Hair)7 hominid, also called the abominable snowman, reputed to live in the Himalaya Mountains. Called by Tibetans Metoh-Kangmi (“manlike thing that is not a man;” misinterpreted by a translator as “wild man of the snows”), the creature became better known in the West by its nickname, Yeti. Although the Yeti has been reported in Western literature for at least two centuries (and in Tibetan folklore for much longer), it found its permanent place in the Western popular imagination through the well-publicized expeditions of Eric Shipton and Sir Edmund Hillary in the 1950s. Shipton, a mountaineer and explorer, in 1951 took photographs of footprints that his local Sherpa guides believed were made by a Yeti. In 1960, Hillary and his crew, the first westerners to climb to the top of Mount Everest (in 1953), went back to the Himalayas hoping to capture a Yeti or at least to find scientific evidence of one. They did find footprints, and they were given an alleged yeti scalp by local Sherpas. Later analysis showed the scalp, which was covered with red and black hair, to be from an animal, not a hominid. Hillary denounced the Yeti as a fraud or a delusion.
The Yeti is reported to range between about 1.5 and 2.5 meters (5-8 feet) tall (a few reports say 4.6 meters [15 feet]) and to be covered with red and black fur every place except its face, palms, knees, and footsoles. Its footprints have been described as up to 38 centimeters long and 15 centimeters wide (15 inches long and 6 inches wide), and it carries with it an obnoxious odor.