Bigfoot, Yeti, and the Last Neanderthal, page 5
Slick and his companions left Nepal after having spent five weeks in the country. Although Slick remained enthusiastic about the chances of finding a yeti, and financed two further expeditions, he never himself returned to Nepal. No one seems to know what happened to the hair, the droppings and footprint casts. There are rumours that they are held to this day in the vaults of Life magazine, which covered the story, or kept in the private Slick family archive well away from prying eyes, and nosey scientists like me.
Despite Slick's decision not to go on any more yeti-hunts to Nepal himself, he organised and, with his business partner Kirk Johnson Sr, financed two further forays into the Arun Valley. Once again, Peter Byrne was involved, this time with his brother Bryan, another hunter, and Gerald Russell the naturalist, who had been a member of the successful Harkness giant panda expedition of 1936. The expedition arrived in the Arun Valley in February 1958 and stayed for several months. The strategy was to split up into small groups, find a promising location and to stay there. This time the expedition came with dogs, American Bluetick Coonhounds that were bred for hunting and had the reputation of forcing animals up into trees, where they could then be shot. Blueticks were used widely for hunting jaguar, mountain lion and bear in Central and South America, so they seemed to be ideal for doing the same with the yeti in Nepal. Not that Slick wanted a yeti killed, just tranquillised and captured alive. However, it soon became obvious that the Blueticks were not cut out for high-altitude tracking. They became morose and disobedient, needed constant medical attention, kept escaping and were finally ‘discontinued’ as the expedition log puts it.
The 1958 expedition did find footprints, a nesting cave and some droppings, but had little more to show for months of arduous work. I would have expected hairs in the nest cave but, if they were taken, they have – like everything else from the Slick expeditions – vanished.
The following year, 1959, Slick and Johnson financed the last of the three yeti-hunts in the Himalayas and sent orders to Peter Byrne, by then in Kathmandu, to return to the mountains. Though the earlier expeditions had been deliberately small, the third was positively minimalistic, involving only Peter and his brother Bryan. The pair had no tents and very little equipment, the rationale being that this was the best way to get close to a yeti. They lived off the land, sleeping in the open or in caves when it snowed. Altogether they spent nine months in Nepal, but still they found only footprints. However, the 1959 expedition did do one thing that was to become the focus of future attempts to identify the yeti. At the monastery in Pangboche, not far from the Everest Base Camp, the Byrne brothers were able to examine and photograph a yeti scalp, and a wizened hand belonging to one of the creatures. These were holy relics, and although the Daily Mail expedition of 1954 had seen one of the scalps, they had not been allowed to examine or photograph it.
The Slick expeditions came to a sudden end in the winter of 1959. The Byrne brothers were living in a cave high up in the Chhoyang Khola, one of the steep valleys running down to the Arun. There was deep snow cover and the temperature outside had dropped to 45 degrees below zero, which is about the same on both Fahrenheit and Celsius scales. Their equipment all but lost or destroyed and their clothes in tatters, they were subsisting on champa, a local grain mash, yak's milk and what edible ferns they could find beneath the snow. As they were sitting at their campfire a runner arrived from the south. In his hand was a letter from Tom Slick with a fresh set of instructions. As we shall see a little later, as one adventure came to an end, another was about to begin for Peter Byrne.
Although 1959 marked the end of Tom Slick's expeditions in search of the yeti, there were further Himalayan expeditions that set out with the same purpose, the most famous of which was led by Sir Edmund Hillary in 1962. Writing now in New Zealand, I am only too aware of the tremendous regard everyone has for one of their few truly international heroes. His craggy profile decorates the five-dollar note and there are numerous exhibits around the country celebrating not only his conquest of Everest in 1953 but also his subsequent expeditions, such as to the South Pole in 1958. Perhaps most praise for Hillary is reserved for his founding of the Himalayan Trust, which has helped to build schools, roads and hospitals for the Sherpas of Nepal. He is remembered for his modesty and lack of pretension even now, but there is no doubt he became an influential international figure after his triumph on Everest. Awarded a KBE within eight days of reaching the summit, and thereby entitled to use the title ‘Sir’, he continued to be heaped with honours for the rest of his life.
