Apparently I was mistaken in some previous statements about the release date of Bryan Sykes’ Bigfoot  DNA results. I say this because I am seeing articles where Sykes is releasing some results. The Oxford Website does state:

Timetable
The project is divided into three phases.

SAMPLE SUBMISSION PHASE May – September 2012
DNA ANALYSIS PHASE September – November 2012
PUBLICATION PHASE November – December 2012

And this is what I have gone by, but apparently some results have been released early. If there are more to come, I would not guess at this point.

The Winner Is? Yes to hybrid,

But the hybrid is a bear.

According to The Province

DNA test proves Bigfoot is roaming Himalayas, says Oxford scientist
By Jasper Copping, The Daily Telegraph October 16, 2013

Professor Bryan Sykes has found a genetic match between two separate hair samples found in the upper reaches of mountains and a large bear that lived more than 40,000 years ago. The findings suggest that there are several “yetis” roaming the area.

The results were compared to other animals’ genomes stored on a database of all published DNA sequences. Prof Sykes found a 100 per cent match with a sample from an ancient polar bear jawbone found in Svalbard, Norway.

That specimen dated back at least 40,000 years, and probably 120,000 years — a time when the polar bear and the closely related brown bear were separating as different species. Prof Sykes believes that the yeti is a hybrid of the two bears.

Now many people are going to say this is positive proof that Bigfoot is just the fantasy born out of our own minds, and who can truthfully say yet they are incorrect. But the fact remains that the Sykes study has, obviously, only studied the samples in hand and proven what those samples are. The article is also careful to state that these results apply only to two hair samples, where Sykes himself has said:

We have collected and analyzed over thirty samples and results are being prepared for publication.

Ironically, in looking for proof of one cryptid, Sykes may have discovered another. What may be a Bergman’s Bear has been reported in remote regions of Siberia over the years and sounds very much like what is being described in the Sykes results.

The Bergman’s bear (Ursus arctos piscator) is an alleged and probably extinct subspecies of the brown bear that lived in the Kamchatka Peninsula. The bear was identified and named by Swedish zoologist Sten Bergman in 1920.

Bergman determined that the bear was a separate subspecies after examining a hide (which had fur very different from other local bears) and series of footprints, measuring 14.5 x 10 inches, which he judged to be much larger than other bears on Kamchatka.

Interest in the bear was revitalized in the 1960s. Hunter Rodion Sivolobov reported claims by Kamchatka natives of an unusually large bear they called either the Irkuiem (roughly meaning “trousers pulled down” due to the appearance of the bear’s hind legs), or the “God bear” due to its large size. Based on Sivobolov’s description, biologist N.K. Vereshchagin suggested that the God bear might be a relict Arctodus simus, a massive extinct bear.

Arctodus Simus, also referred to as the Short Faced Bear was a huge creature.

Size Comparison to other bears

It would seem that no matter which way you look at Sykes’ results, something that applies to discovery of a cryptid comes out of it, and a large cryptid at that.

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