IT had languished untouched in a London museum for more than 50 years, but now scientific tests on the specimen known as the "Yeti's finger" have proven that the oversized digit comes from a human hand.

Hopes DNA tests might have backed up the legend of the Abominable Snowman were quashed after the finger, uncovered in a Nepalese temple in 1958, was analysed by experts at the Zoological Society of Scotland in Edinburgh.

Senior scientist at the society, Dr Rob Jones, said: "We have got a very, very strong match to a number of existing reference sequences on human DNA databases.

"It's very similar to existing human sequences from China and that region of Asia but we don't have enough resolution to be confident of a racial identification."

The curiosity had been forgotten about in the vaults of the Royal College of Surgeons's Hunterian Museum in London, where thousands of human and animal specimens collected from across the globe are stored.

However, in 2008, attempts by curators to catalogue the thousands of items in the collection turned up an intriguing mystery when they uncovered a box containing a blackened, curled finger labelled simply the "Yeti's finger", which had been bequeathed to the museum by primatologist Prof Osman William Hill.

The specimen was 3.5 inches long and almost an inch thick at its widest part, with a long nail.

The finger had been added to the collection by former explorer and mountaineer Peter Byrne, after a visit to the Pangboche Temple at the foothills of the Himalayas in 1958.

Mr Byrne, now 85 and living in the US, had been a member of an expedition sent to the Himalayas in search of evidence of the legendary Abominable Snowman.

He said: "We found ourselves one day camped at a temple called Pangboche. The temple had a number of Sherpa custodians. I heard one of them speaking Nepalese, which I speak.

"He told me that they had in the temple the hand of a yeti which had been 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."

Mr Byrne – eager to bring the hand back to London for research – was told that removing it from the temple would bring bad luck. Instead he struck a deal with the lamas to remove just one finger and replace it with a human finger from a severed human hand belonging to the Hunterian Museum.

To help transport the finger, expedition sponsor Tom Slick called on an old friend, Hollywood great James Stewart. The actor was on holiday in Calcutta with his wife Gloria and they were sufficiently intrigued to help out. Thus Mrs Stewart smuggled the digit out of India in her lingerie case.

The finger was handed over to Prof Hill in London, after which Mr Byrne lost contact with him.