In 1951, seasoned mountaineer Eric
Shipton and his colleague Michael Ward
were scouting an approach to Everest.
They were traversing the treacherous
Menllum glacia 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
in 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 4,000
m.
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
Astramm 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 is 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 map in Guari.
How is it that centuries old rumors of
their existence still circulate? Is
there any truth behind the swaths 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 apelike wild man
that stalks the mountains. The Sherper
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 meadow Kangmi or
man bear snowman in Tibetan
over a century later and the name stuck
igniting western fascination.
Even Sir David Atenburgh, 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 NA Tombbazi claimed
he saw a dark humanoid figure leaving
footprints on a snow field at 15,000 ft.
By the 1950s, outsiders were pouring
into Nepal. After news broke that Sir
Edmund Hillary conquered Everest in
1953,
the Yeti story captured global
imagination. And perhaps coincidentally,
sightings and stories proliferated.
An American oil financier, Tom Slick,
funded multiple expeditions.
The Daily Mail newspaper even sponsored
a hunt in 1954.
And 6 years later, even Sir Edmund
Hillary himself organized an expedition,
at least in part, to investigate the
Yeti mystery.
Not wanting to miss out, the government
of Nepal also got involved. Keen to
capitalize on the craze, they started
offering officially regulated Yeti
searches for any brave, intrepid
travelers.
In 1959, they even issued rules, yep,
for Yeti expeditions, requiring a hefty
permit fee and declaring that if a Yeti
were found, it must not be killed.
except of course in self-defense.
In fact, any evidence at all had to be
surrendered to the state. And so the
stage was set for a series of intriguing
discoveries.
This the photograph we shared at the
start of the video is perhaps the most
iconic piece of evidence in Yeti law. An
image of a supposed Yeti footprint
snapped in Nepal by mountaineer Eric
Shipton and his colleague Michael Ward.
Now, aside from just looking impressive,
the fact it was Shipum himself who found
it, a highly respected explorer,
electrified the world. The media ran
wild with the possibility, dubbing the
print the Rosetta Stone of Yeti
evidence.
Over subsequent years, as you can
imagine, footprints remained a key piece
of evidence cited by Yeti hunters.
Plaster casts were made of some prints,
and one famous one even made it to
Disneyland.
But footprints weren't the only clues.
There were other physical artifacts,
too. In some remote Buddhist monasteries
of Nepal, monks safeguarded curious
relics, scalps and bones attributed to
yetis, locked up and stashed away from
prying eyes.
The most famous of these is the socalled
Yeti scalp of Kum Jun, a hairy half
sphere of hide housed in the village of
Kum Jun. During Edmund Hillary's 1960
expedition, he actually managed to
borrow this scalp with permission of
course from the llamas. He even brought
it back to Europe and the US for
scientific examination. And the results,
well, not good. Zoologologists 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
artifact 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 scrutinized 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 gulp antelope hive looks like,
well, there you go. Another famous relic
was the so-called Pang Bosch hand.
Unsurprisingly, given its name, it can
be found in the Pang Bosch 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 Llama Sanga Dori, who in the 17th
century went to southern Tibet to study
Buddhism.
While there, he meditated in a cave near
Pangbos, where he claimed a yeti brought
him food, water, and fuel and even
became his Buddhist disciple.
When the yeti died, Sanga 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 Burn, 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. Burn then smuggled the
finger and some extra handkin across the
Nepalese border into India where he met
American movie star James Stewart. What
a great name. And his wife Gloria in
Kolkata. The famous couple agreed to
smuggle the finger back into the United
Kingdom to Slick's friend and
pimeatlogist 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. Sadly,
upon closer analysis, it was eventually
determined to be of actual human origin,
rather killing the mood and opening up a
whole different series of questions.
