A British scientist has linked supposed hair samples from the legendary Yeti, or "Abominable Snowman," to a breed of ancient Arctic bears that he says could have survived to the modern day—but other experts say the results need to be published before any conclusions can be drawn. 
 
 Bryan Sykes, a respected geneticist at Oxford University in the U.K., this week reported the findings of a yearlong project that aimed to rigorously test hair and tissue samples that were claimed to have belonged to the elusive creature. 
 
 "I put out a call for Yeti, Bigfoot, and Sasquatch hairs in 2012, and I received a good response from all over the world," Sykes told NBC News. 
 
 One of the most promising samples that Sykes received included hairs attributed to a Yeti mummy in the northern Indian region of Ladakh; the hairs were purportedly collected by a French mountaineer who was shown the corpse 40 years ago. Another sample was a single hair that was found about a decade ago in Bhutan, some 800 miles (1,290 kilometers) away from Ladakh. 
 
 According to Sykes, the DNA from these two samples matched the genetic signature of a polar bear jawbone that was found in the Norwegian Arctic in 2004. Scientists say the jawbone could be up to 120,000 years old. 
 
 Sykes's findings will be the focus of Bigfoot Files, a documentary series premiering on Britain's Channel 4 this Sunday. (A two-hour special will air in the U.S. on Sunday, November 17, at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT on the National Geographic Channel.) 
 
 Still Alive? 
 
 Sykes said the fact that the hair samples were found so far apart, and relatively recently, suggests the species that the hairs came from may still be alive. 
 
 "I can't imagine we managed to get samples from the only two 'snow bears' in the Himalayas," he told the Associated Press. 
 
 Sykes speculated that the creature could be a new bear species, or perhaps a hybrid of polar bears and brown bears. 
 
 "The next thing is [to] go there and find one," Sykes told the Associated Press. 
 
 Loren Coleman, director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine, said Sykes's finding could be the "number one story in cryptozoology"—the study of hidden, or unverified, animals—"for the decade." 
 
 Coleman, who also appears in the upcoming documentary, said he thinks Sykes's findings likely explain only one of the Yeti varieties that have been reported. 
 
 "That's one of the problems with the word 'Yeti,'" Coleman said. "It's an umbrella term for three different varieties. There's the small kind, there's a man-sized type, and then a larger one that is known as Dzu-Teh. I must assume what he's looking at are samples from the larger-sized one that many of us in the field have speculated was a form of bear." 
 
 If, as Sykes's findings suggest, the Dzu-Teh is indeed the same species of early polar bear that once roamed the Arctic, it is unlikely to have a white fur coat, as often shown in popular depictions of the Yeti, since it was one of the first polar bears to branch off from brown bears. 
 
 That, Coleman said, actually strengthens Sykes's case that the larger Yeti is an ancient polar bear species. 
 
 "It's one of the myths of the Abominable Snowman and Yeti that they're white," Coleman said. 
 
 "The native people actually describe them as brown and reddish-brown." 
 
 Conceivable 
 
 Brian Regal, a science historian at Kean University in New Jersey, called the possibility of an unidentified bear species living in the Himalayas "exciting," but said it will be difficult to definitively connect the hairs to the Yeti of legend. 
 
 "This is another disappointment for the cryptozoology community," Regal said. "Just because [Sykes] showed that this particular DNA sample is from a bear doesn't necessarily mean that's what people have been seeing. They may have been seeing bears; they may have been seeing something else." 
 
 Biologist Robert Rockwell, who has studied polar bears, said he thinks it's conceivable that a bear species has managed to survive in the Himalayas unnoticed. 
 
 "It is possible, as Asiatic black bears, brown bears, and even sun bears—or some odd combination—conceivably could or could have historically been in that general region. Since they are [bears], they too would share a lot of the DNA sequences found in the fossil cited," said Rockwell, who is at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. 
 
 "Could something like that be in that area and not be seen clearly or captured or collected? It is a huge area, much of which is not densely populated, and except for increasingly habituated individuals, most [bears] are pretty shy. And if there are not many of them, it is even more conceivable." 
 
 Need for Peer Review 
 
 But Rockwell said he will need to see Sykes's results published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal before he is convinced the hair samples indeed came from bears. 
 
