Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [423]
During the Second World War, a man named Slavomir Rawicz escaped from a Siberian prisoner-of-war camp and made his way by foot to India. In The Long March (1956), a book describing his experiences, Rawicz stated that while traveling across the Himalayas, he encountered two wildmen, six feet in height and covered with long reddish hair. However, explorers familiar with the region traversed by Rawicz have pointed out some inconsistencies in his account of his journey. For example, he took an inordinate amount of time to travel a certain section of the route—even at his own stated rate of progress. Critics thus insinuated that Rawicz’s book, including the story of the wildmen, was largely if not completely fictional (Shackley 1983, pp. 54–55).
In November of 1951, Eric Shipton, while reconnoitering the approaches to Mt. Everest, found footprints on the Menlung glacier, near the border between Tibet and Nepal, at an elevation of 18,000 feet. Shipton followed the trail for a mile. Already well known as a mountaineer, Shipton could not easily be accused of publicity-seeking. A close-up photograph of one of the prints has proved convincing to many. Myra Shackley (1983, pp. 55–56) wrote: “Indeed, even the doubters admit that Shipton’s famous footprints, seen on the Menlung Glacier in 1951, cannot readily be explained away.”
The footprints were quite large. John R. Napier considered the possibility that the particular size and shape of the best Shipton footprint could have been caused by melting of the snow. Napier, however, noted (1973, p. 140): “Eric Shipton agrees that melting and sublimation might be responsible for the appearance, but he points out quite correctly that it would be reasonable to expect the narrow ridges behind and between the little toes to be the first features to disappear in these circumstances.” For Napier, Shipton’s observation appeared to rule out the snow-melting explanation, or at least make it far less likely. Napier proposed another possibility: “that the footprint is double—two tracks superimposed. But a double—what? I don’t know.”
Napier (1973, p. 141) concluded: “Something must have made the Shipton footprint. Like Mount Everest, it is there, and needs explaining. I only wish I could solve the puzzle; it would help me sleep better at night. Of course, it would settle a lot of problems if one could simply assume that the Yeti is alive. . . . The trouble is that such an assumption conflicts with the principles of biology as we know them.” In the end, Napier suggested that the Shipton footprint was the result of superimposed human feet, one shod and the other unshod. In general, Napier, who was fully convinced of the existence of the North American Sasquatch, was highly skeptical of the evidence for the Yeti. But, as we shall see later in this section, new evidence would cause Napier to become more inclined to accept the Himalayan wildmen.
In the course of his expeditions to the Himalaya Mountains in the 1950s and 1960s, Sir Edmund Hillary gave attention to evidence for the Yeti, including footprints in snow. He concluded that in every case the large footprints attributed to the Yeti had been produced by the merging of smaller tracks of known animals, by superimposition and melting. To this Napier (1973, pp. 57– 58), himself a skeptic, replied: “The signs of melting are so obvious that no one with any experience would confuse a melted footprint with a fresh one. Not all the prints seen over the years by reputable observers can be explained away in these terms; there must be other explanations for footprints, including, of course, the possibility that they were made by an animal unknown to science.”
But although Napier was unwilling to completely reject the existence of an unknown hominid, he was nevertheless inclined to regard this as the least probable or desirable alternative.