Decades later, this was further
confirmed by DNA testing. As for the
rest of the Pang Bosch hand and scalp,
well, those relics were unfortunately
stolen in the 1990s. They were likely
taken by artifact hunters after media
reports.
but in a modern twist. A replica of the
hand was crafted by Veta Workshop, the
people known for creating Lord of the
Rings props and delivered to the
monastery in 2011 to plate the monks. So
maybe in that sense, the legend of the
Yeti lives on in Middle Earth. Beyond
relics and prints, the best evidence
comes from eyewitness reports in the
Himalayas. In 1986, Reinhold Mesner, one
of the world's greatest mountaineers,
claimed he came face tof face with a
large, hairy, bipedal creature during a
solo trek in Tibet.
Mesnner was initially convinced he had
encountered a yeti. So convinced, in
fact, he became rather obsessed with the
concept, spending years investigating.
Eventually, however, he concluded the
creature he saw was not the fable beast
at all, but likely a bear, the rare
Tibetan blue bear or Himalayan brown
bear, and perhaps rather sadly for him,
came to the conclusion that the yeti
exists only as a myth.
Another incident the same year involved
British climber Anthony Wardridge, who
even took photographs of what he
believed to be a yeti, only to realize
later on it was just an oddly shaped
rock formation.
Many Sherper and Tibetan locals also
recount stories of glimpsing yetis in
forests or during yak hering trips,
describing them as shaggy, upright
creatures that flee quickly or vanish in
an instant. In fact, Sherper tradition
often held the yeti as a spiritual or
magical being. Seeing one was considered
an ill omen, but it was the seeing one
that still remained a problem.
Even the Indian army was at it. In a
more recent case in 2019, they announced
they had found Yeti footprints near a
base camp measuring a gigantic 32x 15
in. They even tweeted photos of the
tracks.
The claim was met with widespread
ridicule and skepticism, however, and
experienced trackers immediately noted
the prince likely came from a bear. So,
the army quietly let the matter drop
rather quickly after the initial
publicity.
So, it's not looking good for yetis in
this part of the world. But our quest
continues because there is another place
on Earth to look where something even
more terrifying is rumored to lurk.
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 Mapping Guari, a
fearsome, shaggy creature said to lurk
in the green depths of the rainforest
undergrowth.
Descriptions of the Mapping Guari 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 odor, 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 map
and guari drew the interests of
scientists and cryptozoolologists.
Those 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 tantalizing theory
emerged. Perhaps the map guari 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 sloth, but the size of
bears or even elephants did once exist
across South America. Fossil remains of
the giant meggathereum and its relatives
show they were bearlike 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. Orurin,
a then respected ornithologist and
research director at Brazil's Goldie
Museum, took up the mantle of the
mapari.
Initially dismissive of it as folklore,
Orin changed his mind after hearing
dozens of firsthand accounts from
Amazonian hunters and villagers. By
1994, he hypothesized that the map guari
could indeed be a relic population of
mediumsized 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.
Some of the accounts he collected were
pretty compelling. One hunter, Xiao Dos
Santos, described hearing an unearly
humanlike scream in the forest that made
his hair stand on end. When he saw trees
thrashing and realized the mapari was
coming, he ran in terror, hiding in a
river for an hour.
Another man claimed a mapari's horrid
smell left him dizzy and sick for 2
months after an encounter.
Chilling as these tales are, what Orin
needed was tangible evidence.
During more than six expeditions spread
across the 1990s into the early 2000s,
Orin set about collecting samples from
the field to try and prove his theories.
He found large tracks about 11 in long
with a stride suggesting a sizable
creature and made plaster casts. He
gathered toughs of coarse hair snagged
on branches and even analyzed dung piles
locals attributed to the mapari.
For a time these finds fueled hope. The
footprint, if genuine, hinted at a heavy
animal. The hairs were reddish and
fibrous. Every discovery felt like a
step toward unearthing this creature.
But then along came scientific analysis.
When Orin sent the hair for testing, it
turned out to belong to an ordinary
Agooti, a common rainforest rodent whose
fur had gotten caught on brush.
The fecal samples were tested for DNA
traces. It was from a giant anter.
