How the legend of the Yeti, the abominable snowman, came about – 12/26/2023 – Science

The 1921 British Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition set out from India to find a route to the world’s highest mountain and, if possible, climb it.

But upon returning, the team had more to report than reconnaissance successes.

Interviewed by journalist Henry Newman, they said they found huge footprints in the snow.

The expedition leader, Charles Howard-Bury, concluded that they had been left by the footsteps of a wolf.

Local guides and porters, however, said they belonged to the legendary metoh-kangmi, which roughly translates to “snowman bear-man.”

Intrigued, Newman spoke to some of the Tibetans who saw the footprints. They mentioned stories of a mysterious and wild creature that roamed the Himalayas.

Fascinated, the journalist needed an attractive name for the newspapers, as a poor translation of metoh made him think they called him a “disgusting snowman”.

He invented something much more evocative: the abominable snowman.

And so, the legend of the Yeti — its Tibetan name — went global, capturing the imagination and inspiring more than a century of study, research and cryptozoological quests.

The furry, monkey-like biped comes in different shapes and sizes. It is sometimes considered to be much taller than a human and sometimes small but terribly strong.

Although he is depicted with white fur to blend into the snow-covered landscape, he can also be reddish brown and live in the Himalayan forests.

In film, the Yeti ranges from the murderous horror fantasy monster of “The Abominable Snowman” (1957) to the cuddly cave dweller of “Monsters, Inc..” (2001).

However, when it comes to evidence of the Yeti’s existence, the closest anyone has come are footprints – but not the ones Howard-Bury and her team said they saw.

During another British expedition that reconnoitred the routes of Everest 30 years later, in 1951, climbers Eric Shipton and Michael Ward saw strange footprints that ran approximately one mile at an altitude of more than 4,500 meters.

There were also signs of claw marks.

Shipton took several photos and the footprint was almost twice the size of a human.

These images of Shipton became icons of the 20th century’s fascination with the Yeti.

Traditional tales from the Himalayan region refer to the Yeti as a glacier spirit that brought luck to hunters, or as a creature that scared people from venturing too far into the mountains.

Such a creation was far from uncommon: today, the Yeti is part of a family of bipedal cryptids across the world, including the Sasquatch in North America, the Yowie in Australia, and the Mapinguari in the Amazon.

Behind the legend

Belief in the Yeti as a physical creature, of course, was established long before British explorers found its footprints.

It is said that when Alexander the Great invaded the Indian subcontinent in 326 BC, he demanded to see one, but the locals refused to show it, claiming it would not survive at low altitudes.

Over the centuries, the stories continued until different types of Yeti were formed (the archetypal Meh-teh, the smaller Teh-Ima, and the enormous Dzu-teh or Nyalm) and the legend became part of the region’s mythology.

The Yeti remained largely untouched (in fact, many local beliefs held that it would be a bad omen to see one) until the 20th century, which proved to be a fertile time for cryptozoology.

Two decades after journalist Henry Newman popularized the term “abominable snowman” in 1921, two travelers claimed to have seen “two black specks” moving through the Himalayan snow.

Then Shipton’s 1951 images, aided by the conquest of Everest two years later, drew attention like never before to the region and the Yeti that may lurk there.

And the interest was great.

In 1959, the US embassy in Kathmandu even issued a memorandum to the State Department in Washington DC about groups of Yeti hunters congregating in the Himalayas.

The “Regulations Governing Mountaineering Expeditions in Nepal — Relating to the Yeti” consisted of three rules for anyone wishing to travel.

The first claimed that 5,000 rupees had to be paid to the Nepalese government to obtain permission to search for the creature.

The second stated: “If the ‘Yeti’ is located, it may be photographed or captured alive, but must not be killed or shot except in an emergency arising out of self-defense.’ It also said that all photographs should be turned over to authorities .

The third guaranteed that any “news and reports that shed light on the creature’s real existence” must also be delivered.

Evidences?

Visitors dreamed of making some progress and were on the lookout for anything Yeti-related.

In the late 1950s, an expedition financed by Texan oilman Tom Slick discovered a curious object in a Buddhist monastery in the town of Pangboche: the mummified hand of a supposed Yeti.

