Whether George Mallory and his climbing partner Andrew "Sandy" Irvine reached Everest summit before Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary is still a topic of debate.
Now, mountaineer Frank Smythe's son has claimed that his father found George Mallory's body in 1936.
Tony Smythe has made the claim in his book, 'My Father, Frank' in which he writes that he found a letter written by his father, Frank, to Edward Norton, leader of the 1924 expedition when Mallory and Irvine disappeared, while trying to reach the summit, the Guardian reported.
An ice axe, assumed to belong to Irvine, was discovered in 1933 by the fourth British expedition to the Everest.
The axe was lying on rock at 27,760ft, and Frank felt that it marked the scene of an accident.
He told Norton that he was scanning the face from base camp through a high-powered telescope, when he saw something queer in a gully below the scree shelf.
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Frank wrote in the letter that it was a long way away and was very small, but he had six/six eyesight and did not believe that it was a rock.
He said that this object was at precisely the point where Mallory and Irvine could have fallen had they rolled on over the scree slopes.