The casts of footprints, while
intriguing, could not be taken as proof.
Even Orin himself admitted the tracks
are easily faked in a region where
hoaxing a gullible foreign scientist
might be an amusing pastime for locals.
In the end, despite years of effort,
Orin did not find the fabled beast.
There wasn't even a blurry photo, no
unknown DNA, no sloth in the flesh,
nothing but disappointment.
By the mid 2000s, Dr. Orin reluctantly
conceded that the map guari is likely
only a legend. He speculated that the
folklore might be a cultural memory of
real encounters with the last ground
sloths from centuries ago passed down in
exaggerated form.
Extinct species can survive as legends
for hundreds of years, Orin told the New
York Times in 2007.
But whether such an animal still exists
or not is another question. one we can't
answer. He said, "A lot has changed in
the last 60 years, and with ever more
accurate tests have come some
increasingly interesting results,
particularly when it comes to DNA
analysis. This technology has not only
been a gamecher in modern forensics, but
also when it comes to examining
mysterious biological samples.
In 2012, a team led by Brian Sykes at
Oxford University undertook an ambitious
project. They actually put out an open
call for alleged Yeti and Bigfoot
samples. They wanted everything from
hairs and bones to tissues and to be
quite honest, anything else. All in an
attempt to put the rumors to the test
and gain a definitive answer, which is
what I think we all want.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, they were
inundated, receiving dozens of
submissions. After weeding out some
obvious fakes, for example, some hairs
were actually fiberglass, plant
material, or even glass strands, Sykes's
team genetically tested the viable
samples.
Away from the terrifying stories of
flesh-eating, bullet repelling beasts,
the reality was a little different.
To test the hairs, the team used a
standard forensic method. A small piece
of each hair was cleaned and broken down
with an enzyme called proteinise K,
essentially a molecular scissor that
frees up the DNA.
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 a track
of all the human remains in this video,
by the way, because something's going
on. But it wasn't all bad news. Sites
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 Linquist, 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, Linquist'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? Well, Daniel
Taylor, a conservationist who spent
decades studying Yeti reports, also
suspected a bear was the culprit for
this. To put his theory to the test, he
conducted a short experiment using a
tranquilized Asiatic black bear. He
pressed the bear's paw into soft earth
to simulate tracks. Sure enough, the
bear's hind foot, which in Asian black
bears has a flexible big toe for
climbing, left the print strikingly
similar to the shipton photo, including
a thumblike indentation. The overlapping
of bearhind and forprints in melting
snow can also create the illusion of a
giant bipedal track. Other mountaineers
have noted that snow can distort prints.
A small depression enlarges as some
melts the edges and repeated melting and
refreezing can make a bear's paw or even
yak hoof look surprisingly like an
enormous human footprint.
These natural, even slightly boring
explanations don't capture headlines
like a monster story, but they do fit
the data far better.
After examining a century's worth of
expeditions, eyewitness tales, and
scientific tests to finally scratch my
Yeti itch, the answer is pretty clear.
The Yeti, the Mappen Guari, and their
kin around the world, whether it's
Bigfoot of North America or the Yahi of
Australia
have not been proven real in the
biological sense and exist only in a
fictional one. Despite the footprints in
the snows of Everest and the screams in
the Amazon night, no body alive or dead
has ever been found. But despite the
evidence lacking for a flesh and blood
bipeedal ape, the yeti does live on in
another way as a cultural phenomenon. In
this vein, the Yeti is very real and
quite significant, shaping local
traditions, inspiring conservation in
wild places, and keeping the sense of
wonder alive in an age of satellites and
smartphones. That is the power of the
Yeti legend. A story that true or not
will continue to captivate and inspire
wherever wilderness remains. Let me know
in the comments if you've heard any
other stories of yetis or Bigfoot. Maybe
you've even found a footprint or seen
something lurking in the distance. Or do
you think there's something science
might have missed? Could the yeti really
be alive and well? Let us know down
below and we'll see you in the next one.