Culture & Heritage
In 1960 Sir Edmund Hillary carried a Khumjung monastery relic to Chicago to test it. The answer was stranger than the myth, and it is still on show.
By Maya Rai · Jul 19, 2026
The "yeti scalp" kept at Khumjung monastery is real, old and sacred — and in 1960 zoologists in Chicago found it was moulded from the hide of a serow, a Himalayan goat-antelope. Sir Edmund Hillary had flown it around the world with its own monk chaperone to…
Travel Himalaya Nepal · News
Hillary took it on a 1960 expedition sent partly to hunt for the yeti, and the village let it go only with its guardian monk. The expedition, backed in part by the World Book Encyclopedia, brought the world's most famous mountaineer — already known for the…
Travel Himalaya Nepal · News
The scalp had been moulded from animal hide, most likely a serow, and had probably served as a template for ceremonial masks. It was genuinely old — the 200-to-300-year estimate held up — just not the evidence of an undiscovered ape that villagers and…
Travel Himalaya Nepal · News
Two trekking days up the valley, the monastery at Pangboche kept a mummified hand, and part of it left Nepal in a film star's luggage. During the yeti expeditions funded by the Texas oilman Tom Slick between 1957 and 1959, a finger fragment was taken from the…
Travel Himalaya Nepal · News
Every piece of physical evidence tested so far has turned out to be a known animal. In 2014 the Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes analysed 30 hair samples from alleged yeti sightings across the Himalaya and Tibetan Plateau; they came from bears, cattle, horses…
Travel Himalaya Nepal · News
You can see the scalp yourself, and you will walk past it anyway. Khumjung, at about 3,790 metres beneath the sacred peak of Khumbila, is the standard acclimatisation walk out of Namche Bazaar, and the monastery is a five-minute stop on the trail toward the…
Travel Himalaya Nepal · News
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