 "The claim is based on a really small sample, and the DNA is likely degraded to some extent. Until the sequence data have been published, I am going to be rather skeptical," Rockwell said. 
 
 "So many critters share so much of their DNA that getting 'matches' can be an artifact of sampling and will certainly depend on precisely what region of DNA is being used." 
 
 Molecular biologist Charlotte Lindqvist expressed a similar sentiment. "I'd like to see the data published and scrutinized," said Lindqvist, who is with the State University of New York's University at Buffalo. She was part of the team that extracted DNA from the ancient polar bear jawbone that Sykes used in his genetic comparisons. 
 
 "Before that happens, it makes little sense to me to suggest any links between the 120,000-year-old polar bear and a bear (or Yeti) in the Himalayas," Lindqvist said in an email. 
 
 Sykes says he intends to publish his findings. "The project is still going on," he told NBC News, "and the idea is to publish these results in a scientific journal to bring it back into the realm of science." ||||| geograph.org.uk The quest for definitive proof of bigfoot, the towering man-like ape that reportedly walks on two legs and terrorizes loggers and campers in North America, has been well documented for decades. The search for his Russian counterpart is less well known. 
 
 A group of Russian enthusiasts says they have new evidence of the existence of a Russian bigfoot — and it was found just outside of Moscow. 
 
 On a table inside the capital's illustrious State Darwin Museum last month, surrounded by glass cases containing beetles and moths, lies the purported proof: a fragment of tree bark that appears to have been marked by a large primate. 
 
 The bark sample was taken by Andrei Stroganov, a biophysical technologist at Moscow's Agricultural Academy, from an uprooted two-meter-long tree trunk that he says had been planted in the earth and marked with horizontal scratches. Stroganov found the curiosity in July in a forested area near a railway line in the Solnechnogorsk district — just five kilometers from the Moscow satellite town of Zelenograd — while scouring the forests for signs of the Almas, as the Russian bigfoot is known, after hearing reports that such a creature had been spotted in the area. 
 
 "The Almas is cosmopolitan," jokes Stroganov in response to an expression of alarm at its apparent proximity to the capital. 
 
 "I am not worried: They are benevolent and need our protection." 
 
 Igor Burtsev, an athletic septuagenarian who has become Russia's most vocal publicist for Almas research and is also present in the Darwin Museum, concurs. He calls the as yet mythical creatures "Forest People" and sees them as a hybrid species, half-human and half-something unknown. 
 
 Stroganov has placed the tree bark behind Perspex glass, over which he has drawn measurements. He thinks the marks resemble a paw print measuring nine inches across. There are no thumb marks, nor are there the claw marks of a bear. 
 
 Stroganov takes swabs of the bark prints and, with Burtsev videoing the proceedings, secures them in small plastic folders. They will air-mail these to Alabama in the U.S., where the Russian-born researcher Vladimir Yamschekov will do a morphological study of the traces and check out any DNA. 
 
 Burtsev heads a closed online Russian-speaking community of researchers and investigators that includes members in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. They all share the belief that the Almas announces its presence with stick structures. 
 
 Burtsev has just returned from a 1,730-kilometer journey to the city of Miass in the Urals region of Chelyabinsk, where he stayed with someone who claimed to have seen a Almas and be able to show just such signs of the creature's habitats. 
 
 He was reluctant to discuss the details, saying only that he had seen "confirmation" of the Almas' presence there. 
 
 "There is more information on this than when I started 50 years ago," he said. "Then again, people have less time now and travel is more expensive. The bigfoot scene in America is bigger." 
 
 Indeed, the quest for definitive proof of bigfoot, the towering man-like ape that reportedly walks on two legs and terrorizes loggers and campers in North America, has been well documented for decades. The search for his Russian counterpart is less well known. 
 
 The Soviet government set up a "Almas Commission" in 1958 to conduct field work on the matter after Everest mountaineers returned with tales of the yeti. The commission was short-lived, but areas like the Urals, Siberia's Kemerovo region and the Caucasus became known as the stomping ground of the real-life Almas. 
 