I was privileged to meet his widow Lady June at her home in Auckland in 2013. I especially wanted to ask her about the blue bear skins and other artefacts that her husband had brought back with him from Nepal. She found some photographs of the skins in one of his books, all special leather-bound and autographed editions, and told me what she could about them. My most vivid memory of the visit is the collection of framed photographs on the sideboard, much as any family might have. Except that these showed Sir Edmund and his family in all stages of his life, from the summit of Everest, to Antarctica, to the official residence in Delhi when he was appointed New Zealand High Commissioner in 1985.
I recognised another famous face in a photograph taken with Reinhold Messner, the first to climb Everest solo and without oxygen and also a man with a deep interest in the yeti, as we shall see. The image on Lady Hillary's mantelpiece was a publicity photograph for a luxury brand of wristwatch. She pointed out that her husband was a very tall man, so to equalise the height of the two mountaineers the directors of the shoot had dug a hole in the snow for Sir Edmund to stand in. When you knew what to look for it was obvious but, if not, the shot looked perfectly natural. I felt, just as I did after my encounters with Reinhold Messner and with Peter Byrne, that I had somehow brushed against a vanished and heroic world.
The only community that does not regard Sir Edmund as a hero is the tight-knit group of cryptozoologists. His 1962 expedition to Nepal left with the stated purpose, like others before, of looking for evidence of the yeti. Unlike Tom Slick, Hillary was not much interested in the creature himself but wanted to go back to Nepal to conduct experiments on high-altitude physiology and the effects of altitude on blood oxygen levels. This aim failed to excite financial backers, so Hillary was persuaded to include some yeti-hunting in the prospectus. As soon as he did that, the money rolled in.
In contrast to the later Slick yeti-hunts, Hillary's 1962 expedition was on a large scale, numbering six hundred people at its height. They found the usual footprints, though Hillary dismissed these as the impressions of regular animals enlarged by melting. For instance he describes following one such set of giant footprints in deep snow only to find that when the tracks passed through the shadow cast by a ridge, the toes and heel marks resolved into four separate pugmarks of a small quadruped the size of a fox.1 However, like Peter Byrne, Hillary did examine a yeti scalp, this time at Khumjung, and persuaded the monastery to let him borrow it for six weeks in order to have it properly examined in the West. Along with its Khumjung guardian, Khumjo Chumbi, the scalp toured Europe and America where the experts soon declared it to be a fake, probably fashioned from the skin of the serow, a Himalayan goat-antelope.
Neither Hillary nor his companions were impressed by another holy relic – the yeti hand kept in Pangboche monastery, which they also examined, though did not borrow. Though attributed to the yeti, Hillary thought the hand was ‘essentially human, strung together with bits of wire with the possible inclusion of several animal bones’. He was at least partly right. What Hillary did not know was that Peter Byrne had surreptitiously replaced one of the fingers with a human bone during a clandestine visit to the same monastery in 1959. Peter told me the colourful details of this daring heist and I shall relate them in a later chapter.
Not only did Hillary fail to find any convincing evidence for the yeti, he went further than Slick ever did by declaring that the yeti did not exist, much to the disgust of cryptozoologists. It was this further step that cost Hillary the otherwise universal admiration with which he is remembered.
5
The Professor
Before I began my own research in earnest, and while I was still finding out was going on in cryptozoology, I was soon referred to Dr Jeff Meldrum from Idaho State University in Pocatello. Dr Meldrum is a professor of anatomy and anthropology and one of the very few full-time academics who are working on anomalous primates as part of their professional activities. As a result, he is in demand all over the world whenever an opinion on Bigfoot or yetis is required. Dr Meldrum's particular expertise lies in the evolution of bipedalism, the art of walking on two feet, and the substantial anatomical changes that our ancestors needed to undergo in order to develop that ability. With our feet securely hidden from view in shoes and boots, we are blissfully unaware of how sophisticated a structure they really are. In his book Sasquatch, which I read as soon as I could get hold of a copy, Dr Meldrum explains that in his opinion the foot is second only to the brain in terms of complexity.
