Sykes became an Oxford
lecturer in
molecular pathology in 1987. Hagelberg published, as Sykes would, on mtDNA's use in establishing prehistoric human population movements, and made high-profile strides in
forensic analysis of degraded genetic samples. Sykes received a
personal-chair professorship in
human genetics at Oxford in 1997. Modern autosomal genetic clustering is testament to this fact, as both modern and Iron Age British and Irish samples cluster genetically very closely with other North European populations, rather than Iberians,
Galicians, Basques, or those from the
south of France. Similar studies have concluded that the Anglo-Saxons, while not replacing the previous populations outright, may have contributed more to the gene pool in much of England than Sykes had claimed.
Asian and Pacific genetics Sykes used a similar approach to that in
The Seven Daughters of Eve to identify nine ancient (
Palaeolithic to
Jōmon period) "clan mothers" of Japanese ancestry, "all different from the seven European equivalents". While this work garnered some brief press attention, it did not culminate in a book, and has not had a significant impact in academic circles. More importantly, his Pacific mtDNA genetic sample collections and analyses in the 1990s demonstrated that
Polynesia and the rest of
Oceania were historically entirely populated from Asia, not (even in part) from the Americas. The latter idea – a notion of migration of people from South and Central American into the Pacifc, and extensive maritime trade between the regions – has never had solid evidence to support it, yet remained stubbornly popular in certain circles for over half a century, especially after being heavily promoted by adventurer
Thor Heyerdahl from 1938 onward in books, films, and on television. He conducted another similar survey in 2014, this time examining samples attributed not just to Yeti but also to
Bigfoot and other "anomalous primates". The study concluded that two of the 30 samples tested most closely resembled the genome of a
Palaeolithic polar bear, and that the other 28 were from living mammals. The samples were subsequently re-analysed by Ceiridwen Edwards and Ross Barnett. They concluded that the mutation that had led to the match with a polar bear was a damaged artefact, and suggested that the two hair samples were in fact from
Himalayan brown bears (
U. arctos isabellinus). These bears are known in parts of Nepal as
dzu-the (meaning 'cattle-bear'), and have been associated with the myth of the Yeti. Sykes and Melton acknowledged that their
GenBank search was in error but suggested that the hairs were instead a match to a modern
polar bear specimen "from the Diomede Islands in the Bering Sea reported in the same paper". They maintained that they did not see any sign of damage in their sequences and commented that they had "no reason to doubt the accuracy of these two sequences any more than the other 28 presented in the paper". Multiple further analyses, including replication of the single analysis conducted by Sykes and his team, were carried out in a study conducted by Eliécer E. Gutiérrez, a researcher at the
Smithsonian Institution, and Ronald H. Pine, affiliated with the
University of Kansas. All of these analyses found that the relevant genetic variation in brown bears makes it impossible to assign, with certainty, the Himalayan samples to either that species or to the polar bear. Because brown bears occur in the Himalayas, Gutiérrez and Pine stated that there is no reason to believe that the samples in question came from anything other than ordinary Himalayan brown bears. Despite the cold academic reception, and the hypothesis not panning out, Sykes's idea was not on-its-face implausible, as
brown × polar bear hybridization is well-documented elsewhere. ==Personal life==