The Yeti

Stories of wild giants living in the snow are part of growing up in the mountains. There’s a good chance you’ve heard these stories too; tales of large bipedal creatures (an animal that walks on two legs) living within the foothills of the Himalayan mountains have been around for over 2,000 years.

Sherpas (people from Nepal, native to the mountain range) say the legend of a Yeti or Abominable Snowman is deeply rooted in their culture, but where do modern tales come from? What is the creature? And is it really possible such a giant might exist?

Spotting a yeti

British journalist Henry Newman was the first to report “very large footprints” on Everest which his Sherpa guides had attributed to the metoh-kangmi, Tibetan for “man-bear snow man”, a creature between 1.5 and 4.5 metres tall with black, brown or grey fur. Newman mistranslated “snow man” to “abominable”, giving the creature its infamous name.

Supposed sightings soared in the years after, when Western adventurers began exploring Everest. The most famous sighting occurred in 1951 when English mountaineer Eric Shipton stumbled upon a set of footprints in the snow. Photos show footprints much larger than human ones with toes in different locations. Another member of the Shipton team wrote in his diary that the Abominable Snowman “is not a myth”.

Japanese mountaineer Yoshiteru Takahashi reckons he saw a 1.4 metre tall monster with his own eyes in 2003. Five years later, he led a Japanese team which spent 40 days atop Dhaulagiri IV, a 7,661 metre tall mountain that’s also part of the Himalayan range. They claim to have seen yeti-like footprints at 4,800 metres but despite their efforts were unable to photograph the creature that caused them.

Mountains are challenging climbs and summiting even the most modest mountain takes a tremendous toll on the human body. Everest has claimed the lives of more than 300 adventurers. At about 8,000m, oxygen levels are low and unable to sustain human life for long. Oxygen deprivation can cause sickness and even plants struggle to survive in such climates. Could these adventurers have been hallucinating or suffering from exhaustion, leading them to think they’d seen a mythical beast? And could an ape-like creature really be hiding at that altitude, somehow managing to survive?

What makes a yeti?

Yetis are often depicted as solitary and friendly creatures in films and stories. What isn’t clear is whether yeti sightings are of the same single animal or whether there could be multiple yetis living in the mountains.

Tibetan folklore actually describes three different varieties of yetis, with different heights, fur colour and personalities.

The largest, at 4.5 metres tall and with thick black fur, is the Nyalmo. It looks similar to a very large bear, eats yaks (an animal native to the region), and supposedly smells of garlic. According to biologist Charles Stonor, the Chuti is the Himalayan red bear or Himalayan brown bear, and Sherpas recognise it as such. The Rang Shim Bombo is the smallest (1 to 2 metres) with reddish-brown fur.

They’re all very important to the native Sherpa people. Yeti are depicted on walls of temples and one monastery (where monks live and work) in Nepal even says it has a yeti’s scalp (top part of the head) in a box.

The bear necessities

Biologist Charlotte Lindqvist reckons the answer to “the Yeti legend can be found in local bears”. In an effort to solve the mystery, scientists in 2017 tested nine specimens that supposedly came from a yeti including bone, hair, skin, and faeces (poo). One specimen matched the DNA of a dog and the other eight matched a variety of Asian bear species.

University of Oxford geneticist (someone who studies genes, the building blocks of life) Bryan Sykes obtained DNA from hair samples of suspected yetis in 2013 and found they matched a DNA sequence from a 40,000 year old polar bear jaw found in Svalbard, near the north pole. Speaking to BBC News, Sykes said the creature could be “some sort of hybrid (mixture)” between a polar bear and brown bear. He says such an animal may well be the source of the mystery and the source of the legend.

In 2019, the Indian Army shared photographs of supposed yeti footprints taken by their Mountaineering Expedition Team claiming the “elusive snowman” was on the move. The prints were 81cm long and it’s not clear what might have made them. Even the footprint of the largest known bear on Earth (a polar bear) is only about 30cm.

Not Yet-i

Whilst samples and studies have disappointed yeti hunters, it hasn’t deterred them. Locals still love the tale and the people it brings to the mountains. Explorers still flock to Everest, perhaps because, in the words of Henry Newman, the man that coined the creature’s name, “the whole story seemed such a joyous creation”.

Also

Instead of a bear, many modern-day believers think the Abominable Snowman might be a species known as Gigantopithecus, the largest primate that ever lived; a polar-bear sized ape that went extinct 350,000 years ago. This is also one of the candidates for another famous mythical creature – Bigfoot. Like the Yeti, Bigfoot (also known as the Sasquatch) is a hairy, human-like creature. It is said to live in the forests of northwestern US and western Canada.

If you want to learn more about Bigfoot, then check out our Mysteries of Science podcast. In season 1, we spoke to experts to find out whether the rumours are true, or if it was just a folk story.

First published in The Week Junior Science+Nature, issue 56, December 2022.