Bigfoot, Yeti, and the Last Neanderthal, page 19
‘I could see it later in the next years that this chemo is always walking like this when it comes on snow, crossing glaciers. He's putting the back foot in the fore foot because he knows instinctively that if the fore foot is standing (here Messner put his right hand on the table) so there's no crevasse, so he can safely put the other foot in the same place. So there's only footprints looking like a two-legged figure.’
I could now see why, at our first meeting, his only words had been: ‘It's a bear.’ Messner had been back to the Himalayas several times and asked about the chemo and is now completely convinced that it is some kind of bear. Whereas I, being a scientist, was curious to know what sort of bear it was, Messner was far more interested in the mythology surrounding this creature than its precise species identification, as he explained.
‘I think for understanding the yeti story scientifically it is not so necessary to know the genes of the chemo. It's not important, the biological and genetic facts, it is important to study how legends are beginning. The legend is existing in the mind of the local people, but the legend always has a real base. Not an invention; all legends have a real base. The legends we have still in our memories which we heard from the grandmother and from the grandfather. And in this case after a while I understood that this is the way to understand the story and it's a different kind of bear.’
To Messner, the yeti and the chemo are one and the same. A legendary creature, but with a physical presence of a kind of bear. Actually I found Messner's zoological knowledge of Himalayan bears rather sketchy. In his book he shows two photographs of a chemo in captivity in Norbulingka Zoo in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. One clearly has the characteristic white markings on its chest of the Asiatic black bear Ursus thibetanus. But this pale marking is also found in the lower altitude sloth bear, Melursus ursinus. The sloth bear has a longer coat and a bigger head than the black bear and the second photograph looks more like a sloth bear to me. Whether it is or not doesn't matter a bit, but what I did initially find quite surprising is that Messner didn't know what a sloth bear was. But when I understood that he was far more interested in how the yeti legend had spread and how it still has an influence on the everyday lives of the people he met on his travels, his skimpy knowledge of the details of ursine taxonomy seemed entirely unimportant.
Nevertheless, Messner did allow me to go to his Mountain Museum at Sulden to have a look at, and take a hair sample from, the second yeti in his collection. This was another trophy from the Schafer expedition, although displayed very differently. While the yeti at Juval that I had sampled the previous year was a stuffed head mounted on a wall, the Sulden yeti was a complete specimen enclosed in a display cabinet yet only partly visible. To add to the mystery, it was on a rotating stage and bathed in an eerie blue light.
Having received a call from Messner, the curator of the museum went around the back of the cabinet and unlocked it. With the rotating plinth turned off, I was able to climb inside, right up to the ‘Snow Bear’ as it was labelled. As there was no other illumination, the creature was still bathed in blue light. And what a creature it was. Standing about six feet tall, with one arm raised across its chest, it was like nothing I had ever seen before. Two amber glass eyes stared out from an extraordinary face that looked like a cross between a bear and a baboon, if you can imagine such a thing. It had a long sloping nose covered, like the rest of the face, with short pale hair. The region around the open mouth was heavily reconstructed with plaster or clay while the mouth itself held an assortment of teeth on both the upper and lower jaws. There were long Dracula-like incisors embedded in both jaws, but at the front of the mouth, where I expected incisors there were instead what looked like molar teeth – perhaps even inserted upside down. The rest of the body was covered in hair about four inches long, and seemed to me to be made up of parts of different animals. The hair on the arms and legs, for example, was considerably darker than on the trunk.
I tried to suppress a laugh. It was such a terrible fake that it surely couldn't have fooled anybody if they had a chance of close inspection. But a combination of the moving platform, the restricted viewpoint and, of course, the glow of the blue light made sure visitors had only a fleeting glimpse at each rotation.
Nevertheless, I carefully removed hair samples from six different parts of the creature for analysis. I wasn't expecting to discover a new primate, but this was a famous historical specimen so at the very least it was a rare chance to expose a Nazi practical joke.
