“That would normally be too slim a margin to launch a major study,” Sykes said, “but I did think there was just a chance we would uncover something extraordinary.”

What he hoped for was less the abominable snowman of legend than evidence for a surviving Neanderthal, which some say could be the origin of yeti stories.

He found neither. However, the team, which publishes its findings in this week’s Proceedings of the Royal Society, has found something almost equally extraordinary, in two samples of bear fur from Bhutan and the Indian Himalayas.