Astrum Space - Scientists Finally Found the Truth About the Yeti | Astrum Earth

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

Does the Yeti really exist?For decades, massive footprints and chilling sightings have fueled the legend of a shaggy, humanoid giant roaming the world's most isolated wilderness. Whether known as the Yeti, the Abominable Snowman, or the Mapinguari, this elusive beast has baffled explorers and skeptics for over a century. Now, groundbreaking DNA testing of physical remains has finally uncovered the staggering truth. We’re diving into the evidence to reveal once and for all what is really lurking in the mountains.▀▀▀▀▀▀🔒 Remove your personal information from the web at https://joindeleteme.com/ASTRUMEARTH and use code ASTRUMEARTH for 20% off 🙌 DeleteMe international Plans.▀▀▀▀▀▀Astrum's newsletter has launched! Want to know what's happening in space? Sign up here: ⁠https://astrumspace.kit.com⁠A huge thanks to our Patreons who help make these videos possible. Sign-up here: ⁠https://bit.ly/4aiJZNF

Wireless can feel like a world of traps, but not with Visible. It's one-line wireless with unlimited data and hotspot, powered by Verizon for $25 a month, taxes and fees included. Plus, for a limited time, new members pay just $20 a month for one year on the Visible plan, using the code Fresh Start. Refresh your wireless with Visible. Tap the banner to switch today. Terms apply, limited time offer subject to change. See Visible.com for plan features and network management details. In 1951, seasoned mountaineer Eric Shipton and his colleague Michael Ward were scouting an approach to Everest.

They were traversing the treacherous Menloon glacier on the Nepal-Tibet border when they encountered something strange. There in the snow, a huge footprint stared back at them. The print was humanoid, yet not quite human, about 13 inches long, unusually. broad with a divergent big toe that looked almost like a thumb. The print was just one of many. In fact, Shipton and Ward followed these tracks for a mile, which is no mean feet at an altitude above 4,000,000 metres. What made these marks in the remote heights of the Himalayas?

Could it really be a Yeti? And if not, well, what on earth was it that these? esteemed mountaineers saw. I'm James Stewart and you're watching Astrum Earth. Now I know what you might be thinking why is he making a video about Yetis? Clearly there's nowhere these things can be real, right? And I would have agreed with you, really, I would. But something about Yetis has just always bothered me. Every year there's a new story, a new discovery, a new leaked picture somewhere online and how can there be this much smoke without fire? If it's not a Yeti that we're seeing, then it has has to be something else, and I want to know what that is. That's just how my brain works.

So join me in this video as we delve into the world of the fabled Yeti and meet its Amazonian equivalent, known as the Map in Guari. How is it that centuries old rumours of their existence still circulate? Is there any truth behind the swathes of evidence? Or can science finally explain what lies hidden in the wilderness? High up in the Himalayan peaks and the Tibetan plateau. Legends tell of a hairy, ape-like wild man that stalks the mountains. The Sherpa people call it the Yeti, a term which roughly means wild man of the rocks. In Tibetan folklore, it's sometimes thought of as a spirit of the glaciers, or an elusive mountain creature.

Westerners came to know it by a slightly more flamboyant name, shall we say. the abominable snowman, a moniker coined in 1921, when journalist Henry Newman interviewed members of a British Everest reconnaissance expedition. The mountaineers described seeing large footprints at high altitude, and local porters filled in the gaps, suggesting they were left by the meadow Kangmi, or man-bear snowman in Tibetan. Over a century later, and the name stuck,

igniting Western fascination. Even Sir David Attenborough, yeah, my personal hero and universally respected natural history expert, has said the legendary Yeti could really exist and be living in the Himalaya Mountains. So what's the truth? Throughout the 20th century, the Yeti legend grew as climbers and adventurers reported strange sightings. In 1925, a Greek photographer named N.A. Tombasie claimed he saw a dark humanoid figure leaving footprints on a snowfield at 15,000 feet. By the 1950s, outsiders were pouring into Nepal. After news broke that Sir Edmund Hillary conquered Everest in 1953, the Yeti story captured global imagination, and perhaps coincidentally, sightings and stories proliferated. An American oil finance

Tom Slick, funded multiple expeditions. The Daily Mail newspaper even sponsored a hunt in 1954, and six years later, even Sir Edmund Hillary himself organised an expedition, at least in part, to investigate the Yeti mystery. Not wanting to miss out, the government of Nepal also got involved. Keen to capitalise on the craze, they started offering officially regulated Yertyly. Yeti searches for any brave, intrepid travellers.

