KATMANDU, Nepal (AP) -- A 10-member team of Americans and Europeans retracing the route taken by George Mallory and Andrew Irvine in their quest to become the first to scale Mt. Everest are divided over whether the two climbers made it to the top. The team discovered Mallory's frozen body earlier this month, 75 years after he and Irvine disappeared while climbing the 29,028-foot mountain, the world's highest peak. Irvine's body has never been recovered. There has been speculation for years about whether the two made it to the summit of Mt. Everest and died on the way down -- 29 years before New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay successfully scaled the mountain. The 10-member team held a news conference Tuesday in Katmandu to describe how they discovered Mallory's body, his face frozen to the ground, and buried it under rocks on the mountainside. However, they were divided over whether the two climbers ever made it to the summit. ``I don't think they made it. ... The route was too long and too hard,'' said Eric Simonson of Ashford, Wash., who led the expedition retracing the route the two climbers followed in 1924. But another team member, Andy Politz of Columbus, Ohio, disagreed. ``I still think they made it to the top,'' he said, without explaining why. Conrad Anker, 36, of Big Oakflag, Calif., who spotted the body on May 1, cited ``the length of time they were gone and the depth of difficulty'' of their route for his belief that Mallory and Irvine died on the way up rather than the way down. In 1975, a Chinese climber, Wang Hongbao, described finding a body he thought was Irvine. It was lying near an ice ax with three notches on the handle, similar to the marks Irvine made on his equipment. Wang described the body as that of a ``dead Englishman'' dressed in old-fashioned clothes. Two days after relating the discovery, Wang died. So when team members came across a body, ``at first we thought it was Irvine,'' Anker said. But soon they realized they had found Mallory instead. ``We found George in a very different place'' from the spot Wang described, said Simonson. ``We all had to sit down'' once the realization set in, said Politz. ``Never in my wildest dreams did I think that we would find George.'' For several hours, team members looked for physical evidence, including the camera the two climbers were believed to have been carrying, which could yield information about whether they reached the summit. ``We can conclusively say that there was no camera on Mallory. It is our intention to come back looking for Irvine and the camera since I think we can find it,'' said Simonson who is planning another expedition within the next two years. The team brought back handwritten letters addressed to Mallory, goggles, an altimeter, a pocketknife and a piece of rope, and handed them over to the American Foundation for International Mountaineering Exploration and Research. They also cut a piece of flesh from the arms of the body and sent it to England for forensic tests. The tests could take weeks to complete. Unable to remove the body, the team buried it under rocks. ``George is buried. ... He can rest in peace,'' Simonson said. The team has been criticized for selling photographs of Mallory's body to Newsweek magazine and newspapers in Britain, Australia and New Zealand. ``We will donate all the money from the photographs to Himalayan charities. We are mountaineers and not treasure hunters. Nobody expected to get rich by this,'' Simonson said. -=-=- 