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This video is about a trail of footprints Eric Shipton found at the base of mount Everest in the 1950's. One red flag that came up was appeal to authority; at one point the narrator said "Now days they (the photographs) would be cries of hoax, but back in the 1950's respectable adventurers where taken at their word." this implies that if you don't believe that theses footprints were real you were disrespecting honest working people. The only flaw is that Shipton and crew stood to gain money for future expeditions if people thought that there was something mysterious afoot in the mountains.

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Evidence of the Yeti | National Geographic

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this video is about a DNA scientist and an explorer's search for the yeti in the Himalayas. in this video they followed the scientific method; they asked a question: is the yeti real?
they did research in areas it is thought to live and gathered hair samples. then they hypothesized that the DNA of the hair would tell them what type of animal the yeti was. after that they did a test and drew conclusions based on their findings.

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Bigfoot Files - S01E03  - Himalayas Yeti -  720p

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I this video a Sherpa explains how his grandfather and his forefathers saw the yeti as an ape like animal and talked about how you would freeze with fear if you ever saw one.  the obvious reason for belief here is ancient wisdom; his forefathers saw and believed in the yeti so he does as well.

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In 1951, a British explorer named Eric Shipton looking for an alternative route up Mt. Everest found a footprint that appeared to be hominoid. He took a picture, and the mystery of the Yeti-a Sherpa word for "wild man"-cast a spell over the world. Daniel Taylor, author of Yeti: The Ecology of a Mystery, has been searching for signs of this "Abominable Snowman" in the high Himalayas since he was a child.

Talking from his home in West Virginia, Taylor explains what he thinks made that human-like footprint, how his search eventually led to the creation of a national park, and why, in an age where we have become disconnected from nature, we have a deep need to believe in mysteries.

The photograph was taken on the Menlung Glacier, west of Mount Everest, on the Nepal-Tibet border. Shipton and Michael Ward were searching for an alternative Everest route when they came across the prints. Shipton was one of the most highly respected Everest explorers, so if he is bringing back a print, it is a real print. Nobody ever questioned that. But what is it?

What was captivating about the prints was that they're really sharp. The snow was hard so the photo looks like a sort of plaster of Paris cast. The second feature was that the prints looked like a human footprint, but with a thumb. So, you get this primate-like feeling but hominoid at the same time. Its enormous size-13 inches-also suggests a magnificent hominoid, a King Kong type of image! And the media grabbed it.
Numerous expeditions were sent out in search of the Yeti. Give us a brief timeline.
The most important one was the Daily Mail one in 1954. That's when Yeti fever took off, though the name for the Yeti was given as the Abominable Snowman. Then American oilman Tom Slick mounted several expeditions. One of them had 500 porters and spent 6 months in the field. They even took along bloodhounds to track the scent.

The World Book Encyclopedia then got captivated by the Yeti and approached Edmund Hillary. He had been somewhat of a believer in the 1950s but he said, "We shouldn't go just Yeti searching, we should study how people live at high altitude." So they built a house at 19,000 feet and did a bunch of experiments on how humans acclimatize. They're the ones who first made the distinction between the Sherpa belief in the Yeti and the Yeti as a mysterious hominoid that lives in the mountains.
Describe how you first became fascinated by the Yeti.
My grandmother came from Cincinnati; my grandfather was a cowboy in Kansas. They met in medical school in Kansas City in hard times and decided to go to India as medical missionaries. In 1914 they ended up in an area near India's western border with Nepal: dense, rich jungle, made famous by Jim Corbett, in books like Man-Eaters of Kumaon.

I come into the picture in 1946, when my own parents went to India to take over running a hospital. It was a fabulous childhood. My grandparents had bought a property at the top of a mountain near the old British hill station of Mussoorie. It was a lovely old compound with jungle all around.

One Saturday, during the monsoon, I saw the famous picture of the Yeti's footprint in a magazine. I knew most of the jungle animals so when the curator at the British Museum said he thought these were prints of the langur monkey, I said, "This is outrageous! I know the langur monkey, bouncing on the tin roof all the time. Some other animal must have made this mysterious, human-like footprint."

I must have gone to my father and grandfather and they said, "Danny, that's the Yeti!" I said, "What is the Yeti?" They said, "The Yeti is a wild man that lives out in the mountains, and that's his footprint." That's when the spark was lit.

