You're listening to the second and final part of Unexplained, Season seven, episode eight. Walking on Snow. In early February nineteen fifty four, a man in a silk cravat, golfing jacket and plimsuls strode confidently toward a small village of tents erected in the yak pastures of the Upper Dudecosey Valley,
about fourteen thousand feet up in the Himalayas. The man was British Foreign correspondent ralph Izart, and walking alongside him were numerous mountaineers, ornithologists, zoologists and fellow journalists, as well as three hundred and seventy Nepalese porters. As they arrived, Anthropologist Charles Stoner welcomed them his art, waved back his greeting, then took a moment to catch his breath and fished
inside his jacket for his cigarette case. He motioned for the porters carrying all his things to go ahead and set up his tent. Then he lit up a cigarette and gazed out at the surrounding mountains dusted white with snow. The Daily Mail's Yeti hunting expedition had well and truly arrived. Their mission was to find substantive physical evidence of a yeti and, if possible, capture one and bring it to
the UK. After settling in to what would be their home for the next three months, the team promptly set
about devising a plan. Since their quarry was supposedly a scarce solitary creature may be seen only once or twice by people who lived their entire life in these mountains, they decided to venture out in two person teams, each with local porters and guides to cover as much ground as possible, and so, day after day, equipped with huge tranquilizer guns, they clambered across miles of broken, rocky slopes and boulder filled depressions, doggedly, waiting out periods of foggy
weather and periodic snowstorms. The higher terrain was still covered in a blanket of snow, excellent conditions they thought for finding fresh yetty tracks, but it was tough going. Members of the team who were not seasoned mountaineers, like Charles Stoner, found themselves feeling shorter and shorter of breath with every hundred feet they trudged above the camp. In late February, Ralph izz Art, now dressed more appropriately, and American naturalist
Gerald Russell arrived at a deserted summer grazing village. According to their sherper guide, Serdar Ang Sharing, yety tracks had been seen there by locals just a few days earlier. After failing to find any evidence of them for themselves, the men decided to set up camp for the night. Setting off early the next morning, The men were crossing a slope covered in deep snow on the shaded side of the valley at around fifteen thousand feet when Sharing
began gesturing excitedly. There in front of them was a single line of tracks about nine inches long and five inches wide, with a stride length of just over two meters, heading down the valley. Despite some melting and drifting having slightly obscured the footprints, there was enough detail to reveal one big toe and at least three smaller ones, almost identical to the prince that Eric Shipton had photographed in
nineteen fifty one. The chirpers Ralph Izard and Gerald Russell followed the tracks up the slopes, where there was continuous snow cover, and across a small plateau. On the plateau's furthest rim the footprints became confused and seemed to be joined by a second set of tracks. Some of those tracks on the rim appeared to be smaller, leading the team to wonder if perhaps they were of a parent
and child. The team continued to follow what they believed now to be two sets of tracks, made at the same time and heading in the same direction over two consecutive days, for a distance of around eight miles, placed just under four meters apart. At one point, the tracks divided i the side of a large boulder, clear evidence the men thought that two bipeds had passed that way together. As they continued, Iard tripped over a ridge of hardened
snow and pitched headlong into the snow drift. A little embarrassed, he struggled back to his feet, then smiled at the sight of another deep impression in the snow next to him. Clearly one of the creatures they were tracking had done exactly the same thing as him. From there, it appeared to have sat down on the snow and slid down the rest of the slope on its backside, before rising
and continuing again on two feet. Whatever these creatures were, they seemed to use human made paths with the utmost caution and often made lengthy detours around huts or other structures that might be inhabited by humans. To Izard and Russell, this painted a captivating picture of a creature determine to avoid being seen, let alone court. The expedition took photos of the tracks, but despite continuing the search deep into the surrounding snowy slopes, they failed to find any tangible
evidence to present to their sponsors. Meanwhile, Charles Stoner was dispatched to follow up on another lead, back down into the village of Pangboche, where it was rumored that the monastery there contained a yetty scalp. As Stoner and his guide made their way down a winding path through glades of birch trees and rhododendrons, in the distance, they heard the sound of ceremonial conch shell trumpets booming out from
the monastery of Cross the Valley. When they eventually arrived in the village, Stoner was dismayed to find it seemingly lifeless, since most of the inhabitants had gone away trading. After much searching, he and his guide eventually found an elderly man who looked after the monastery's temple. With the help of his guide, Stoner persuaded him to find the key
