Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2021 i National Geographic Magazine

IN THIS SECTION New Human Species? Animals in Space Lost River of Paris Feather Forensics ILLUMINATING THE MYSTERIES—AND WONDERS—ALL AROUND US EVERY DAY Excerpts from the National Geographic book Fauci—Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward I WAS BORN ON Christmas Eve, 1940. As my father tells the tale … the obstetrician who was taking my mother through her pregnancy happened to have been at a black-tie cocktail party. And when my mother went into labor, apparently it was pretty quick. My father brought her to Brooklyn Hospital, and he remembers the doctor walking in with a tux on. He had to get into the delivery room very quickly, so he just washed his hands and put the scrubs over the tux … We always…

As seas warm, some fish are descending to cooler waters and may see less color, recent study models show. Photos below simulate what copperband butterflyfish may see at depths 66 feet apart; one researcher likens the dimming effect to “going back to the days of black-and-white TV.” Reduced color perception can jeopardize a fish’s critical ability to identify others—to tell prey, predator, and potential mate apart.…

3.7 mya–50,000 ya Roots of our family tree Bone fragments reveal that human ancestry is far more complex than first thought. 3.7 MILLION YEARS AGO* The LAETOLI FOOTPRINTS, preserved in volcanic ash, prove that our earliest ancestors walked upright. • Tanzania, found in 1978 3. 2 MILLION YEARS AGO A fossilized skeleton, LUCY, is the most complete set of bones of those ancestors. • Ethiopia, 1974 2.4 TO 1.4 MILLION YEARS AGO Fossils from OLDUVAI GORGE include an early toolmaker and reveal East Africa as the cradle of humanity. • Tanzania, 1959 1. 8 TO 1.75 MILLION YEARS AGO Fossils found in DMANISI show when early humans first migrated out of Africa. • Georgia, 1991 335,000-236,000 YEARS AGO An entirely new species of human, HOMO NALEDI, is found in a…

IN A TUNNEL 50 FEET BELOW THE GRASSY PLAZAS OF COPÁN, an ancient Maya city in what is now Honduras, National Geographic staff archaeologist George Stuart peered through an opening in a wall of dirt and stone. There, in a hot, stuffy, earthquake-prone space, he saw a skeleton on a large stone slab. Stuart’s archaeological colleagues had discovered a royal burial—most likely that of K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’, or Sun-Eyed Green Quetzal Macaw. The revered god-king, whose name appears in many of the site’s hieroglyphic texts, was the founder of a dynasty that maintained the power of this Maya valley kingdom for some 400 years. That momentous discovery was made in 1989, but Maya scholars had long recognized the enormous significance of Copán. From more than a century of research,…

ON HANDS AND KNEES, THREE MEN CRAWLED UP A SLICK AND steep mountain slope in Peru. It was the morning of July 24, 1911. Hiram Bingham III, a 35-year-old assistant professor of Latin American history at Yale University, had set out in a cold drizzle from his expedition camp on the Urubamba River with two Peruvian companions to investigate reported ruins on a towering ridge known as Machu Picchu (“old mountain” in Quechua, the Inca language). The explorers chopped their way through thick jungle, crawled across a “bridge” of slender logs bound together with vines, and crept through underbrush hiding venomous fer-de-lance snakes. Two hours into the hike, at nearly 2,000 feet above the valley floor, the climbers met two farmers who had moved up the mountain to avoid tax…

Where globe mallow plants bloom in the western United States, you’ll often find a species of bee that shares the plant’s name and taps it for food. Nature photographers Joe and Niccole Neely were walking in an Arizona field when they saw the bees’ other use for the blooms: as crash pads. Globe mallow bees don’t make hives; females sleep in ground nests, males on plants. Near sunset, the Neelys saw bees enter one flower after another. “They’d just kind of crawl in and plop over,” Joe says. And when one more bee alighted and saw all blooms occupied, it converted a single into a double.…