Due to its microclimate, the Barun Valley brings in more moisture than any other valley in the Himalayan system. That means the Barun is really dense jungle with a lot of rain. That is why people didn't settle it. If you're looking for the last read-out of the wild, it is this valley. It is so dense that very few people have actually entered it, even the locals who live on its edge.

I was advised to go there by the King of Nepal, who said, "If you want to go to the wildest place, where the Yeti might be, it is the Barun." And when the King says that, you go, because he really knows his country.

Once I got in that valley I found footprints. I'd seen footprints before but these were fresh and I had no doubt I had found the Yeti.

The question was, what made them?

A local hunter I worked with said he thought what I'd found was a tree bear. I'd never heard of a tree bear in this region. Suddenly we had an explanation for where the thumb came from. A bear that lives in a tree forces an inner digit down so it can make an opposable grip. Normal bears cannot make an opposable grip. But if you're spending a lot of time in the tree, you train that one thumb to grab a branch or break bamboo. So I spent two years trying to figure out whether it was a species, sub-species, or a juvenile bear.

They created a lot of confusion! A professor from Oxford makes a global call for all Yeti artifacts-hair, fingernails, bones, fragments-and he gets many, many artifacts, mostly bits of bear or sheep. He then does DNA analysis and finds that two appear to be bear-like, but can't be explained by any known animal. The closest DNA connection is the polar bear but with mysterious DNA sequences.

After he publishes his research, the Yeti myth gets reactivated worldwide. A couple of doctoral students then decide to check his DNA sequencing. They show that he made a mistake and that rather than proposing a new animal it is the incomplete sequence of a known animal. Once again, we come back to the bear.

In my search for the Yeti, I had stumbled into, arguably, the greatest wilderness on the planet. But it was not a protected area. Villagers were moving in and making the Barun into fields. On the Tibetan side, the Chinese were making a road into the valley immediately north of the Barun to clear-cut the timber! This is one of the world's three or four most majestic places on the planet, so I said, I've got to do something to protect it!

I'm not the World Wildlife Fund. So I decided to take my family heritage of community-based solutions in healthcare and apply it to nature protection, working with the local community to manage the whole landscape rather than just creating pockets. When I initiated this in the mid 1980s the idea had been kicked around but nobody had ever done it. So it was extremely exciting to take the idea of participatory, zone-based conservation and do it in the highest place on Earth. Now, tourists are walking on the Yeti Trail through a pristine, wild park.

You have spent 60 years searching for the Yeti, Daniel. What are your final thoughts? And how did this odyssey change your life?

In this series of discoveries, I came to what I and many other biologists now believe is a completely new understanding of biology, which I call bio-resilience. As we look to save life itself we are concentrating on the diversity of DNA. But there are certain life forms like the crow, cockroaches, or zebra mussels which are more resilient than others and can deal with temperature and moisture changes due to climate change. The lesson of the Yeti is that we have to treasure and build up the resilience in biology if we are going to save life itself.

It changed my life because I understood life in a different way. In a world that's increasingly urban, it is important that we understand we are part of life, connected to life. There are Yeti legends all over the world. There's a Russian legend about the Jungle Man, and there's a Chinese legend. This leads us into the question, what is this human hunger for these humanoid apparitions? I'm convinced it evolved out of the Victorian age when people were circling the world looking for the missing link.

The deep mystery at our core is that we want to be connected to the great beyond. And we need symbols to help us understand the connection. That's why we believe in God or angels or the Loch Ness Monster. Throughout human history, and across human cultures, we have developed messengers from the great beyond. Ultimately, that's what the Yeti is.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.

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This Man Searched for the Yeti for 60 Years-and Found It

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In 1951, a British explorer named Eric Shipton looking for an alternative route up Mt. Everest found a footprint that appeared to be hominoid. He took a picture, and the mystery of the Yeti-a Sherpa word for "wild man"-cast a spell over the world.

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Assignment 2: The Yeti (Abominable Snowman)

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Assignment 2: The Yeti (Abominable Snowman)

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By Tyler Atkinson
The first recorded mention of the yeti was in 326BC when Alexander Of Macedonia as to see one.

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This scalp and hand are claimed to be from a yeti and are kept in a monastery in Nepal when it has spiritual significance.  There have been no test performed on the artifacts to prove if the claim is true there is a red flag do to a lack of evidence.  Ideology is a cause for belief here because t he Sherpa claim that the yeti is a creature of god and is a big part of their religion.

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This image depicts a yeti running away from the photographer at a sky resort in the Swiss alps.

