If Reinhold Messner wasn’t the first person to climb all the 8,000m peaks, who was?

There have been rumours in the mountaineering world for a couple of years now that all the records about ascents of the world’s fourteen 8,000m peaks might need to be rewritten.

The rumours were started by a German statistician called Eberhard Jurgalski, who runs the website 8000ers.com, arguably the second best source of data about ascents of the 8,000m peaks behind the Himalayan Database, and the only one to cover stats about the five 8,000ers in Pakistan.

Eberhard was troubled by the fact tha...