Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2013 i National Geographic Magazine

A quest, says journalist Paul Salopek, is the oldest form of story telling there is. The quest he has set out to do is about the biggest one there is, as well. “To Walk the World”—the title of his article in this issue—sums it up. He has begun the first leg of an epic journey, the initial chapter in his Out of Eden Walk project, a retracing of the migration of the first modern humans who walked out of Africa to explore the world. It’s a walk across 2,500 human generations and 60,000 years of human history. It will span four continents and 21,000 miles, but it’s more than just a retracing. It’s a way to tell important stories of our time—stories about cultural survival, conflict, and climate change, stories…

Japan Jigokudani—“hell valley”—Monkey Park is known for its hot springs, which may feel more like heaven in subzero weather to the Japanese macaques that congregate there. United States The loading dock of a warehouse on Chicago’s South Side resembled the South Pole after a five-alarm blaze on January 23, 2013. Met with single-digit temperatures, spray from the firefighters’ hoses soon turned to eerie ice art. Poland From the ground, it was just another line for the lift at Czarna Góra resort. But from a motorized para glider, the skiers became bright brushstrokes on a snowy canvas. Photographer Kacper Kowalski says he seeks “to show daily situations in the abstract.” Order prints of select National Geographic photos online at NationalGeographicArt.com.…

The name Maasai is among the world’s most valuable brands. More than 80 products estimated to be worth billions—including cars, clothing, and jewelry—are labeled with the name of the nomadic group. The only problem, says the Maasai Intellectual Property Initiative’s Isaac ole Tialolo, is that no one asked the Maasai’s permission. The initiative is reaching out to all the tribes of the more than three million Maasai spread across Kenya and Tanzania. The goal is to elect an authorizing body to review requests to brand future products as Maasai, and assess the ones already on the market—much as the Navajo have done in the U.S. “As the cultural owners, we want respect,” says Tialolo. “We want to protect our heritage, our name, our image.” SKYCAST Overhead this month in parts…

“Most people know more birds than they give themselves credit for,” says the Great Backyard Bird Count’s Pat Leonard. Since 1998 the count has been asking bird-watchers to record which ones they see over four days every February, just before birds begin migrating north again. The value comes over the long term—marking a drop in the population of American crows from year to year, for example. Having citizens, not scientists, contributing data has a big upside: They can cover a massive area. It also comes with reliability challenges. Organizers—which include Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology, the National Audubon Society, and Bird Studies Canada—flag and review reports that contain birds not known to be in the area or an unusually large number of species. Adds Leonard, “We also tell people, ‘If you…

THE WORD “MAGAZINE” offers a lesson in how the English language evolved. The familiar term likely made its written debut in a 1583 letter from a British merchant traveling through the Middle East: “Neither any other Officer shall meddle with the goods, but that it may be kept in a Magosine.” There it meant “storehouse,” derived from Arabic. The word came to mean a periodical publication—a storehouse of information—in the early 1700s. The roots of “magazine” were uncovered after the Philological Society of London began to catalog the history of words in 1859. It took 71 years to compile the initial ten-volume work, now known as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The current version holds more than 600,000 entries, with new words arriving all the time. WHERE WORDS CAME FROM…

A big cat with a vast range, the adaptable cougar (Puma concolor) is found across a variety of habitats. The New World mammal is recognized as six distinct subspecies (with a possible seventh in Florida). Five inhabit Latin America. The sixth lives in North Amer -ica, including in the hills of the second most populous U.S. city, Los Angeles. HAZARDOUS HABITAT The hills around Los Angeles offer prime cougar real estate— shrubland and forests filled with deer—but survival rates can be lower than in some hunted populations because of several threats. Losing ground: As more land is taken up by roads and homes, suitable habitat for cougars shrinks and becomes more fragmented. Much of the remaining habitat is unprotected. Deadly roadblocks: High-volume expressways such as the 405, the 101, the…

