(Describer) Clouds pass over mountain peaks.

HOSTESS: Atop Earth's highest mountain above sea level hardly seems like an easy place to live. Mount Everest's tall peaks, freezing temperatures, fierce winds, and ever-present snow make it hard to support life. And while it's true that very few plants or animals can survive there, the most famous residents certainly seems at home, the Yeti. The huge, hairy monster has been spotted walking across Asian mountains from China to the Himalayas. Some say it looks like an ape, others a bear, and others even insist it's an unidentified humanoid species. The first reports of a wild man in the Himalayas appeared in the Western world during the 19th century, but didn't really get much attention. But in the 20th century, a few expeditions, some reported tracks, and one very famous photograph began a crazed hunt for the Yeti.

(Describer) A huge animated eye opens.

I'm Dr. Emily Zarka, and this is Monstrum. It's generally believed Yeti is a mispronunciation of the "yeh teh" from Tibetan Sherpa dialect, meaning either a cliff-dwelling bear or animal of rocky places. Regardless, when you hear Yeti, you probably picture the huge creature with fluffy white fur that pops up in movies all the time, the one commonly called the "abominable snowman."

YETI: Abominable. Can you believe that? Do I look abominable to you?

EMILY ZARKA: But there's no real folklore that supports that version before the 20th century. Written accounts of the Tibetan legend of the Yeti date back to the 12th century. Also called a "wild man," many accounts describe the creature as an ape-like being, over six feet tall, walking on its back legs, with reddish-brown fur covering its muscular body. Explanations range from a real animal displaced in search of food to a purely fictional folklore creature. Tibetan tradition recognizes a variety of Yeti, one said to walk on two legs, and another larger Yeti that preys on livestock and walks on four legs.

(Describer) Tracks lead away from a gutted cow.