18
The Explorer
One of the first responses to our call for yeti samples came from Christophe Hagenmuller, a French climber and explorer from the town of Annecy, not far across Lake Geneva from Michel's museum in Lausanne. That is where I met him and where he told me how he had come across his astonishing find. Christophe is a wiry, fit man who now works for an international software company that allows him time to indulge his enthusiasm for the mountains. He has been travelling in the Himalayas since 1996 and, like so many before and since, fell in love with that part of the world and with the people who live there. The way his eyes sparkled when he began his story showed this was no invented passion. His favourite part of the Himalayas is Ladakh, actually in India or, to be more precise still, in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir. Ladakh borders Tibet and many Tibetans crossed the border to live there after the Chinese annexed their homeland in the 1950s. Hagenmuller and a companion travelled to Ladakh every year between June and September from 1996 to 2003, walking with some Tibetan friends, one of who was from a Buddhist monastery. There was no particular objective in his travels. He just enjoyed being there among the mountains, getting to know the people, immersing himself in their culture and enjoying the nature of the place. Yetis were the last things on his mind.
‘I was not looking for the yeti, I was just walking the area to discover the culture and looking at the nature, the flowers, the animals. I wanted to see the snow leopards – that was my goal but I was not focused on that. I just wanted to discover the nature and people. I learnt the Tibetan language there. I spent two weeks in a monastery where I was teaching English to young monks and in return I was taught the Tibetan language. During one of my travels, the second or third one, I was told about hunters who had killed strange creatures.
‘It was an accident that led me to the yeti. One day we walked to a village. My friend was ahead of me and I saw a person sitting beside a horse. I asked him in Tibetan if he was okay and he said he was almost okay but he had fallen from the horse and couldn't go back home. I helped him getting again on his horse and went back to his house where he invited me to stay with his family for a day or two. And we started talking. I told him I was looking for the snow leopard and other creatures but he told me that he had something more interesting to show me. That's when he started telling me about the tenmo, which is the local name for yeti there. That's how I got introduced to the yeti, let's say.
‘He hadn't seen the yeti himself but he knew that in his village a hunter had killed a strange creature forty years ago and thought he could show me the creature. Unfortunately after a few days and after meeting with the chief of the village we discussed about how I could see this creature, but finally they decided not to show it to me. They were afraid about what would happen if I would reveal the place and say what I had seen there. So I didn't insist too much and I said, “Okay, if I can see when I come back next year maybe, or in the future, that would be nice.”’
Hagenmuller returned the following year, but once again the village chief refused to allow him to see the creature. A year later, his fifth visit, a friend of his told him that he had heard that there was another village four days' walk away where a hunter had killed a yeti thirty years before. Hagenmuller continued:
‘I had heard of the yeti, of course – a strange creature you can see sometimes but no one knows what they are. I wasn't focused especially on the yeti, for me it was more probably a bear or something like that which people would see in the dark or in special conditions where they were confused. I was interested but not that interested. For me it could be anything. It could be an animal like a bear or any strange creature, I had no idea on that before. But I thought I may as well have a look at this creature, so we set off for the village where the creature's body was said to be kept.
‘We were travelling in a party of only three. The Tibetan monk who knew the way to the village, the man who I had helped coming back on his horse, and me. Only three persons. They didn't want me to bring any other persons to them and I had to promise that I would never reveal the place where I would see the animal. We travelled on a donkey for four days and, to be honest, I am not even sure I could find the village again. That is how we came to the village and then we went down the valley to a house. I have some pictures in mind of the house, and that's the one where we saw the hunter who had killed the animals, and we entered his house.
‘It was very dark inside. In this area, because of the coldness, people have houses with very small windows. Some light entered the room but it was still really dark and I couldn't really see the animal. I asked if he could bring the animal outside, and he agreed. It was a sunny day so I asked if he could put the animal on the balcony or roof of his house, and he put it on the roof with plenty of light.
