Yeti (Abominable Snowman)

Two of the people closest to the 1951 photograph have offered explanations that need no unknown animal. Michael Ward, the doctor who stood beside the print, proposed in the Alpine Journal in 1999 that the Menlung tracks could have been made by "a local Tibetan with abnormally-shaped feet", and illustrated the deformed foot of a Nepalese highlander with both big toes twisted. He also listed the animals seen on snowfields up to at least 21,000 feet (yak, wild goat, snow leopard, fox and wolves) and noted that a bear or a langur monkey were possibilities, although no tail marks were seen. The Natural History Museum, according to Gillman, concluded at the time that the tracks could have been made by a langur. Peter Gillman, in the Alpine Journal of 2001, argued that the crucial footprint was a hoax. It would have been "the work of moments", he wrote, to enhance one of the oval, melted prints by adding the toe-prints by hand, and the crisp indentations along the inner side of the print could have been made with Shipton's ice axe. Edmund Hillary, an early sceptic, had noticed that the single print looked new and fresh compared with the tracks in the long shots, and told Gillman that he could imagine Shipton "tidying up" the footprint. Gillman also noted that Shipton in The Times, and Murray and Bourdillon in their diaries, described a single line of tracks. Ward rejected the hoax theory: he pointed out that his own description of the prints was written at least a year before Shipton lost the leadership of the 1953 expedition. The animals behind the wider legend came from genetics. In 2014 Bryan Sykes and colleagues sequenced 30 hair samples attributed to anomalous primates; two from the Himalaya, one from Ladakh and one from Bhutan, matched a Pleistocene polar bear fossil more than 40,000 years old, and they suggested a previously unrecognised bear species, colour variants of the polar bear, or hybrids of brown bear and polar bear. Ceiridwen Edwards and Ross Barnett replied in 2015 that the two sequences were identical to that of a modern polar bear and differed by one base from the Pleistocene fossil, that the single base separating them from brown bears sat exactly where DNA damage produces such errors in old hair, and proposed instead the Himalayan brown bear, Ursus arctos isabellinus, a rare subspecies of the high Himalaya long associated with the yeti myth. In 2017 Lan and colleagues analysed samples attributed to the yeti, nine of them supplied by the Reinhold Messner Museum and the Icon Film Company: one tooth from a stuffed exhibit matched a dog, all the rest were bears, and the authors concluded that their results strongly support "the biological basis of the yeti legend to be local, extant bears". For the footprints themselves, the explanations remain several. Daniel Taylor, who looked for the yeti for sixty years, told National Geographic in 2017 that he believes they were made by an Asian black bear. Ward and Gillman each rejected the other's explanation of the 1951 print in the Alpine Journal.