Legend or reality: Who is Yeti?

Information about the mystery of the legendary creature called Yeti or Bigfoot, which has been the subject of many stories for centuries:

It is a giant humanoid primate believed to live in the Himalayas, around Nepal and Tibet. In the region, Meh-Teh 'little human-like animal', Miche 'bear man', Dzu-teh 'bovine bear', Migoi 'wild man', Mirka 'wild man'. He is also known as Kang Admi 'snowman' and Jobran 'man-eater'. It is thought that the name Yeti is related to the word Yah-Teh, which means 'rock (mountain) animal' in the Tibetan language.

The Yeti is an ape-like creature purported to inhabit the Himalayan mountain range in Asia. In Western popular culture, the creature is commonly referred to as the Abominable Snowman. Many dubious articles have been offered in an attempt to prove the existence of the Yeti, including anecdotal visual sightings, disputed video recordings, photographs, and plaster casts of large footprints. Some of these are speculated or known to be hoaxes.

Although it is similar to Bigfoot or Sasquatch, which is believed to live in North America, it is depicted as a stronger and wilder creature that lives in cold and high places. Three different definitions have been made for Yeti, one of the most important subjects of cryptozoology.

• Giant ape (Gigantopithecus blacki) that can walk like a human
• Human-sized bipedal monkey (Almas)
• Dwarf creatures (Orang Pendek)

First published in 1832 in the 'Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal', Hodgson wrote that his guide had seen a tall, hairy creature in northern Nepal. LA Wadell wrote in his article 'Among the Himalayas' in 1889 that his guides talked about a giant monkey called yeh-tih. In 1921, Lieutenant Colonel Howard-Bury found giant footprints near the Lhakpa La pass at an altitude of 6,000 m on Mount Everest and noted that the Sherpas, the natives of Nepal, called these prints 'Meh-teh kangmi' (snowman that looks like a human but is not human).

In the same year, Henry Newman, a columnist in the Calcutta Statesman newspaper, talked about the creature he called the 'abominable snowman', and the story of the creature quickly gained popularity in the Western press under this name. In 1925, photographer N A Tombazi reported that while he was at an altitude of 4,000 m, he momentarily saw a human-like being 180-270 m away. In 1942, while Siberian prisoner Slavomir Rawicz and his friends were crossing the Himalayas, they reported seeing a giant monkey-like creature from a distance of 100 meters. Eric Shipton took a photo of a footprint, 30 cm long and 15 cm wide, which he claimed belonged to the creature, at an altitude of 6,000 m in 1951, and managed to create a heated debate in the scientific world. In 1970, British mountaineer Don Williams came across the footprints of a human-like creature on Annapurna Mountain, and in August 1981, Soviet mountaineer Igor Tatsl reported to the 'Moscow News Weekly magazine that he had seen the Yeti.

According to one claim, the Yeti was a giant ape from the Gigantopithecus family that lived in China and Southeast Asia during the Pleistocene Era, 1.8-10 million years ago, and somehow managed to survive. However, from the fossils that can be found, it has not been possible to prove that Gigantopithecus lived later than 500 thousand BC and that Neanderthal humans lived later than 40 thousand BC. Another theory put forward in 1999 is that the yeti is another human species that is closely related to modern humans (Homo Sapiens) and has been able to adapt to cold weather conditions. As a result, although investigating the existence of this creature, which has not been caught until now and even a skeleton or fossil has not been identified, has been the insistent passion of folklorists as well as adventurous explorers and scientists from various disciplines, the yeti should be considered as the subject of mythology and cryptozoology in our current knowledge.