and let them in. After Stoner laid offerings at the temple altar, the elderly man disappeared into a deep cupboard housing ornaments for sacred dances, and returned moments later with a garish looking object, conical in shape and sparsely covered with stiff, thick, bristle like hairs that were foxy, red and black. The man explained earnestly that the scalp was over three hundred years old and was only brought out once a year, when it was worn by a dancer
personifying the YETI. Stoner was unimpressed. However, to his mind, it looked more like it had been cut from an animal skin then fashioned to fit a person's head. Nonetheless, he took some photographs and a few hair samples, which he then sent to London for analysis. The verdict, when it came was that the scalp was indeed quite old, but that this was not a true scalp at all, but rather, as Stoner had suspected, a piece of skin
cut from the shoulder of some indeterminate animal. Another two such sculps were later tracked down by the expedition, but were similarly disregarded. After fifteen weeks of grueling searching, the Daily Mail's expedition came to an end with only photographs of footprints, the alleged Yeti scalps and a few bristly hair samples to show for all their efforts. For the next several decades, explorers from Britain, America, Russia and beyond would arrive periodically in Nepal and other parts of the
Himalayas to search for the Yeti. The monasteries housing the apparent scalps became places of pilgrimage for many Yeti hunters desperate for physical proof of the creature's existence. Among them were members of a nineteen fifty eight expedition funded by explorer Tom Slick, a Texan oilman who'd assembled a team including several mountaineers, a photographer, a filmmaker, and Irish brothers
Peter and Brian Byrne. Naturalist Gerald Russell, veteran of the fifty four Daily Mail expedition, was the team's deputy leader. As with the previous expedition, this team split into small groups and hold themselves up in caves in the middle of a leige Yeti country for extended periods of observation, during which they claimed to have seen Yeti tracks, but no yetis. Like Charles Stoner before him, Peter Burn of Tom Slick's expedition visited the monasteries to inspect their alleged
Yeti scalps. Some who had seen them were convinced that they were single pieces of skin with no traces of stitches or glue, with hair that did not match any known animal, But Peter Burn was not impressed, noting that it was well known in Nepal that one of them,
taken from the Kumjong Monastery, was an accepted fake. It was believed to be made around fifteen years earlier by a Tibetan taxidermist who was jealous of all the attention that the Lamas at pang Botche, the teachers of Buddhism who reside at the monastery, were getting with their Yeti scalp. When Burne then visited the Pangbotcha monastery, unlike Stoner, he was shown something else alongside the scalp, what looked like
the large mummified hand of an unknown primate. As the monks explained, many years ago, one of them had climbed to a high cave to meditate, but they had encountered a Yeti there and soon made a rapid return to the village. When the monk went back to the cave a few days later, he found that Yeti was dead,
and so decided to remove its scalp and hand. Looking at it now, Burne could see it was unusually large, around twice the size of a large human hand, and about four times bigger than the average hand size of the local people. Burne told Tom Slick about the relics, and Slick in turn relayed the news to a professor William Hill, a primatologist at the Royal College of Surgeon's
Hunterian Museum back in London. Slick and Hill desperately wanted the hand, but the monks refused to give it to them, believing it would bring disaster to the temple if it was ever removed. Reports of what happened next diverge. In a letter written to mountaineer Mike Alsop, Burn claimed to have made a donation to the temple in exchange for the lamour's permission to take one finger and replace it
with another. Finger bone from a human hand, which he happened to have brought with him in a paper bag. Others say that Burn and Slick got the monks drunk one evening, giving Burn enough time to secretly steal one of the relic's fingers and wire in a substitute bone in its place. Way, Burne did smuggle a finger from the pang Botcher hand, along with a piece of the leathery mummified skin taken from the palm, across the Nepalese
border into India. The real problem then was getting the items from India to London without being caught by customs. While traveling, Burne received a cable from Tom Slick instructing him to make his way to Calcutta, where Slick had arranged a meeting with his friends, the American movie star Jimmy Stewart and his wife Gloria, who happened to be
holidaying in India at the time. Convinced that customs officials would never examine the underwear of a famous woman, the finger and skin fragment were then hidden in Gloria Stewart's lingerie case, which indeed was never opened. Despite all that where the relics finally made it to Professor Hill in London. He concluded that they were most likely human in origin.
