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

2026-06-13 · Mysterious Creatures · 7 min read

On the morning of 8 November 1951, two exhausted men were picking their way down a glacier below the Menlung La, a high pass on the border of Nepal and Tibet, when the snow in front of them stopped being empty. Eric Shipton, one of the most experienced Himalayan climbers alive, and his companion the surgeon Michael Ward had spent weeks probing the southern approaches to Everest. Now, at somewhere between 5,000 and 5,500 metres, a line of tracks ran across the fresh snow ahead of them and vanished over the ice. They were large and they were clear, and in the clearest of them a broad, splayed toe pressed into the crust. Their Sherpa companion Sen Tensing had no doubt what had made them. Shipton, who carried no ruler, laid his ice axe alongside one print, set Ward's boot beside another, and took four photographs before the sun could melt the evidence away.

Those photographs went around the world. Published in The Times that December, one image in particular, a single print with an ice axe for scale, became the most famous piece of physical evidence the yeti has ever produced. Here at last was something that could be measured: not a traveller's tale, not a monk's story, but a mark in the snow captured on film by a man whose competence nobody questioned. Shipton himself never claimed to know what had made the track.

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