According to a new study, the ‘Abominable Snowman’ is a brown bear. According to an older hypothesis, the creature is a polar bear. Yet another says it could be a human species thought extinct. Which one is it?
This article was originally published on December 17, 2017, and was republished on February 20, 2018, with some new information.
The large shaggy beast terrorised generations of mountain people. Around campfires in the Himalaya, residents shared stories of the yeti’s shenanigans. It stinks, they said, and it walks on two legs. It attacks livestock and people. It’s an animal; it’s a man. Ever since mountaineers and travellers through these remote areas returned with these stories in the 19th century, the yeti has gripped the imagination of the outside world. A misinterpretation of a corrupted Tibetan word gave us another name, ‘The Abominable Snowman’.
Arguably the world’s greatest mountaineer, the first to climb 14 peaks above 8,000 metres without oxygen, Reinhold Messner didn’t escape its hold. Even though another mountaineer, Eric Shipton, photographed an enormous human-like footprint in the snow at 5,700 metres in 1951, it wasn’t until 1986 that Messner took the myth seriously. While trekking in eastern Tibet, he had a close encounter with the bipedal creature. It whistled at him before disappearing among the trees. Messner then spent 12 years obsessed with unravelling the identity of the mythical beast. After considering all the shreds of evidence, he concluded the biological basis of the yeti was a bear in his book, My Quest for the Yeti: Confronting the Himalayas’ Deepest Mystery.