The Yeti: The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas

About 6 min read

High in the Himalayas, where the snow line sits at around 5,500 metres and the air is too thin for most animals, local people have long spoken of a wild, hairy being. In Sherpa tradition it is the metoh-kangmi, roughly “man-bear snowman,” and in Nepali and Tibetan belief it is a creature best left alone — some accounts say that seeing one is an ill omen. Western climbers first heard the stories in the early 20th century, gave the creature a new name, and spent the next hundred years searching for it.

The Yeti — the “Abominable Snowman” of Western popular culture — is the most famous cryptid in the world after the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot. Unlike them, it has been the subject of serious scientific testing. Hair, bone, teeth, skin and droppings attributed to the Yeti have been DNA-tested, and every sample that has returned a result has matched a known animal. That does not end the story, because the Yeti was never only a biological question. It is also a story about how mountains, folklore and expedition publicity combine.

Table of Contents

A name born from a mistranslation

The English name “Abominable Snowman” was coined in 1921, and it began with a translation error. That year, the British Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition, led by Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Howard-Bury, crossed the Lhagpa La pass at about 21,000 feet (6,400 metres) and found large footprints in the snow. Interviewed in Darjeeling by Henry Newman, a columnist for the Calcutta Statesman, the expedition’s porters spoke of the metoh-kangmi. Newman rendered metoh as “filthy” or “abominable,” and the “Abominable Snowman” was born.

Howard-Bury himself concluded that the tracks had been made by a loping wolf. The local guides disagreed, attributing them to the legendary creature. That disagreement — a Western leader offering a mundane explanation, local people offering a traditional one — would repeat itself for decades.

The name “Yeti” comes from the Sherpa and Tibetan words for the creature, and it gradually replaced “Abominable Snowman” in serious writing. The older name survives in popular culture, including in Hergé’s 1958 Tintin adventure Tintin in Tibet, which introduced the Yeti to a generation of European children.

The Shipton footprint, 1951

The single most famous piece of Yeti evidence is a photograph taken on 8 November 1951. British climbers Eric Shipton and Michael Ward were crossing the Menlung basin, near Everest, at an elevation of well over 15,000 feet, when they found a line of large footprints running for about a mile through the snow. Shipton photographed one print with his ice axe and Ward’s boot laid beside it for scale. The clearest print was about 13 inches (33 cm) long and 8 inches wide — roughly twice as wide as a human footprint — with a broad, shortened big toe and a row of smaller toes.

The Shipton photographs became icons. They were reproduced around the world, studied by zoologists, and treated by many as the strongest physical evidence for the Yeti. They also launched a wave of Yeti expeditions. In 1954, the Daily Mail funded a months-long Snowman Expedition, sending reporter Ralph Izzard and zoologist Biswamoy Biswas to examine relic scalps kept at the Pangboche and Khumjung monasteries in Nepal’s Khumbu region. In the late 1950s, American oilman Tom Slick launched several search expeditions, including one that lasted six months.

Shipton himself was a respected explorer, not a man prone to superstition, and that lent the photographs weight. But the photographs have also been intensely scrutinised. Zoologist Daniel Loxton and palaeontologist Donald Prothero, among others, have argued that the celebrated single print is most plausibly two overlapping bear tracks — a hind paw landing partly inside a fore paw — with afternoon sun melting the edges into a deceptively toe-like outline. Others have noted that a single clear print, photographed in isolation from the full trackway, is a weak basis for identifying an unknown animal.

Other sightings and relics

The Shipton footprint was not the only report. In 1925, photographer N. A. Tombazi reported seeing a dark figure moving across a slope in Sikkim, at a distance of about 200 yards, in his Account of a Photographic Expedition to the Southern Glaciers of Kanchenjunga. In July 1986, the mountaineer Reinhold Messner reported finding large footprints in Tibet. In April 2019, the Indian Army posted photographs on social media of footprints it said measured 32 inches long and 15 inches wide, found near Makalu Base Camp in Nepal. The claim was widely reported and widely questioned: the longest recorded human foot measures under 16 inches, and no independent verification of the prints was offered.

