The Yeti: Footprints, Fur, and a Himalayan Bear

There is one photograph that carries the whole legend. In 1951, high on the Menlung Glacier during a reconnaissance of the approaches to Everest, the mountaineer Eric Shipton photographed a single track pressed into the snow, an ice axe laid beside it for scale. The print is broad and clearly toed, larger than a man’s boot, and it marches off across the white in a line of others toward the ridge. Shipton was a serious climber with no reason to invent, and the image ran around the world. For half a century it was the best physical evidence that something large and unknown walked the high Himalaya: the Abominable Snowman, the yeti.

In 2017 a team of geneticists finished a study that put nine of the most treasured yeti relics — bones, teeth, a scrap of skin, hair, a piece of dung, all gathered from monasteries and private collections across the region — through modern DNA analysis. Eight of the nine came back as bears native to the Himalaya and the Tibetan plateau. The ninth came back as a dog. It was a quiet ending to a loud legend, and the animal the science named turned out to be the same animal the people of those mountains had been describing all along, in a language the outside world had never bothered to hear correctly.

The thing on the glacier

Start with the story as the climbers told it, because it was genuinely gripping and it belonged to the golden age of Himalayan mountaineering. Through the 1920s, 1930s and 1950s, expedition after expedition pushed toward the great peaks, and again and again their Sherpa companions spoke of a wild creature of the snows — the meh-teh — that lived above the tree line, walked upright, and was to be feared. Climbers reported strange tracks crossing high snowfields at altitudes where no known animal had business being. Some heard cries. The monasteries of the region kept relics: a “yeti scalp” at Khumjung, a hand at Pangboche, hair and bones preserved as sacred objects.

The 1951 Shipton photograph crystallised all of it into a single unforgettable image. Here was a print you could measure, on a glacier at nineteen thousand feet, taken by a man whose word carried weight. The Western press had the perfect emblem, and the “Abominable Snowman” — a phrase already circulating — became a fixture of the century’s idea of the Himalaya. The 1954 Daily Mail Snowman Expedition went out specifically to find it. Everyone who climbed high enough seemed to come back with a track, a tale, or a distant dark shape moving on a far slope.

The kernel: what the bones actually were

The relics were real objects, and they could be tested, and eventually they were. The decisive work was led by the geneticist Charlotte Lindqvist of the University at Buffalo, whose team analysed the mitochondrial DNA of nine samples attributed to the yeti and reported the results in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B in 2017. The samples came from museums, from private hands, and from expeditions that had gathered supposed yeti material over the years, including relics from the Himalayan monasteries.

The findings were consistent and unglamorous. Of the nine, one tooth belonged to a dog. The other eight were bears: Himalayan brown bears, Tibetan brown bears, and Asian black bears. A “yeti” thigh bone from a Tibetan cave was a Tibetan brown bear. Hair said to be from a yeti was a black bear. The famous scalps and hands and mummified fragments, when their DNA was read, kept pointing at the same short list of large mammals that already live in those mountains. The study went further and mapped how these Himalayan and Tibetan bears relate to one another and to the world’s other brown bears, so the science gained something real about bear evolution in the process. The yeti, as a distinct unknown animal, did not survive contact with a sequencing machine.

This built on an earlier round. In 2014 the Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes had tested purported yeti hairs and announced a match to an ancient polar bear, hinting at a mysterious Himalayan bear lineage. Lindqvist’s more thorough work showed those samples were ordinary Himalayan brown bears, deflating the exotic reading. The relics were bears the whole way down.

The fork: a word that got lost in translation

If the animal was a bear, where did the Abominable Snowman come from? The fork is a mistranslation, and it can be dated. In 1921 the British reconnaissance expedition to the north side of Everest, led by Charles Howard-Bury, crossed a high pass and saw dark figures moving on the snow far above; their Tibetan guides called the creatures that made such tracks “metoh-kangmi.” Howard-Bury reported it. When the account reached Calcutta, a journalist named Henry Newman, writing for The Statesman, rendered the phrase into English and reached for something vivid. “Kangmi” is fairly translated as “snowman.” “Metoh” he took to mean something like “filthy” or “abominable,” and so, in a newspaper column, the “Abominable Snowman” was born. Newman later admitted the phrase was largely his own flourish. A Tibetan expression bundling together a bear and a mountain spirit had been reforged, in a wire report, into a monster with a marvellous name, and the name did most of the work for the next fifty years.

