For centuries, tales of a wild man of the Himalayas have fascinated mankind, but is the Yeti fact or fiction?
High in the Himalayas lurks a monster. A fearsome and rarely seen creature whose name has become legendary – the Yeti. Appearing first in Tibetan folklore, it was in the 1950s that stories of the Yeti, or ‘The Abominable Snowman’, quickly captured the public’s imagination. Thanks to accounts of half-glimpsed figures and of strange footprints in the snow, expeditions to capture the beast were launched by everyone from famous mountaineers such as Sir Edmund Hillary, to British tabloid The Daily Mail. In the decades since, the mysterious creature continues to fascinate us and has inspired animated children’s films, episodes of Doctor Who and even a Kate Bush song. In 2013 renowned naturalist and television presenter David Attenborough even went as far to state that he believed “the Abominable Snowman may be real.” And yet, we still seem no closer to locating the beast. But where do stories of the Yeti come from? And are they fiction… or might there be a grain of truth in them?
“THE ROOF OF THE WORLD”
Stories of the Yeti first appear to originate in Himalayan myth. Part of the mountainous region of High Asia, often referred to as “The Roof of the World”, for centuries the Himalayan mountains have fascinated mankind. Stretching across roughly five countries (Nepal, China, India, Pakistan and Bhutan) and 2,500km, the mountains are known for their extraordinary heights. The most famous of the formidable Himalayan Mountains is undoubtedly Mount Everest; at 29,029 feet above sea level it is the highest mountain in the world. Due to their high elevation, the Himalayas have a foreboding landscape covered with ice and snow and with many of the highest areas inhospitable to humans.
Perhaps it should not be surprising that such an unwelcoming place has given birth to stories of strange creatures wandering its snowy peaks. The folklore of the Himalayan peoples, including the Nepalese, Tibetans and Bhutanese, features three main different types of Yeti. These are the relatively small and benign Rang Shim Bombo, the Chuti which lives in many of the highest areas, and the giant and ferocious Nylamo. Other terms for the Yeti include ‘Dremo’ and ‘Mi-Go’, the latter meaning ‘Wild Man’. According to Lee A Weiss in the article ‘Man, Yeti, and Mi-Go’ for the collection The Transgressive History Of A Monstrous Word, belief in the Yeti is “historically and geographically widespread throughout the Himalayas.”
EARLY SIGHTINGS AND THE ‘ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN’
By 1832, naturalist BH Hodgson had lived and worked in India and Nepal for 14 years, studying animal life. That year he submitted a report to the Asiatic Society of Nepal on the many mammals in the country. But within this do
