14.6 Michael Ward Standing Beside the Trail of ‘Yeti Tracks’ That He and Eric Shipton Found on the Menlung Glacier in 1950—Note How the Trail Reveals ‘for There Had Been at Least Two’
Source: Royal Geographical Society
But, apart from an increasingly firm explanation to the iconic Shipton print, there is mathematical refutation against Heuvelmans’s Gigantoithecus hypothesis of a race of giants, a side branch of Homo sapiens, that didn’t die out half a million years ago, but survives as a remnant community in remote Himalayan valleys. For this, John Craighead astutely argues about minimum viable populations, and I earlier referenced his argument. Minimum viable population mathematics pretty well debunks the Yeti as a hominoid.
Without data on Yeti reproduction, let us start with Craighead’s grizzly numbers. Thirty individuals is the smallest population of grizzlies that can survive. Assuming hominoid intelligence, a Yeti might require half that number. But as hominoids spend more time raising their young than the three years of a grizzly, and the reproductive period is longer, plus the likelihood of maternal death is probably higher, these variables raise the minimum population. However, arguing from the other position, the Barun and its neighbouring valley in Tibet is ideal, isolated, food-rich habitat, so it might be possible that the lowest possible number of Yetis could be twenty individuals. For the Yeti, therefore, what is needed is a minimum population of between twenty and thirty individuals.
That number also fits with humans where the settlement of the Pacific gives evidence on minimum viable populations. Anthropologists have shown that a human boy and girl going out in a canoe to settle a new island will unlikely be able to reproduce beyond several generations. Larger concentrations are required of twenty or more even in the idyllic, food-rich, disease limited, Pacific Islands. A boy and girl, lying on a beach having sex eating coconuts and fresh fish, will happily make babies. But over several generations (aside from inbreeding) they are unlikely to create a community.
To put it another way, once the population of an animal that must live by hiding gets so low that the population is impossible to find, the population is probably so small it is gone. Or, to put this in terms of the Yeti search, since a population—not an individual—must exist, the search is not for a solitary animal. And after a hundred years of searching, if not even one animal has been found when at least twenty must exist, the population is nonexistent. Statistically speaking, there is probably not even one Yeti.
If, then, it takes a village to grow a people—how did humanity or gorillas or bears (or chickens from eggs) ever start? Twenty new babies are not born at one time. (Adam and Eve, by this proof, are mathematically not enough to start the human species.) Evolution is the explanation. A genetic mutation occurs, but not such a significant mutation that the new being cannot breed back to the prior species. Closely related species can breed to each other. (Consider all the new DNA evidence to show that humans were breeding with earlier hominoid species. As a separate species, humans evolved to be distinctive over generations.) Speciation comes from breeding back, and then numbers growing as speciation differentiation continues. A new species is not formed in the first mutation. Multiple generations grow the minimum viable populations, and in these years ongoing mutation reinforces separate identity.
More on DNA’s role solving the Yeti enigma is worth mentioning. More definitively than skulls, DNA now identifies species. So, it is essential to subject all alleged Yeti relics to DNA analysis—a new animal might just turn up. With this objective, the Oxford professor, Bryan Sykes, led a team that systematically examined all ‘anomalous primate’ artefacts they could recover. That explained all but two based on known animal DNA, and the two they advanced might connect to a remnant population of bears in the Himalaya.3 This possibility again ignited Yeti speculation—in 2014, the Yeti was back. A subsequent study by Eliecer Gutierrez and Ronald Pine repeated this analysis. Working with parallel mitochondrial 12SrRNA sequencing, they showed that the short genetic sequence was not adequate to support a conclusion of an ‘anomaly’ and was almost certainly from the Himalayan brown bear.4
Lore of this Yeti mystery began in the 1890s, continuing through the 1960s when in the Western view there still existed ‘undiscovered’ Himalayan valleys. Discoveries were happening still then in the Himalaya. The great summits were being ‘conquered’, and the would-be conquerors were finding the footprints. Today with the Barun explored—and not even Lendoop finding the Yeti (which is hugely telling)—the remaining area of sufficient size where a Yeti might live is Tibet.