In 1959, they even issued rules, yep, for Yeti expeditions, requiring a hefty permit fee and declaring that if a Yeti were found, it must not be killed, except of course in self-defence. In fact, any evidence at all had to be surrendered to the state. And so the stage was set for a series of intriguing discoveries. This, the photograph we shared at the start of the video, is perhaps the most iconic piece of evidence in Yeti law. An image of a supposed Yeti footprint snapped in the pool by Mountaineer Eric Shipton and his colleague Michael Ward.

Now, aside from just looking impressive, the fact it was Shipton himself, who found it, a highly respected explorer, electrified the world. The media ran wild with the people. possibility, dubbing the print the Rosetta Stone of Yeti evidence. Over subsequent years, as you can imagine, footprints remained a key piece of evidence cited by Yeti hunters. Plaster casts were made of some prints, and one famous one even made it to Disneyland. But footprints weren't the only clues. There were other physical artefacts too.

In some remote Buddhist monasteries of Nepal, monks safeguarded curious romewomenes. relics, scalps and bones attributed to Yetis, locked up and stashed away from prying eyes. The most famous of these is the so-called Yeti scalp of Kum Joom, a hairy half sphere of hide housed in the village of Kumjum. During Edmund Hillary's 1960 expedition, he actually managed to borrow this scalp, with permission, of course, from the llamas. He even brought it back to Europe and the US for scientific examination. And the results?

Well, not good. Zoologists found that the scalp was not from an unknown primate at all, but rather had been fashioned from the hide of a sero, a Himalayan goat antelope. In other words, the monk's relic was likely a ceremonial artifact made from animal skin, rather than a gigantic humanoid covered in hair. Hillary later returned the scalp to Nepal, along with this rather disappointing news. In fact, this happened more than once, as Hillary's team also scrutinise other Yeti remains.

Many of those other relics turned out to be from bears. Hillary had found no compelling trace of an unknown monster lurking in the Himalayas. So much so that by the end of his quest, he remarked that he had wanted to bring back the truth, And that was not a Yeti. To quote Hillary himself, he could not, in all conscience, view it as more than a fascinating fairy tale. Today, a replica of the Kumjung scalp is on display at the Explorers Club in New York City, while the original is still kept under lock and key by the monastery, displayed to visitors for a small donation.

So if you want to see what a gop and slope hide looks like, well, there you go. Another famous relic was the so-called Pangbosch hand. Unsurprisingly, given its name, it can be found in the Pangbosch monastery, not far from Everest. Here, some monks had a mummified skeletal hand and a skullcap on display, which they claimed belonged to a Yeti. Of course they did. This relic came from the great Sherpa Lida Lama Sangua Dorji, who in the 17th century went to southern Tibet to study Buddhism.

While there, he meditated in a cave near Pangbos, where he claimed a Yeti brought him food, water and fuel, and even became his Buddhist disciple. When the Yeti died, Sanguar kindly brought his hand and scalp back to the monastery. So could this one be real? Well, in 1958, on the orders of Tom Slick, the oil financier bloke I mentioned earlier, and after much debate by the monks, Peter Byrne, a well-known Everest explorer, managed to obtain a single finger from the hand in exchange for a rather large donation toward the temple's upkeep, and a replacement human finger. I'm not sure I want to know where he got that one from, actually. Anyway, if you thought that was weird, this story takes a turn no one could ever dream of.

Byrne then smuggled the finger and some extra hand skin across the Nepalese border into India. where he met American movie star James Stewart. What a great name. And his wife, Gloria, in Calcutta. The famous couple agreed to smuggle the finger back into the United Kingdom to Slick's friend and primatologist, Osmond Hill, a member of the Zoological Society of London to study it. Now, the story goes, they pulled off the heist

by hiding the remains inside Gloria Stewart's undergarments, inside her luggage. So after all of that, the finger did indeed finally make it to London for analysis by William Osmond Hill, who initially reported the finger might be from a Neanderthal. Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard, but not the pipeline? That's bullspend, and marketers are calling it out in. Dashboard, Confessions. My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive-sounding metric I had.

