Last year, in a study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Bryan C. Sykes of Institute of Human Genetics, Wolfson College, University of Oxford and co-authors analyzed hair samples attributed to “anomalous primates”. Yetis, bigfoot and other such mythological creatures are all considered anomalous primates.

The researchers claimed that the DNA contained in two samples from the Himalayas had a 100 percent match with an polar bear species, which became extinct 40,000 years ago. The researchers concluded that there must still be an unknown bear species roaming the Himalayas.

Now, in a paper published in ZooKeys, a US zoologist and Venezuelan evolutionary biologist have reexamined the evidence for the unknown bear.

It is not the first time that Sykes paper has gotten a second look. In another paper, also in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, C. J. Edwards of the Research Laboratory for Archaeology, University of Oxford and R. Barnett of the Natural History Museum of Denmark showed that the sample had come from a modern day Alaskan polar bear and not from the extinct asian species. They said, however, that the sample could have been misleading because of degradation of the genetic material.

“Once they had determined that two of their samples were a match to a polar bear, they should have run further analyses on the extracted DNA to look at other regions of the mitochondrial genome [DNA passed down by the mother] in order to double-check this controversial result,” Edwards, told Live Science.

“Instead, after (incorrectly) establishing a direct link to a 40,000-year-old polar bear sequence, they then used this misinformation in the publicity for the paper,” Edwards told Live Science in an email.

Despite that study, Sykes and his co-authors have maintained the validity of their findings and that the samples originated from an unknown species of Himalayan bear.

In their study, Eliécer E. Gutiérrez of the Smithsonian Institution and Ronald H. Pine of the Biodiversity Institute and the Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas concluded that the genetic variation in brown bears makes it impossible to assign with 100 percent certainty to either Sykes unknown Himalayan bear or Edwards and Barnett’s polar bear.

Because of genetic overlap, the researchers claim, the material could have come from either one. However, because brown bears live in the Himalayas, Gutiérrez and Pine suspect that the material came from nothing more exotic than Himalayan brown bears.

“We made this discovery that basically that fragment of DNA is not informative to tell apart two species of bears: the brown bear and [modern-day Alaskan] polar bear,” said Gutiérrez.

Sykes, who was contacted via email by Live Science is still not convinced.

“What mattered most to us was that these two hairs were definitely not from unknown primates. The explanation by Gutiérrez and [Ronald] Pine might be right, or it might not be,” he said.

Sykes added that his book, “The Nature of the Beast”, will be published on April 9 and said that it will contain additional information about his research.

Polar bears are directly descended from brown bears, splitting off from their darker cousins only within the last half-a-million years. According to Elizabeth Pennisi, staff writer for Science, the bears are still so closely related that they can interbreed.