Mystery of the snowman

The footprints of blame

At first, the legend of the Yeti was confined to the inhabitants of the Himalayas, who called it the Yeti, a large, muscular, hairy creature that lived in seclusion in the snowy mountains. These legendary stories can inspire or have moral education significance, quite the taste of ghost stories in Chinese culture. And it was the Western explorers who came here who spread the legend of the Yeti around the world.

The first clue may have come from 1832. That year, naturalist Hodgson wrote that his tour guide had seen a tall bipedal creature with long black hair in northern Nepal, which Hodgson believed was probably an orangutan. Then, in 1899, explorer Wardle wrote about an ape-like creature that left footprints. In 1921, explorer Howard Bree led an expedition to the top of Mount Qomolangma and discovered similar footprints, which locals told him were those of a "Man Bear snowman." Western journalists covered the story, the threads were stitched together, and numerous local legends were translated and published. As a result, the legend of the snowman spread around the world.

Around 1950, the story of the yeti was fully fermented, and explorers became enthusiastic and launched many activities to search for the yeti. Local people also took the opportunity to sell a lot of hair and limbs of the "yeti". Even Hollywood star James Stewart got in on the act, bringing home a "snowman finger" hidden in his suitcase. In 2011, DNA tests confirmed that it was just a human finger...

The much-questioned cryptozoology

In the end, the vigorous search yielded no direct evidence, and all the yeti specimens turned up their known counterparts. Some serious scientists have suggested that yeti do not exist and that they are probably a miscalculation of the bears in the area, which can also stand up and look a lot like hairy savages.

But crypto-zoologists aren't giving up. This group of people in question is dedicated to the search for animals such as the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and Wildman of Shennongjia, and believes that there are large relict species in the world that have not yet been discovered. Serious scientists say they are doing their job badly, turning a blind eye to the world's undescribed creatures, such as millions of insect species, and focusing on sensational events for unscrupulous reasons.

Crypto-zoologists are fighting back, arguing that the discovery of large animals, such as the megafauna in 1976, the Sora antelope in 1992, and the Kapomani tapir in 2013, is not over, so there is still hope of finding hominin relays. Even more exciting was the naming of the island dwarf fossil species Homo Floresiensis in 2004. The group, which is as young as a three-year-old child and has been described as a "real-life hobbit", may have lived on the isolated Indonesian island of Flores as long as 10, 000 years ago. Could yeti be another relict species, perhaps a little luckier than Homo Floresiensis?

New clues

In recent years, scientists have used DNA analysis to identify existing "yeti samples." A 2013 study by Brian Sykes and his team at Oxford University suggested that the yeti is a close genetic match to the ancient polar bear and is probably descended from a cross between a brown bear and an ancient white bear. But other scientists have reanalyzed their data and found a major flaw -- that the DNA of the yeti sample may have been damaged, making it impossible to conclude that it was related to ancient polar bears.

Sykes later published an admission of error, but stressed that "the conclusion that the yeti samples did not come from a hitherto unknown primate remains". In other words, the yeti samples are not related to apes or hominins.

Still, the discovery of H. Floresiensis has encouraged many scientists, who have analyzed the ecology of the Himalayan region and theorized that there should be anthropoids, at least in geological history, and that the yeti legend may be the legacy of their contact with humans. But since "all local mammals larger than rats are regularly hunted in various ways", their survival is now doubtful. Of course, this is purely speculative and not supported by evidence.

However, the villagers there firmly believe in the snowman and talk about it with relish. Every village has a "witness" who leads the explorer to a more remote "sighting spot" and continues the expedition, which of course also costs more money in heartbeats and thrills. The legend of the yeti is becoming an unspoken consensus among locals and explorers, evolving into a tourism activity with an air of mystery that neither side cares much about whether the yeti exists.