‘I took a whole roll of photographs of this animal. Then, and I don't know why, I asked if I could take some pieces of its fur. I didn't know anything about DNA analysis, and anyway by then the creature had been dead for thirty years. The guy hesitated but said, “Okay, if you don't reveal where the animal is, you can take part of the fur.” I put that in a little box where you put your film and that's how I brought the fur back to Europe.’
I had already seen one of Christophe's photographs of the animal. It certainly looked odd so I asked him about his first impressions of the creature.
‘The first thing that came to my mind, which is funny, was that it was a mix of a wolf and a bear, two animals I didn't think could hybridise. That was the first impression. Then I looked more closely at different parts of the animal. I looked at the foot, the mouth, the teeth, and it seemed to be more a bear than anything else. But it was a very strange creature. I had seen a lot of bears in India as well as in the US and Canada and I wouldn't have said immediately that it is a bear, but I thought after some examination that probably it is a bear.’
We both looked at Christophe's photograph. The animal was about four feet in length with golden brown fur that was long and matted. It had a wide, flat snout, not like a bear at all, and a mouth with large teeth. Its front paws certainly had the claws of a bear, but it was the creature's head that looked distinctly un-bearlike. The ears, if they were there at all, were lying flat against the head, not sticking out as a bear's would, at least when it was alive. I asked Christophe if the man who shot the creature also thought it was a bear.
‘No. He said it's definitely not a bear. He said, “I am sure it's not a bear and I cannot be confused because I'm a hunter. I've killed maybe thirty in my life and I can assure you it's not a bear. Don't tell me it's a bear. It is a tenmo.” He wasn't hesitating at all. For him it was a tenmo. Period. When I started to joke about that he became a little bit angry like I was doing something wrong, not respecting his culture, whatever. Not respecting what he was saying seriously. He was not joking; he was serious, saying it was a tenmo.’
Having brought the precious sample back to France, Hagenmuller contacted the eminent palaeontologist Yves Coppens, an expert in many aspects of human evolution and a scientist of international reputation. They corresponded a few times but then nothing more happened until a colleague in Geneva saw the press coverage surrounding the launch of the Oxford-Lausanne Collateral Hominid Project in 2012 and mentioned this to Hagenmuller. And that is how the hair of the tenmo came to be in my laboratory, nearly forty years after the animal it belonged to had been shot. This was going to be a very tough sample to analyse. Eventually we got it to work and with a stunning result that we will cover later.
Hagenmuller plans to return to Ladakh quite soon. He thinks the hunter who shot the tenmo has since died. He wants to try once again to take a look at the first creature which he was denied on his previous visits. I didn't ask him precisely where the tenmo hair was found. It may have been technically correct to report an exact location, but far more important is Hagenmuller's promise to his Tibetan friends to keep it a secret. He may have seen and photographed a tenmo, perhaps the rarest of creatures, but he has yet to see a snow leopard, surely the most beautiful of all.
19
The Pangboche Finger
Cryptozoology is not short of good stories, but none beats the case of the Pangboche Finger. Fortunately there is a DNA angle, which allows me to include it without straining the boundaries of my enquiry. This case has everything. Skullduggery sanctioned by the most famous zoologist in Britain, tales of adventure by an intrepid explorer, the last of the ‘Great White Hunters’, some sharp moves by a Hollywood movie star, and all set against the snow-covered peaks of the Himalayas. And now some DNA results as well.
The story begins in 1959 when the director of London Zoo, the world-famous primatologist Professor William Osman Hill, summoned the Irish adventurer, Peter Byrne, already a veteran of the Texas millionaire Tom Slick's yeti-hunts in the Himalayas, to meet him in London. Osman Hill, alongside his regular research into comparative anatomy, had always nurtured an interest in cryptozoology, and yetis in particular. He offered Byrne a commission: to steal part of an ancient yeti relic, a mummified hand, from the Buddhist monastery at Pangboche in Nepal and to replace it with a human finger so the theft would not be discovered. Osman Hill pulled out the substitute from his office drawer and placed it on his desk. Byrne took the commission, and the finger, and set out for Nepal. With his long experience of the region, Byrne had little difficulty in crossing the border and trekking to Pangboche. Once there, he bluffed his way into the sanctuary where the hand was kept, snapped off the ring finger and replaced it, as best he could, with the substitute he had brought from London.