By lucky chance my book tour for DNA USA took me to Salt Lake City, about two hours' drive south from Pocatello, and Dr Meldrum very kindly agreed to make the trip down and meet Ulla and me at the Market Street Grill. When he declined a coffee I soon discovered that Jeff was a Mormon, though he didn't mind our own indulgence. I began by asking him how he became professionally involved in sasquatch. He replied that it was triggered by his experience as a young man when he came across a clear set of large prints while out hiking.
In that sense, Dr Meldrum has much in common with many other enthusiasts. This time, however, the experience had a profound influence on his choice of career. After a degree from Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City, a PhD at the State University of New York and postdoctoral work at Duke and Northwestern universities, Dr Meldrum took up an appointment at Idaho State where his interest in sasquatch and other anomalous primates was allowed to flower. Dr Meldrum has persisted in honing his expertise in bipedalism and especially in the analysis of footprints. He has amassed a huge collection of casts from all over the world, and not just of sasquatch and the like.
Unfortunately, there wasn't time on that occasion to ask him much about sasquatch footprints. In any event I was only beginning to find my bearings in this new field and didn't really know what questions to ask. Nevertheless Dr Meldrum agreed to put the word out that I was on the lookout for hair samples that had been attributed to sasquatch and Bigfoot, and later helped me to screen for the most promising specimens. So far we have not met again, so it was left to my researcher Marcus Morris to ask him the more detailed questions that I had formulated. I am including Dr Meldrum's remarks here not because they impact directly on the DNA work, but because footprints are such an important component of the evidence for yeti and Bigfoot. The first thing I wanted to hear about was his opinion of the Shipton 1951 photograph that had such a huge influence in bringing the yeti into the realm of public consciousness.
Dr Meldrum began by highlighting the things that might happen to a footprint in the snow. The first, of course, is melting, which tends to enlarge a print, or sometimes amalgamate several prints into one large one. As Hillary also pointed out, in certain examples four separate prints of a fox bounding over the snow could be condensed into one large print. Melting could also leave a small pool of water in the print, which can enlarge it at its lowest point, usually the heel, exaggerating these features. This process typically leads to the rounding out of the heel impression which, in the case of a bear for example, transforms it from the typically narrow heel to a broader, more human-like shape.
Ice doesn't have to melt before it disappears. The process of sublimation converts solid ice and snow to water vapour without an intermediate liquid step. You can see sublimation at work if you hang out the washing on a very cold day. The clothes freeze and stiffen, but still dry off even though the temperature never climbs above zero. The sublimation process is speeded up at high altitude, where the pressure and humidity are both low. So it's certainly a factor. Sublimation tends to increase in sunlight, so the shadow cast by the side of a footprint slows sublimation while the opposite side, exposed to the sun, evaporates more quickly. Depending on the angle of the print relative to the sun's rays this can either broaden the impression if the track is at right-angles, or lengthen it if the track is in line with the sun. In snow, the casting process itself may also distort the impression, often breaking down the small ridges of snow that separate the individual toe prints from each other, making it look as if the creature has fewer toes than it really does. So given these difficulties of interpretation, what did he think of the famous Shipton print?
‘For a start, it's a very clear footprint in a thin layer of snow in ice. We get the impression of a large, very broad rounded heel and then this odd arrangement of toes. When you consider the entire photograph, though, it is remarkably similar to a melt-out area. You see just a little hint of it where there was some irregularity that was catching the sunlight at its incident angle, and that caused this crescent shape around the heel. The heel is the main support; that's where the pressure is concentrated beneath the foot. And when we look closely at the photograph, to see a ridge running right through what is interpreted as the heel with loose shards of ice or snow scattered there is just inconceivable to me. However, if we say that the deepest point of this area is the heel and we treat the crescent as an artefact of melting and remove it, then what's interesting is that the foot has a better symmetry with a tapered heel which is much more typical of a great ape.’