The first surprises, after the long, dusty drive from Ahmadabad, are the shade trees and the rolling green lawn. Then you notice the monkeys, mynah birds, and parakeets swooping in and out of the trees. After passing through the entrance gate, you follow a long stone pathway until the ground begins to open up before you. There, on the far side of the grass, is a gaping sandstone canyon, sculpted not by wind and rain but by human hands: Rani ki Vav, the Queen’s Step Well. It is dry most of the year in northwestern India, the rain arriving abruptly during the summer monsoons and seeping down through the sandy soil. Centuries ago people dug to get at the water and then built stone stairways down to the pools. These…

Every month this page features our staff picks of National Geographic Society products and events. For more go to nglive.org. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ON TV Man v. Cheetah No mammal on Earth runs faster than the cheetah. In just three seconds the spotted cat can go from zero to 60 miles an hour. But can it beat a professional football player in a slalom race? This month the National Geographic Channel kicks off Big Cat Week by exploring the science behind cheetah speed—and finding out how human intellect stacks up against animal instinct. SPECIAL HISTORY’S VILLAINS Blackbeard. Genghis Khan. Vlad the Impaler. You know their names, now learn the true stories behind their notoriety. This issue of Exploring History looks at the dark side of human nature, with features on infamous…

While you were quick to blame the “adman and candy clerk,” I think the media also share a lot of the blame for addiction to sugar. Your article focused on the negative health effects of sugar and also the price paid by humans over the course of history for the crop to be grown and consumed. It didn’t make sense to me then that the photographs would portray sugary food in a beautiful light. It’s like doing the same article on tobacco and showing gorgeous people enjoying cigarettes. I might be a teenager, but for me the pictures didn’t match the words. RACHEL COHEN Westport, Connecticut Next time you include an article about the toxicity of sugar, please skip the pictures of cupcakes, candy, and cereals. My daughter loved them…

This page features two photographs: one chosen by our editors and one chosen by our readers via online voting. For more information, go to yourshot.nationalgeographic.com. READERS’ CHOICE Tó Mané Porto, Portugal Near the western Portuguese town of Nazaré, Mané—a professional photographer—wanted to capture the coast’s famously large waves from a new angle. Standing on the side of a hill, he watched a surfer tackle one of the biggest waves recorded that day. EDITORS’ CHOICE Priyanka Telang Gautam Buddha Nagar, India In northern India, Telang watched a performance of a ritual dance known as Raas Leela, which celebrates the Hindu deity Krishna. To tell the story of Krishna’s life, men dress in women’s costumes and use flower petals to add color.…

EXPLORE This quiz is the last of seven to run in 2013 to celebrate National Geographic’s 125th anniversary. COOL TOOLS FROM MOTHER NATURE We often get our best ideas by looking out the window. What’s out there in nature represents 3.8 billion years of research and development, according to biomimicry expert Janine Benyus. Ideas that failed in evolutionary product testing are now fossils. What’s left are some highly instructive success stories. This is a quiz about some of the spin-offs that have come from paying attention to life right here on Earth.…

Mars—named for the Roman god of war—is represented by the male symbol. Venus— named for the Roman goddess of beauty—is represented by the female symbol. The lookdown fish—named for its downward gaze—is a master at hiding in plain sight. Its skin manipulates polarized light, allowing the fish to remain mostly undetected by predators in its brightly lit Atlantic coastal habitat. The adaptation may prove useful for warfare too. The U.S. Navy requested research this year on whether the properties of the lookdown’s skin may be mimicked on ships and submarines. Painting hulls with reflective paint, says biologist Molly Cummings, may boost underwater camouflage. ANSWERS FOR EXPLORERS QUIZ 1. (B) Gila monster spit. John Eng, an endocrinologist in New York City, was studying venoms in the early 1990s when he began…

