The 1951 Photo That Convinced the World Yetis Were Real — And What DNA Finally Proved Made the Tracks

A grainy black-and-white photograph of a footprint in the snow, taken by a British mountaineer scouting a route toward Everest, ran in newspapers around the world in December 1951 and did more to convince the public that a Himalayan 'abominable snowman' existed than every folk tale that came before it. Sixty-six years later, a DNA lab in New York state finally told us what actually made it.

The 1951 photograph was not the beginning of the legend, it was the moment it went global. Himalayan communities had talked of a yeti for generations, and Sherpa guides on the 1921 British Everest reconnaissance pointed out strange tracks to their British clients, who misheard and mistranslated the Sherpa term metoh-kangmi, roughly man-bear snowman, into 'Abominable Snowman' via a Calcutta newspaper editor named Henry Newman. But it took a clear photograph, shot by a serious, credentialed mountaineer with an ice axe laid beside it for scale, to turn a mountain story into a worldwide sensation.

What the DNA actually found

Charlotte Lindqvist, a biologist at the University at Buffalo, and her team collected hair, bone, tooth, skin and scat samples that had been kept for years in monasteries, museums and private collections as physical yeti evidence, including one specimen reportedly kept as a relic at a Himalayan monastery. They sequenced the mitochondrial DNA against a reference library of known bear species.

None were an unknown primate. But the study was not a debunking for its own sake, it turned up something genuinely interesting about Himalayan bears: the Himalayan brown bear is one of the earliest branches in the whole brown bear family tree, meaning it split off and adapted to the high Tibetan Plateau far earlier than scientists had assumed. The yeti evidence, in other words, helped map real bear evolution nobody had fully traced before.

As for why a bear print could look 50cm long and startlingly human: Daniel Taylor, who spent six decades chasing the mystery on the ground in Nepal, recreated the effect with a tranquilised Asiatic black bear at an Indian zoo in the 1980s. Himalayan bears place their rear paw partly on top of the front paw's print as they walk. In soft, melting afternoon snow, the two overlapping prints fuse and widen into a single, elongated track with what looks unmistakably like a big toe.

Sir Edmund Hillary, for what it's worth, called it decades before the lab work existed. On a 1960 Everest-region expedition specifically sent to investigate yeti reports, he examined supposed yeti scalps and concluded the whole legend rested on wild dog and snow leopard tracks warped by the melt-freeze cycle of high-altitude snow, essentially the same mechanism Taylor and Lindqvist later proved with plaster casts and DNA.

The Menlung Glacier where Shipton took his photo sits in the wild, lightly trekked Rolwaling region just west of the Everest trail system, but the same high, glacier-fed valleys are what you cross on the way to Gokyo Ri or over the Everest Three Passes. Read more on the DNA science already coming out of these mountains in our report on the snow leopards confirmed living again in Sagarmatha National Park.

Source: Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Evolutionary history of enigmatic bears in the Tibetan Plateau-Himalaya region and the identity of the yeti (Lindqvist et al., 2017).

Cover photo: Siddhartha Sen via Pexels (Pexels License).