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 catalogued a collection bequeathed to the museum by primatologist William Charles Osman Hill. Among Hill's assemblage of items relating to his interest in crypto-zoology (the study of animals not proved to exist) there was a box labelled 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,
"Mr Byrne is now 85, and living in the United States, I discovered," said Matthew Hill, the BBC journalist who last year was granted permission to research and produce a documentary on the mysterious finger.
A member of a 1958 expedition sent to the Himalayas to look for evidence of the legendary creature, Byrne camped at the Pangboche temple and learned of a Yeti hand preserved there for many years.
"It looked like a large human hand. It was covered with crusted black, broken skin. It was very oily from the candles and the oil lamps in the temple. The fingers were hooked and curled," Byrne told the BBC reporter.
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.
Hidden in Gloria's lingerie case, the finger finally reached professor Hill in London.
The scientist identified it as belonging to an early hominid.
But DNA analysis at the Zoological Society of Scotland in Edinburgh proved that Hill was wrong.
"We found human DNA," the zoo's genetic expert Rob Ogden told the BBC.
Read more at Discovery News
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