The first man to see the mountain was probably a Homo erectus who wandered through the area perhaps half a million years ago. The first men to climb it, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, did so a century after it was named. No one knows who the first man to die on it was, although seven Sherpas were killed in an avalanche during the first British reconnaissance expedition in 1921. The first measurements of the mountain were made in 1849 by a team of surveyors working in six different locations; the measurements were computed three years later by several people working in two offices at different sites in India. The mountain was named in honor George Everest, head of the Great Trigonometrical Survey from 1830 to 1843, who had retired when the mountain was still known as "Peak XV" on the charts. The name was chosen by Everest's successor, Andrew Waugh.
