The yeti

The yeti is a figure of Himalayan legend. Evidence offered for it includes footprints photographed during a 1951 Everest attempt and scalps held by a monastery and a village; a 2017 DNA study and a 2019 account of the 1951 print both point to bears.

In 1951, during an attempt on Mount Everest, Eric Shipton photographed a number of large prints in snow some 6,000 m up. Wikipedia says he took three photographs, one of the tracks and two of a single print shown beside a pickaxe and a boot for scale. The print showed two big toes and three smaller toes set close together, and the photographs have been argued over since.

Relics followed. Wikipedia says the Daily Mail reported on 19 March 1954 that expedition teams had taken hairs from a scalp said to be a yeti's, kept at Pangboche monastery. By Wikipedia's account the hairs looked fox red in sunlight and, in poor light, black shading to dark brown. The anatomist Frederic Wood Jones studied them; in that study the hairs were bleached, sliced into sections and examined under a microscope. In December 1960 the Guardian reported that Sir Edmund Hillary and Desmond Doig had flown into London from a yeti hunt in Nepal with a scalp that Khumjung village held to be a yeti's, together with its guardian, the village headman Khumjo Chumbi. The Guardian's headline reported a claim that the scalp was 240 years old.

Later work reads the evidence as bears. Lan and colleagues, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2017), compared mitochondrial DNA sequences from purported yeti samples and found strong support for local living bears as the source of the yeti story. They also assembled the first complete mitochondrial genomes of the Himalayan brown bear and black bear. In a 2019 piece for Scroll.in, Daniel C. Taylor said an Asiatic black bear made the 1951 print: the hind paw came down on the rear half of the front paw's print, stretching it to about twelve inches.