In nineteen sixty the now knighted Sir Edmund Hillary, who along with Tensing Norgay, was one of the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest, received funding to make another expedition to the Himalayas, this time to find evidence of the Yeti. Not Aware of what Burn had done the previous year, Hillary judged the Pangbotcher hand to also be an unconvincing combination of human and animal bones wired together. Unlike Burn, Hillary succeeded in getting permission to
take the Kumjung monastery's scalp away to be analyzed. When crypto zoologist Bernard Heivelman's first examined the scalp, he thought it appeared genuine. He eventually concluded that the alleged Yeti scalp had in fact been made by stretching some skin from a Himalayan tar an animal halfway between a goat and an antelope over a mold. There was no suggestion that either the Kumjung or pang Botcher scalps had been made deliberately to hoax outsiders. They'd been created several centuries
previously to represent the Yeti in temple rituals. It was most likely that their true origins had simply been forgotten over the centuries, with subsequent monks coming to assume that they were genuine Yeti scalps. As for the finger bone from the pang Botcher hand, after Professor Hill's examination of
it in nineteen fifty four, it subsequently disappeared. It later resurfaced in two thousand eight when a box in the Hunterian Museum was found to contain the nine centimeter long finger fragment, left to the museum as part of a bequest from Hill. In twenty eleven, the finger was analyzed by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland during the making of a BBC documentary about the Yetty. Its DNA was
found to be human. A few years later, one bright and sunny morning, Professor Brian Sykes and his two research assistants sat in his study in Oxford, staring at two white envelopes on the table in front of them. Inside the envelopes were the results of DNA testing that had just come back from the lab. The results of thousands of miles of travel, months of intense lab work, and
the hopes of cryptozoologists across the world. Back in nineteen eighty nine, Sykes, a genetics professor from Oxford University, had developed a new technique for retrieving and analyzing DNA from a ancient bones, but it wasn't until twenty thirteen that he and his team perfected the method for extracting DNA
from hair samples. They proceeded to collect various samples for testing, including those thought to come from Russia's version of the Yeti called the Almasty, as well as North America's Bigfoot and potential Yeti hairs from Laddak in northern India on the west side of the Himalayas and Bhutan eight hundred miles away to the east. Could this advance in DNA technology confirm that these large hairy hominids, including the Yeti,
really existed once and for all. After taking deep breaths, Professor Sykes and his team tore open the envelopes as they looked from one result to the next. Every DNA result showed the heirs to all be from well known animals. One of the potential Yeti heirs was revealed to be a Himalayan brown bear, a rare subspecies that lives in small, isolated populations in the remote higher reaches of the Himalayas.
The common name of this bear in Nepalese is zouter or cattle bear, and it has long been associated with YETI stories. More intriguingly, the samples from Laddak was also found to be a Himalayan brown bear. It was the same story once again in twenty seventeen when Professor doctor Charlotte Lynist and her team at the University of Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences analyzed the mitochondrial DNA of nine samples of purported YETI parts, this time gathered by
a crew make a film about the creature. Eight of the nine samples were from local bears. One was an Asian black bear, another a Himalayan brown and six were the Tibetan brown bear. The ninth sample was from a dog. Once again, serious doubt was cast on more than a century of supposed YETI sightings. Over the decades, encounters between
explorers and possible yeties have continued. British mountaineer Don Willans was a fervent believer, claiming he encountered the yeti while scaling Ana Purna, the tenth highest mountain in the world, in nineteen seventy. He awoke one morning to find a few human like footprints in the snow around its camp. Then later that evening he claimed to have watched a bipedal ape like creature for about twenty minutes through binoculars as it appeared to forage for food not far from
his camp. While climbing solo in eastern Tibet in nineteen eighty six, the Italian mountaineer Reinhold Mesner confronted a creature that he described as standing upright and moving with astonishing agility. Not sure whether he'd seen a human or another animal, he spent the next fifteen years searching across Nepal, Bhutan, and Tibet before concluding that the yeti was in fact
a bear. American scholar and veteran Yeti hunter Daniel Taylor has spent sixty years tracking supposed Yeti evidence across the Himalayas, and he has an explanation for how some so called yeti footprints can be so large. Much like domestic cats, bears often put their hind foot on top of their forefoot print, making an overprint that can quite easily be
thirty two inches long. During his years of field research, Taylor also noticed that larger prints are typically found on the steeper slopes, where the larger, heavier back feet of a bear going up hill would fall slightly further behind than an overprint on flat ground, exaggerating the size of
the compound footprints even more. In the decades since the discovery of the iconic footprints pictured by Eric Shipton in nineteen fifty one, Michael Ward, who was also on that trip, began to ponder the assumption made by most mountaineers that the prints were made by normal feet. Ward, who was a surgeon, suspected that there could be an alternative possibility. What if the footprints often identified as being made by a yeti could be those of Tibetan people living in
the high Himalayas with abnormally shaped feet. In an article published in the Alpine Journal six years before his death in two thousand and five, Ward suggested that in a high mountain community located many days travel from basic medical facilities, people born with abnormally shaped feet would tend to retain their deformity through their life, But how would a human walk bare feet through snow over fifteen thousand feet high
above sea level without getting frostbite? Schrper and former Yak herder Jeta and Tamang from the village of Langtang, Nepal, who featured in part one of this episode, says that while growing up in the nineteen eighties, she and her family possessed no shoes, going bare feet in all seasons.
