The Yeti Under the Microscope: How DNA Quietly Closed the Case

2025-02-23 · Mysterious Creatures · 2 min read

The story begins with a footprint. On 8 November 1951, high in the Menlung Basin near Everest, the mountaineer Eric Shipton and his companion Michael Ward came across a line of tracks in the snow at around 5,500 metres. Shipton laid an ice axe and a boot beside the clearest print and took four photographs. Published in The Times that December, the images gave the yeti its most famous piece of evidence, a single mark with a broad splayed toe that looked disturbingly like a barefoot giant. Edmund Hillary, who knew those mountains, suspected the print was a wild animal's track blurred and enlarged by melting snow.

The belief was far older than the photograph. Sherpa tradition spoke of the yeti as a real inhabitant of the high country, and several monasteries preserved relics said to be its remains, hairy "scalps" and a skeletal hand kept for generations. For decades these objects sat beyond the reach of proof. What changed everything was not a better camera or a braver expedition, but the ability to read DNA.

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