The 'yeti scalp' Hillary flew around the world, and what the scientists found

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 find out. The answer was stranger than the myth, and the village still shows it to trekkers today.

How a sacred relic ended up in Chicago

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 1953 first ascent of Everest — into the Khumbu to look for evidence.

Khumjung had kept the half-football-shaped scalp for generations as a protective charm and was reluctant to part with it. Hillary struck a deal: he would fund improvements to the village school and monastery, and the scalp would travel only with the monk Konchok Chumbi watching over it. It went by way of Paris to the Field Museum in Chicago, then on to scientists and reporters across the US, Britain, Europe and Japan.

What the scientists found

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 visiting Westerners had hoped for.

The other relic: the Pangboche Hand

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 hand and smuggled out of the country in 1959 by the actor Jimmy Stewart, hidden in his wife’s luggage.

For half a century it was cited as physical yeti evidence. In 2011 geneticists at the University of Edinburgh tested the fragment’s DNA and found it was human.

What DNA says about the yeti now

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, even a porcupine and a raccoon.

In 2017 Charlotte Lindqvist’s team at the University at Buffalo tested a separate set of nine specimens and traced eight to Asian bears and one to a dog — along the way identifying the Himalayan brown bear as an old, distinct and barely studied lineage. We tell that half of the story, and the 1951 footprint photograph that started it, in the piece on the Shipton photo and what DNA found.

What this means for trekkers

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 Everest View Hotel.

Sources: Atlas Obscura, “The Yeti Scalp of Khumjung”; NBC News; University at Buffalo (Lindqvist et al., 2017).

Cover photo: AngeshRathi via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Section photos: Amel Uzunovic via Pexels (Pexels licence); Kyle Roxas via Pexels (Pexels licence).

This story is part of Travel Himalaya Nepal’s guide to Nepal’s culture and living heritage.