Khumjung and the Yeti Scalp
The conical russet scalp in the monastery at Khumjung was held by the Sherpas to have been taken from a yeti and kept as a relic. In 1960 Edmund Hillary's expedition was allowed to take it to Chicago, Paris and London for examination, against a deposit and in the company of a village elder. The verdict was unanimous: the scalp had been moulded from the hide of a serow, a goat-antelope common in the same mountains, and the direction of hair growth and the structure of the skin matched exactly. It was returned to Khumjung, where it still is.
The Vinland Map
A parchment that surfaced with a European dealer in 1957 and was bought for Yale: a fifteenth-century world map with an island of Vinland drawn west of Greenland — America, decades before Columbus. Yale announced it in 1965, on the eve of Columbus Day, and the argument ran for half a century. In 1974 Walter McCrone found anatase in the ink, a form of titanium dioxide first manufactured in the 1920s. Yale gave the final answer in September 2021: X-ray fluorescence mapping showed titanium ink along every line of the map, and beneath it an erased medieval inscription. The parchment is genuine; the map on it is not.
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