Innholdsfortegnelse for MARCH 2016 i National Geographic Magazine

Members of a caving club made a startling discovery in 1993 while exploring one of the many limestone chambers near Altamura, Italy: a skeleton partly covered with calcite knobs. At the time experts concluded this was an adult male Neanderthal who had likely fallen into the cave and starved to death. Repeated splashes of mineral-rich water created the knobs, called cave popcorn. A new study has determined that the calcite covering began forming about 130,000 years ago, so the victim must have lived—and died—prior to that. DNA extracted from a shoulder bone confirmed the original identification. “This is the oldest Neanderthal whose DNA has been analyzed,” says David Caramelli of the University of Florence. More sophisticated DNA research in the future may reveal how this extinct cousin of early humans…

A few days before Christmas in 2014 a familiar face flickered to life in a conference room at Bovanenkovo, 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle on the Yamal Peninsula of Siberia. Vladimir Putin looked a little pixelated from the satellite uplink. Alexey Miller, CEO of Russia’s energy giant Gazprom, stood stiffly facing the screen and the Russian president. Outside the room the clusters of prefab buildings and shiny pipes were lit up like a space station floating in the darkness. Bovanenkovo is one of the largest natural gas deposits on Earth. Miller asked Putin for the order to start pumping from a new field there. “You may begin,” said Putin. Miller relayed the message; an engineer tapped a key. With that, Arctic gas began flowing down a 700-mile pipeline…

Five years ago a massive earthquake struck off the eastern coast of Japan. The tsunami it unleashed destroyed large swaths of the island nation, killing nearly 16,000 people, causing $200 billion in damages, and roiling the lives of those who survived. One of the hardest hit places was Otsuchi, a small fishing community on the northeastern edge of Honshu, Japan’s largest island. When the floodwaters receded, its population had been decimated and displaced. Alejandro Chaskielberg arrived in Otsuchi in October 2012. The Argentine photographer had heard about the town from a friend with relatives there, and he hoped to document the devastation. That included “mountains of debris” dotted with red flags where bodies had been discovered. “I decided to photograph in black and white,” he says, “because I thought, This…

Parrot communication goes well beyond “Polly wants a cracker.” The colorful birds—whose family includes parakeets, like those on this page—actually speak in dialects. Biologist Timothy Wright and his team at New Mexico State University used sonograms to compare vocalizations of Amazon parrots living in Costa Rica. They discovered that all birds used a specific call to maintain contact with others in their flock, but the acoustic structure of that call varies by region. And when one bird heard the local dialect of another, it modified its own vocalizations to match the new tune. They found comparable patterns with small flocks of parakeets in the lab. Humans and parrots learn to vocalize similarly: Both listen and then repeat back what was heard. Relatively few animals develop communication this way. The trait…

Farmers once cultivated a wider array of genetically diverse crop varieties, but modern industrialized agriculture has focused mainly on a commercially successful few. Now a rush is on to save the old varieties—which could hold genetic keys to developing crops that can adapt to climate change. “No country is self-sufficient with its plant genetic resources,” says Francisco Lopez, of the secretariat of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. The group oversees the exchange of seeds and other plant materials that are stored in the world’s 1,750 gene banks. THE POTATO CHALLENGE Potatoes in southwestern China had long been plagued by disease, so scientists began searching for blight-resistant varieties that could be grown in tropical highlands. By the mid-1990s researchers at Yunnan Normal University in China…

A genteel disquisition on love and lust in the animal kingdom “Sex-mad,” roared the headline in the U.K.’s Daily Mail. The news report quoted Sheffield, England, homeowners’ complaints that their “neighbours from hell” were having “noisy late-night passionate encounters outside.” Get a room, Meles meles! Then again, the Eurasian badger’s homemaking may be as disruptive as its lovemaking: It can ruin lawns and undermine buildings as it digs setts, the chamber-and-tunnel systems it calls home. Who knows whether badgers’ favorite pastime is digging or breeding. Clans move tons of earth to create labyrinthine setts; some incorporate tunnels that their fore-badgers dug centuries ago. They pile up leafy bedding (which they regularly change) in chambers used for indoor breeding. During sex, females may yelp, males may emit a cross between a…