She said that even when she worked as a porter carrying equipment for expeditions, she wore through the snow and over frozen ground, this way protected by a thick layer of hardened, cracked skin which had developed on the soles of her feet through long exposure to the harsh conditions. Ward also quoted evidence from two scientific investigations, the first of which took place during an expedition he was part of in nineteen sixty, which wintered at nineteen thousand feet
in the Everest region. Over the winter, the team had a visit from a thirty five year old Nepalese pilgrim who normally lived at six thousand feet. He stayed for fourteen days and at fifteen thousand feet and above throughout this period other than a woolen coat, wore minimal clothing, with neither shoes nor gloves. He was continuously monitored while spending four days without shelter around seventeen thousand feet high, with night temperatures down to as low as five degrees
aahrenheit and daytime temperatures that remained below freezing. The man walked in the snow and on rocks in bare feet without any evidence of frostbite in conditions Ward said where any European members of the party would undoubtedly have become severely frostbitten and hypothermic. Photographs included in the study also show the deformed feet of a Himalayan highlander, showing clear
similarities with the alleged Yeti footprints. Michael Ward also questioned whether some parts of the Himalayas where mountaineers have found seemingly inexplicable footprints are as deserted as foreigners might assume. The area where Eric Shipton took his nineteen fifty one photographs was visited regularly by people living in the wrong Shah Gorge only a few miles away, or could there
be another explanation. Could a hominid species assumed to have gone extinct, still be living in small, fragmented groups in the remote, snowy vastness of the Himalayas. Even acclaimed naturalist Sir David Attenborough isn't sure. In an interview in twenty thirteen, he said, much like the way giraffes were once thought improbable to Europeans, he believes the abominable snowman could yet
be real. A sister group to the Neanderthals, known as the Denisovans, are known to have lived alongside our Homo sapiens ancestors, and may even have been interbreeding with them as recently as fifteen thousand to thirty thousand years ago, according to a detailed analysis of the DNA of people living in Indonesia and Papa New Guinea twenty nineteen. Initially, Denisovans were known only from fragmentary fossils found at one site,
the Denisova Cave in Siberia. Then in nineteen eighty, a large human looking jawbone with two huge teeth attached was found by a Buddhist monk who entered a cave on the Tibetan Plateau to prey. In twenty nineteen, results from the analysis of proteins extracted from the bone, published in the scientific journal Nature, revealed that this ancient jaw was in fact from a Denisovan who lived about one hundred
sixty thousand years ago. Not only was this the first conclusive evidence that Denisovans occupied the Tibetan Platau, but it also presents the possibility that they passed some of their genetic traits to Himalayan peoples, including successful adaptation to high altitude hypoxic environments, and some believe they might even still live among them. Over the decades, reports and theories on the Yeti's existence by people from outside the Himalayas have
blown hot and cold. In the folklore of the Himalayan country of Bhutan, it said that the Yeti is real and yet not real, possessing supernatural powers that enable it to appear in a tangible form and then suddenly vanish, so that those who search for it will be eternally doomed to fail. Despite all the legends, the footprints in the snow, and the endless searching so far, the complete truth of the Yeti's possible existence remains to this day unexplained.
This episode was written by Diane Hope and produced by Richard mclin Smith. Unexplained is an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard McLain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard mc clain smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook, with stories never before featured on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and
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