For generations, stories of giant ape-like creatures roaming the wilds of the Himalaya have persisted. Recent discoveries suggest there’s a very plausible explanation…
Words and photographs by Stuart Butler
Nobody in my family has spoken about this for a long time. The last time we talked about it to strangers, bad things happened. My mother got very sick and my sister died of an illness. Perhaps it was a curse. But, since then, nobody in my family has spoken about the yeti again.’ A keen gardener, Dawa Yanji Sherpa was sat on a wooden bench in her home in the Nepalese mountain village of Khunde surrounded by the shocking pink and purple flowers of dozens of delicate potted plants. ‘It all happened a long time ago. Back when I was very small, so I don’t remember it myself, but my mother has told me what happened.’ She paused, as if she wasn’t sure whether to continue. ‘My mother had taken the yaks further up the valley to a place called Machhermo. Today there is a village there, but back then, it was just a summer pasture for the animals and she was there on her own. The yeti came from behind, grabbed her by the hair and threw her maybe five or ten metres across the ground. She hit her head on a rock when she landed and fell unconscious for a few minutes. When she woke up, she saw that the yeti had killed two of the yaks by splitting their heads open, and as she watched, she saw it lick the blood out of the skull of one of the dead yaks. My mother stayed very still until the yeti left and then she ran back down the mountain to the village.’
The yeti, the abominable snowman, a creature, a myth, a spirit, a human-like ape or a figment of the imagination. Whatever the yeti is – or is not – it has become Himalayan and Hollywood folklore. To many, the mere thought of a giant, undiscovered ape-like creature roaming the Himalaya is intriguing – perhaps exciting and strangely desirable – but in the end, laughable. However, for many people living in the Himalaya, Tibet and parts of highland Central Asia – all places where yetis are supposed to live – the yeti is a very rare, but real flesh-and-bones creature (although often with supernatural powers that allow it to move undetected and disappear at will) that should be accorded all the protection of any other rare species. Indeed, in the tiny Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, a huge swathe of the densely forested and mountainous east of the country has been set aside as a national park with the specific aim of providing the yetis, who are said to be abundant in the region, with a safe area.
So, what actually was it that attacked Dawa Yanji Sherpa’s mother all those years ago? Well, the answer seems to depend upon whom you ask. Stories of large, hairy ape-like creatures that walk upright like a human inhabiting remote parts of the Himalaya have been around for a long time. A creature or spirit that roughly matches up with our modern idea of the yeti was a part of the pre-Buddhist mythology of several Himalayan peoples. Once Buddhism became the dominant religion in so much of the Himalaya and Tibet, the idea of the yeti was carried over into Buddhist mythology, and there are a number of tales of yetis helping important religious figures. In the part of Nepal where Dawa Yanji Sherpa lives, a story is commonly told about the accomplished Buddhist Master Lama Sange Dorje, who lived around 600 years ago and spent much of his time meditating in remote caves. It’s said that to aid him in his meditation, he had an assistant who brought him food and water from a nearby river. That assistant was a yeti. One day, as the yeti crossed over a fold in the upper valley carrying water for Sange Dorje, it was killed by a rockfall. When Lama Sange Dorje finished meditating, he returned down the valley, bringing the hand and scalp of the yeti with him. Those yeti relics can still be seen today in a Buddhist monastery in the village of Pangboche, where the sharply domed, reddish scalp is held in pride of place in a glass display case just inside the entrance to the monastery.
A friendly yeti who helps spiritually pure humans? That doesn’t fit with the description of the creature that attacked Dawa Yanji Sherpa’s mother. But, according to those who live in yeti country, there are three different kinds of yeti and not all are inherently dangerous. The Rang Shim Bombo is the yeti you have to fear the least if met on a dark Himalayan night. Living in the dense forests that predominate at about 3,000–3,500 metres, it’s only about a metre to a metre and a half tall, has a coat of rust-red fur and isn’t generally considered a threat to people. Perhaps this was the kind that helped our meditating lama? The next kind of yeti, the Chuti is more formidable, with a big male said to stand over two metres tall. The third is the scariest of all. The dark-haired Nylamo can be more than two and a half metres tall and has a decidedly aggressive manner. These live above the tree line out in the wilds of the high mountains and are said to enjoy snacking on yaks. Perhaps this is the beast that attacked Dawa Yanji Sherpa’s mother.
