The Pangboche Yeti Scalp Hair Specimens

The idea came from Ralph Izzard, a journalist at the Daily Mail. His paper would send an expedition into the Himalaya to hunt the abominable snowman. The biologist Charles Stonor went ahead from Kathmandu in December 1953. The main party joined him at Namche Bazar in February 1954. With them were John Angelo Jackson, the mountaineering leader, and Dr Biswamoy Biswas of the Zoological Survey of India.

About 3 km northeast of Tengboche, in the Imja Khola valley, lies the village of Pangboche. Its gompa kept a relic, a yeti scalp. Monastery tradition held that Lama Sangwa Dorje befriended a yeti in a cave. When it died, he brought its hand and scalp to the monastery. The relics were reportedly paraded around the village in a fertility ritual.

The monks kept it carefully wrapped in cloth, the ties sealed with wax. A five-rupee note persuaded them to break the seal. What emerged was a domed object covered in hair. A ridge ran from the base of the forehead, over the crown, to the nape.

In dim light the hair looked black to dark brown. In sunlight it turned fox red. Stonor put its age at about 250 years. A 1959 report would call it "the 350-year-old scalp."

Charles Evans of the 1953 Everest expedition had already examined it the year before and taken a few hairs from its crest. Now Stonor examined it in detail. Biswas was photographed studying it, and one account says he found no stitching or joins. The scalp was in one piece. Jackson and Tom Stobart, who also examined it carefully, suspected it "might have been made from the skin of a wild pig."

19 March 1954. The Daily Mail reported that the expedition had sent hair specimens from the scalp for study. They went to the anatomist Professor Frederic Wood Jones. He bleached the hairs, sectioned them, made microphotographs and compared them with the hair of bears and orangutans.

His answer was careful: he could not name the animal. But he was convinced the hairs came from neither an ape nor a bear. Nor, he judged, were they actually from a scalp. Some animals carry a ridge of hair from the crown down the back, but none has one running from the forehead across the crown to the nape. The hairs were undyed and probably exceedingly old, and most likely, Wood Jones suggested, they came from the shoulder of a coarse-haired hoofed animal.

If Wood Jones was right, the scalp had been shaped from the body skin of a hoofed animal. Bernard Heuvelmans is said to have called the Himalayan scalps serow skin. The 1954 team reportedly found a third scalp at Namche Bazar and judged it a crude imitation of the other two. Later, Hillary's World Book expedition of 1960 and 1961 tested a different relic, the Khumjung scalp. Marca Burns concluded it probably came from an animal closely resembling a serow, but definitely not identical with it.

Jackson returned around 1987. Viewing now cost 10 rupees. The scalp seemed to have less of the bristly hair. "Either visitors were extracting hairs surreptitiously or the Yeti was going bald!" he joked.

A "Yeti" hand had joined the display, and the general opinion was that the hand is human. After Unsolved Mysteries aired around 1991, the hand was stolen. One account says the scalp went with it. In 2010 Wētā Workshop made replicas of the skull and hand. Mike Allsop gave them to the monastery in May 2011.