Questioning and re-examining our own history is often fraught with peril, as most important

history is pretty well established. But some of the tidbits are known only from much

thinner evidence. One favorite is the question of who was first to summit Mount Everest.

History tells us it was Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norge in 1953. But there is a

faction who claimed the honor should go instead to George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, who

disappeared on their 1921 attempt. Who is the first to summit Everest is coming up today

on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com. Hillary versus Mallory,

the first to Everest. Today we're going to go up an altitude back into history and down

in temperature to the days when the most daring adventurers wore wool, cotton and leather

instead of advanced light weights and thetic materials. They had heavy wood handled ice

axes instead of aluminum. Their canvas and nylon sleeping bags and tents weighed at

least three times what today's climbers use. They packed calories with heavy metal tins

of fish and fruit instead of dense energy bars and electrolyte shots. Their only support

was sparsely manned expeditions rather than today's crowds of competing porters and contractors

and rope layers. Their chances of survival were far slimmer, yet even in the punishing days

of the mid-twentieth century, men managed to compete to be the first to summit the world's

tallest point, Mount Everest.

Sir Edmund Hillary and Tinsing Norge were the first to summit the mountain and lived

to tell the tale, which they did in 1953, but they certainly weren't the first to try.

Tinsing had in fact made it the previous year to a point only 240 meters short of the summit

with a Swiss expedition. A competing claim exists from about 30 years earlier when climbers

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