'Yeti Finger' Mystery Solved

news.discovery.com...

A blackened, curled, oversized finger, long claimed to belong to a yeti, has been identified as human after all.

Featuring a long nail, the mummified relic -- 3.5 inches long and almost an inch thick at its widest part -- has languished for decades in the Royal College of Surgeons' Hunterian Museum in London.

The specimen caught the interest of scientists in 2008, when curators cataloged a collection bequeathed to the museum by primatologist William Charles Osman Hill. Among Hill's assemblage of items relating to his interest in cryptozoology (the study of animals not proved to exist), there was a box labeled simply the "Yeti's finger."

The notes in the box revealed that the digit was taken from the hand of a yeti in the Pangboche temple in Nepal by mountain climber Peter Byrne.

DNA analysis performed at the Zoological Society of Scotland in Edinburgh proved that Hill was wrong.

"We found human DNA," the zoo's genetics expert, Rob Ogden, told the BBC.

According to Sam Alberti, director of the Hunterian Museum, the Pangboche finger testifies to the fascination the yeti continues to exert on people.

"The story of how this artefact came to find itself in our museum store reveals the extraordinary lengths people have gone to in order to prove the existence of mythical animals," Alberti said.

www.bbc.co.uk...


No Yeti this time, but someday perhaps they will discover real evidence. We can only hope.

It's still a fascinating story here. Read the story from the source. This finger has had quite a history.

all i know for sure is that, that dude had huge freaking grabbers!

reply to post by CaDreamer


He had big hands, but not that big. I was curious, so I measured my fingers. My middle finger is over 5 inches long and about an inch thick, so mine are bigger, but I'm not exactly a small person.

Maybe they'll think my fingers are yeti fingers many years from now.....lol

Originally posted by isyeye
reply to post by CaDreamer

 

He had big hands, but not that big. I was curious, so I measured my fingers. My middle finger is 4.25 inches long, so mine are bigger, but I'm not exactly a small person.

Maybe they'll think my fingers are yeti fingers many years from now.....lol

isnt that supposed to be a single bone? if so it is not the entire length of the finger just the bone from the base of the hand to the first knuckle.

reply to post by CaDreamer


Judging from the picture, I think it's the whole finger. It looks like 3 joints on the finger. The article also mentioned the nail.

but, if it is one bone, then I agree.....that's a big man.

i did some digging and found out who that bone originally belonged too.









SnF

Originally posted by isyeye
reply to post by CaDreamer

 

Judging from the picture, I think it's the whole finger. It looks like 3 joints on the finger. If it is one bone, then I agree.....that's a big man.

then i retract the huge grabbers comment interesting conclusion to the story though. still one huge question remains;

who does the finger belong to, they have DNA so it isnt that old?

P.S. upon re examining the picture, with my glasses on this time, it does indeed look like an entire finger, so not so big. dont yeti's have long ape like hands anyhow?

reply to post by CaDreamer

A year later, Byrne returned to the monastery and struck a deal with the monks about removing just one finger.

According to Byrne, the alleged yeti's digit was replaced with a human finger provided by professor Osmond Hill, who got it from a severed hand belonging to the Hunterian Museum.

The relic was smuggled out of Nepal with the help of Hollywood movie star James Stewart, who was on holiday in Calcutta with his wife, Gloria

Is it possible that Byrne was tricked and he got the human finger mentioned above?.....and the original yeti finger is still with the hand the monks have?

reply to post by isyeye


A decent mind will question that quick brush off.
Let it be demanded that the complete DNA be revealed and identified with its origins as is typically done these days. Was the DNA typical of people in that area or some outlander?

Plus,--getting over my head here--to what extent was the DNA human? Isn't about 99% of higher animals DNA about the same? What about the oft-cited "junk" DNA that can't be explained for ourselves and is seen as unnecessary? Perhaps this finger came from a creature that USED that portion of the DNA and those genes that cause blond hair and blue eyes were its junk? --OK. So I'm a idiot about DNA, can somebody enlighten me about what could be beyond of what is not acceptable in "polite circles.?"

Ahh... this is just what our secret Yeti overlords want you to believe.

Hi all. Long time lurker first time poster.

I would not call this solved at all. I mean it's not like we have any actual Yeti DNA to compare it to. Not to sound like a smarta$$ or anything, but how do we know that bigfoot DNA isn't human DNA?

I'm not on board for the whole DNA proof idea. We will never know if the hair, tissue, finger or whatever is a bigfoot or not even with extensive DNA testing until we actually have a body. Sad but true.

This goes from a "giant" finger to a "normal" finger overnight, huh?

"We found Human DNA" is the best answer they can come up with?

Sounds like a quick ruboff, one-liner answer and very inconclusive. In fact it almost sounds like a bait and switch.
For that matter, Yeti are anthropoids so shouldn't it be a question of "how much" human DNA vs. that of "normal" humans? Frigging Chimps have 99% or so identical DNA to Humans, too. Or if you want to go with the "contamination" angle, this souvenir's been around and around, so who's to say they didn't pick up the DNA of the millionth person to handle it last?

Very inconclusive.