Yeti

Behind glass in a gompa in the Khumbu sits a conical cap of skin and coarse russet hair, stiff as a scrubbing brush, with a crest running front to back across the crown. Khumjung has kept it for generations. In 1960 Edmund Hillary borrowed it and carried it to London, and the village headman Khumjo Chumbi travelled with it to make sure it came home again. A sliver was cut off for testing. Marca Burns compared the skin and hair against samples from serow, blue bear and black bear, and concluded that the thing was probably made from the hide of an animal closely resembling the serow, though definitely not identical with it.

The scalp is the whole story in miniature: a real object, genuinely revered, and not quite what the label says. The creature it points at is older than every man who came to measure it, and the trouble starts with what to call it.

Tibetan gives g.ya’ dred, the bear of rocky places, which is where the English word yeti comes from. It also gives mi dred, man-bear, and dzu-teh, cattle bear, which is not a mystery at all but the Himalayan brown bear. Alongside those sits mi rgod, wild man, which becomes migoi in Bhutan. Nepali speakers outside the Sherpa villages say bun manchi, jungle man. Most of the oldest names for the yeti are names for a bear.

The traditions that describe it do not agree on one animal either. Tibetan lore separates at least three kinds: the Nyalmo, black-furred, the biggest and the worst tempered, said to stand something like fifteen feet; the Chuti, roughly eight feet, keeping to the belt between eight and ten thousand feet; and the Rang Shim Bombo, reddish brown and no taller than a child. Nothing in that range is white. The shaggy snow-coloured giant of Western cartoons has no footing in the Himalayan accounts, which run to brown, grey, russet and black.

Older still is a religious creature rather than a zoological one. Halfdan Siiger, working among the Lepcha of Sikkim, was told of a Glacier Being worshipped as a god of the hunt, and reported that followers of Bön had once held the blood of the mi rgod to have use in certain ceremonies. In that picture the creature carries a large stone as a weapon and announces itself with a whistling rush of air. Tibetan Buddhism took it in and filed it among the animals, but as an animal human enough to sometimes keep the dharma, and stories accumulated of yetis attaching themselves to lamas as servants and disciples. Because it can also act as an enforcer of the dharma, meeting one is a bad omen, and the witness has merit to make up.

In 1925 the photographer N. A. Tombazi was at about fifteen thousand feet near the Zemu Glacier when he saw a figure two or three hundred yards off, dark against the snow, upright, wearing nothing, stopping every so often to pull at dwarf rhododendron. He watched it for about a minute. Two hours later, coming down the same slope, he found the prints: six or seven inches long, four across, and made by something walking on two legs.

The name everyone knows was manufactured four years earlier, and by a journalist. In 1921 Charles Howard-Bury crossed the Lhakpa La at twenty-one thousand feet with the first British Everest reconnaissance and found tracks he put down to a loping grey wolf, whose paws in soft snow doubled up into something like a bare human foot. His porters volunteered a name for the maker: metoh-kangmi, the wild man of the snows. When the expedition came back to Darjeeling, Henry Newman of The Statesman in Calcutta, writing under the pen name Kim, interviewed the porters. Metoh means roughly man-bear. Newman rendered it as filthy, then improved filthy into abominable, and the Abominable Snowman went out on the wires. It has a birthday and an author. Newman admitted as much long afterwards in a letter to The Times: “The whole story seemed such a joyous creation I sent it to one or two newspapers.” The word has been coming apart ever since. When Bill Tilman printed the variant metch, the Tibetan authority David Snellgrove pointed out that the consonants cannot be conjoined in Tibetan and the word therefore does not exist.

What kept the creature alive was a photograph. In 1951 Eric Shipton, high on Everest at around twenty thousand feet, laid an ice axe beside a print in the snow and took three exposures. The track showed two broad toes and three smaller digits bunched together, and it looked nothing like a bear. Those frames have been argued over for seventy years, and the argument always comes back to the same physics: sun on snow widens a print, softens its edges, and can turn one animal’s foot into another’s.

Everything solid that has come down off the mountain has dissolved on the bench. The Daily Mail expedition of 1954 obtained hairs from a scalp held at Pangboche monastery, black to dark brown in shade and fox red in sunlight. Frederic Wood Jones sectioned them, photographed them under the microscope and set them against bear and orangutan. His finding was that the object was not a scalp at all, since no animal carries a hair ridge running from the forehead over the crown to the nape, and that the hairs themselves came off the shoulder of some coarse-haired hoofed animal he could not name. Pangboche also kept a set of skeletal fingers. Part of the hand left Nepal in the 1950s, reportedly carried out of India in James Stewart’s luggage in 1959; the remainder was stolen from the monastery in 1991 and has never been found.

