Chapter 1: What evidence sparked the Yeti legend?
In 1951, seasoned mountaineer Eric Shipton and his colleague Michael Ward were scouting an approach to Everest. They were traversing the treacherous Menlun Glacier on the Nepal-Tibet border when they encountered something strange. There in the snow, a huge footprint stared back at them.
The print was humanoid, yet not quite human. About 13 inches long, unusually broad, with a divergent big toe that looked almost like a thumb. The print was just one of many. In fact, Shipton and Ward followed these tracks for a mile, which is no mean feat at an altitude above four and a half thousand meters. What made these marks in the remote heights of the Himalayas? Could it really be a yeti?
And if not, well, what on earth was it that these esteemed mountaineers saw? I'm James Stewart and you're watching Asteroom Earth. Now I know what you might be thinking, why is he making a video about yetis? Clearly there's no way these things can be real, right? And I would have agreed with you, really, I would. But something about yetis has just always bothered me.
Every year there's a new story, a new discovery, a new leaked picture somewhere online. And how can there be this much smoke without fire? If it's not a Yeti that we're seeing, then it has to be something else. And I want to know what that is. That's just how my brain works.
So join me in this video as we delve into the world of the fabled Yeti and meet its Amazonian equivalent, known as the Mapinguari. How is it that centuries-old rumours of their existence still circulate? Is there any truth behind the swathes of evidence? Or can science finally explain what lies hidden in the wilderness?
High up in the Himalayan peaks and the Tibetan Plateau, Legends tell of a hairy, ape-like wild man that stalks the mountains. The Sherpa people call it the Yeti, a term which roughly means wild man of the rocks. In Tibetan folklore, it's sometimes thought of as a spirit of the glaciers or an elusive mountain creature.
Westerners came to know it by a slightly more flamboyant name, shall we say, the Abominable Snowman, a moniker coined in 1921, when journalist Henry Newman interviewed members of a British Everest reconnaissance expedition.
The mountaineers described seeing large footprints at high altitude, and local porters filled in the gaps, suggesting they were left by the Mehto Kangmi, or Man Bear Snowman in Tibetan. Over a century later, and the name stuck, igniting Western fascination.
Even Sir David Attenborough, yeah, my personal hero and universally respected natural history expert, has said the legendary Yeti could really exist and be living in the Himalayan mountains. So what's the truth? Throughout the 20th century, the Yeti legend grew as climbers and adventurers reported strange sightings. In 1925, a Greek photographer named N.A.
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Chapter 2: How did the Yeti myth evolve over the decades?
Well, not good. Zoologists found that the scalp was not from an unknown primate at all, but rather had been fashioned from the hide of a sero, a Himalayan goat antelope. In other words, the monk's relic was likely a ceremonial artefact made from animal skin, rather than a gigantic humanoid covered in hair. Hillary later returned the scalp to Nepal, along with this rather disappointing news.
In fact, this happened more than once, as Hillary's team also scrutinised other Yeti remains. many of those other relics turned out to be from bears. Hillary had found no compelling trace of an unknown monster lurking in the Himalayas. So much so that by the end of his quest, he remarked that he had wanted to bring back the truth, and that was not a Yeti.
To quote Hillary himself, he could not in all conscience view it as more than a fascinating fairy tale. Today, a replica of the Kum Jung scalp is on display at the Explorers Club in New York City, while the original is still kept under lock and key by the monastery, displayed to visitors for a small donation. So if you want to see what a Gope Antelope hide looks like, there you go.
Another famous relic was the so-called Pangbosh Hand. Unsurprisingly, given its name, it can be found in the Pangbosh Monastery, not far from Everest. Here, some monks had a mummified skeletal hand and a skull cap on display, which they claimed belonged to a yeti. Of course they did.
This relic came from the great Sherpa leader Lama Sangwa Dorje, who in the 17th century went to southern Tibet to study Buddhism. While there, he meditated in a cave near Pangbosh, where he claimed a yeti brought him food, water and fuel, and even became his Buddhist disciple. When the yeti died, Sangwa kindly brought his hand and scalp back to the monastery. So could this one be real?
Well, in 1958, on the orders of Tom Slick, the oil financer bloke I mentioned earlier, and after much debate by the monks, Peter Byrne, a well-known Everest explorer, managed to obtain a single finger from the hand in exchange for a rather large donation toward the temple's upkeep and a replacement human finger. I'm not sure I want to know where he got that one from, actually.
Anyway, if you thought that was weird, this story takes a turn no one could ever dream of. Byrne then smuggled the finger and some extra hand skin across the Nepalese border into India, where he met American movie star James Stewart, what a great name, and his wife Gloria in Calcutta.
The famous couple agreed to smuggle the finger back into the United Kingdom to Slick's friend and primatologist Osmond Hill, a member of the Zoological Society of London, to study it. Now, the story goes they pulled off the heist by hiding the remains inside Gloria Stewart's undergarments inside her luggage.
