Himalayan Yeti could be just the Himalayan brown bear, according to researchers Eliécer Gutiérrez of the Smithsonian Institution and Ronald Pine, associated with the University of Kansas’ Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center. Last year, Oxford University’s Bryan Sykes claimed that his team conducted DNA tests on various animal hairs, which possibly belonged to yeti.

Two of the samples analyzed by the team led by Sykes last year, closely matched the DNA for paleolithic polar bear fossil dating to tens of thousands of years ago. The yeti legend has been continuing in the region for centuries.

One sample came from an aggressive animal walking on hind legs in the Himalayas, shot by and Indian hunter, 40 years back. The second sample was taken from a high-altitude bamboo forest in Bhutan.

The new study has been published journal Zookeys. The research team looked more closely at the gene fragment that Sykes and his team examined. Eliécer Gutiérrez said, "There is essentially no reason to believe that they [the hairs] belong to a species other than the brown bear."

Co-author for the study published in 2014, Ceiridwen Edwards said, "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."