In my now three decades of conservation work starting nature preserves, I’ve been privileged to work in every prefecture in the Tibet Autonomous Region. I’ve gathered Yeti-related evidence at every opportunity in forty-five exploratory trips. Yeti stories abound—from Tibetans in the west along the Tsangpo River and also a thousand kilometres away in the east at the headwaters of the Mekong. They speak of Dremu who steels sheep, an animal that has human footprints. They speak of Metoh Kangmi that travels alone, has ears flopped forward, lives high on mountain ridges, and can walk erect.
Careful probing of these reports give details pointing to a known animal, once again a bear. Some Tibetans have actually seen the Dremu and do not pass on someone else’s story, a large head compared to the body, long teeth, yellow hair around the face, long snout where the nose and mouth seem one. For years I was puzzled. Then one day at the Lhasa zoo I saw two animals and an explanation connected. The Dremu is the super-rare, never-studied Himalayan blue bear, Ursus arctos pruinosis (or sometimes a subspecies labelled isabelensis).
That identification connected because decades before, in 1961 as a sixteen-year-old, I asked the former king of Bhutan about the Yeti (the Bhutanese now call this king The Third King as his grandson, The Fifth King, sits on the throne). The Third King was an outdoorsman unusually knowledgeable about wildlife. He smiled when I asked about the Yeti, and it was clear he had given the matter some thought. He said he thought that the Yeti was a blue bear that sometimes crossed into Bhutan; of all the world’s bears, these live at the highest elevations. He went on to say he was certain, as king, if actual wild people were in his mountains, he would have other reasons to know of such.5
In 1961, I was not happy to hear that the Yeti was a bear—and from the king of most pristine part of the Himalaya, a wildlife expert who also knew his kingdom’s secrets. But now his conclusion is comforting. In 1961, Yeti searching was at a fever pitch in Nepal; it would only be logical that the king next door who had extensive jungles and snows would wonder: Is the Yeti here? And, it was clear as The Third King and I talked, that His Majesty had worked through all the options.
I had never heard of the blue bear. It was not until I saw that strange bear in the Lhasa zoo that I started to read up on this extremely rare animal. Then twice later doing fieldwork on the Changtang Plateau I saw individuals of this bear, once a male alone and another time a mother and two cubs. Ursus arctos pruinosis has huge shoulders and head, disproportionately large compared to other bears. I have not tranquilized this animal and mimicked its footprints in plaster as I have done with Ursus arctos thibetanus—perhaps there is no need for no one has yet brought forward photographs of Yeti footprints from Tibet that need to be matched—but given what we know about Yeti behaviour (and I saw the blue bear walk bow-legged out in the wild) and the paws I studied through the cage in Lhasa zoo, I am certain this bear, like all bears, will make overprints and that when going uphill, those overprints will elongate and look bipedal and human-like.
fifteen
Discovery
15.1 Petang Ringmo Camp—High Pastoral Camp to Which Herders Come on Makalu’s North Side
Source: Author
October 1991. In the rock above, crouches a snow leopard; it has crouched there for tens of thousands of years. I am in the upper Barun Valley. Pilgrims who descend this path I have just walked believe the leopard guards Lord Shiva’s sacred cave just around the corner. For ge
ologists the leopard is a chemical stain in the cliff. To mountaineers coming to Makalu, the leopard portends avalanches unpredictably pouncing onto climbers.
Looking at the snow leopard, I wonder whether Rodney Jackson is right. Rod ‘knows’ snow leopards; he was the first to tranquilize and radio track this animal, and then spent three decades studying it. And what we have learnt is that snow leopards are more than just an animal—certainly the real animal’s mating yowl, which reverberates through valleys from January to March, which people have compared to a horse, could explain the call attributed to the Yeti. But the snow leopard’s call has also become a plea for the wild Himalaya. Where the Yeti speaks of a mythic wild, photographs of the snow leopard speak of the danger to the wild.
