It’s easy to hear ‘yeti’ and think of something like Missing Link’s Mr Link — a friendly-looking hairy humanoid. The actual origins of the yeti are a bit different. The Yeti of the Himalayas can be devout and caring, or a god of the hunt. It can also be a violent creature that steals goats, and kills farmers and soliders alike. The closest comparison in European mythology would be the Wild Hunt or the fair folk; a force beyond the control of mortal man. Much like stories of the Wild Hunt, Yeti mythology goes back centuries in the Himalayan region. So how did we end up with Mr Link? That, maybe unsurprisingly, was down to the tourists.
If you’re being generous, you can track Yeti sightings from European travellers back as far as Pliny the Elder. He wrote of various creatures existing in the mountainous eastern part of India, who were ‘covered in hair’, with teeth like dogs. In terms of when yeti-mania really took off though, you have to go to 1921.
That year’s British Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition was led by a man by the name of Colonel Howard-Bury, who had been dutifully sending reports on progress back home. He off-handedly mentioned they’d seen “one mark, like that of a human foot” which the porters thought “was the track of a wild, hairy man”. This proved to be the spark to a journalistic wildfire. The London Times tracked down the famous William Hugh Knight, explorer and member of the Royal Society, who claimed to have seen these Yetis with his own eyes. This could have been game-changing.
If you haven’t ever heard of Knight, though, you wouldn’t be alone. Actually, no-one had heard of Knight; the London Times had completely made him up. On his return home, Howard-Bury was by all accounts amused to find the fuss his report had kicked up, and entirely debunked the rumours in his book. Yeti-mania, however, lived on.
Eric Shipton, of the 1951 Himalayan expedition, would probably have been aware of it when he took his famous photo on the Menlung Glacier. In fact, if you want to put a price on it, Yeti-mania endured so much that this very same photo went as part of a set for £3,500 in 2008. Truthfully, 1951 was just the beginning of Yeti-related expeditions.
By 1954, the Snowman Expedition had been mounted. Funded by the Daily Mail (that paragon of news sources), they found nothing conclusive. There were a number of unidentifiable prints and a scalp in a monastery in Pangboche, which was duly analysed according to the best scientific methods of the day. The results concluded it was hair from some sort of hoofed animal, and not anything ape or bear-like at all.
The genetic yeti debate continues to the current day; testing was carried out on yeti samples as recently as 2013 and 2017. Charlotte Lindqvist and her team (2017) found the samples collected were from bears, with one exception; a yeti tooth. That, instead, came from a dog. Who knows, maybe Pliny was right about the teeth…
Then, just to add another dimension to this debate, there’s speculation of a familiar sort; a not-so-extinct species. First found in China being marketed as dragon teeth, there’s absolutely no doubt that whatever these came from, it was quite literally gigantic. The Gigantopithecus is thought to have been a massive cousin of the gorilla and orangutan, coming in at around twice the size of an adult male gorilla. The problem, unfortunately, is that all palaeontologists have got to work with is teeth. Apparently the bones are very popular with porcupines (not a joke — genuinely).
Despite everything, belief in the Yeti persists. People argue that even if Europeans could have mistaken a bear or a langur monkey for something else, the same can’t be said for the local Nepalese. There have, after all, been a massive number of apparent eyewitness sightings, if all unsubstantiated by either genetic or photographic proof. Footprints-wise, there’ve been even more, including those taken by Mike Rees in 2013. Still, who knows? As Heuvelmans said,
“The hypotheses and reconstructions of cryptozoology… are no more daring, questionable, fantastic, or illegitimate than those upon which paleontology has based its reconstructions of the fauna of past ages”.
Basically, if a footprint is enough proof for an extinct species, why isn’t it legitimate for a living one? It’s a fair point.
For now, though, even Daniel Taylor, author of The Ecology of a Mystery concludes that the footprints probably come from a species of tree bear. It’s not all doom and gloom — good has come of the search for the Yeti. In fact, Taylor’s own search for the Yeti lead him to spearhead the creation of the Makalu-Barun national park. And Taylor raises another good question — “what is this human hunger for these humanoid apparitions?”. Maybe it’s a sort of third-man syndrome. Maybe it’s a need to find the missing link between humanity and nature. Or maybe the Yeti really is out there.
Conspiracy Custard is fun, not fact. Don’t take us seriously — we don’t! (We’re not even sure if custard is a dessert or a drink. Answers, anyone?)