Yeti are believed to live in the alpine forest below the snow line, although they will brave higher altitude for food and shelter. They don't eat or hunt humans-- although they may steal food from them-- preferring the mosses, frogs, and pikas that live on the mountain. In many stories, the Yeti is nocturnal, and emits a high-pitched screech or whistle. In Tibetan tradition, it is more common to hear a Yeti than to see one. The two-legged Meh Teh appears in Buddhist temple decorations and religious painted scrolls. According to a religious and historical Tibetan text from the 12th century, these wild people and humans come from shared ancestors, although the Meh Teh is neither fully human nor fully animal. This is why much of the art in Tibetan temples shows the Yeti realm of rebirth between humans and animals. And Tibetan Buddhist stories feature Yetis as both kind and malevolent characters. One popular tale from the Himalayas tells of an injured yogi helping a wild man with an infected foot from a splinter. The yogi kindly removes the splinter and cleans the wound. The grateful Yeti thinks the yogi by bringing him a tiger, which the man skins and offers to a monastery. Legends are often born when we blur the lines between fiction and real-life events. In the 17th century, a Buddhist religious leader walked from India to Nepal to reside in a cave as a religious hermit. While living there, he claimed friendly Yetis would bring him food and water, allowing him a life of quiet meditation. When one of the Yetis died, he kept the scalp as a holy relic in the temple he built in 1667. This real-life relic became a part of blessing rituals for the temple monks. Later, a Yeti hand was added to the collection, another tribute to the creatures that made the temple possible. The temple monks refused to allow anyone to remove the relics for hundreds of years. But in 1959, explorer Peter Byrne stole a few finger bones from the hand, substituting them with human ones. So Yeti legends and stories were culturally important long before the Western world was even aware of their existence. In reality, the Yeti entered into Western thought as a footnote-- literally a footnote in a book. In 1832, British naturalist Brian H. Hodgson writing about mammals in Nepal noted that no monkeys could be found in the northern and central regions. But a footnote mentioned that during one expedition, frightened local shooters fled what they believe to be a wild man. He was told the creature moved upright, was covered with long, dark hair, and had no tail. Still no monkeys, but the tail of the curious humanoid gave Hodgson pause. In 1889, the first mention of Yeti footprints appeared in Among the Himalayas by British explorer Laurence A. Waddell. He writes that according to Tibetans, the large tracks were made by what they identified as hairy wild men, who are believed to live amongst the eternal snows. At the turn of the 20th century, the first exploration and hunting parties descended on the Himalayas in search of the mysterious hairy wild man. But it wasn't until Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Howard-Bury's 1921 Mount Everest exploration that the press started to pay attention. Howard-Bury and five others saw tracks in the snow that they could not identify. Local laborers accompanying them identified the tracks as belonging to the wild man of the snows. Howard-Bury believed the prints in the snow were from a gray wolf. But when he and his team were interviewed by journalist Henry Newman, the reporter found no excitement in that explanation, and instead focused on the Tibetan boogeyman, with his backward-facing feet and long-matted hair. He mistranslated "metoh-kangmi," which roughly means man-bear snowman, as filthy snowman, which he decided sounded better as abominable snowman. Something about the name captured the public's imagination, and interest in the creature snowballed. But expeditions to search for the Yeti became difficult because of political and religious tensions after China invaded Tibet, leading to thousands of deaths, until in 1951, an agreement was made affirming China's sovereignty over Tibet, but allowing their political system to remain unchanged and religious freedom to stay protected, including the belief in the Meh Teh. With a more stable political climate, explorers once again poured in to hunt for the monster. Most notable was the 1951 Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition led by Eric Shipton, which produced the single most famous piece of Yeti evidence, a photograph of a footprint. Dubbed the Shipton Print, the widely-published photo shows a huge human-like footprint in the snow reportedly discovered on Mount Everest at 18,000 feet. It was printed everywhere. Newspapers, science journals, and popular magazines around the world plastered it across their pages. In 1952, a year after Shipton's famous photograph, a Swiss exploration team found possible Yeti tracks at 16,000 feet. A porter even claimed to be attacked by a Yeti, but the rest of the team didn't corroborate his story. The monster search craze reached such a level that the Nepalese government, seeing an opportunity to exploit the Yeti, began offering special Yeti hunting licenses. In 1954, the popular British newspaper The Daily Mail funded a Himalayan Yeti-finding expedition. Texas oilman and monster hunter Tom Slick through his cowboy hat into the ring. His bio included hunts for Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. In the 1950s, he dedicated three expeditions to the Yeti, and Life Magazine offered him $25,000 for the rights to any photos he took of the creature. After 1959, tensions in the area came to a head again, and a Tibetan uprising led to a Chinese crackdown on Yeti expeditions for fear of espionage. For a decade, it was difficult to travel into the country to look for the Yeti. But two expeditions managed to wiggle through the cracks. Between 1960 and 1961, Edmund Hillary and Marlin Perkins led expeditions with a team of scientists, who examined the infamous Yeti relic hand, and IDed it as coming from a modern human, although at the time they didn't know Byrne had swapped out the finger bones. Shockingly, the monks at the temple also allowed them to take the famous Yeti scalp, but only if one of their elders could accompany it, using the opportunity to raise money to build schools in Nepal. In 1960, separate examinations of the scalp in London, Chicago, and Paris found that it was a fake relic made from serow flesh. The discovery appeared to dampen the spirits of Yeti hunters, and expeditions began to wane. None of the expeditions were able to bring back conclusive evidence of a Yeti. Enter Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, the 1964 Christmas television special whose fluffy, white, arguably adorable Yeti reignited the popularity. The fanged, white, furry character with blue hands and feet at first seemed scary, until it's revealed that it's only suffering from a toothache. The character Bumble is explicitly called an abominable snow monster. It's my opinion this is the thing that created the white-haired snow monster Westerners identify as a Yeti, the one most often seen in pop culture today. In the '70s, the Chinese government sent more than 100 people to investigate the Yeti. After they found nothing, they even allowed Western expeditions into Tibet again. But those didn't reveal anything either. In the same decade, the famous Shipton photograph became widely viewed as a fake. One team member of the 1951 expedition even told a journalist that it was very possible the photo was a hoax, given that Shipton "definitely liked to take the mickey out of people" and would think that was quite a good joke. But some of the expeditions over the years did return with more than photos. Newly-discovered fragments of bones, skin, teeth, and fecal matter were all brought back and investigated. But nothing conclusive developed. It seems that every time some new scientific insight attempts to answer: Is the Yeti real? the world pays attention. Take the Bhutan discovery for example. In 2001, a British zoologist collected a few strands of hair from a hollow cedar tree in Bhutan. Under DNA analysis, the hair could not be identified as coming from any animal known to science. Was this conclusive proof that some yet-unidentified creature lived in the Himalayas? Not exactly. In 2014, Yeti made the news again when a study showed that the hair actually came from an extinct paleolithic polar bear. In 2017, a team of scientists analyzed another 24 supposed Yeti specimens taken from the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau, including bone, tooth, skin, hair, and fecal samples. All but one of the samples, which came from a dog, were from bears, including Himalayan bears, who occupy the Northwestern plateau. Himalayan bears have paler, reddish brown fur, which seems awfully like the hair in the descriptions of the original Tibetan Yetis. Interestingly, the scientists discovered that the Himalayan brown bear came from a unique evolutionary lineage that diverged from all other brown bears around 650,000 years ago. So in their report, the scientists say that the study's findings strongly suggest that Yetis are based on local brown and black bears. I happen to agree. Bears also play a really important role in Tibetan mythology and lore. There's belief in a half human and half brown bear creature called the "mi dred." In upper Tibet, among the Chinese Nakhi people, apes, marmots, brown bears, and mi dred are the four brothers, who are like humans but are not human. They are believed to have the same ancestry, because they are all capable of standing on their back legs. Folklore tells of brown bears abducting women and producing children with them, and of brown bears leaving human footprints. Tibetan folklore, religion, scientific discoveries-- there's actually a lot going on with this monster. It's kind of amazing. Both the snarling bloodthirsty Yeti we see in some depictions--

(Describer) In a movie, one rips out a man's heart.

[SCREAM]

--and the kinder, helpful versions we see in others have some basis in Himalayan folklore. But ultimately, they only touch the surface. The more dangerous representations promote a healthy sense of wariness around bears, or serve as warnings of the very real dangers of the snow and high altitude. And the kinder, helpful versions of the Yeti speak to the Buddhist belief that all living things have a purpose and a place in the world.