Two Soviet steppe tortoises had already flown around the moon by the time Neil Armstrong set foot on it in 1969. In fact, dozens of animals, including insects, traveled into space before humans did. In the 1940s, scientists began to explore the limits of our atmosphere. They wanted to understand if humans could survive a weightless environment and the rocket journey to get there—and once they did, whether they’d be able to operate a spacecraft. While the research no longer involves canine cosmonauts (above), decades on, mice, fruit flies, even jellyfish continue to expand our understanding of biology in space and on Earth. The studies may one day hold the key to sending humans to the outer reaches of our solar system and to better treating earthbound diseases such as…

For more stories about how to help the planet, go to natgeo.com/planet 1 CAN YOU FIX IT? Rating Repairability May Reduce Replacing Sometimes all that stands between your things and the landfill is whether they can be fixed if they break. That’s why France now requires products (such as smartphones and laptops) to be labeled with a repairability score. Worldwide, the “right to repair” movement appeals to people who want the ability to service their own products, from cars to tractors to electronics, instead of buying new ones. Feel handy? Find repair guides and scores at ifixit.com. 2 GOT EXTRA FOOD? COLLEGE STUDENTS ACROSS THE COUNTRY ARE COLLECTING SUR­ PLUS CAFETERIA FARE AND DELIVERING IT TO AREA GROUPS IN NEED THROUGH THE FOOD RECOVERY NETWORK. FIND A CHAPTER OR START…

THE URGE TO UNCOVER BURIED WEALTH has obsessed countless searchers, enriching a few and driving others to the brink of madness. “There are certain men who spend nearly all their lives in seeking for—kanûz—hidden treasures,” wrote the British traveler Mary Eliza Rogers after she visited Palestine in the middle of the 19th century. “Some of them become maniacs, desert their families, and though they are often so poor that they beg their way from door to door, and from village to village, they believe themselves to be rich.” Not all the fortune hunters whom Rogers came across were desperate vagabonds. She also encountered sahiri, roughly translated as necromancers, “who are believed to have the power of seeing objects concealed in the earth.” These esteemed clairvoyants, often women, entered a trance…

IN 1991, HIKERS HIGH IN THE MOUNTAINS ON ITALY’S BORDER with Austria discovered a mummified body protruding from a glacier. Little did they suspect that this “iceman” was a time traveler from the Copper Age. Indeed, further investigation revealed that the 5,300-year-old Ötzi the Iceman—named for the Ötztal Valley near his death site—is the oldest intact human ever found. “Not since Howard Carter unlocked the tomb of King Tutankhamun in the early 1920s had an ancient human so seized the world’s imagination,” wrote mountaineer and author David Roberts. Over the ensuing three decades, scientists have used an array of high-tech tools, including 3D endoscopy and DNA analysis, to examine the iceman and refine his biography in exquisite detail. What at first appeared to be a tale of a solitary Neolithic…

AN HOUR’S DRIVE ALONG THE GARDEZ HIGHWAY SOUTH OF Kabul, there is a sharp left turn onto an unpaved road. The path continues along a dry riverbed, past small villages, paramilitary roadblocks, and sentry towers. A little farther on, the view opens over a treeless valley creased with trenches and exposed ancient walls. In 2009, a team of Afghan and international archaeologists and local laborers began to uncover thousands of Buddhist statues, manuscripts, coins, and holy monuments at this epic site. Entire monasteries and fortifications have come to light, dating back as far as the third century A.D. The excavation was by far the most ambitious in Afghanistan’s history. A fluke of geology put these cultural treasures in jeopardy, though. Mes Aynak means “little copper well” in the local dialect,…

