One of the first responses to our call for yeti samples came from Christophe Hagenmuller, a French climber and explorer from the town of Annecy, not far across Lake Geneva from Michel's museum in Lausanne. That is where I met him and where he told me how he had come across his astonishing find. Christophe is a wiry, fit man who now works for an international software company that allows him time to indulge his enthusiasm for the mountains. He has been travelling in the Himalayas since 1996 and, like so many before and since, fell in love with that part of the world and with the people who live there. The way his eyes sparkled when he began his story showed this was no invented passion. His favourite part of the Himalayas is Ladakh, actually in India or, to be more precise still, in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir. Ladakh borders Tibet and many Tibetans crossed the border to live there after the Chinese annexed their homeland in the 1950s. Hagenmuller and a companion travelled to Ladakh every year between June and September from 1996 to 2003, walking with some Tibetan friends, one of who was from a Buddhist monastery. There was no particular objective in his travels. He just enjoyed being there among the mountains, getting to know the people, immersing himself in their culture and enjoying the nature of the place. Yetis were the last things on his mind.
‘I was not looking for the yeti, I was just walking the area to discover the culture and looking at the nature, the flowers, the animals. I wanted to see the snow leopards – that was my goal but I was not focused on that. I just wanted to discover the nature and people. I learnt the Tibetan language there. I spent two weeks in a monastery where I was teaching English to young monks and in return I was taught the Tibetan language. During one of my travels, the second or third one, I was told about hunters who had killed strange creatures.
‘It was an accident that led me to the yeti. One day we walked to a village. My friend was ahead of me and I saw a person sitting beside a horse. I asked him in Tibetan if he was okay and he said he was almost okay but he had fallen from the horse and couldn't go back home. I helped him getting again on his horse and went back to his house where he invited me to stay with his family for a day or two. And we started talking. I told him I was looking for the snow leopard and other creatures but he told me that he had something more interesting to show me. That's when he started telling me about the tenmo, which is the local name for yeti there. That's how I got introduced to the yeti, let's say.
‘He hadn't seen the yeti himself but he knew that in his village a hunter had killed a strange creature forty years ago and thought he could show me the creature. Unfortunately after a few days and after meeting with the chief of the village we discussed about how I could see this creature, but finally they decided not to show it to me. They were afraid about what would happen if I would reveal the place and say what I had seen there. So I didn't insist too much and I said, “Okay, if I can see when I come back next year maybe, or in the future, that would be nice.”’
Hagenmuller returned the following year, but once again the village chief refused to allow him to see the creature. A year later, his fifth visit, a friend of his told him that he had heard that there was another village four days' walk away where a hunter had killed a yeti thirty years before. Hagenmuller continued:
‘I had heard of the yeti, of course – a strange creature you can see sometimes but no one knows what they are. I wasn't focused especially on the yeti, for me it was more probably a bear or something like that which people would see in the dark or in special conditions where they were confused. I was interested but not that interested. For me it could be anything. It could be an animal like a bear or any strange creature, I had no idea on that before. But I thought I may as well have a look at this creature, so we set off for the village where the creature's body was said to be kept.
‘We were travelling in a party of only three. The Tibetan monk who knew the way to the village, the man who I had helped coming back on his horse, and me. Only three persons. They didn't want me to bring any other persons to them and I had to promise that I would never reveal the place where I would see the animal. We travelled on a donkey for four days and, to be honest, I am not even sure I could find the village again. That is how we came to the village and then we went down the valley to a house. I have some pictures in mind of the house, and that's the one where we saw the hunter who had killed the animals, and we entered his house.
‘It was very dark inside. In this area, because of the coldness, people have houses with very small windows. Some light entered the room but it was still really dark and I couldn't really see the animal. I asked if he could bring the animal outside, and he agreed. It was a sunny day so I asked if he could put the animal on the balcony or roof of his house, and he put it on the roof with plenty of light.
‘I took a whole roll of photographs of this animal. Then, and I don't know why, I asked if I could take some pieces of its fur. I didn't know anything about DNA analysis, and anyway by then the creature had been dead for thirty years. The guy hesitated but said, “Okay, if you don't reveal where the animal is, you can take part of the fur.” I put that in a little box where you put your film and that's how I brought the fur back to Europe.’
I had already seen one of Christophe's photographs of the animal. It certainly looked odd so I asked him about his first impressions of the creature.
‘The first thing that came to my mind, which is funny, was that it was a mix of a wolf and a bear, two animals I didn't think could hybridise. That was the first impression. Then I looked more closely at different parts of the animal. I looked at the foot, the mouth, the teeth, and it seemed to be more a bear than anything else. But it was a very strange creature. I had seen a lot of bears in India as well as in the US and Canada and I wouldn't have said immediately that it is a bear, but I thought after some examination that probably it is a bear.’
We both looked at Christophe's photograph. The animal was about four feet in length with golden brown fur that was long and matted. It had a wide, flat snout, not like a bear at all, and a mouth with large teeth. Its front paws certainly had the claws of a bear, but it was the creature's head that looked distinctly un-bearlike. The ears, if they were there at all, were lying flat against the head, not sticking out as a bear's would, at least when it was alive. I asked Christophe if the man who shot the creature also thought it was a bear.
‘No. He said it's definitely not a bear. He said, “I am sure it's not a bear and I cannot be confused because I'm a hunter. I've killed maybe thirty in my life and I can assure you it's not a bear. Don't tell me it's a bear. It is a tenmo.” He wasn't hesitating at all. For him it was a tenmo. Period. When I started to joke about that he became a little bit angry like I was doing something wrong, not respecting his culture, whatever. Not respecting what he was saying seriously. He was not joking; he was serious, saying it was a tenmo.’
Having brought the precious sample back to France, Hagenmuller contacted the eminent palaeontologist Yves Coppens, an expert in many aspects of human evolution and a scientist of international reputation. They corresponded a few times but then nothing more happened until a colleague in Geneva saw the press coverage surrounding the launch of the Oxford-Lausanne Collateral Hominid Project in 2012 and mentioned this to Hagenmuller. And that is how the hair of the tenmo came to be in my laboratory, nearly forty years after the animal it belonged to had been shot. This was going to be a very tough sample to analyse. Eventually we got it to work and with a stunning result that we will cover later.
Hagenmuller plans to return to Ladakh quite soon. He thinks the hunter who shot the tenmo has since died. He wants to try once again to take a look at the first creature which he was denied on his previous visits. I didn't ask him precisely where the tenmo hair was found. It may have been technically correct to report an exact location, but far more important is Hagenmuller's promise to his Tibetan friends to keep it a secret. He may have seen and photographed a tenmo, perhaps the rarest of creatures, but he has yet to see a snow leopard, surely the most beautiful of all.