Legend of the Yeti Monsters
The Abominable Snowman
Who's never heard about the legend of the Yeti monsters or metoh kangmi, "the abominable snowman", as it was called by the inhabitants of the Himalayan zone? Yeti monsters regularly leave traces of their passages and their footprints are regularly witnessed. The Himalayas is indeed their domain. Is Yeti a survival of our very distant ancestors or is it a species of its own still unidentified to this day?
Yeti monsters footprints
The legend of the Yeti monsters is a classic of cryptoozology. However, the apparitions of the abominable snowman are not common. Indeed, it is usually more about its footprints, whose size varies surprisingly between 15 and 45 centimeters long.
However, even rare, its manifestations are often mentioned. In his book Yeti - Legende und Wirklichkeit (The Yeti - Legend and Reality), published in 1998, Reinhold Messner tells how he met a Yeti. At least that's what his native guides say. A closer look allows Messner to see that it was a Tibetan brown bear. Frequently, their bone structure and ability to stand on their hind legs leads to confusion between brown bears and cryptides. However, all of the witnesses who have closely observed a Yeti say that it is not a monkey or a bear.
The three types of Yeti monster
For Himalayan natives convinced of the existence of the abominable snowman, there are several types: the small yeh-the, the big meh-the and the immense dzu-the. This distinction would explain the different sizes of footprints found. Footprints of small or medium size are probably due to species of monkeys often mistaken for yeti monsters in the Himalayas. If the abominable snowman exists, it probably descends from the gigantopithecus, this giant monkey whose species has now disappeared. When it died half a million years ago, Mount Everest rose 500 meters. It is possible that this geological change has isolated many species.
According to another theory, the Yeti habitat is located in forests and valleys below the snow limit. In fact, the lush valleys that are embedded in the fog are isolated from humans. To move from one valley to another, the abominable snowman would systematically cross snowy areas, which would explain footprints regularly seen.
Himalayan legends
In his book, Reinhold Messner explains that the Yeti, a fearsome wild and hairy humanoid creature, is among the religious beliefs deeply implanted among the Himalayan indigenous. But it is clear that, except for some bad pictures (often identified as special effects) and Tibetan religious texts, the existence of the abominable snowman is not based on any real proof. Spoils are regularly found in isolated Tibetan monasteries and presented as evidence of its existence. But they are systematically refuted, because they are generally the remains of known animal species. In 1960, Heuvelmans studied a scalp supposed to come from a Yeti monster, a ritual object of the inhabitants of these countries. A comparison with the hairs of a goat from the Himalayan mountains, preserved in a Brussels museum, allowed him to demonstrate that the supposed Yeti scalp was in fact the fur of this unknown goat species.
There is therefore no real evidence of the existence of Yeti monsters. In spite of thousands of visual testimonies, still today, this cryptide remains an enigma of the vertiginous Himalayan peaks.