Peter Byrne told me the next part of the story when I visited him at his home in Oregon. While getting into Nepal was straightforward, even with a dislocated human finger in his rucksack, getting the stolen digit out was much more of a problem. The theft from the monastery had been discovered and news had spread. Peter told me that he did not anticipate any great difficulty in getting the finger across the Nepalese border into India, but the customs in Calcutta were far more vigilant. Smuggling the finger back to Britain was going to be much more testing.
Then Peter had a lucky break. In Calcutta, he was staying at the five-star Taj Bengal and among the other guests was none other than the Hollywood actor James Stewart. Something I did not know about Jimmy Stewart, but Peter did, was that he was a very keen amateur archaeologist and anthropologist and a regular attendee at monthly meetings of the Malibu Anthropology Society in Los Angeles. This made the introduction easy. Peter Byrne explained his dilemma to Stewart and the most fantastic plot was hatched between them. Stewart and his wife Gloria offered to help, at great risk to themselves, and when they left next day for London the stolen yeti finger was hidden deep inside Gloria's lingerie case.
The Stewarts passed through customs in Calcutta without being searched but things did not go so well when they arrived in London, as Peter went on to tell me. The Stewarts were staying in their usual suite at the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane. When their luggage was delivered to their rooms from the airport, Gloria's lingerie case was missing. Had it been intercepted? Had the finger been found? Anxiety turned to dread when, later that evening, there was a knock at the door and in walked a young customs officer carrying the case. Expecting the worst, the Stewarts offered the officer a cup of tea from the tray freshly arrived in their suite. The officer politely declined and instead asked Mrs Stewart if this was indeed her case, which she confirmed. Then he handed it over. Gloria saw at once that it was locked. If it had been searched, surely the lock would have been forced.
‘It's still locked,’ Gloria exclaimed.
‘Of course, madam. The British Customs would never open a lady's intimate luggage.’
The Stewarts tried to hide their relief, and as soon as the officer had left clutching the autographed photograph that James had swiftly produced by way of thanks, the tea tray was put to one side and the drinks cupboard opened instead.
I caught up with the Pangboche Finger when my attention was drawn to an article in the Daily Mail in late 2012. Mathew Hill, a health correspondent for the BBC, had found out that the Royal College of Surgeons had discovered the finger while clearing out Osman Hill's archives, curated by the museum since his death in 1975. Hill arranged to have DNA extracted from the relic and sequenced by Dr Rob Ogden from Edinburgh Zoo who, according to the article, had found only human DNA. But what sort of human DNA could it be?
I went to see Dr Ogden in Edinburgh and he told me that he had indeed drilled out a piece of the Pangboche Finger and sequenced the recovered mitochondrial DNA. It was definitely human. I asked if I could have a look at the sequence, which he kindly gave me on a memory stick. When I returned to Oxford, I compared the Pangboche sequence to the many tens of thousands on my research databases from all over the world. Dr Ogden, sensibly given the age of the specimen (and who knows how old it was already when Peter Byrne snapped it off in 1959), had applied an ancient DNA approach that analysed the recovered DNA in short segments. Not all of them had worked and there was a gap of seventy-six bases in the middle of the sequence. In the runs of DNA sequence that Dr Ogden had managed to retrieve from the finger, I recognised some key variants. This was a European mitochondrial DNA sequence, in the clan of Ursula. The gap in the sequence missed out some important positions, but when I searched my database I found I could fill them in to create a rather unusual European sequence that I had only seen twice before. The Pangboche Finger sequence was almost certainly not from Nepal or anywhere else close by as it lacked the key variant (at position 16223) that is almost universal throughout Asia.