Explorer Peter Byrne managed to acquire one of his fingers, reportedly after making a financial donation to the monastery, and smuggled it out of Nepal.

He did this with the help of Hollywood star James Stewart, a friend of Slick, who hid his finger in his wife’s luggage, wrapped in underwear.

In 1960, another body part appeared.

After claiming to have seen strange footprints during his historic ascent of Everest with Tenzing Norgay, climber Edmund Hillary went in search of the Yeti and returned with a supposed scalp borrowed from a monastery in Khumjung.

However, tests revealed that the helmet-shaped skin came from a serau, a goat-like animal.

As for Pangboche’s hand, DNA analysis carried out in 2011 proved once and for all that it was human.

Apparently, all those footprints seen by climbers could also be explained.

The individual footprints could have been from fallen stones that changed shape as the snow melted.

The multiple footprints were possibly from a different animal, creating a larger and seemingly inexplicable footprint when the front and back paws landed in similar locations.

Michael Ward, Hillary’s expedition doctor, noted that they could even be a person’s “abnormally shaped feet,” as he has met Tibetans and Nepalese whose big toe “was at right angles to the rest of the foot.”

But what about the people who claimed to have seen the creature?

In 1986, English physicist Anthony Wooldridge, who was on a charity run in the Himalayas, claimed to have seen a Yeti just 150 meters away from him and managed to take photos.

In the same year, experienced Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner, famous for climbing Everest without supplemental oxygen, claimed that he also had an encounter with the creature.

He spent years trying to find another Yeti, without success. The conclusion of Wooldridge’s story was that he had seen an unusually shaped rock formation.

Could it exist?

Equally questionable secondary reports of people who have seen Yetis have been common, including that of Nepalese mountaineer Ang Tsering Sherpa, who said his father had seen one.

“Yetis are not that big. They are about the size of 7-year-old children. But they are very strong,” he said, before alluding to the magical powers that are sometimes cited in myths about Yetis.

“If the Yeti had seen my father first, my father wouldn’t have been able to walk. The Yeti can stop people from walking. Then he eats them.”

All the scientific analyzes and debunked claims were not enough to extinguish the fascination with the Yeti.

In 2011, cryptozoology experts and enthusiasts held a conference in Western Siberia and announced their “indisputable proof” of the Yeti’s existence, with the discovery of nests made from twisted tree branches.

However, shortly afterwards, a participant, American anthropologist Jeff Meldrum, revealed that Russian authorities falsified the story as a publicity stunt.

Cryptozoology has always been plagued by deception, motivated by fame and fortune.

This is possibly what led hunters in China to publicly announce in 2010 that they had captured a four-legged, hairless Yeti (actually a cat-like animal called a civet).

But of all the cryptids, the Yeti has been the subject of a surprising amount of scientific investigation, leading to significant advances in the last decade.

In 2013, Bryan Sykes, a geneticist at the University of Oxford, issued a global call for any Yeti “evidence” to be analyzed.

Of the dozens of samples he received, two hairs (one from northern India, in the western Himalayas, and another, hundreds of kilometers away, in Bhutan), corresponded to a prehistoric polar bear, believed to have lived long ago. at least 40 thousand years.

Sykes put forward the intriguing theory that the Yeti exists, but is actually a hybrid bear. If this isn’t a prehistoric anomaly, other rare bear breeds could be the real-life Yeti.

Reinhold Messner concluded in the 1980s that the Yeti could be the Tibetan blue bear or the Himalayan brown bear.

In 2017, American scholar Daniel C. Taylor, a conservationist and leading figure in Yeti study who spent decades hunting the creature, finally published his extensive findings, including a comprehensive analysis of Shipton’s footprints.

In “Yeti: The Ecology of a Mystery”, he pointed to the Asian black bear as the likely creature spotted in the Himalayas.

But these findings are unlikely to convince everyone.

The Abominable Snowman has experienced more than a century of excitement and speculation.

A century of footprints, stories, sightings and specimens, coinciding with a century of growing interest in other unproven beasts such as the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot.

For many who believe it exists, the Yeti represents Earth’s wondrous unknowns, and the hope of finding it will not end for lack of definitive evidence.

*To read the original article in English on BBC HistoryExtra, Click here.