And any scientist taking on the task may risk his or her reputation. (Sykes says he wasn’t worried what colleagues would think of his new pursuit: “I’m in the cocktail hour of my career.”)
Maybe more scientists would be willing to test “cryptid” samples, but it takes money and time. No scientist working at a university or lab capable of genetic analysis has “testing Bigfoot samples” in their job description, it’s probably safe to say. Plus, it cost Sykes $2,000 to analyze each ‘yeti’ DNA sample, and not many Bigfoot enthusiasts are keen to pay. Part of Sykes’ work was paid for by a filmmaker, but he paid for the rest himself (and points out that no government funding was used).
Finding a new bear rather than a humanlike primate may be a letdown for some Bigfootologists. But not Loren Coleman. “I’m not disappointed. The whole role of science is to keep searching. We need to have patience,” he says.
And Sykes points out that he hasn’t actually disproven that the animals exist. There’s always some chance, however small, that the right sample just hasn’t been collected. Now, he says, Bigfoot chasers “can go back into the forest knowing that if they get a genuine sample it can be identified, and to a standard that everyone will accept.”
And if the next round of samples don’t turn up yetis, or the next after that, so be it. Maybe we’ll find something interesting anyway, like more new bears. Cryptozoologists like to point to the weirdly striped okapi that was once thought to be mythical. And then there are the recent discoveries of the lesula and olinguito.
Bryan Sykes’ new book on his project and his finding is The Yeti Enigma, due September 25, 2014.
The Daily Telegraph was one of the first newspapers in the UK to publish a summary of the Dr. Bryan Sykes paper on his Yeti hair study:
A scientist who has devoted much of his career to trying to establish the truth behind the yeti has discovered that the abominable snowman is probably just a large, aggressive bear.
Bryan Sykes, a professor of genetics at Oxford University, and his team analysed 57 “yeti hair” samples and found most were not hair at all, or belonged to horses, dogs and even a human.
Two of the samples, however, sprung a surprise, showing a 100 per cent match with polar bear DNA from 40,000 years ago, suggesting a hybrid of polar bears and brown bears may exist in the Himalayas.
Scientists at the Natural History Museum in London said Prof Sykes’s results “neither prove nor disprove the existence of yetis” but simply eliminate some hair samples from further consideration as evidence.
Prof Sykes said genetic tests on two hair samples revealed a close match with bear DNA — but not any bear known to be living today, or in the Himalayas. However, they were identical to that from a polar bear fossil.
One golden-brown hair sample came from an animal shot by a hunter in Ladakh, India, 40 years ago. The other, reddish-brown hair, was recovered from a high altitude bamboo forest in Bhutan. The site was described as the nest of a “migyhur”, or Bhutanese yeti.
“If these bears are widely distributed in the Himalayas, they may well contribute to the biological foundation of the yeti legend, especially, if as reported by the hunter who shot the Ladakh specimen, they behave more aggressively towards humans than known indigenous bear species,” said Prof Sykes.
Bryan Sykes, a professor of genetics at Oxford University
In the first study of its kind, scientists analysed hair specimens reported to have come from “anomalous primates” — hairy human-like beasts — including the yeti, Bigfoot from the United States and Almasty from Russia.
In almost every case they had easily explainable origins, such as the modern brown bear Ursus arctos, or other animals. However, two of the samples showed a match with polar bear DNA from the Pleistocene period, but not the present day.
There have been anecdotal reports of white bears in central Asia and the Himalayas, said the scientists. “It seems more likely that the two hairs reported here are from either a previously unrecognised bear species, or brown bear/polar bear hybrids.”
However, Prof Norman MacLeod, a palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum, said: “These results neither prove nor disprove the existence of yetis, bigfoots and other cryptids, including anomalous primates. What they do is eliminate certain hair samples from further consideration as evidence that such creatures exist.”
Prof Sykes is undeterred. “Bigfootologists and other enthusiasts seem to think that they’ve been rejected by science,” he said. “Science doesn’t accept or reject anything, all it does is examine the evidence and that is what I’m doing.”
The study was published in the journal Proceedings of The Royal Society B. [Click through to read the full report via open access.]