Dr Meldrum also explained that the same editing to remove melt artefacts enlarges the gap between the big toe and the other digits, which is also typical of a great ape like a gorilla or a chimpanzee. He then turned his attention to the second toe.
‘The curious thing that has often sparked a lot of discussion and debate is the second toe. It's been described as something almost like a natural piton, used to help the creature climb up crevices in the rock and so forth. What struck me is that it bears a remarkable resemblance to a condition in human pathology known as macrodactyly. This is a condition where the skeletal elements, but especially the soft tissue, hypertrophy. They enlarge, pathologically. And so you get this over-sized toe and in this case probably some deformity of the first digit as well.
‘It's hard to draw very firm conclusions from the Shipton print and, I guess, very unfortunate that under the extreme circumstances they found themselves in, Shipton and Ward only took a photo of a single footprint. But it could be great ape or other hominid. I'm just not sure.’
Did Dr Meldrum think the print was genuine? Sir Edmund Hillary, who was also a member of the 1951 expedition, once quipped that Shipton was a well-known practical joker. But Jeff dismissed the suggestion that the print was a deliberate hoax. For one thing, Shipton was not alone, but accompanied by Michael Ward, whose ice axe appears in the photograph.
‘I find that suggestion hard to accept when Michael Ward, a surgeon, a professional, recently published an article in a medical mountaineering journal revisiting the whole issue and discussing possible explanations for the odd morphology of the feet.1 He didn't necessarily advocate the existence of the yeti but he was trying to explain what could have accounted for these footprints. He even included photographs of Sherpas with deformed feet. One individual had a big toe that stuck out at right angles to his foot. I can't imagine that Ward would perpetuate a practical joke by publishing such a paper. So I think what they saw and photographed, they really did see.
‘It's not unreasonable to suggest that this could have been left by a hominid. One of the things that reinforces that inference, that hypothesis, is the presence of another very hominoid-looking footprint that has much more thorough documentation than the Shipton print. This was one that was described from the expedition by the biologists Edward Cronin and Jeffrey McNeely above the Arun Valley in Nepal in 1972.
‘They discovered footprints outside their tents in the morning hours before the sun even touched them. And they backtracked. The creature, whatever it was, had come up a very steep slope through deep snow, never touching the ground with its fore limbs. It came marching up there, apparently spied their tents and detoured to meander through the camp before continuing on over the pass it was using to get to the adjacent valley. Cronin and McNeely lost the trail in the rhododendron groves on the other side of the pass.
‘Here was a long line of crisp, fresh footprints unaffected by melting or sublimation that was observed and photographed by two professional zoologists. Cronin and McNeely also made a cast of the track but unfortunately it was confiscated at the border as they were leaving and now it's lost. But based on the photographs of the original footprint, it looks remarkably like a chimpanzee, though it cannot be from a chimpanzee because they are confined to African rainforests. No bear has an opposable digit like this creature. Based on that and using reference material from other hominoids, again assuming for a moment that the slight indications of digits and the length of those digits can be interpreted, they can be fitted to a great ape foot. That is what I came up with.
‘You know, it's always surprised me that the Cronin-McNeely footprints have not made a bigger splash amongst the scientific community because here is a biological team up there with the express purpose of studying the wildlife.’
That answered a lot of questions about the Shipton image, and tracks left in snow generally. Other than the Shipton-Ward and Cronin-McNeely prints, Dr Meldrum didn't think any of the other Himalayan tracks could be attributed to hominids. The great majority are so distorted by melting and sublimation that they cannot be identified – but that certainly doesn't mean they are from unidentified animals!