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Decades later this was further confirmed by DNA testing. As for the rest of the Pangbosch hand and scalp, well, those relics were unfortunately stolen in the 1990s. They were likely taken by artefact hunters after media reports. But in a modern twist, a replica of the hand was crafted by Veta Workshop, the people known for creating Lord of the Rings props, and delivered to the monastery in 2011 to placate the monks. So maybe in that sense the legend of the Yeti lives on in Middle Earth.

Beyond relics and prints, the best evidence comes from eyewitness reports in the Himalayas. In 1986, Reinhold Messner, one of the world's greatest mountaineers, claimed he came face to face with a large, hairy, bipedal creature during a solo trek in Tibet. Mezner was initially convinced he had encountered a Yeti, so convinced in fact he became rather obsessed with the concept, spending years investigating. Eventually, however, he concluded the creature he saw was not the fable beast at all, but likely a bear,

the rare Tibetan blue bear or Himalayan brown bear, and perhaps rather sadly for him, came to the conclusion that the Yeti exists only as a myth. Another incident the same year involved British climber Anthony Waldridge, who even took photographs of what he believed to be a Yeti, only to realise later on it was just an oddly shaped rock formation. Many Sherpa and Tibetan locals also recounts stories of glimpsing yetis in forests or during yak herding trips, describing them as shaggy,

upright creatures that flee quickly or vanish in an instant. In fact, Sherpa tradition often held the Yeti as a spiritual or magical being. Seeing one was considered an ill omen, but it was the seeing one that still remained a problem. Even the Indian army was at it. In a more recent case in 2019, they announced they had found Yeti footprints near a base camp, measuring a gigantic 32 by 15 inches. They even tweeted photos of the tracks. The claim was met with widespread ridicule and scepticism, however,

and experienced trackers immediately noted the Prince likely came from a bear. So the army quietly let the matter drop rather quickly after the initial publicity. So it's not looking good for Yetis in this part of the world. But our quest continues, because there is another place on earth to look, where something even more terrifying is rumoured to lurk. Sometimes I wish I can make myself as invisible online as Yetis do in the mountains and avoid all those annoying spam emails. So, like a Yeti hunter clearing out a Tibetan monastery, I'm in full out clean mode for 2026. I'm not just talking about old clothes that have been donated and adding labels to things that don't need labels.

I'm talking about a digital clearout. I got pretty annoyed about how easy it was for people to find my contact details online. So I started using Delete Me. It removes my name, address and my info from data broker sites. Basically those pesky companies that sell your info to whoever wants to buy it, including, by the way, scammers. Yeah. So why not treat yourself to a digital detox this year and join DeleteMe? You can get 20% off with my link, join Deleteme.com slash Astrum Earth, and use code Astrum Earth at checkout.

Thanks to Delete Me for sponsoring this video. The link is in the description. want your digital life a little more private, as we have back to the video. While the Himalayas were buzzing with Yeti fever in the 1950s, the Amazon jungle had its own monstrous myth. Indigenous peoples in the Amazon basin, Brazil, Bolivia and beyond, spoke of something called the Mapinguari, a fearsome, shaggy creature said to lurk in the green depths of the rainforest undergrowth. Descriptions of the Mapingwari vary. but they consistently paint a nightmarish picture,

a giant beast over seven feet tall when it rears up, covered in matted reddish fur, and armed with enormous curved claws capable of tearing apart palm trees and humans in an instant. Even more disturbingly, legend has it that this grotesque beast is so ravenous for human flesh, it has a second mouth on its belly. If that were not warning enough to stay your distance, the creature is also said to give off an overpowering odour, a stench so foul that humans allegedly faint

or become disorientated when it's near. Locals claim it has backward-facing feet to confuse anyone trying to track it, and it's so fearsome that even bullets don't kill it, bouncing off its tough hide like rubber. So it's not difficult to see why the Mapungwari drew the interests of scientists and cryptozoologists, those are the people studying animals whose existence is unproven, in the 20th century. After all, the Amazon is so vast and was so unexplored at the time,