The other pillars of the legend fork off the record in the same way, once you look closely. The Shipton footprint owes its shape to the sun. A track pressed into snow does not stay the size it was made; through a day of thawing and refreezing the edges melt back and the print swells, so that a modest bear or a set of overlapping animal tracks can enlarge into something broad and strange and humanoid. A walking bear compounds the effect, because it sets its hind foot partly into the impression left by its forefoot, and the doubled print reads as a single huge foot with odd toes. As for the sacred scalps, the 1960 expedition led by Edmund Hillary borrowed the Khumjung “yeti scalp” and had it examined by scientists, who found it was moulded from the skin of a serow, a goat-antelope of the Himalayan forests. Reinhold Messner, the great mountaineer, spent years on the question after his own frightening encounter with a large dark animal in the dusk and concluded in his book My Quest for the Yeti that the creature behind the legend was the Himalayan brown bear, which in Tibetan tradition is the chemo, a real and dangerous animal wrapped in dread.

The journey: how a bear conquered the world

The legend travelled on the back of the century’s obsession with the high mountains. Every well-publicised expedition to Everest carried the yeti along with it, because a monster in the itinerary made better copy than snow and altitude sickness. The 1921 mistranslation gave the creature a name in English; the 1951 photograph gave it a face; the 1954 newspaper expedition gave it a hunt; Hillary’s fame in the 1950s and 1960s kept it in the headlines even as his own 1960 investigation quietly dismantled the physical evidence. The yeti became a fixed feature of Western popular culture, complete in cartoons and films and cereal boxes long before anyone had a testable sample.

Underneath the Western monster, the Sherpa and Tibetan traditions carried on saying something more careful and more accurate the entire time. Their wild-man-of-the-snows was tangled up with real bears and with genuine mountain spirits, and it functioned, as such stories do, partly as a way of holding hard-won knowledge about a lethal environment: stay off certain slopes, respect the high country, fear what moves above the tree line. The outside world took the spirit, dropped the bear, kept the fear, and sold it back as an abominable mystery.

What the mountain was really carrying

The pattern here is the one that runs under every great cryptid, and it is worth naming plainly. A real place that is hard to see into, a real animal that is rarely met, and a human need to fill the blank with something larger than an animal. The Himalaya is the highest, coldest, least penetrable landscape on the planet, and for the mountaineering nations of the twentieth century it was the last great blank on the map, the final place a Western adventurer could still be the first to stand. A monster is the natural inhabitant of a blank like that. It guarantees that the mountain keeps a secret, that the summit is not the end of the wonder.

This is the same hunger that keeps the treeline watched for Bigfoot across North America, and the same one that sends expedition after expedition into the Congo swamps after Mokele-Mbembe, a survivor the searchers carried in with them. In each case there is a real environment and a real local tradition, and in each case the wider world enlarges the tradition into a creature that the environment cannot support and the science does not find. When the DNA came back from the Himalaya, it told the story that had been available all along to anyone who listened to the people who lived there: the thing on the high snow is a bear, and the mountain is quite dangerous enough without a monster on it.

The bear was the answer

There is a temptation to feel that something has been taken away, that a bear is a poor exchange for the Abominable Snowman. I would resist it. The Himalayan brown bear is a genuinely awesome animal, rare, huge, superbly adapted to an altitude that kills unprotected humans in hours, and largely unseen by the outside world. To meet one at dusk on a high slope, as Messner did, is to understand exactly why the mountain people surrounded it with dread and story. The yeti was never nothing. It was a real animal, correctly feared, wrapped in a real tradition, and then mistranslated by a journalist in a hurry into a monster with a better name.

The relics are the quiet heart of the whole thing. For generations, monasteries kept a scalp, a hand, a bone, treasured as proof that the wild man of the snows was real. When science finally read them, they said serow, and dog, and again and again bear. The mountain had been answering the question honestly the entire time. It just took a hundred years, and a sequencing machine, for the outside world to hear the answer over the sound of its own name for the beast.