*Sigh*
http://www.theguardian.com/science/grrlscientist/2014/jul/02/genetics-evolution-dna-analysis-yeti-sasquatch-bigfoot-zoology-primates
I guess this was the ‘official’ release of the study, but unless I had a premonition 3-6 months ago, I definitely read this before. Not sure why this involved Bigfoot so much, I thought it was strictly a Yeti hair study (the book and TV program seem to be only about the Yeti). The famous mountain climber thought the Yeti was a bear as well. Hard to fathom an intelligent primate living strictly on the snow line, doesn’t sound like fun. For a bear … no problem. It gets harder to believe every year, but it sounds like our own Pacific Northwest, home to millions of people, is the habitat of an unknown human-like creature.
[...] Loren Coleman points out on his CryptoZoo News site that the news is hardly all bad for cryptozoology. Coleman notes the study itself and some of the news coverage – [...]
Hey Red Pill! Long time no see. Let’s examine some quotes from that link.
Note that Sykes published his peer-reviewed paper (not a flawless system, but the best we have) before coming out with a book.
At least the admission is made. Peer review can actually quash important new information because the “peers” aren’t ready for it yet, as Meldrum and Bindernagel and Mionczynski can attest.
Too often in cryptozoology, people do the reverse. Also too often, the science is sloppy: Sykes and colleagues dismiss the contaminated samples and the overall toxic mess of the Ketchum sasquatch DNA study.
No argument here either. Really, it’s impossible to make heads or tails of Ketchum; and it’s largely her fault. She made too much of the wrong kind of noise in advance; her presentation was chock full of flaws, including the wrong kind of response to critics; and, well, Melba, just what did you get the ‘samples’ from? We can’t see that, can we? But we know straight from your mouth that you’ve done lotsa hanging out with the Big Folk that you can’t prove are real. Submitted as science, by an alleged scientist, that is understandably gonna set scientists’ teeth on edge. I get it.
The new findings do not prove there is no sasquatch, yeti, etc., but they do prove no one has gotten a genuine hair sample, which does lengthen the odds against these putative primates. Sykes has taken the best-quality evidence primate hunters could supply him with and showed that almost all of it is irrelevant.
Bad wrong here. OK, up to “etc.” is correct. Otherwise, nothing of the sort has been done. We don’t know that “no one has gotten a genuine hair sample.” Many have been sent in; many have been thrown out, most without testing. Do we have only people’s word on that? Right, which means in all probability sloppy science by the testing labs, which is totally on them, unless one has a major propensity to call liars anyone speaking what might be uncomfortable truths. It sure isn’t scientific to label people liars when the evidence has been tossed or lost. The first Denisova sample was cut in two and sent to two labs; one has never been heard from again, so don’t tell me it doesn’t happen.
He has, though, established a database of results that will come in handy for identifying and future samples: negative findings do matter in science.
Or rather, positive findings of something else. No argument here. And of course, nothing can be said about samples that are either contaminated or for whatever reason yielded no usable DNA.
Whoops, Red Pill! I mixed a greeting with analysis of the link below your post.
Having read that one, I’ll just echo your review. Of course it has its brief moments. As the Chinese say, even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then…
^^^I meant of course “the link below jamesrav’s post.” “Having read that one” means the link within Red Pill’s post.
I’m feeling like Melba Ketchum at the moment. Good thing I wasn’t writing scientific papers today…;-p
rouz
“Bryan Sykes, a professor of genetics at Oxford University, and his team analysed 57 “yeti hair” samples and found most were not hair at all, or belonged to horses, dogs and even a human.”
I’m, European and more interested in European wildmen than in American Bigfoot, Himalayan Yeti etc. So I’d like to ask: How many of the samples, analysed by Bryan Sykes, he received from Russia. Russia has probably the most intensiv research in this field since many years – among such samples who could not determined, were samples from Russia too?
What about such hair samples from Kemerovo/Siberia (world press reported about) Takjikistan and the Caucasus for example – - Igor Burtsev talked about in Russian TV and declaired: We have many samples from different Russian regions (my Petersburg penfriend wrote me about) – - Russian TV reported not only one time that Yeti hair has been found in Russia and it was microscopic examined and the result: No animal, no men, but primate like…. Hair from these samples must exist yet in Russia! Has Bryan Sykes analyzed hair from especially such samples too? Or: why not?
I’m very thankfull for every information in this connection.
Best regards from Europe to all readers,
Luis B.