it seems plausible a big unknown animal could be hiding there somewhere. So why not this one? One tantalizing theory emerged. Perhaps the Mapungwari was not an ape or wild man at all, but instead a surviving giant ground sloth. To paleontologists, this wasn't as far-fetched as it sounds. Enormous ground-dwelling sloths, related to today's tree sloths but the size of bears or even elephants, did once exist across South America. Fossil remains of the giant megatherium and its relatives show they were bear-like herbivores with long claws,

able to stand up on two legs and often had red fur, as inferred from preserved hair. The only problem was they were thought to have gone extinct at least 5,000 years ago. But that didn't stop people from looking for them. In the 1990s, Dr David C. Oren, a then-respected ornithologist and research director at Brazil's Goldie Museum took up the mantle of the Mapungwari.

Initially dismissive of it as folklore, Orin changed his mind after hearing dozens of first-hand accounts from Amazonian hunters and villagers. By 1994, he hypothesized that the Mapunguari could indeed be a relic population of medium-sized giant ground sloths, surviving in remote areas. And if true, it would be a discovery on par with finding a living dinosaur. He set about interviewing witnesses that have braved the jungle,

enduring clouds of insects, oppressive heat and treacherous terrain, searching for any sign of the beast. Some of the accounts he collected were pretty compelling. One hunter, Zhao Dos Santos, described hearing an unearthed human-like scream in the forest that made his hair stand on end. When he saw trees thrashing and realised the Mapungwari was coming, he ran in terror,

hiding in a river for an hour. Another man claimed a Mapungwari's horrid smell left him dizzy and sick for two months after an encounter. Chilling as these tales are, what Oran needed was tangible evidence. During more than six expeditions spread across the 1990s into the early 2000s, Oren set about collecting samples from the field to try and prove his theories. He found large tracks, about 11 inches long, with a stride suggesting a sizable creature and made plaster casts. He gathered tufts of coarse hair snagged on branches

and even analysed dung piles locals attributed to the Mapengwari. For a time, these finds fueled hope. The footprint, if genuine, hinted at a heavy animal. The hairs were reddish and fibrous. Every discovery felt like a step toward unearthing this creature. But then along came scientific analysis. When Orrin sent the hair for testing, it turned out to belong to an ordinary agouti,

a common rainforest rodent whose fur had gotten caught on brush. The fecal samples were tested for DNA traces. It was from a giant anteater. The casts of footprints, while intriguing, could not be taken as proof. Even Oren himself admitted the tracks are easily faked in a region where hoaxing a gullible foreign scientist might be an amusing pastime for locals. In the end, despite years of effort,

Oren did not find the fabled beast. There wasn't even a blurry photo. no unknown DNA, no sloth in the flesh, nothing but disappointment. By the mid-2000s, Dr. Oren reluctantly conceded that the Mapengwari is likely only a legend. He speculated that the folklore might be a cultural memory of real encounters with the last ground sloss from centuries ago, passed down in exaggerated form. Extinct species can survive as legends for hundreds of years, Oren told the New York Times in 2007.

But whether such an animal still exists or not is another question. One we can't answer, he said. A lot has changed in the last 60 years, and with ever more accurate tests have come some increasingly interesting results, particularly when it comes to DNA analysis. This technology has not only been a game changer in modern forensics, but also when it comes to examining mysterious bio-ynolds, samples. In 2012, a team led by Brian Sykes at Oxford University undertook an ambitious project.

They actually put out an open call for alleged Yeti and Bigfoot samples. They wanted everything, from hairs and bones to tissues, and to be quite honest, anything else, all in an attempt to put the rumours to the test and gain a definitive answer, which is what I think we all want. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they were inundated, receiving dozens of submissions. After weeding out some obvious fakes, for example, some hairs were actually fibreglass, plant material, or even glass strands, Sykes' team genetically tested the viable samples. Away from the terrifying stories of flesh-eating, bullet-repelling beasts, the reality was a little different. To test the hairs, the team used a standard forensic method.

