(Other hominoid) Yeti

The Abominable Snowman or Yeti

The Yeti or Abominable Snowman is an apelike creature said to inhabit the Himalaya region of Bhutan, Nepal and Tibet that has some of the tallest peaks in the world including Mount Everest which at 29,028 feet high is the highest mountain peak in the world.

Contents

1. First Report
2. The Abominable Snowman
3. Further Sightings
4. The Snow Walker Video
5. Yeti Expeditions
6. Folklore
7. References

First Report

The names Yeti and Meh-Teh are among the many commonly used by the people indigenous to the region and are part of their history and mythology.

The first person from outside the region to report the possible existence of the Yeti was Irishman Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Howard-Bury, who led the Royal Geographical Society's "Everest Reconnaissance Expedition" which he chronicled in "Mount Everest The Reconnaissance," 1921. In the book, Howard-Bury includes an account of crossing the "Lhakpa-la" at 21,000 feet (6400 meter) where he found footprints that he believed "were probably caused by a large 'loping' grey wolf, which in the soft snow formed double tracks rather like a those of a barefooted man." He adds that his Sherpa guides "at once volunteered that the tracks must be that of "The Wild Man of the Snows," to which they gave the name "metoh-kangmi." "Metoh" translates as "man-bear" and "Kang-mi" translates as "snowman."

The Abominable Snowman

A bit of confusion exists between Howard-Bury's recitation of the term "metoh-kangmi" and the term used in H.W. Tilman's book Mount Everest, 1938 where Tilman had used the words "metch" (which may not exist in the Tibetan language) and "kangmi" when relating the coining of the term "Abominable Snowman." Further evidence of "metch" being a misnomer is provided by Tibetan language authority Professor David Snellgrove from the School of Oriental Studies in London (ca. 1956), who dismissed the word "metch" as impossible to conjoin the consonants "t-c-h" in the Tibetan language." Documentation suggests that the term "metch-kangmi" is derived from one source (from the year 1921). It has been suggested that "metch" is simply a misspelling of "metoh."

Like the legend itself, the origin of the term "Abominable Snowman" is rather colorful. It began when Mr. Henry Newman, a longtime contributor to The Statesman in Calcutta (using the pen name "Kim") interviewed the porters of the "Everest Reconnaissance expedition" upon their return to Darjeeling. Newman mistranslated the word "metoh" as "filthy" or "dirty," substituting the term "abominable," perhaps out of artistic license. As author H.W. Tilman's recounts, "[Newman] wrote long after in a letter to The Times: The whole story seemed such a joyous creation I sent it to one or two newspapers.'"

Tilman continues, "Whatever effect Mr. Newman intended, from 1921 onwards the Yeti... became saddled with the description "Abominable Snowman," an appellation which can only appeal to the music-hall mind rather than to mammalogists, a fact which has seriously handicapped earnest seekers of the truth," a view supported by Sanderson: "It cannot be denied however that Mr. Newman put the Yeti 'on the map.' During the twenties and thirties, sightings...of prints and of the animal itself occurred right across the Himalaya from the Burmese frontier to the Karakoram, not all of them by credulous witnesses."

Further Sightings

In 1925 a Greek photographer N. A. Tombazi working on a British expedition saw a biped creature who disappeared unfortunately before Tombazi could capture a photo of it.

"Unquestionably, the figure in outline was exactly like a human being, walking upright and stopping occasionally to uproot or pull at some dwarf rhododendron bushes," said Tombazi, "It showed up dark against the snow and, as far as I could make out wore no clothes."

Unlike it's Pacific Northwestern cousin Bigfoot or Sasquatch - the Native American name given for it - whose first-hand sightings are much more frequent, the Yeti best case of evidence is usually only of those of snow footprints, pelts of feces, and long distanced sightings.

In 2009 Lorraine Marriott spotted a yeti roaming in the wilds of Kent. It was dressed in a tutu and was roller skating with a string of onions around its neck singing YMCA.

The Snow Walker Video

A short video clip released in 1996 and referred to as the 'Snow Walker video' was initially reported to be a video of a yeti in the Himalayas. The film initially fooled three of the most prominent bigfoot researchers, but was later revealed by Jeff Meldrum as an elaborate hoax.

See Snow Walker for more details.

Yeti Expeditions

During the 1950's and 1960's the search for the Yeti reached an unknown peak highlighted by an expedition led by the great mountaineer and explorer Sir Edmund Hillary, a New Zealander who along with a Sherpa named Tenzing Norgay were the first people to climb to the summit of Mount Everest and return safely.

Hillary, a skeptic of the Yeti from the beginning, failed to find any evidence that backed the existence of the Yeti and concluded the snow prints attributed to the Yeti were produced by the merging of smaller animal snow prints.

Tom Slick in 1957 financed and led a search for the Yeti that did result in a interesting find in droppings that produced parasites of an unknown primate. His expedition also uncovered bedding areas much like ones made by mountain gorillas.

Folklore

Lore of the yeti is reported to go back as far as the 400 BC according to the Tibetans, in the poem "Rama and Sita" there are references to the yeti, and the word yeti when translated in Tibetan means "magical creature" hinting at the kind of hold this mysterious and elusive apeman has with the Tibetan culture. So much in fact that in 1961 the government of Nepal officially declared that the yeti does exist.

References

• Stonor, Charles - The Sherpa and the Snowman(1955)
• Charles Howard-Bury (February 1921). Some Observations on the Approaches to Mount Everest. The Geographical Journal vol. 57: 121-124.
• Charles Howard-Bury (1921). "19", Mount Everest The Reconnaissance, 1921. Edward Arnold, p. 141. ISBN=1-135-39935-2.
• John A. Jackson (1955). More than Mountains. George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd).
• Tilman H.W, (1938). Mount Everest 1938. Pilgrim Publishing, pp. 127-137. ISBN 81-7769-175-9.
• Ralph Izzard (1955). The Abominable Snowman Adventure. Hodder and Stoughton: pp. 21-22.