Child Saver LALE LABUKO will never know some things about himself—like his birth date. His tribe in Ethiopia’s Omo Valley keeps no written records (his best guess is October, early eighties). But one thing he knows with absolute surety: He will not rest until he halts the custom of killing babies born out of wedlock, born to parents who didn’t get permission from the elders to have a child, or whose teeth grow in top first instead of the usual bottom up. These babies are believed to be cursed. Labuko has rescued 37 children, ages one to eleven; they live in a home he built with the help of California photographer and filmmaker John Rowe, co-founder of Labuko’s Omo Child organization. When did you find out about this practice? I…

The hunting party slowly glides into the Altay Mountains in search of elk. It is dead calm, minus 38°F. Just as their ancestors have for millennia, the five men traverse deep, feathery snow buoyed on handmade skis hewed from spruce, with strips of horsehide attached to the bottoms. In lieu of poles each man carries a single wooden staff. Since boyhood, they have learned to master their deceptively crude equipment with exquisite efficiency and grace—the grain of the horsehair providing traction to move uphill and a slick surface for rapid descents, the staff aiding balance. I follow on state-of-the-art telemark skis, using modern poles, but at times still struggle to match their pace. Their lungs and legs seem impervious to the thin alpine air as they stride up even the…

On ice floes and rocky beaches in the far North Atlan tic, cinnamon brown blobs pile up in living heaps. Some weigh more than a ton. Some are longer than ten feet. Each is a rumpled portrait of buckteeth and whiskers, deep scars and bloodshot eyes. They nap, burp, squabble, and bark—“something between the mooing of a cow and the deepest baying of a mastiff,” noted a 19th-century explorer. Walruses may seem familiar from Beatles lyrics and Lewis Carroll verses, but most of us will never see a herd in the wild. And few photographers have documented this dangerous, musical, and socially sophisticated pinniped, a fin-footed kin to seals, sea lions, and sea elephants. “I used myself as bait,” says Paul Nicklen, who spent three weeks aiming his lens at…

Perhaps you’ve seen them in old Westerns—those weeds that roll down a town’s empty streets. They’re the color of dirt, they’re covered with spikes, they’re nobody’s idea of beauty. So Diane Cook and Len Jenshel were uncertain how to capture compelling images of tumbleweeds. When they began the assignment, they learned that common photography rules didn’t apply. Photographers usually avoid shooting in the middle of the day, when harsh light makes unflattering contrast. But with the weeds, the shadows added fullness and depth to the monochromatic clumps. “If it was overcast, the weeds didn’t look good at all,” says Jenshel. The pair attempted to capture the weeds interacting with the landscape, the way they’d pile up against big-box stores or gather in housing tracts. Westerners try to get rid of…

It was my first night in the Tanzanian bush, and I was near Ruaha, a region known for its abundance of lions. The camp owner welcomed me and said, “Your tent is over that way,” indicating the thick bushes next to the river, past the tents on raised platforms. I came across a clearing on the river’s edge. I paused to watch hippos meandering into the water and noticed a pup tent perched on what appeared to be the main hippo trail down to the water. This tiny structure was to be where I slept. EXPERTISE Wildlife Biologist LOCATION Tanzania Not wanting to be dragged down by a lumbering hippo to drown in the river in a heap of multicolored nylon, I moved my tent off the trail. I lay…

Get Lost in Found. Go to NatGeoFound.tumblr.com. On March 6 we debuted our Tumblr blog Found, a collection of photos from the National Geographic archives. Within five months the site had 100,000 followers. You too can find Found—at NatGeoFound.tumblr.com. Girls eat large swirls of cotton candy in Copenhagen, Denmark, January 1963. A swimming dock rests peacefully on Switzerland’s Lake Thun, September 1985. Scarab beetles from the Scarabaeid family gleam like jewels, July 1929. Children form a circle around an ultraviolet lamp to get a dose of vitamin D in Murmansk, U.S.S.R., August 1977.…