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The Yeti, once better known as the Abominable Snowman, is a mysterious bipedal creature said to live in the mountains of Asia. It sometimes leaves tracks in snow, but is also said to dwell below the Himalayan snow line. Despite dozens of expeditions into the remote mountain regions of Russia, China and Nepal, the existence of the Yeti remains unproven.

The Yeti is said to be muscular, covered with dark grayish or reddish-brown hair, and weigh between 200 and 400 lbs. (91 to 181 kilograms) It is relatively short compared to North America's Bigfoot, averaging about 6 feet (1.8 meters) in height. Though this is the most common form, reported Yetis have come in a variety of shapes.

History of the Yeti

The Yeti is a character in ancient legends and folklore of the Himalaya people. In most of the tales, the Yeti is a figure of danger, author Shiva Dhakal told the BBC. The moral of the stories is often a warning to avoid dangerous wild animals and to stay close and safe within the community.

Alexander the Great demanded to see a Yeti when he conquered the Indus Valley in 326 B.C. But, according to National Geographic, local people told him they were unable to present one because the creatures could not survive at that low an altitude.

In modern times, when Westerners started traveling to the Himalayas, the myth became more sensational, according to the BBC. In 1921, a journalist named Henry Newman interviewed a group of British explorers who had just returned from a Mount Everest expedition. The explorers told the journalist they had discovered some very large footprints on the mountain to which their guides had attributed to "metoh-kangmi," essentially meaning "man-bear snow-man." Newman got the "snowman" part right but mistranslated "metoh" as "filthy." Then he seemed to think "abominable" sounded even better and used this more menacing name in the paper. Thus a legend was born.

In her book " Still Living? Yeti, Sasquatch, and the Neanderthal Enigma (opens in new tab)" (1983, Thames and Hudson), researcher Myra Shackley offers the following description, reported by two hikers in 1942 who saw "two black specks moving across the snow about a quarter mile below them." Despite this significant distance, they offered the following very detailed description: "The height was not much less than eight feet ... the heads were described as 'squarish' and the ears must lie close to the skull because there was no projection from the silhouette against the snow. The shoulders sloped sharply down to a powerful chest ... covered by reddish brown hair which formed a close body fur mixed with long straight hairs hanging downward." Another person saw a creature "about the size and build of a small man, the head covered with long hair but the face and chest not very hairy at all. Reddish-brown in color and bipedal, it was busy grubbing up roots and occasionally emitted a loud high-pitched cry."

It's not clear if these sightings were real, hoaxes or misidentifications, though legendary mountaineer Reinhold Messner, who spent months in Nepal and Tibet, concluded that large bears and their tracks had often been mistaken for Yeti. He describes his own encounter with a large, unidentifiable creature in his book " My Quest for the Yeti: Confronting the Himalayas' Deepest Mystery (opens in new tab)" (St. Martin's, 2001).

In March 1986, Anthony Wooldridge, a hiker in the Himalayas, saw what he thought was a Yeti standing in the snow near a ridge about 500 feet (152 meters) away. It didn't move or make noise, but Wooldridge saw odd tracks in the snow that seemed to lead toward the figure. He took two photographs of the creature, which were later analyzed and proven genuine.

Many in the Bigfoot community seized upon the photos as clear evidence of a Yeti, including John Napier (opens in new tab), an anatomist and anthropologist who had served as the Smithsonian Institution's director of primate biology. Many considered it unlikely Wooldridge could have made a mistake because of his extensive hiking experience in the region. The following year, researchers returned to where Wooldridge had taken the photos and discovered that he had simply seen a dark rock outcropping that looked vertical from his position. It was all a mistake - much to the embarrassment of some Yeti believers.

Yeti evidence?

Most of the evidence for the Yeti comes from sightings and reports. Like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, there is a distinct lack of hard proof for the Yeti's existence, though a few pieces of evidence have emerged over the years.

In 1960, Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to scale Mt. Everest, searched for evidence of the Yeti. He found what was claimed to be a scalp from the beast, though scientists later determined that the helmet-shaped hide was in fact made from a serow, a Himalayan animal similar to a goat.

In 2007, American TV show host Josh Gates claimed he found three mysterious footprints in snow near a stream in the Himalayas. Locals were skeptical, suggesting that Gates - who had only been in the area for about a week - simply misinterpreted a bear track. Nothing more was learned about what made the print, and the track can now be found not in a natural history museum but instead in a small display at Walt Disney World.