Nick Page, a genial New Zealander with a sunburned face and curly black hair, holds a photograph of Assumption Island’s Most Wanted: a red-whiskered bulbul, a bird about the size of a cardinal with a black Mohawk crest and a fiery red tuft of feathers behind each eye. Since 2013, a team of conservation rangers have shot and netted 5,278 redwhiskered bulbuls on this four-square-mile comma of land 250 miles north of Madagascar. There is now one bulbul left. Page has come within range of 5,279 twice, but bad luck prevented a shot. On the first occasion, a kite flew overhead, spooking his quarry, and on the second, a rainstorm struck. Such are the trials of the everyday sniper. But Page, a young conservation graduate, says that “with a bit…

Japan Sunset paints the sacred Meoto Iwa (“wedded rocks”) in pastel hues. Bound by heavy rice-straw ropes, the two stacks off the coast of Futami— Izanagi (left) and Izanami—symbolize the Shinto deities said to have created Japan. China Frigid meets florid in a garden in Hami, where a blooming tree, watered the night before, dangles ice during a two-day cold snap in April. This cold-tolerant species will survive to bloom next year, but the plunge damaged many crops in the area. North Korea Young pupils in Sinuiju perform a dance routine for a group of Chinese tourists. The border town—separated from Dandong, China, by the Yalu River—has long been open to its neighbors. It began admitting some Western tourists in 2013. Order prints of select National Geographic photos online at…

Optimists, you’re not alone: Turns out most people look on the bright side of life—or at least talk about it. A recent study by University of Vermont data scientist Peter Dodds and colleagues found a universal positive bias in languages. Dodds and his team gathered billions of words from ten languages and 24 types of sources—books, news, social media—then identified the 5,000 words most frequently used in each tongue. When people were asked to rate words on a nine-point “happy-to-sad” scale, results were more positive than negative. And when words were translated across languages, people rated words similarly. University of Pennsylvania linguist Mark Liberman says Dodds’s big-data study supports previous anecdotal findings that humans tend to focus on the positive. Will emotional gauges join economic indexes as a measure of…

Scientists have long known that oceans store carbon from the organic matter that washes into them. Instead of being released into the atmosphere as harmful carbon dioxide, carbon can be locked up underwater for millions of years. New research shows that fjords, like the one above in Norway, are even more adept than oceans at holding on to carbon: Per square mile, the glacier-carved waterways hoard a hundred times the ocean’s average. They’re fed by swift mountain rivers, and their depth and sinewy shape transport and store organic matter relatively efficiently, taking in an overall 11 percent of the carbon buried in marine areas annually. But humans shouldn’t exploit them as dumps for carbon. The fjords’ power rests in staying pristine, says chemical oceanographer Richard W. Smith of Global Aquatic…

About a third of the planet’s food goes to waste. In California’s Salinas Valley growers annually trash thousands of tons of fresh greens that lack sufficient shelf life for a crosscountry journey. That’s enough to feed two billion people. At a Paris feast chefs simmer cosmetically challenged veggies— gleaned or donated— into a curry for 6,100 anti-waste enthusiasts. The Future FOOD of natgeofood.com Tristram Stuart has 24 hours to produce a restaurant meal for 50 people—to plan a menu, gather food, then welcome guests to a venue in a city not his own. Complicating what sounds like a reality-show contest is a singular rule: Nearly all the ingredients must be sourced from farms and vendors intending to throw them out. After racing back to New York City from a New…

On the day that Mosul fell to ISIS, Botan Sharbarzheri decided he was willing to die. The 24-year-old university student smiled as he left his parents’ home in Slemani, a city in Iraqi Kurdistan, bought cigarettes, made a few phone calls. He and many of his friends were on summer break, so he had no trouble raising a group of like-minded young men, would-be warriors, eager and untested. Together, in a haze of smoke and text messages, they sketched out a plan. Questions arose and were quickly settled. Everything seemed clear, righteous. All agreed they would die for their homeland—not for Iraq but for Kurdistan. They would die to protect their families against a brutal enemy, just as their fathers had once done against Saddam Hussein’s army. All they needed…