The physical body is one way to describe a person, so are their ideas, and why not also their connections. Trails walked in wild cities differ from trails walked in wild nature … but how? The earth herself shifts, as do seemingly solid mountains when they quake. The habitat of living is alive; its constant growing that we cannot control is the essence of the wild.
On the edge of extinction until a few years ago, snow leopard numbers now come back, so much so that the species is taking a ‘tax’ in sheep and goats from its sister species, humans, where herders and their flocks also live in this animal’s home range. Whose home is primary? Because of the Qomolangma (Mount Everest) National Nature Preserve in Tibet, snow leopard numbers have rebounded so much that animals left that preserve and crossed here into the Makalu–Barun National Park and the QNNP’s western fringe, the Annapurna Conservation Area. In its recovery, the snow leopard shows how human life with wildness can return.
Snow leopards are like tigers: solitary from the time they leave their mothers. As adults, they move through their home range alone. But unlike tigers, usually two or more snow leopards move simultaneously through a home range, signalling their presence to one another with scratch marks they scent at rock outcrops on their routes as they pursue their primary prey: the blue sheep. Travelling at dawn and dusk, then stealthily waiting to pounce during the day, sometimes one snow leopard follows another down the same route, usually never closer than a mile apart—except when they join to procreate—the male then leaves, and three months later the mother typically has two to three trailing cubs.
Bears with two identities. Animals crossing the land making overprints. Snow leopards making ethereal yowlings. People filling in the details. These are all about the animal—but what about the habitat, the wild. For this trip I’ve returned to work through a hypothesis of the Yeti’s changing portrait. We are the most dangerous of species—pressing the wild into remnant pockets—in exterminating the way life used to relate, we created a new age. On this trip, I have come to see if I can walk into the old pristine wild.
In a knee-wearying descent today, I came off Shipton’s Pass on the southern ridge of the Barun to reach this series of meadows that cascade like ponds of green, a place called Yangle Karka. Most foreigners at this juncture go up-valley to Makalu Base Camp, seeking ice, glacier, and lofty summits. A few Japanese botanists as well as McNeely and Cronin came and went down. That is what I am going to do. The descending meadows of Yangle Karka are, the shepherds say, the last good grazing before the dense jungle of the middle Barun.
Every year for 200 years (maybe hundreds before that), herders have come. Like most Nepalis they’re social, preferring village life, missing families and neighbours. They come, but they’re afraid in coming because a snowfall might trap them here. They come for one thing, grass, as much as their animals can carry home in bellies and bodies, avoiding going lower into the jungle afraid of its animals and spirits. To expand the grass areas, on those weeks when this upper valley is dry, these pastoralists burn the slopes to push back the bushes.
Grass is also the reason why I’ve come. Studying the grass may give me a clearer understanding of the balance of wild and domesticated nature. In the people’s fear is my hope to find a pristine balance that the life of shepherds has not touched. I seek a belt of wildness between the grazing of the upper valley and the penetration into the Lower Barun by the villages of Shyakshila and Shebrung. Lendoop says he has never even entered this Middle Barun where a human presence rarely passes.
I will be walking alone. I seek to listen for a wild humanity in me—and through that unlock an understanding of myself. The jungle of firewood, medicinal plants, and animals to which people come are a human supply closet. All the summits around have been trod on, those are the end limits of people from the city. But I seek places beyond the end limits of pastoral living or human conquest. If such balance exists anywhere in the Himalaya, it may survive down-valley ahead of me.
Here at Yangle Karka, year after year more and more domestic animals come, and one signature of this, beyond burning back the rhododendron and juniper, is the changing ratio of grasses and sedges. Jungle ungulates (musk deer thar, serow, and ghoral) don’t alter the balance in their foraging. These animals, watchful for leopards, do not stand in the open. But domesticated animals, protected by herders, eat and trample in one place, and as grasses diminish, the more fibrous sedges take root. I seek a meadow at least three-quarters grass, where tiny buds on green stems display the pure wildness.