A small piece of each hair was cleaned and broken down with an enzyme called Protonese K, essentially a molecular scissor that frees up the DNA. Then a short mitochondrial fragment was extracted, the type often used in wildlife forensics because it survives well even when samples are old or damaged. They amplified this tiny stretch of DNA and compared it to a genetic library to see which species it matched. matched. Even a sequence this small is generally enough to pinpoint the species, because each animal has a unique pattern of mutations. If the fragment doesn't match any living species, well that's when scientists start getting excited, but that wasn't quite the case here.

Most samples turned out to come from mundane sources, everyday animals like cows, horses, bears, and in one case, even a human. I hope someone's keeping track of all the human remains, in this video, by the way, because something's going on. But it wasn't all bad news. Sykes reported that two Himalayan samples had DNA closer to an ancient polar bear than to any known modern species. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a glimmer of hope

that something unknown, something abnormal could be roaming the Himalayas sprung back to life. Something enthusiasts hurriedly linked to the Yeti. The media frenzy was, as in, intense as the Yeti sightings evolved. So imagine, finally, actual scientific evidence of a giant polar bear-like creature lurking in Tibet. Finally, they had cracked the case. That was until something bought Sykes and the millions of other intrepid jetty hunters crashing back down to Earth.

Almost immediately, other geneticists challenged the findings, and a reanalysis indicated that these sequences likely belong to a normal Himalayan. brown bear, and that Sykes had most probably matched a fragment to an ancient polar bear in error. A couple of years later, the proverbial nail was put into the coffin, with a definitive genetic study in 2017. Led by Charlotte Lindquist, an international team conducted the most rigorous analysis of purported Yeti remains to date. Unlike earlier work, the team generated much longer and far more informative mitochondrial sequences. In some cases, assembling complete mitochondrial genomes for the very first time.

This meant that the scientists could distinguish closely related species with confidence and avoid the false matches that can happen with degraded fragments. Genetically speaking, this leaves little room for mystery. Using advanced DNA sequencing, Linquist's group compared the Sarmes, to comprehensive genetic data from known regional wildlife, and the verdict was clear. Every single sample corresponded to known animals. What people called Yetis were in fact bears all along.

Bears whose fur footprints or other traces were misidentified, blown up in the media, made into something mysterious. Beyond DNA, other scientific work has also set out to demystify classic Yeti evidence. Remember Shipton's famous footprint with the thumb? Well, Daniel Taylor, a conservationist who spent decades studying Yeti reports, also suspected a bear was the culprit for this. To put his theory to the test, he conducted a short experiment.

Using a tranquilised Asiatic black bear, he pressed the bear's paw into soft earth to simulate tracks. Sure enough, the bear's hind foot, which, in Asian black bears has a flexible big toe for climbing, left the print strikingly similar to the Shipton photo, including a thumb-like indentation. The overlapping of bear hind and foreprints in melting snow can also create the illusion of a giant bipedal track.

Other mountaineers have noted that snow can distort prints, a small depression enlarges as some melts the edges, and repeated melting and refreezing can make a bear's paw, Even yak hoof, looks surprisingly like an enormous human footprint. These natural, even slightly boring explanations, don't capture headlines like a monster story, but they do fit the data far better. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day,

like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply. After examining a century's worth of expeditions, eyewitness tales and scientific tests, to finally scratch my Yeti itch, the answer is pretty clear. The Yeti, the Mapungwari, and their kin around the world, whether it's Bigfoot of North America or the Yowie of Australia,

have not been proven real in the biological sense, and exist only in a fictional one. Despite the footprints in the snows of Everest and the screams in the Amazon night, nobody alive or dead has ever been found. But despite the evidence lacking for a flesh and blood bipedal ape, the Yeti does live on in another way as a cultural phenomenon. In this vein, the Yeti is very real and quite significant, shaping local traditions, inspiring conservation in wild places,

and keeping the sense of wonder alive in an age of satellites and smartphones. That is the power of the Yeti legend. A story that true or not will continue to captivate and inspire, wherever wilderness remains. Let me know in the comments if you've heard any other stories of Yetis or Bigfoot. Maybe you've even found a footprint or seen something lurking in the distance. Or do you think there's something science might have missed? Could the Yeti really be a life?

and well. Let us know down below and we'll see you in the next one. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.