A ton of the accepted “facts” of Dylatov Pass were invented by journalists after the fact, and aren’t included in any of the original reports at all. It’s easy to read one article or website and assume everything on it is accurate, but if you start to explore and read lots of different articles and sources, they all say different things and none of them cite original sources.
For example, there are all sorts of different reports on the radiation: some claim they all had massively higher radiation, some that none did and that this was a detail invented later, some that only one hiker did, some that the level of radiation was only slightly higher than normal, some point to the long delay in taking radiation readings and the incomplete original data. Some point to the fact a certain type of lamp was in use that left traces of radioactivity. One thing that’s been repeated consistently enough that I’m confident it’s accurate is that one of the hikers worked as a cleanup specialist at Mayak nuclear power plant after the Kyshtym disaster.
I’ve read up on Dylatov extensively and never come across anything about medical evidence showing the tongue was removed prior to death. That sounds really unlikely - none or hardly any of the articles about it have access to the original Russian medical report and the bodies lay undiscovered for such a long time. The most logical solution is animal predation.
There was an interesting Reddit thread once where a poster who was fluent in Russian got hold of scans of all the original documents that were publicly available and translated them. It was interesting.
My favourite theory is either avalanche or a Kármán vortex street.