Long Mystery about Yeti’s solved :'Yeti finger' turns out to be human ~ Technology Update

Scottish scientists have analyzed the DNA of a mummified finger claimed to belong to a yeti.

The finger's about three and a half inches long and blackened, with a long nail, It was recently rediscovered at the Royal College of Surgeons in London during cataloging.

It was brought back from Nepal in the 1950s - smuggled out of the country with the help of actor James Stewart. It had been removed from what's known as the Pangboche Hand, claimed to be the hand of a yeti, and kept in a temple.

An artist's impression of what the mythical Yeti would look like

Explorer Peter Byrne was able to get permission from the temple to remove one finger in secret - which was then smuggled back to

Britain

in Stewart's wife's lingerie case. There is a myth that during heavy snowstorms, Yeti can be found only by travellers who listen for the monks’ ceremonial horns.

The walls are lined with traditional Nepalese paintings depicting the treacherous tracks to the monastery.

And among them are pictures of the legendary ape-like creature we refer to as the Yeti.

The Yeti' finger, pictured that was displayed at London's Royal College of Surgeons

This might seem fanciful until you learn that, for many years, a shriveled hand (about the size of an adult human’s, with long, fat fingers and curling nails) was also on display in the monastery — and revered by the monks, who believed it protected them from bad luck. The myth has it that the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, is a vast creature which inhabits the Himalayan regions of

Nepal

and

Tibet

, where tales about Yetis have been passed down through generations.

Fossil remains found there from the Pleistocene age (2,500,000 to 11,700 years ago) reveal skeletons of a creature called the Gigantopithecus, or great ape, which became extinct 300,000 years ago.

These towering primates reached about 10ft in height and weighed half a ton.

It is possible they lived alongside our human ancestors in what are now China, India and Vietnam. Yet the scientific community generally regards this species simply as a large, extinct ape — and the Yeti as nothing more than a legend.

Tales of the Meh-te, or ‘man bear’ as Yetis are known in Nepal, gained popular currency in the West only in the 1830s when the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal published British orientalist B.H. Hodgson’s account of a tall, two-legged creature covered with dark hair that he claimed to have seen while trekking in Nepal.

However, the finger's now been analyzed by scientists at Edinburghzoo - who have concluded that it's actually human.

"We had to stitch it together. We had several fragments that we put into one big sequence and then we matched that against the database and we found human DNA," Dr Rob Ogden, of the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland told the BBC, which has made a documentary about the tests.

Actor Jimmy Stewart

"So it wasn't too surprising but it was obviously slightly disappointing that you hadn't discovered something brand new. Human was what we were expecting and human is what we got."

The team says it's very similar to known human DNA sequences from that region of Asia, and could have belonged to a long-ago monk. The Royal College of Surgeons says it's happy to return the finger to the monastery.