In 2010, hunters in China caught a strange animal that they claimed was a Yeti. This mysterious, hairless, four-legged animal was initially described as having features resembling a bear, but was finally identified as a civet, a small cat-like animal that had lost its hair from disease.

A finger once revered in a monastery in Nepal and long claimed to be from a Yeti was examined by researchers at the Edinburgh Zoo in 2011. The finger generated controversy among Bigfoot and Yeti believers for decades, until DNA analysis proved that the finger was human, perhaps from a monk's corpse. [See also: Bigfoot & Yeti DNA Study Gets Serious]

Russian search for Yeti

The Russian government took an interest in the Yeti in 2011, and organized a conference of Bigfoot experts in western Siberia. Bigfoot researcher and biologist John Bindernagel claimed that he saw evidence that the Yeti not only exist but also build nests and shelters out of twisted tree branches. That group made headlines around the world when they issued a statement that they had "indisputable proof" of the Yeti, and were 95 percent sure it existed based on some grey hairs found in a clump moss in a cave.

Bindernagel may have been impressed, but another scientist who participated in the same expedition concluded that the "indisputable" evidence was hoaxed. Jeff Meldrum, a professor of anatomy and anthropologist at Idaho State University who endorses the existence of Bigfoot, said that he suspected the twisted tree branches had been faked. Not only was there obvious evidence of tool-made cuts in the supposedly "Yeti-twisted" branches, but also the trees were conveniently located just off a well-traveled trail and hardly in a remote area.

Meldrum concluded that the whole Russian expedition was more of a publicity stunt than a serious scientific endeavor, likely designed to increase tourism in the impoverished coal-mining region. Despite quasi-official claims of "indisputable proof" of the Yeti, nothing more has come of the story.

DNA samples

In 2013, Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes put out a call to all Yeti believers and institutions around the world claiming to have a piece of Yeti hair, teeth or tissue taken from a sighting. He received 57 samples, 36 of which were chosen for DNA testing, according to University College London (UCL). These samples were then compared with the genomes of other animals stored on a database of all published DNA sequences.

Most of the samples turned out to be from well-known animals, such as cows, horses and bears. However, Sykes found that two of the samples (one from Bhutan and the other from India) were a 100 percent match for the jawbone of a Pleistocene polar bear that lived sometime between 40,000 and 120,000 years ago - a period of time when the polar bear and closely related brown bear were separating as species, according to BBC. Sykes thought the sample was probably a hybrid of a polar bear and a brown bear.

However, two other scientists, Ceiridwen Edwards and Ross Barnett, conducted a re-analysis of the same data. They said that the sample actually belonged to a Himalayan bear, a rare subspecies of the brown bear. Their study results were published in the Royal Society journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Another team of researchers, Ronald H. Pine and Eliécer E. Gutiérrez, also analyzed the DNA and also concluded that "there is no reason to believe that Sykes et al.'s two samples came from anything but ordinary brown bears."

And in 2017, yet another team of researchers analyzed nine "Yeti" specimens, including bone, tooth, skin, hair and fecal samples collected from monasteries, caves and other sites in the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. They also collected samples from bears in the region and from animals elsewhere in the world.

Of the nine yeti samples, eight were from Asian black bears, Himalayan brown bears or Tibetan brown bears. The ninth was from a dog.

True believers undeterred

The lack of hard evidence despite decades of searches doesn't deter true believers; the fact that these mysterious creatures haven't been found is not taken as evidence that they don't exist, but instead how rare, reclusive, and elusive they are. Like Bigfoot, a single body would prove that the Yeti exist, though no amount of evidence can prove they don't exist. For that reason alone, these animals - real or not - will likely always be with us.
Additional reporting by Traci Pedersen, Live Science contributor. Additional resources
Ever seen Bigfoot's eyeshine in your headlights at night? Heard a splash and sworn you saw Nessie's tail disappearing below the lake surface? Cryptic creatures of myth and legend are known the world over.

Bigfoot, Nessie & the Kraken: Cryptozoology Quiz

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The Yeti, once better known as the Abominable Snowman, is a mysterious bipedal creature said to live in the mountains of Asia. It sometimes leaves tracks in snow, but is also said to dwell below the Himalayan snow line. Despite dozens of expeditions into the remote mountain regions of Russia, China and Nepal, the existence of the Yeti remains unproven.

