PANGBOCHE HAND

Opening

For generations the Buddhist monastery at Pangboche, on the trekking route to Everest, kept a mummified hand and a scalp it held to be a yeti's. Monastery tradition says the 17th-century Lama Sangwa Dorje was served by a yeti while meditating in a cave and kept its hand and scalp when it died. The relics were shown to visitors, and later to paying trekkers. In 1958 Peter Byrne, an Irish-born hunter leading Tom Slick's yeti expedition, was shown the hand by a custodian.

Within a year Byrne had removed a thumb and a finger bone, wired human bones in their place, and sent the pieces to London with help from the actor James Stewart. The remaining relics were stolen from the monastery in the early 1990s and have not been seen since. In 2011 a sliver of the surviving finger, rediscovered in a London museum, was tested in Edinburgh. The DNA was human.

Timeline

1957The Texas oilman Tom Slick hears of a yeti hand at Pangboche on one of his first yeti treks.

1958Byrne, on the second year of the Slick expedition, is shown the hand. He describes it as looking like a large human hand, covered in crusted black skin and oily from the temple lamps. The custodians refuse to let it go.

1958 to 1959In London, at a lunch at Regent's Park Zoo, the primatologist William Osman Hill produces a dried human hand from a paper bag to supply replacement bones. Byrne returns to Nepal.

3 February 1959Byrne writes to Slick that he has the thumb and a phalanx and that the lamas do not know.

February 1959The pieces travel from Calcutta to London in Gloria Stewart's luggage and reach Osman Hill on 20 February, by Loren Coleman's account from the Slick papers.

1959 to 1960Osman Hill first judges the material human, then tells Slick he no longer thinks it fully human, and by 1960 suggests Neanderthal affinities.

1960Edmund Hillary and Marlin Perkins examine the hand at Pangboche during the World Book expedition and are reported to have dismissed it as a fake, apparently unaware of the substituted bones.

1975Osman Hill's research collection is bequeathed to the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons.

1991NBC's Unsolved Mysteries broadcasts a segment on the hand. Shortly afterwards, in the early 1990s, the hand and scalp are stolen from the monastery.

2008Cataloguing at the Hunterian turns up a box from Osman Hill's collection with a finger labelled as a yeti's, from Pangboche Temple.

May 2011Mike Allsop, a New Zealand pilot and mountaineer, delivers replicas of the hand and scalp made free by Weta Workshop.

27 December 2011The BBC reports that DNA from the finger is human.

28 July 2023Byrne dies in Oregon, aged 97.

Key figures

The monks and custodians of Pangboche owned the relics and lost them twice: first a thumb and finger bone, then everything.

Peter Byrne (1925 to 2023) removed the bones. He told the story several ways over 50 years.

Tom Slick financed the expedition and arranged the smuggling route through his friend Kirk Johnson and the Stewarts.

William Osman Hill, prosector at London Zoo, supplied the human replacement and examined the pieces.

Rob Ogden of the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland ran the 2011 DNA analysis.

Mike Allsop took the replicas back.

Physical and documentary trail

The physical evidence is one finger, 9 cm long, curled, black at the tip with a long nail, now in the Hunterian Museum. The rest of the hand, which held Osman Hill's human substitutes as well as whatever was original, has been missing since the early 1990s. Before that there are photographs from 1958 onwards and the Slick expedition papers, which Loren Coleman used for his 1989 biography of Slick.

The papers matter because the removal story changed. In 2011 Byrne said he made a donation and the custodians agreed to the exchange. Other accounts say he got a monk drunk. His own letter to Slick, written at the time, says the lamas did not know.

What they do not know, and what they must never know, is that the thumb and the p. phalanx at present on the hand are human ones, which we switched.

The 2011 result is clear on what it tested. Ogden's team stitched DNA fragments into one sequence and found a very strong match to human reference sequences, similar to people from China and that region of Asia. One BBC piece names the scientist as Rob Jones; the main BBC report and the zoo's statement say Rob Ogden.

Corrections to the earlier version: the JSON summary called him Jimmy Byrne; he was Peter Byrne. The removal was in 1959, not 1958 to 1959, and it was a thumb and a phalanx rather than "finger bone". Osman Hill did not lean human and then mutter: he moved from human toward Neanderthal over 1959 and 1960. And the replica was not returned "after" the result: it reached Pangboche in May 2011, seven months before the DNA was announced.

Things you might not know

• The replacement hand came from London Zoo's lunch table. Byrne said Osman Hill tipped a dried human hand out of a paper bag among the silverware, to the horror of the yeti writer Odette Tchernine.
• Customs lost the lingerie case. By Byrne's account the case carrying the bones went missing at Heathrow, and a customs officer returned it days later, assuring Gloria Stewart that British customs would never open a lady's lingerie case.
• Stewart told it differently too. In an introduction to one of Byrne's books he said Byrne had found some bones in a cave.
• Byrne misdated his own exploit. On BBC Radio 4 in 2011 he placed the removal in 1961. His letters put it in 1959.
• Pangboche had a sister relic. The monastery at Khumjung kept a yeti scalp. Hillary's 1960 expedition borrowed it and it was found to be made from the skin of a serow, a Himalayan goat-antelope.

Competing explanations

A yeti hand. This is the monastery's tradition and what visitors paid to see. Against it: the only piece ever tested is human, and Osman Hill's own judgement never went further than human with possible archaic features.

A human hand kept as a relic. The DNA result fits this, and so did Hillary's 1960 verdict, although he was looking at a hand already part-substituted.

A muddled specimen. Osman Hill supplied the human replacement bones, so a mix-up between the Pangboche finger and his donor hand is at least conceivable. The museum label and Byrne's identification of the finger argue against it, but the provenance rests on one box of notes.

Later life of the case

Allsop runs a campaign to recover the stolen originals, no questions asked, and the monastery has said it would like the London finger back without trouble. The replicas now stand in for the hand and scalp. No one has been charged with the theft, and the hand is believed to have gone into a private collection.

Finding

The Pangboche hand was a sacred relic held in good faith, and the yeti identity is the monastery's legend. The one fragment ever tested with modern methods is a human finger. The relic was not a fraud by its keepers, and nothing tested shows a yeti. The evidence points to a human hand venerated for generations, raided once by Western collectors and then stolen outright.

What still will not resolve: what the rest of the hand was. Only the missing originals could answer that, and they have not surfaced in more than thirty years.