The three different yeti ‘species’ described above all sound suspiciously like a type of ape. So, have any large apes ever existed that might have led to the myth of the yeti? The answer is yes and no. In 1935, a German-Dutch palaeontologist was rummaging about in a Chinese apothecary shop when he came across the oversized molar of an ape that was unknown to science. Later named Gigantopitherus blacki, this creature, which died out some 350,000 years ago, was a huge, bulky ape with rusty-red hair that stood over three metres high. A wave of media excitement spread. Could a relict population still exist in the Himalaya? Unfortunately, that turned out to be unlikely because while many G. blacki bones have been discovered in southeastern China, none have ever been found in the vicinity of the Himalaya. But, while G. blacki never lived in the Himalaya, there is an ape that definitely did live in the forests of the eastern Himalaya – and much more recently. Today, orangutans, a name that, intriguingly, means ‘person of the forest’ in Malay, live only in parts of Borneo and Sumatra. But, 10,000 years ago, they ranged much more extensively across Asia, including right up into the Himalayan foothills.
Humans were definitely present in the Himalaya at this time, so could the legend of the yeti stem from an ingrained memory of these animals? It’s even possible that the legend of the yeti is based on handed-down tales from when the earliest Homo sapiens in the Himalaya shared the mountains with other hominids.
These theories don’t account for the creature that attacked Dawa Yanji Sherpa’s mother. However, there’s another type of creature that’s very much alive, lives in the Himalaya and is known to attack people and yaks. Over the years, many different hair samples and relics from ‘yetis’ (including those in the monastery in Pangboche) have been discovered. But, after scientific analysis, almost all have turned out to come not from a yeti, nor even from a giant ape. Instead, they’ve invariably come from a bear. Several different kinds of bear live in the Himalaya and Tibet. Most are one of a multitude of brown bear subspecies and sometimes – such as with the fabled Tibetan blue bear – they are very rare indeed. In fact, up until 2019, the Tibetan blue bear, about which we know almost nothing, was considered, at best, critically endangered and, at worst, extinct in the wild. But, in that year there were a couple of confirmed sightings in different parts of Tibet and the Himalaya. Indeed, while visiting a monastery that year in a densely forested valley in a remote corner of eastern Tibet, a monk I met gave me video footage of a female blue bear and her cubs that had been filmed just two weeks earlier. The monk explained how these bears hadn’t been seen for many years, but they had recently made a sudden reappearance and had become bold and aggressive enough to have started killing yaks and entering nomad tents.
Classic yeti behaviour! Then, Madhu Chetai, a wildlife researcher from Nepal, captured camera-trap footage of bears in a Nepalese mountain valley. Although bears were suspected to live in the Nepalese Himalaya, they actually hadn’t been officially recorded until that moment. But what makes this sighting so interesting is that local people had talked of the presence of yetis in the valley for years. They even provided Chetai with ‘yeti’ hair samples and showed him footprints. And in all cases, the samples turned out to be from bears.
So, is the yeti nothing more than a rare species of bear living in the remotest folds of the Himalaya? Quite possibly. After all, bears do occasionally stand on their hind legs, and they will attack people. So, imagine, just for an instant, that you were a shepherd out alone in a remote valley, just like Dawa Yanji Sherpa’s mother was. Or that you were a mountaineer on a cold, stormy evening, feeling a little delirious from the high altitude. And suddenly, emerging out of the haze of a snowstorm comes a large, aggressive shaggy creature walking on its hind legs. Reality says it’s a bear, but your mind tells you that what you have just seen is nothing less than the yeti of legend. In our minds, in our dreams, in our desire for the unknown, the yeti lives. And scientists call it a bear.