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A team of scientists ran DNA tests on bits and pieces of "Yeti" samples kept in treasured collections around the world and found that the pieces came from more mundane -- but equally rare -- creatures. Their study, published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, adds to a string of scientific discoveries about that elusive hairy creature.

Yeti: 'that thing there'

To appreciate how much of a mystery modern science has solved, one must understand how many famous people have been driven to brave terrible snowy conditions and scale the world's highest mountain in search of answers.

Yetis are believed by some to be shy, furry human-like "snowmen" who live in the remote mountainous regions of Nepal and Tibet. The name sounds much more poetic than what it translates to, which in the local Sherpa language is "that thing there." Yeti was mistranslated to "Abominable Snowman" when stories of the creature captured the imaginations of people in the West.

Initially, the creatures were thought to be fictiona l, stories the Nepalese would tell children to keep them from wandering into the wild. The Yeti became included in more serious Sherpa/Buddhist tradition about 350 years ago, when a holy man named Sangwa Dorje took up residence in a cave near the remote village of Pangboche, which had clear view of Everest.

Legend has it thatLama Sangwa Dorje wanted to remain alone, meditating. To help, friendly Yetis brought him food, water and fuel. When one Yeti died, the holy man kept its scalp and hand as a reminder of the creature's kindness. When the Lama created a temple, these " Yeti" relics became a main attraction.

The Yeti, a US State Department concern

It wasn't the relics that drove high-profile explorers in search of these elusive creatures. Rather, it was photographs taken in 1951 by Eric Shipton that were printed in newspapers around the world.

Shipton, a mountaineer, found mysterious footprints about 12 or 13 inches long and about twice as wide as his boot on the lower part of a glacier in the Himalayas. The pictures sparked dozens of expeditions into the mountains to find more proof. One included the famous Sir Edmund Hillary, the first Western explorer to reach the summit of Mount Everest who said Hillary also found a tuft of long black hair, thick and coarse, at 19,000 feet on Everest.

"The Abominable Snowman was obviously no mean rock climber," he wrote in 1952.

He later led an expedition to find a Yeti on Everest, but the results were inconclusive.

The belief in the Yeti's existence was so strong that in 1959, the US State Department created rules on how one was to behave in its presence.

A memo with "Foreign Service Dispatch" typed at the top spells out that to be with a Yeti, one must get an official permit and pay a Yeti fee. Hunters are told not to kill it and instead are to photograph or capture it. And they should clear any news about their discovery with the Tibetan government first.

No one is ever known to have needed to comply with those rules, but several "Yeti" samples found their way into museums, private collections and universities. It is those samples that scientists believe could give the world answers that dozens of famous expeditions could not.

The proof is in the pieces

Charlotte Lindqvist and a team of scientists were first approached to examine the "Yeti" samples by Icon Films, which had been working on a2016 documentary about the creature.

"We didn't set out to debunk the myth. We were open-minded, and we did learn something," said Lindqvist, a scientist in the department of biological sciencesat the University at Buffalo. She is currently a visiting associate professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

"I'm not an expert in the Yeti legend, I'm not an anthropologist, but as someone who works with genetics, I thought thisis the kind of the work that could tell an interesting story."

Lindqvist used mitochondrial DNA sequencing to examine 24 "Yeti" samples including hair, bone, skin and feces.

Mitochondrial DNA has been used in archeology to solve a number of mysteries. For example, scientists used it to determine that fossilized human feces samples found in a cave in Oregon were at least 14,000 years old, suggesting that humans have lived in what is now the United States a lot longer than historians had thought.

Using this technique on the "Yeti" samples, Lindqvist and the team discovered that the items came from a Himalayan brown bear and a black bear. One tooth was from an animal in the dog family. The paw of the "Yeti" kept in a monastery came from a black bear. Another bone kept as a monastic relic was from a Tibetan brown bear.

A bearable ending to the Yeti story

The new study is not the first to point in this direction. A 2014 genetic analysis of 30 hair samples from "anomalous primates" believed to be Yetis came from a variety of better-known animals like a Paleolithic polar bear, other bears and dogs. One sample was believed to be from a hybrid bear, but that idea has come under question.

Though Yeti devotees may be disappointed in this latest news, Lindqvist was not. The findings, she said, will help scientists better understand the history and evolution of local bears.

The Himalayan brown bear is a subpopulation of the more commonly found brown bear that is critically endangered and threatened with extinction. The Asian black bear, known for its dark fur and a white "collar" of fur around its neck, is listed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as vulnerable. Both are threatened by illegal hunting, trade in parts and loss of habitat.

