Yeti Debate: There's No Such Thing as Yeti Says New Study

Last year, in a study, researchers analyzed hair samples attributed to "anomalous primates" also known as Yeti, bigfoot. However, now a new study says the hair used in the previous study did not come from a mysterious animal but from a Himalayan brown bear.

"There is essentially no reason to believe that they [the hairs] belong to a species other than the brown bear," said one the new study's researchers, Eliécer Gutiérrez, a postdoctoral fellow of evolutionary biology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

Researchers re-examined the study reported in 2014 and concluded that the linked "yeti" hair samples to the jawbone of an ancient polar bear that lived in Norway. Researchers added that it's likely the hairs came from "a previously unrecognized bear species," living in the Himalayas.

Probably this unknown bear inspired the legend of the yeti, researchers said in the study.

"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," Gutiérrez told Live Science. The polar bear does not live in the Himalayas, so the hair samples likely belong to the Himalayan brown bear, he said.

The study was published online in the journal ZooKeys.