Yeti | The Myth is dismissed

Edmund Hillary, one of the first two people to scale Mount Everest, and Khunjo Chumbi, a Nepali village elder, hold what was then thought to be the scalp of yeti, in Calcutta, India, on December 9, 1960. AP Photo

Study dismisses myth of the yeti with bear facts

Purported samples from wild man of the Himalayas are found to be from local bear population

Samanth Subramanian

December 7, 2017

Updated: December 7, 2017 10:15 PM

Nearly every time Sujoy Das leads a trekking group in the Himalayas, he gets the question, asked half in jest, half in hope. Has he ever spotted signs of the yeti?

Mr Das guides treks on some of the mightiest Himalayan peaks — Everest, Annapurna, Gangapurna — and through the Nepali valleys that lie in between. This is the terrain where the myth of the yeti — or the Abominable Snowman — first arose, and where it still persists. A hirsute, apelike creature, taller than most human beings, the yeti and its legend grew out of old local tales about wild men living in the mountains.

European explorers seized upon the mystery and expanded it, reporting glimpses of the creature or finding outsize footprints in the snow. Every Everest expedition seemed to keep half an eye cocked for the yeti or its tracks; one British mountaineer took photos of footprints twice the size of the average adult human's foot.

The fascination has not died down. “In Nepal and in the Everest region, this question always comes up. Has anyone see a yeti?” Mr Das said, who lives in Kolkata and runs South Col Expeditions. "The local people say they have, but we don’t know if it is actually one. I always say: ‘No, I haven't seen one.’”

A new genetic study of nine purported yeti samples, however, may put the legend into deep freeze forever. The results, published last week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggested that eight of the samples were from a different sort of shaggy, wild creature: a bear. (The one remaining sample came from an even less elusive creature: a dog.)

Charlotte Lindqvist, an associate professor in the department of biological sciences at the University of Buffalo, New York, who led the study, called it “the most rigorous analysis to date” of relics of the so-called yeti.

Ms Lindqvist first became involved in the yeti myth in 2014, when other researchers contacted her to compare the genes in two purported yeti hair samples with those in a 120,000-year-old polar bear fossil she was working on.

“But the data was very limited, and it made me suspicious about the speculation that the yeti legend represented some strange, hybrid bear roaming the Himalaya mountains,” Ms Lindqvist said. “So I agreed to follow up on this study with a more rigorous approach based on more genetic data from more purported yeti samples.”

The samples came from everywhere: hair found in Tibet in the 1930s; a fragment of leg bone, coloured a toasted brown, recovered from a mountain cave; a tooth and a lump of petrified faeces, which had been carefully stored in an Italian museum devoted to the alpinist Reinhold Messner.

Mountaineers and explorers have hunted for the definitive yeti sample throughout the 20th century. In 1961, Edmund Hillary, one of the first two men to climb Everest, led an expedition to Nepal purely in quest of the yeti.

“He went to Khumjung, a monastery above Namche Bazaar [in Nepal], where a yeti scalp was preserved by the headman of the village,” Mr Das told The National. “Hillary got the headman’s permission to take the scalp, to get it tested.”

One of the villagers accompanied Hillary on his trip. “They thought: ‘Hillary is a foreigner. He doesn’t know what this is, or what the value of it is to them,’” he said. “So they did this world tour with the scalp, meeting anthropologists and so on. The net result: the experts said it was the scalp of a Tibetan blue bear.”

Others have also advanced the theory that the various bits of the yeti — footprints, hair, bone samples — came from a species of bear. In his new book yeti: The Ecology of a Mystery, the conservationist Daniel C Taylor, who has searched for signs of the yeti ever since he was a child growing up in India, concludes that the footprints most probably belong to an Asiatic black bear.

Ms Lindqvist and her team compared their nine samples with 15 others that were known to be from local bear populations. Previous research had hinted at an unknown type of bear, but eight of the nine yeti samples proved to belong conclusively to well-known types of black and brown bears.

