Sighting of Pyrenees’ abominable snowman just another hairy old chestnut?

A video circulating this week of a white ape-like creature wandering in the Spanish Pyrenees has reignited the debate of the existence of abominable snowmen. Is it real or just another hoax?

From the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film

The video of a lumbering white apelike creature in the Spanish Pyrenees doing the rounds on the internet this week has reignited the debate over the existence of the abominable snowman.

While some will be convinced there really is a large hominid roaming the Spanish mountains, many will remain sceptical, given the blurry pictures and lack of other evidence typical of sightings of similar beasts.

Reports of “human-like hairy creatures” in forests and mountains have circulated for centuries, which is why so many people are convinced there is some truth to the stories.

In North America, tales of Sasquatch or Bigfoot were reported in Native American legends. There have been thousands of reported sightings, alleged photographs and even film of the creature. The most famous moving image is the 1967 footage taken by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin at Bluff Creek, showing a creature walking away from the camera but turning to look over its shoulder.

Sherpa Gyalgen holding a scalp of a ‘yeti’.

In South America it’s the Mapinguari, which lives in the Amazon Rainforest and whose description matches that of extinct giant sloths.

In Australia the indigenous people recounted stories of large hairy creatures to Europeans arriving from 1788. Although different Aboriginal people had different names for the creatures, the one that has become most famous is the “yowie”.

In the Himalaya, ape men also have several different names — “migoi”, meaning wild man, and “metoh-kangmi”, which translates roughly as “dirty men of the snow”. However, in 1921 English journalist Henry Newman mistranslated it as the “abominable snowman”. Another popular name is “yeti”, which is thought to mean simply cliff beast or little manlike animal.

Sightings of the yeti go back thousands of years. In 326BC Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great is said to have heard of his troops encountering “hairy men who wore animal skins and had fingernails like animal claws”. Alexander also heard of “mountain-dwelling, wild hairy men” and demanded to see one but was told they couldn’t survive at low altitudes.

Over the centuries there have been reports from villagers who strayed too far and monks living high up in the mountains of hairy men trudging through the snow. Sometimes they were described as being white and sometimes brown.

Folk tales also talk of women being raped by the creatures, or of the yetis hiding to exact revenge on those who wronged them. In her book, Folk Tales Of Sherpa And Yeti, Shiva Dhakal said the stories were mostly morality tales or tales designed to scare people from wandering off in the snow or approaching wild animals, both dangerous in the mountains.

Large footprints believed to be from a yeti or abominable snowman in the Himalayas.

When Westerners began making their way into the Himalayas in the 19th century they heard about creatures living in the mountains.

In 1832 British naturalist Brian Hodgson published an account of trekking in the mountains where his guides claimed to have seen an “ape creature”, which Hodgson dismissed as an orang-utan, not realising the apes were never seen outside Borneo and Sumatra.

In his 1899 book Among The Himalayas, Major Laurence Waddell wrote about seeing large footprints in the snow during an 1889 expedition. His guides told him they belonged to “mountain-dwelling hairy wild men”.

There were more sightings in the 20th century as more Westerners trekked through the mountains.

A 1921 British expedition to Everest reported seeing a creature moving up the slopes. In 1938 a German scientist Professor Ernst Schaefer was commissioned by Heinrich Himmler to look for the yeti. He concluded it was a brown bear.

On their 1953 assault of Everest Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reported seeing large footprints, but both would later back away from claims the prints were those of a yeti.

Among those who funded expeditions to look for the yeti was Texan oil millionaire Tom Slick, who brought back yeti faeces from a 1950s expedition, which didn’t yield proof of the existence of the yeti but an unknown species of parasite.

Similarly, scalps purporting to be those of dead yetis have proven to be from goats, and yeti hands and fingers nothing more than pilfered mummified relics of monks.

Originally published as Sighting of Pyrenees’ abominable snowman just another hairy old chestnut?