The genetics ran the same course. In 2014 Bryan Sykes matched two Himalayan hair samples to an ancient polar bear jawbone and proposed a surviving hybrid bear. Ceiridwen Gutiérrez and Ronald Pine showed that the fragment used was far too short to separate a polar bear from a brown one, and that the match had in fact been to a modern polar bear from the Diomede Islands in the Bering Sea. A re-analysis by Edwards and Barnett landed on the Himalayan brown bear. Then in 2017 Charlotte Lindqvist’s group published nine purported yeti specimens in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, worked up from bone, tooth, skin, hair and faeces. Eight were bears, Himalayan and Tibetan brown bear and Asian black bear. One was a dog.

Daniel Taylor got there from the other direction and took sixty years about it. In 1983 he and the naturalist Robert Fleming Jr. went into Nepal’s Barun Valley after tracks reported eleven years earlier, and found yeti-like prints of their own, showing a hallux and what read as a bipedal gait, along with large nests up in the trees. Villagers described two animals: the rukh bhalu, the tree bear, small and reclusive, maybe a hundred and fifty pounds, and the bhui bhalu, the ground bear, aggressive, up to four hundred. Skulls were collected and set against the reference collections at the Smithsonian, the American Museum of Natural History and the British Museum. They were one species, the Asiatic black bear, tree bear and ground bear alike.

Its powers are the powers of something never cornered. It is strong out of all proportion to a man, it moves through country that kills climbers, and in the Bhutanese telling it can turn invisible and walk backwards so its trail runs the wrong way. Its weaknesses are stranger, because they belong to the search rather than the animal. It cannot be hunted deliberately; the elders say a planned expedition will never find one, and that the sightings that count happen to a single traveller who was not looking. It cannot survive a laboratory either, since every fragment carried down the mountain has come back serow, or goral, or bear. What it can apparently do is hold ground. Bhutan set aside the Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary in the far east of the country, and the migoi is named among the things the sanctuary exists to protect, while Taylor’s long failure to find a primate produced two protected areas around Everest instead. The yeti has never been caught. It has, however, been remarkably good at getting land put aside for bears.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Yeti?

The Yeti is a large hair-covered upright creature of Himalayan folklore, known across Tibetan, Sherpa, Bhutanese and Lepcha tradition long before Western climbers arrived. Its name comes from the Tibetan g.ya’ dred, meaning roughly the bear of rocky places. Tibetan accounts describe several kinds rather than one animal, ranging from a huge black-furred type to a russet one no taller than a child.

Why is the Yeti called the Abominable Snowman?

The phrase was coined in 1921 by Henry Newman, a journalist for The Statesman in Calcutta, after he interviewed porters returning from the first British Everest reconnaissance expedition. The porters had given Charles Howard-Bury the name metoh-kangmi for the maker of some tracks; metoh means something close to man-bear, and Newman translated it as filthy before upgrading the word to abominable. He later admitted in a letter to The Times that the story struck him as a joyous creation and he sent it to the newspapers.

Is the Yeti white?

No source in the Himalayan tradition describes a white Yeti. Reports and Tibetan classifications give brown, grey, reddish-brown and black hair, and the small Rang Shim Bombo is specifically russet. The white shaggy snow-giant is a Western invention that has no basis in the local accounts.

What did DNA testing find in the Yeti samples?

A 2017 study by Charlotte Lindqvist’s team, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, analysed nine specimens claimed to be Yeti remains, including bone, tooth, skin, hair and faeces. Eight came from bears, specifically Himalayan brown bear, Tibetan brown bear and Asian black bear, and one came from a dog. An earlier 2014 claim of a polar-bear hybrid was shown to rest on a DNA fragment too short to tell the two bear species apart.

Can the Yeti be hunted?

Sherpa tradition holds that an organised hunt will never succeed, because the creature can vanish when it chooses and is only ever seen by accident, usually by someone travelling alone. In Bhutan the migoi is credited with invisibility and with walking backwards to falsify its own tracks. Every physical relic that has been brought down and tested, including the Khumjung scalp and the Pangboche hairs, has turned out to belong to some other animal.

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