An inkling of this ursine identity has existed all along. In 1921, the British explorer Charles Howard-Bury, having found footprints in the snow, was told by his Sherpa guides that they belonged to the “metoh-kangmi”, a wild creature living in the snows.

Later writers misinterpreted “metoh” as “filthy” and replaced it with the more elegant “Abominable”. But a knowledge of the Tibetan language would have provided the clue, for the words “metoh kangmi” translate to “man-bear of the snows”.

https://www.thenational.ae/world/asia/study-dismisses-myth-of-the-yeti-with-bear-facts-1.682529

Annapurna Sanctuary: Don Whillans and the Yeti

About one and a half hours walk from the south base camp of Annapurna I, lies the base camp of Machapuchare, the fish tail mountain. Nowadays, more than twenty five thousand trekkers make their way every year to the Base Camp popularly known as "ABC".   In a hurry to reach their final destination many of them walk from Deorali in the valley to ABC in one day.  I have watched many of them speeding past the avalanche prone Bagar, climbing up to Machapuchare Base Camp (MBC) for a quick cup of tea and then onto ABC by nightfall. On every occasion that I have been to ABC, I have stayed the night at the Machapuchare Base Camp and each and every time I have ruminated over the happenings there one March evening in the year 1970. 

Around that time most of the great walls of the Himalaya were unclimbed. The British under the leadership of Chris Bonington mounted an expedition to attempt the enormous south face of Annapurna I. Bonington had with him a crack team of British climbers including Don Whillans, his comrade-in-arms from the Eigerwand days. Whillans had been sent up ahead along with Mike Thompson to reconnoitre the face as Bonnington was anxious to know if "it would go", a mountaineering phrase meaning “it could be climbed".


In 1970 there were no lodges at MBC or ABC and Whillans and his team had pitched a camp at MBC for the night.   Around five o clock in the evening as Whillans was about to pitch his tent one of his Sherpas Pemba Tharkey said in a matter of fact way, “Yeti coming".  Whillans turned around but was able to see only a shadow disappearing behind a ridge. 

The next day Mike Thompson and Whillans on a reconnaissance trip spotted a set of tracks around the same spot where Whillans had seen the "creature" drop down behind the ridge. Thompson dismissed the tracks saying “It’s a bear” but Whillans was not so sure. 

Thompson left MBC that evening to meet the main party further down the valley but Whillans remained up at MBC with his sherpas.  It was one of those bright moonlit nights in the Himalaya when it is possible to read a book outside. Whillans comments that “it was fantastically cold" even in two sleeping bags. Across the valley he could clearly see the snow slope and the ridge where the creature had been spotted the previous evening.  Despite the cold, Whillans kept putting his head outside the tent right through the evening to scan the hillside from time to time. One can well imagine the excitement and tension on that cold winter's night below the shadow of unclimbed Machapuchare lit up in the moonlight.  Suddenly, Whillans could clearly see a powerful animal which he described as an ape or ape like creature “bounding along on all fours”. From the shadowy portion of the hillside it came out into the moonlight “bounding very quickly across the snow, heading for the shelter of the cliffs.”

As Whillans watched this incredible sight, the creature disappeared into the shadows and was gone.  Whillans never saw it again.


The next morning Whillans walked up the hillside where he saw the tracks in the snow. Interestingly the two sherpas who were with him just ignored the tracks and pretended that they did not exist!


Whillans was convinced that he had seen the Yeti but the mystery still remained unresolved. 


On one occasion in autumn, on a  similar moonlit night, I stood outside a lodge at MBC and scanned the  opposite hillside for quite some time.   I could imagine Whillan's tent in the snow very close to where the lodges are situated. It was still and silent.  Nothing stirred or moved. With the cold getting to me I went inside to my warm sleeping bag. The Annapurna Sanctuary held on to it's secrets.  


Reference Reading:

• Annapurna South Face by Chris Bonington
• High in the Cold Thin Air by Ed Hillary and Desmond Doig
• My  Quest for the Yeti by Reinhold Messner