For all of the grainy video footage, Bigfoot has never been revealed as anything more than a resilient hoax, and a new study only provides more evidence for the complete lack of evidence: after genetically testing 30 hair samples attributed to Bigfoot by museums and amateur hunters, a team of scientists was unable to match the samples to a new species, as USA Today reports. There were bears; there were dogs; there was a porcupine. But no Bigfoot, no yeti, no sasquatch.
What was originally identified as a yeti may have been an undiscovered species of bear
There was, however, a pair of anomalies. Two hair samples gathered from the Himalayas and tested by the scientists had a genetic match. The samples were related to a Paleolithic polar bear bone, dated to more than 100,000 years ago, that was discovered in the Arctic in 2004. What was originally identified as a yeti — the Nepalese version of the Bigfoot — may have been an undiscovered species of bear, possibly some kind of mix between a brown bear and a polar bear.
Those results are preliminary, though, and either way won't do much to assuage the Bigfoot aficionados who contributed samples to the study, which was published this week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. Last year, in fact, believers were hit with more unfortunate news when it turned out a study "proving" Bigfoot's existence seemed to rely on faulty methods — not that any science could fully extinguish the myth.