The Yeti Footprint Fooled the World for 70 Years — Then DNA Solved It

Every guesthouse in the Khumbu has its own version of the story: a shaggy, upright shape seen crossing a moraine at dusk, a footprint too large and too human to belong to anything a guide recognises. The legend has a real starting point in the historical record, and since 2017 it also has a real, tested ending.

The 1951 photograph is the one almost everyone has seen without knowing where it came from. Shipton took it while scouting Everest's western approaches, laying an ice axe next to the print for scale — grainy, genuinely strange-looking, and published worldwide at the exact moment Everest itself was becoming front-page news. Monasteries in the Khumbu leaned into the mystery that followed: Khumjung monastery still keeps a conical 'yeti scalp' relic that trekkers pay a small fee to view, though hair analysis has identified it as tanned skin from a serow, a goat-like animal that lives on the same slopes.

The scientific case took decades to close because the physical evidence was so thin and so scattered — a hair here, a tooth there, held in private collections and monastery shrines rather than laboratories. That changed in 2017, when Charlotte Lindqvist, a biologist at the University at Buffalo, led a team that gathered nine of the most credible specimens still in existence and ran them through modern mitochondrial DNA sequencing, comparing the results against a reference library of known bear genomes from across Asia.

The result, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, was unambiguous: not one of the nine samples pointed to an unidentified species. Lindqvist's team also used the same genetic material to answer a real open question in Himalayan zoology along the way, confirming that the Himalayan brown bear and Tibetan brown bear are genetically distinct populations — a solid finding about real wildlife that the decades-long yeti hunt happened to help fund.

What this means for trekkers

The Khumjung scalp is still on display on the standard Everest View trek route, and the Menlung Glacier sits within reach of the wider Everest Base Camp trek itinerary — worth asking your guide about, since most Khumbu families have their own stories about the mountain's most famous non-resident.

Sources: University at Buffalo news release, 'Abominable Snowman? Nope. Study ties DNA samples from purported Yetis to Asian bears' (November 2017); Lindqvist et al., Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2017).

Cover photo: Bijayaparajuli via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).