Tourism accounts for one in eleven jobs on the planet. The battle against the illegal ivory trade went dental in June when the Philippines became the first non-African country to destroy its ivory stock. As both a consumer of illegal ivory—primarily for Roman Catholic religious icons—and a transit country for ivory headed to bigger markets, the Philippines has played a key role in the ivory smuggling problem. Now it hopes to play a role in its solution. Crime syndicates slaughter tens of thousands of African elephants annually and smuggle their tusks mostly to China, where they are carved into ivory items, from chopsticks to religious figurines. It is a booming $50-million-a-year black market industry. Workers spent days sorting tusks and drilling samples to be sent to the U.S. for DNA…

Walking is falling forward. Each step we take is an arrested plunge, a collapse averted, a disaster braked. In this way, to walk becomes an act of faith. We perform it daily: a two-beat miracle—an iambic teetering, a holding on and letting go. For the next seven years I will plummet across the world. I am on a journey. I am in pursuit of an idea, a story, a chimera, perhaps a folly. I am chasing ghosts. Starting in humanity’s birthplace in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, I am retracing, on foot, the pathways of the ancestors who first discovered the Earth at least 60,000 years ago. This remains by far our greatest voyage. Not because it delivered us the planet. No. But because the early Homo sapiens…

It’s a warm winter day in southern California, and busloads of tourists are pulling into an overlook above Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. As their guides point out movie studios and the mansions of stars, Jeff Sikich, a wildlife biologist with the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, directs my gaze toward a thin ribbon of woods in the distance. At least ten months earlier a young male cougar from the Santa Monica Mountains set out, following that trickle of green through the vast human hive. After somehow crossing two of the world’s busiest roads, including the ten-lane Hollywood Freeway, he settled in at Griffith Park, the huddle of hills rising just behind us, recognizable worldwide by the giant HOLLYWOOD sign partway up. Homing in on signals from a radio…

After the last ice age, Stone Age hunters began strapping long pieces of wood to their feet to travel farther and faster over snow in pursuit of the game that flourished across Europe and Asia. Adaptations for terrain and snow conditions influenced the design of the skis in different regions. Scientists continue to find evidence of these early skiers engraved in rock and preserved in bogs. Historians are divided on where skiing was born. Some argue it arose in Scandinavia and northwest Russia, though others point to the Altay region. 8000 B.C. (disputed) Altay, China Altay skis are long by modern standards. Skiers use a single pole to aid balance. Some Chinese academics say the earliest Altay skis date back to 8000 B.C., but other scholars say skiing came to…

The trouble begins around sundown, when a couple of city slickers out for a drive in the desert become stranded along a lonely canyon road. It’s silent and windless. Yet one by one, like wolves in the night, tumbleweeds start gathering around them. “They’re following us,” the heroine cries. When her husband tries to intervene, one of the tumbleweeds leaps at his eyes. “It was just like an octopus!” he shouts, after tearing it from his face. “There was living strength in it! … Where did all that energy come from? How can you animate a dead weed?” There were scarier moments in The Outer Limits, the old black-and-white science fiction series. But this episode, “Cry of Silence,” holds a special horror for me. My own encounter with these monsters…

Spectators stopped to watch a Boeing 377 Stratocruiser taxi over the Van Wyck Expressway in Queens, New York, in the early 1950s. The Stratocruiser was at the time among the biggest, most luxurious commercial planes in the air. According to Boeing’s description, “A circular staircase led to a lower-deck beverage lounge, and flight attendants prepared hot meals for 50 to 100 people in a state-of-the-art galley.” Nearby New York International Airport was then popularly called Idlewild, but its official name was changed to honor John F. Kennedy in 1963. This overpass is still there; it has since been strengthened to accommodate even heavier aircraft. Get Lost in Found. Go to NatGeoFound.tumblr.com. PHOTO: B. ANTHONY STEWART, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE…