This is the sculpture.
It may look as though it's wrapped in an unusual garb, but that's how we got it when we got it from the monastery itself.
And so we've left these things around it.
This is a sort of a ceremony.
This is a ceremonial scarf that they put around things.
This rather tattered old object you see here is their scalp.
It's a very obviously quite old, certainly very brittle.
You have to be treated with a good deal of care.
But what exactly is it? Well, the local people claim it's 240 years old.
The people who possessed it, the shepherds.
240 years old.
We haven't submitted any tests yet.
What kind of a creature do you think it came from? I don't know.
I think if we did know, we probably wouldn't have brought it back, I suppose.
I don't think we really have any accurate idea.
We've got a few ideas of possibilities.
But if it's authentic, in other words, if it is really, that is a complete scalp.
As is, it's obviously rather unusual for the creature.
You can see the shape of it.
And we want a careful investigation of it to try and identify whether or not it is really a complete scalp of a single unit or whether it's been fabricated out of some other skins many years ago.
In fact, an answer for it, if we can.
Has any analysis been made yet? No, nothing at all.
The work has been done actually on the hairs of this thing.
There's another scalp at a place called Pangbochi, very similar to this, in somewhat worse repair.
And these hairs have been examined by one person, a Japanese professor of zoology, who met us at the airport in Tokyo on the way through, and he showed us his report.
And he said that it could not be discounted, the possibility that it might be some type of anthropoid hairs and so on.
But we don't know and we want to try and find out.
Could you give us an educated guess, Sir Edmund, on what it is? Do you have an idea yourself? I don't really have an idea at all.
As a matter of fact, the scalp in many ways runs right across the evidence we've been accumulating on the scalp.
It's a bit of a throwback as far as we're concerned, in that we feel we have been successful in finding fairly rational answers to most of the yeti questions.
And these answers haven't really involved the mythical yeti soul.
But we haven't really been able to give a satisfactory answer to this scalp.
The possibility that it's just an ordinary skin and has been fabricated into this form in years gone by has to be considered, of course.
But the actual ridges of hair on it are most unusual and have always been its most unusual feature.
Well, how was it used in that village? They used it as a, it wasn't a religious symbol at all, really.
It was, but it had a great deal of tradition associated with it, and it was very much a good luck or bad luck charm.
And once a year, this thing was used as a part of dances, in which they reenacted the whole process of the capturing and killing of the yeti, in which they actually got the scalp several hundred years before.
So it really only was used once a year during the course of these ceremonies.
And then as a, more or less as a hat, as much as anything else, it was on the heads of the dancers, and they used it during the quite long reenactment really of the whole process.
Is there a story or a legend about how this thing might get its scalp? Yes, there certainly is, but I think I'll get Desmond Dory to explain it to you.
He got it from the locals, with his much greater grasp of the language than I have.
And, Desmond, could you give them perhaps an idea of what the legend associated with its initial establishment? Will the legend connect it with this particular scalp? Will you sit down, please? The legend associated with this scalp is not completely a new one.
There have been several stories which we have picked up in Nepal and elsewhere, actually, which are very similar, that yeti has got out of hand.
There were so many of them that they were more than people.
And the lamas of the village were called upon to do something about it, and one particular lama who belonged to the village near theirs, which was bigger than theirs and had the monastery, the only monastery in those days, Roa -wa -jeorje by name, he decided that the only way to get the better of the yeti was by trickery, so they produced a large amount of drink, local drink, which is potato wine or wheat wine, on a certain day, and the yetis were all around looking down from the mountains and saw the shepherd people collect, drink as much of this local wine as possible, and then set to a great battle with knives.
The knives that the people produced were wood, and all day they fought, and at night there was no one left, all the shepherds were dead, and then the yetis, who are very good mimics, descended on the battlefield, at which time the shepherds had withdrawn and left genuine knives behind.
The yetis then drank, fought to the death, and there was only one pregnant yeti left, and she couldn't get away, she was sitting there looking around the days in the morning, and the lama came up and slew her himself and carried the scalp away in victory.
But what happened to all the other thousands of bodies? No one knows, we could never find out.
But that is supposed to be the story connected to this particular spot.
You say that it cuts across your previous evidence that you've been getting, with the logical explanation of the yeti that it was a bear of some sort of daddy.
It's obviously been the cause for a good deal of the, I think the local ideas about it.
The same applies with tracks.
We did find yeti tracks, some good ones too, and unfortunately we also found, well very interestingly we feel, we also found how they were made.
They weren't made by large animals standing on two legs, but were very much the result under certain snow conditions of the effects of the sun, certain amount of melting of sun, on tracks of much smaller animals, where a small animal would say moving quickly along, you get the small tracks together and the effect of the sun on them would cause these tracks to melt together and made quite amazing resemblances really to, well sort of almost bare feet, and the type of track which one relates to the sort of traditional yeti tracks.
We found these tracks some in the morning.
Do you think you can understand? Yes.
You asked us.
Yeti just a karayi.
You said he's not, people wouldn't say if it was a yeti or not, but it's what the people say as a yeti, and it was heard in the same spot where his children actually saw a yeti just a few weeks later.
What's happened to that? What radiation is yeti? Now the radiation equipment was just in the process of being set up by Barry Bishop as he was coming out, and that's all being tied in at the high hut.
What's the highest previous penetration by man without the aid of artificial air? All people have been very high indeed.
They've been to 28 ,000 feet without oxygen before, but they haven't done, our main interest is in long -term projects, living at these considerable heights for a matter of six or seven months.
Have you accumulated any data yet from the people who are living at 19 ,000 feet right now? We've accumulated quite a lot of information, but there's been no attempt whatsoever to assess it or examine it.
That type of work won't be done until after the expedition, all the material has been gathered.
We haven't, we haven't...
I never did of course start with any preconceived ideas about the yeti.
I've always been somewhat skeptical, and I think much of our work has confirmed this belief.
However, the yeti scalp we have here for which we can't give an explanation, I think does indicate that possibly, yeti man is not a man of the mind.
It may have existed perhaps in the past, we hope we don't know, and that's what we're trying to find out.
I'd like to ask Marlin Perkinson the same question there, sir.
How do you feel after your expedition? How do you feel now about this? Do you think it's just a nice little story? I think the thing that Sir Edmund has just said is the feeling of most of the people who were on the expedition, including myself, that we entered this whole field with as open a mind as we possibly could have.
We weren't trying to prove anything, whether that he existed or that he did not exist.
We were trying to find the evidence to assess this and to come up with whatever answer would result from that.
Do you think we'll have to wait just a little bit longer to have one over at Lincoln Bar too? I think we might have to wait a little bit longer before we have a living yeti there.