Monasteries in the Khumbu region have long kept relics said to be Yeti scalps and a preserved hand, the Pangboche Hand. These objects were examined during the 1954 Daily Mail expedition and by later visitors. They are real objects with real histories as religious relics; whether they are what they are said to be is a separate question, and one that DNA testing has now addressed.

What DNA testing found

Two peer-reviewed genetic studies have tested purported Yeti material, and both point in the same direction.

In 2014, a team led by Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes published a study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B analysing hair samples attributed to yeti, bigfoot and other anomalous primates. DNA was recovered from thirty samples. Most matched ordinary animals — horses, cows, bears, a raccoon, a porcupine, a human. Two Himalayan samples, one from Ladakh in India and one from Bhutan, did not match any living brown bear, and instead matched a fragment of DNA from an ancient polar bear jawbone recovered in Svalbard. Sykes was careful not to claim a yeti, and suggested only that the samples might come from an unrecognised or hybrid bear. The finding was based on a short fragment of a single mitochondrial gene, and it was criticised on those grounds.

In 2017, a fuller study led by Charlotte Lindqvist of the University at Buffalo, also published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, re-examined the question with much longer stretches of mitochondrial DNA. Her team analysed nine purported yeti specimens — bone, tooth, skin, hair and droppings — collected from the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. Eight of the nine were bears: Asian black bears, Himalayan brown bears and Tibetan brown bears. The ninth, a tooth from the Reinhold Messner Mountain Museum, was from a domestic dog. When Lindqvist’s team reanalysed the kind of sample that had produced Sykes’s polar-bear match, they found it grouped with the Himalayan brown bear, not with any polar ancestor.

The study’s conclusion was measured: “Our findings strongly suggest that the biological basis of the yeti legend can be found in local bears.” The authors, and the scientists who reported on the work, were careful to add that this does not prove the Yeti does not exist — it proves only that the samples tested so far came from bears and a dog. But no purported Yeti sample has ever returned DNA from an unknown primate.

What the evidence says

Documented: In 1921, the British Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition reported large footprints at about 21,000 feet, and journalist Henry Newman coined the name “Abominable Snowman” from a mistranslation of the Sherpa term metoh-kangmi. On 8 November 1951, Eric Shipton photographed a footprint about 13 inches long in the Menlung basin, with an ice axe and boot beside it for scale.
Documented: In 2017, Lindqvist and colleagues DNA-tested nine purported yeti specimens; eight were bears (Asian black, Himalayan brown and Tibetan brown bears) and one was a domestic dog. The 2014 Sykes study’s polar-bear match was not reproduced when the same kind of sample was reanalysed with longer DNA sequences.
Claimed, not proven: That the Shipton footprint, the 1921 tracks, the 1925 Tombazi sighting, the 1986 Messner footprints, or the 2019 Indian Army footprints were made by an unknown primate. Each report is anecdotal or photographic, and none has been independently verified as the track of an unknown animal.
Disputed: The interpretation of the Shipton print. Some researchers read it as the track of an unknown animal; others, including Loxton and Prothero, argue it is most plausibly two overlapping bear tracks distorted by melting snow.
Proven false: The claim that the tested Yeti relics — hair, bone, tooth, skin and droppings — came from an unknown species. Every sample that returned a result matched a known animal.

What remains unknown

Why Sherpa and Tibetan communities describe a wild man-bear, and what encounters with real Himalayan brown bears — which can stand upright, walk on two legs for short distances, and leave large, human-like tracks in melting snow — contributed to that description, is a question for folklore and ecology rather than for a single expedition. The Yeti may never be found, because the evidence so far suggests it was never a separate animal at all. But the mountains that produced it are real, the tracks that launched a century of searching were real, and the bears whose DNA now answers for the relics are real too.