So after all of that, the finger did indeed finally make it to London for analysis by William Osman Hill, who initially reported the finger might be from a Neanderthal. whilst another, American anthropologist George Agagino, claimed it was near human, sparking huge excitement.
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Chapter 3: What physical relics have been attributed to the Yeti?
The link is in the description if you want your digital life a little more private as we head back to the video. While the Himalayas were buzzing with yeti fever in the 1950s, the Amazon jungle had its own monstrous myth.
Indigenous peoples in the Amazon basin, Brazil, Bolivia and beyond, spoke of something called the Mapinguari, a fearsome, shaggy creature said to lurk in the green depths of the rainforest undergrowth. Descriptions of the Mapinguari vary, but they consistently paint a nightmarish picture. A giant beast over seven feet tall when it rears up.
covered in matted reddish fur and armed with enormous curved claws capable of tearing apart palm trees and humans in an instant. Even more disturbingly, legend has it that this grotesque beast is so ravenous for human flesh it has a second mouth on its belly.
If that were not warning enough to stay your distance, the creature is also said to give off an overpowering odour, a stench so foul that humans allegedly faint or become disorientated when it's near. Locals claim it has backward-facing feet to confuse anyone trying to track it, and it's so fearsome that even bullets don't kill it, bouncing off its tough hide like rubber.
So it's not difficult to see why the Mapumgwari drew the interests of scientists and cryptozoologists, those are the people studying animals whose existence is unproven, in the 20th century. After all, the Amazon is so vast and was so unexplored at the time, it seems plausible a big unknown animal could be hiding there somewhere, so why not this one? One tantalising theory emerged.
Perhaps the Mapungwari was not an ape or wild man at all, but instead a surviving giant ground sloth. To paleontologists, this wasn't as far-fetched as it sounds. Enormous ground-dwelling sloths, related to today's tree sloths but the size of bears or even elephants, did once exist across South America.
Fossil remains of the giant Megatherium and its relatives show they were bear-like herbivores with long claws, able to stand up on two legs and often had red fur, as inferred from preserved hair. The only problem was they were thought to have gone extinct at least 5,000 years ago. But that didn't stop people from looking for them.
In the 1990s, Dr. David C. Oren, a then respected ornithologist and research director at Brazil's Goldie Museum, took up the mantle of the Mapunguari. Initially dismissive of it as folklore, Oren changed his mind after hearing dozens of first-hand accounts from Amazonian hunters and villagers.
By 1994, he hypothesised that the Mapungwari could indeed be a relic population of medium-sized giant ground sloths surviving in remote areas. And if true, it would be a discovery on par with finding a living dinosaur. He set about interviewing witnesses that had braved the jungle, enduring clouds of insects, oppressive heat and treacherous terrain, searching for any sign of the beast.
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Chapter 4: What scientific investigations have been conducted on Yeti remains?
Then a short mitochondrial fragment was extracted, the type often used in wildlife forensics because it survives well even when samples are old or damaged. They amplified this tiny stretch of DNA and compared it to a genetic library to see which species it matched. Even a sequence this small is generally enough to pinpoint the species, because each animal has a unique pattern of mutations.
If the fragment doesn't match any living species, well that's when scientists start getting excited, but that wasn't quite the case here. Most samples turned out to come from mundane sources. Everyday animals like cows, horses, bears, and in one case, even a human. I hope someone's keeping track of all the human remains in this video, by the way, because something's going on.
But it wasn't all bad news. Sikes reported that two Himalayan samples had DNA closer to an ancient polar bear than to any known modern species.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a glimmer of hope that something unknown, something abnormal could be roaming the Himalayas sprung back to life. Something enthusiasts hurriedly linked to the Yeti. The media frenzy was as intense as the Yeti sightings of old. Just imagine, finally, actual scientific evidence of a giant polar bear-like creature lurking in Tibet. Finally, they had cracked the case.
That was until something brought Sykes and the millions of other intrepid jetty hunters crashing back down to Earth.
Almost immediately, other geneticists challenged the findings, and a reanalysis indicated that the sequences likely belonged to a normal Himalayan brown bear, and that Sykes had most probably matched a fragment to an ancient polar bear in error. A couple of years later, the proverbial nail was put into the coffin with a definitive genetic study in 2017.
Led by Charlotte Lindquist, an international team conducted the most rigorous analysis of purported Yeti remains to date. Unlike earlier work, the team generated much longer and far more informative mitochondrial sequences. In some cases, assembling complete mitochondrial genomes for the very first time.
This meant that the scientists could distinguish closely related species with confidence and avoid the false matches that can happen with degraded fragments. Genetically speaking, this leaves little room for mystery. Using advanced DNA sequencing, Lindquist's group compared the samples to comprehensive genetic data from known regional wildlife, and the verdict was clear.
Every single sample corresponded to known animals. What people called yetis were in fact bears all along. Bears whose fur footprints or other traces were misidentified, blown up in the media and made into something mysterious. Beyond DNA, other scientific work has also set out to demystify classic Yeti evidence. Remember Shipton's famous footprint with the thumb?
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