Yangle Karka’s green pond-like meadows irregularly descend down the valley. Amid rocks in one meadow, I find the highest flowering plant in the world, Stellera procumbens, growing in a tight white cushion, having adapted to the altitude by condensing its blossoms to protect itself against the cold. Mountaineers climbing Makalu found this flower with its five deeply divided petals 9,000 feet above these rocks. Here it is low for the plant. At the lowest meadow is nigalo, the thin bamboo, its shoots the highest naturally occurring red panda food. In the rhododendron beyond is usnea, the hair-like lichen favoured by musk deer. So, with this food available, jungle animals will come this high. Somewhere from these meadows leaves the trail used by smugglers heading into Tibet.
WHEN DID HUMANS START RESHAPING THE WILD? Active reshaping began two millennia ago. China cut the forests of Sichuan for iron smelters while Rome deforested the Mediterranean. But global reshaping arose with the British Empire burning coal to drive England’s belching industries. The climate began to be remanufactured. Jesse Oak whose early steps were in these Barun jungles became fascinated by that.
Jesse identifies the moment in February 1884 when John Ruskin ‘ascended the lectern at the London Institution and brought to his audience’s attention “a series of cloud phenomena, peculiar to our own times … which have not hitherto received any notice from meteorologists,” a plague-wind darkening the skies across the British Isles and indeed all of Europe’.1
Jesse notes how Ruskin, with literary sources linked to paintings of clouds and sunsets, connected earth’s climate being ‘remanufactured’ resulting in Britain’s loss of natural richness. Ruskin as an art historian had realized ‘the inextricability of the two’,2 linking a changing planet’s climate and ‘a society worshipful of what Ruskin elsewhere called “the Goddess of Getting On,” … and that such changes heralded a much deeper contradiction within industrial modernity itself ’.3 That changing of nature that would alter the world’s climate had earlier been girdling earth’s subtropics.
The environment in which we live is reshaped by the way we live. Reshaping occurs not because we so intended—but from living in unintended consequences radiating out from the ways of our living. We have moved from ‘where meaning in the skies once bespoke the will of God, it is now bequeathed by the effluence of human affluence’.4 We are awakening to the reality that we have reshaped the planet itself into an unintended consequence. Jesse Oak, a child who began in these jungles wondering about heffalump traps and ‘isn’t it funny how bears love honey’ now as a professor seeks to find meaning in ‘the effluence of human affluence’.
The term for this is ‘abnatural’—an idea that inhabits the concept gap between the natural and unnatural, accents nature as an idea instead
of its usual physical essence.5 More than the identity as a real animal, the Yeti lives also in this space between the idea and the physical—placing ourselves with the wild. The Yeti is neither fully present in nature nor fully absent. Like a novel whose words may be fiction, it tells a story of true meaning. The human quest, as we step ever further from the old wild, seeks to bind nature and life experience. Doing so creates the experience of living. Our lives become worth living when connected to deep roots.
ROLLING UP THE NYLON TARP I sleep under, I say farewell to the large fir above. Yesterday I discovered grasses here comprise less than 50 per cent of the groundcover. So Yangle Karka is heavily grazed. The splay of this fir’s branches suggests its grain to be exceptionally straight. The next human impact here might be the tree. Abies spectabilis is the only Himalayan tree that easily splits into boards with hand wedges and sledges. One summer, herders as they graze this meadow will fell this tree, spend their days as their animals eat the grass, splitting the tree into door and window frames. At the end of the grazing season, they will walk out with the boards carried by their animals. Ten per cent of this tree will typically move, the rest wasted in hand cutting and splitting.
And after trees start coming down here, will houses go up? Maybe not if the Makalu–Barun National Park management works. Maybe this upper Barun will move slowly and non-threateningly not just from its probable future of becoming a village to a new possibility of being a core zone of the park. There will be no villages then, but more outside visitors to spend time in ‘the wild’.
Yeti- The Ecology of a Mystery Page 30