So while the closest you may come to seeing a Yeti may be the Bumble in " Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" or even in your child's Lego set, scientists now know more about rare bears in the area. Their environment and work may help other scientists protect these creatures before they too become the stuff of legend.

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science is no friend to the elusive yeti - cnn

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Science solves the mystery of the elusive Yeti

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A team of scientists ran DNA tests on bits and pieces of "Yeti" samples kept in treasured collections around the world and found that the pieces came from more mundane -- but equally rare -- creatures. Their study, published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, adds to a string of scientific discoveries about that elusive hairy creature.

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Trekker Steve Berry saw mysterious tracks on Gangkhar Puensum, Bhutan

Locals say no man has ever set foot on pass where the tracks were spotted

Experts sceptical about the tracks and believe they could belong to a goat

Many expeditions staged to find yeti but none have ever found proof of it

For decades, it has remained abominably elusive.

But now it seems the game could finally be up for the yeti after a mountaineer claimed to be on its trail.

Steve Berry believes the footprints in this photo, taken in the depths of the remote Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, were left by the legendary beast.

They are bigger than human footprints - and, in any case, were left on a mountainside so far untouched by man.

Placed in a single line, one in front of the other, Mr Berry insists they couldn't have been made by a snow leopard, or any other four-legged creature.

While a bear can walk on two legs, its sheer bulk would make it impossible for it place its paws so precisely.

Instead, he believes they were left by a gorilla-like animal as it carefully picked its way across the steep, snow-covered slope.

The tracks were spotted on Gangkhar Puensum, the world's highest unclimbed mountain, when Mr Berry's Bhutanese guide spotted them 200 yards away across an impassable chasm in October 2014.

Mr Berry, 66, who lives near Badminton in South Gloucestershire, said: 'The local people said we were the first to ever set foot on that pass.

'I had always thought that stories about the yeti were a bit of old bunkum. But there is no denying these tracks existed.

'The prints were clearly visible with the naked eye from where we were standing on a pass at 17,800ft.

'There was a vertical drop in front of us, not to mention a very serious mountainside to cross, so we could not get to them.'

It was another four days before Mr Berry reached human habitation and was able to share news of his find.

There a yak herder told him he had seen the yeti, or migo as it is known in Bhutan, once, some 11 years earlier.

Mr Berry said: 'He said it was about 100 yards from him and standing upright facing him and looked straight at him.

'It was completely covered in long dun brown-coloured hair and a face covered in hair like a cat or dog but of human height.

'Then, he said, "You can recognise migo tracks because they put one foot directly in front of the other" and I nearly fell over.

'I showed him the pictures from my camera and he said, "Yes, these are migo tracks".'

Mr Berry's company specialises in Himalayan treks, so no doubt an appearance by the abominable snowman would be good for business.

However, while Mr Berry, his guide and even the Bhutanese royal family - who take a keen interest in the creature - are convinced, others are more sceptical.

The explorer, whose photographs will feature in a Channel 4 documentary later this year, admits that the fact that his company Mountain Kingdoms specialises in trips to the Himalayas will lead to scepticism about his claims.

Jon Downes, director of the Centre for Fortean Zoology, said the slope is so steep that only an animal like a mountain goat would have been able to negotiate it.

He said: 'I think that the chances of these prints being from anything more interesting are negligible and it is certainly not a bipedal higher primate.

'The centre of gravity for such an animal would mean it just wouldn't be able to venture up a mountain like that.'

The yeti has fascinated the western world since 1921, when a Royal Geographical Society expedition found footprints made by 'a wild man of the snows' - leading to the nickname 'abominable snowman'.

Since then, the creature, whose size, shape and name varies from part to part of the Himalayas, has steadfastly resisted detection despite numerous attempts to find it.

Perhaps the most thorough of them all was the Daily Mail 'Abominable Snowman Expedition' of 1954, in which scientists and mountaineers scoured the Himalayas for months.

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Fiona Macrae Science Editor For The Daily Mail

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Are these the footprints of the yeti? Trekker spots Himalayan trail

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Trekker Steve Berry saw mysterious tracks on Gangkhar Puensum, Bhutan Locals say no man has ever set foot on pass where the tracks were spotted Experts sceptical about the tracks and believe they could belong to a goat Many expeditions staged to find yeti but none have ever found proof of it For decades, it has remained abominably elusive.