 Burtsev, who lives with his daughter in a Moscow suburb, is waiting on a visa to visit America. There he will reconnect with bigfoot advocates such as Thom Cantrall and Randy Bisson, and hopes to generate interest in an English-language book he has written on the Kemerovo Almas. 
 
 Science joins the quest 
 
 Russia's yeti-hunters have not only allies abroad, but also those who argue against the Almas' existence. 
 
 Professor Bryan Sykes, a 67-year-old geneticist and fellow of Wolford College, Oxford, has written his own book debunking some purported evidence of the creature's existence. Sykes previously helped identify the bones of the last of the Romanovs, Russia's royal family murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918. Now, in "The Yeti Enigma," due out in September, he draws on the same expertise to look at alleged yeti evidence. He claims that all the 39 supposed yeti hairs and teeth samples that he tested came from ordinary animals. Sykes has also suggested that the Himalayan yeti is a species of polar bear. 
 
 Last October, Burtsev took on his nemesis in a TV series called "The Bigfoot Files" broadcast by the U.K.'s Channel 4. 
 
 The two men also clashed over a skull in Burtsev's possession believed to have belonged to the son of a "wild woman" who had been held in captivity in Mongolia 150 years ago. After testing some samples, Sykes hypothesised that she might have been a black African slave, or a descendant of a group of people who migrated to Mongolia from Africa thousands of years ago. Burtsev insists that the skull's shape is not that of an ordinary human. 
 
 Michael Trachtengerts, a colleague of Burtsev who also featured in the program, remains unswayed by Sykes' arguments against the existence of the yeti. 
 
 "The samples he tested were doubtful," he says over a recent lunch in a Moscow cafe. "Hairs from Siberia were identified as belonging to a North American brown bear! How is that possible?" 
 
 Trachtengerts, who has his own dual-language website on the Almas, remains optimistic that proof will soon be found. He is nearly 80. 
 
 Mission to America 
 
 
 
 While Burtsev waits for his U.S. visa, his collection of footprint casts — as well as the contentious skull — remain stashed away in a Moscow garage. Burtsev hopes to transfer them to a sanctuary in the form of the State Darwin Museum. 
 
 The museum has provided a haven for the Almas hunters since 1960. They gather there every month. This does not necessarily mean, however, that the museum officially believes in their cause. 
 
 "I specialize in birds, and haven't looked into this problem," says Vitaly Kontorshchikov, a staff member of the museum's ecology department who was present at the bark examination. 
 
 "However, we can say nothing until we have some real bone samples. No bones — no science," he said. 
 
 This leaves the usually garrulous Bourtsev silent. He merely offers a sphinx-like smile.
– People in the US have long been on the hunt for Bigfoot, just like those in Canada are in search of Sasquatch and the Himalayas lay claim to the Yeti. But did you know Russians have their own version of an extra large and hairy primate, the Almas? And now a researcher in Russia says he's found evidence in the form of a piece of bark that Almas not only exists but is wandering the forests on the outskirts of Moscow. "The Almas is cosmopolitan," Andrei Stroganov tells the Moscow Times. "I am not worried: They are benevolent and need our protection." The biophysical technologist at Moscow's prestigious Agricultural Academy says he found a piece of tree bark near Moscow that appears to have been marked by a large primate. He believes the horizontal scratches on the bark are from a paw print nine inches across, and there are no claw marks to indicate they came from a bear. Long in search of Almas proof, he also claims to have confirmed the presence of Almas during a recent visit to Chelyabinsk in the Urals, but declined to go into details. The next step is to send swabs of the bark prints to Alabama, where a Russian-born researcher will analyze any DNA found and do a morphological investigation. But one of Stroganov's Almas-hunting colleagues has previously been challenged by an Oxford geneticist who said last year that after putting out calls for Yeti, Bigfoot, and Sasquatch hairs in 2012, he performed DNA tests on the samples sent to him and they pointed to a bear—either a newly discovered species or some hybrid between brown and polar bears, reports National Geographic. Back in 1958, the Soviet government established a short-lived "Almas Commission" to look for the creature; nowadays, Almas is typically thought to roam the Kemerovo region of Siberia, the Caucasus, and the Urals. (Earlier this year, a Texas man claimed to have killed Bigfoot, but...)