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE OF NUNALLEQ ON THE SOUTHWEST coast of Alaska preserves a fateful moment, frozen in time. The muddy square of earth is full of everyday things the Indigenous Yupik people used to survive and to celebrate life here, all left just as they lay when a deadly attack came almost four centuries ago. As is often the case in archaeology, a tragedy of times past is a boon to modern science. Archaeologists have recovered more than 100,000 intact artifacts at Nunalleq, from typical eating utensils to extraordinary things such as wooden ritual masks, ivory tattoo needles, pieces of finely calibrated sea kayaks, and a belt of caribou teeth. The objects are astonishingly well preserved, having been frozen in the ground since about 1660. Climate change is now hammering…

NEARLY 90 YEARS AFTER it was hidden at the bottom of an abandoned well, a stunningly preserved skull is getting its day in the sun. The artifact may represent a new human species: Homo longi, aka “dragon man” (reconstruction above). At least 146,000 years old, the cranium sports a mash-up of ancient and modern features that show it’s closely related to us—even more so than Neanderthals, some researchers say. “I’ve held a lot of other human skulls and fossils, but never like this,” says study co-author Xijun Ni, a paleoanthropologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Yet dragon man is stirring debate, with some experts suggesting it could be a Denisovan, a mysterious Neanderthal sister group represented by scant fossils. No matter its identity, the skull underscores just how tangled…

ON A SEPTEMBER AFTERNOON IN 1940, FOUR TEENage boys made their way through the woods on a hill overlooking Montignac in southwestern France. They had come to explore a dark, deep hole rumored to be an underground passage to the nearby manor of Lascaux. Squeezing through the entrance one by one, they soon saw wonderfully lifelike paintings of running horses, swimming deer, wounded bison, and other beings—works of art that may be up to 20,000 years old. The collection of paintings in Lascaux is among some 150 prehistoric sites dating from the Paleolithic period that have been documented in France’s Vézère Valley. This corner of southwestern Europe seems to have been a hot spot for figurative art. The biggest discovery since Lascaux occurred in December 1994, when three spelunkers laid…

IN THE YEAR 730 B.C., A MAN NAMED PIYE DECIDED THE ONLY way to save Egypt from itself was to invade it. The magnificent civilization that had built the Pyramids at Giza had lost its way, torn apart by petty warlords. For two decades Piye had ruled over his own kingdom in Nubia, a swath of Africa located mostly in present-day Sudan. But he considered himself the rightful heir to the traditions practiced by the great pharaohs. By the end of a yearlong campaign, every leader in Egypt had capitulated. In exchange for their lives, the vanquished urged Piye to worship at their temples, pocket their finest jewels, and claim their best horses. He obliged them and became the anointed Lord of Upper and Middle Egypt. When Piye died at…

“THE CITY OF KILWA IS AMONGST THE MOST BEAUTIFUL OF CITIES and elegantly built,” wrote Ibn Battuta, one of history’s great travelers. The city minted its own coins and had houses with indoor plumbing. Its residents wore clothing of imported silk. During its golden age, from the 12th to the 18th centuries, Kilwa was one of some three dozen prosperous ports that dotted what is known as the Swahili coast. Those ports, which stretched from present-day Somalia to Mozambique, had evolved into powerful city-states that grew rich from Indian Ocean trade. They flourished as ships from Arabia, India, and China called at their ports to carry away goods that made the Swahili wealthy. Arabian sailors arriving in Africa found good harbors, a sea full of fish, fertile land, and opportunities…

AT 2:20 A.M. ON APRIL 15, 1912, THE “UNSINKABLE” R.M.S. Titanic disappeared beneath the waves, taking with her some 1,500 souls. Why does this tragedy exert such a magnetic pull on our imagination more than a century later? The sheer extravagance of the Titanic’s demise lies at the heart of its attraction. This has always been a story of superlatives: A ship so strong and so grand, sinking in water so cold and so deep. The ship’s fate was sealed on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City. At 11:40 p.m. it sideswiped an iceberg in the North Atlantic, buckling portions of the starboard hull along a 300-foot span and exposing the six forward compartments to the ocean’s waters. From this moment onward, sinking was a certainty.…