Wild men of the mountains
The peoples of the high Himalayas have long told of wild beings living above the villages, in the rock and snow below the passes. Sherpa and Tibetan stories use several names, among them meh-teh and migoi, a Tibetan word often translated as wild man, and the creatures in them range from a dangerous animal to a figure in tales told to children. Some monasteries kept relics said to come from one, the best known a scalp at Khumjung and a hand at Pangboche.
Those stories belong to Himalayan cultures and their own ways of describing the mountains. The yeti most of the world knows, a tall, shaggy ape that leaves giant footprints in the snow, is younger. It was put together in the twentieth century from the reports of Western climbers, the newspapers that covered them, and the expeditions that followed.
1921: how the snowman became abominable
In 1921 a British expedition led by Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Howard-Bury made the first reconnaissance of Mount Everest. High on the mountain, near the Lhakpa La pass, the party crossed large footprints in the snow. Howard-Bury thought a wolf had probably made them, but the porters with the expedition said they belonged to a wild man of the snows, a name he wrote down as metch kangmi.
A journalist in India, Henry Newman, rendered the name loosely as the abominable snowman. Translators have argued about the original words ever since, but the phrase was irresistible, and it carried the creature into newspapers around the world. From then on, almost every Himalayan expedition came home with a yeti story, and some went looking for one.
1951: the footprint on the Menlung glacier
In November 1951 the mountaineers Eric Shipton and Michael Ward, scouting a route toward Everest, photographed a line of footprints in the snow on the Menlung glacier. One close-up, with an ice axe laid beside the print for scale, became the most famous yeti picture ever taken. The print was large and broad, with what looked like a big, rounded toe.
Footprints in snow are poor witnesses, though. Sun and wind melt and widen a print within hours, so a fox's or a bear's track can grow into something huge, and an animal that sets its hind foot down on or near its front print leaves one large, strange shape. No one saw the animal that walked across the Menlung glacier, and the print alone cannot say what it was.
1960: Hillary goes looking
In 1960 Edmund Hillary, who had reached the summit of Everest seven years earlier, led a scientific expedition to the region whose aims included finding out what the yeti was. The team borrowed the Khumjung monastery's yeti scalp, a tall, conical cap of reddish hair, and took it abroad to be examined. Marlin Perkins, the expedition's zoologist and director of the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, concluded that it was not a scalp at all. It had been shaped from the hide of a Himalayan serow, a goat-like antelope, and fur offered as yeti fur turned out to come from a Tibetan blue bear.
Hillary came home convinced that the yeti was a story rather than an animal. The expedition is remembered for its high-altitude physiology research as much as for the hunt, but it set a pattern that every later test has followed: a relic, a sample or a skin examined closely, and a known animal found inside.
What the DNA says
In 2014 the Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes reported that two hair samples from the Himalayas matched an ancient polar bear, a result other geneticists soon challenged, arguing that the hairs most likely came from an ordinary Himalayan brown bear. In 2017 a team led by Charlotte Lindqvist of the University at Buffalo published, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the most thorough test so far: nine samples of bone, tooth, skin, hair and droppings said to come from yetis, gathered in Tibet, Nepal and India. Eight came from Asian bears, one an Asian black bear, one a Himalayan brown bear and six Tibetan brown bears. The ninth came from a dog.
The footprints keep coming. In April 2019 the Indian Army posted photographs of prints it said measured 32 by 15 inches, found near the base camp of Makalu, and called them the footprints of the mythical yeti. Scientists were skeptical, and many commenters pointed out that the prints appeared to come from only one foot, the kind of track a bear, or a print widened by melting, can leave. The bears of the Himalayas, which can stand and walk on two legs, remain the explanation that fits the evidence best.
Frequently asked questions
Is the yeti real?
No animal has ever been found. Every yeti relic and sample that scientists have examined, from the Khumjung scalp in 1960 to the nine samples in a 2017 DNA study, has turned out to come from a known animal, most often a Himalayan bear.
Why is the yeti called the abominable snowman?
Because of a loose translation. In 1921 porters on the British Everest reconnaissance attributed a line of footprints to a wild man of the snows, and a journalist in India, Henry Newman, rendered their name for it as the abominable snowman.
What were the Indian Army yeti footprints in 2019?
Photographs of large prints in the snow near Makalu base camp, posted by the Indian Army in April 2019. Scientists were skeptical: the prints appeared to be a single line, and melting, overlapping tracks of a bear can make prints look far larger than the animal that left them.