JANUARY

J
ANUAR
UAR
UA
U
A Y2
2015
015

HOW A TINY
12,000-YEAROLD TEENAGER
BECAME

THE
FIRST

AMERICAN
The Firsts Issue
THE FIRST
ARTISTS
THE FIRST
YEAR OF LIFE
THE FIRST
CITY OF AFRICA
THE FIRST
GLIMPSE OF THE
HIDDEN COSMOS

JANUARY 2015 VOL. 227 NO. 1

The wedding of
Gbenga Adeoti and his
bride, Funmi Olojede,
featured traditional
customs and attire of
the Yoruba, Lagoss
main ethnic group.

78 Africas First City

In Lagos, Nigeria, a boom economy widens the rift between the wealthy and the poor.
By Robert Draper

Photographs by Robin Hammond

32

58

By Chip Walter
Photographs by Stephen
Alvarez

By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee
Photographs by Lynn Johnson

The First Artists

Credit them with a pivotal innovation in human
history: the invention of
symbolic expression.

The First Year

In the incredible
learning machine that
is a babys brain,
development depends
on loving caretakers.

138 Proof | First Bird

The bald eagle may be a majestic national
symbolbut its also one tough bird.
By Klaus Nigge

108

A First Glimpse of the

Hidden Cosmos
As scientists map the
universe, what they cant
seedark energy and
dark matteris key.
By Timothy Ferris
Photographs by Robert Clark

124

Tracking the
First Americans
Genetic data and
new archaeological
discoveries offer clues
to the mystery of early
Americans origin.
By Glenn Hodges

On the Cover Geneticists say that Native Americans ancestors

were Asians who separated from other Asian populations and
remained isolated for about 10,000 years. Art by Tomer Hanuka
Corrections and Clarications

Go to ngm.com/more.

O F F I C I A L J O U R NA L O F T H E NAT I O NA L G E O G R A P H I C S O C I E T Y

FROM THE EDITOR

Firsts

Looking
Ahead
This issue of National Geographic is built
around the idea of rstsdiscoveries,
innovations, and actions that changed
the world. As a rst, its hard to top the
bravery of Ruby Bridges, who tells us in
our 3 Questions feature what it was like
to be the rst child to desegregate an
American public elementary school in the
South. We also use the term less formally,
as in a photo essay on Americas rst
bird (the bald eagle) or a vibrant story on
Africas rst city (Lagos, Nigerias commercial center, which is driving the biggest
economy on the continent).
So in an issue of rsts, how do we forecast
what comes next? What will be the next
rsts that will change us, our families,
our communities, and our planet?
In an attempt to answer some of those
questions, we went to the experts and
futurists who contemplate coming changes
both prosaic and profound. Take Paul
Saffo, a Silicon Valley seer who, in 1994
(four years before the founding of Google),
predicted that the future belonged to
those who control the ltering, search,
and sensemaking tools we will rely on to
navigate through the banal expanses of
cyberspace. Indeed.
Whether its about the anticipated
demise of the combustion engine or a decrease in divorce, we hope youll nd these
experts ideas thought provoking as we enter 2015. One cautionary note: No predictor
is always right. In what he calls his worst
forecast, Saffo wrote in 1993 that cyberpunks are to the 1990s what the beatniks
were to the 60sharbingers of a mass
movement waiting in the wings. Thats one
mass movement we still await. Onward to
the next rstsand Happy New Year!

Susan Goldberg, Editor in Chief

HOW WE WILL LIVE

WITHIN 5 TO 10 YEARS

Paul Saffo, Technology Forecaster

Driverless cars will share roadways with conventional cars.
This will happen in urban areas first and will take a decade
to fully diffuse. In the long run, people wont own cars at all.
When you need to go somewhere, youll have a subscription to an auto service, and it will show up at your door.
Were moving away from a purchase economy. We will
subscribe to access rather than pay money for possessions
such as smartphones. We wont buy software anymore;
well subscribe to it.
A new religion could emerge in the next decade or two,
perhaps based around the environment. Digital technology
is the solvent leaching the glue out of our global structure
including shaking our belief systems to the core.

HOW WE WILL LOVE

WITHIN 10 TO 20 YEARS

Pepper Schwartz
Professor, University of Washington
Divorce may decrease after the baby boomers, who have
a high divorce rate, age into their 50s and 60s.
We will also see more people who are in love but do not
share a domicile. Though definitely couples, these people
are tied to different places because of a job or family, or because they love where they live. Maybe we will see people
going back and forth between assisted living facilities.

HOW WE WILL HEAL

WITHIN 10 TO 20 YEARS
Bertalan Mesk
Medical Futurist
Author of The Guide to
the Future of Medicine

The next decades of medicine and

health care will be about using
technologies and keeping the human touch in practicing medicine.
Everyones genomes will be sequenced to access personalized
treatments.
Well measure almost any health
parameters at home with diagnostic devices and smartphones.
The 3-D printing revolution will
produce affordable exoskeletons
and prosthetic devices.

HOW WE WILL AGE

WITHIN 20 YEARS

Byron Reese, Tech Entrepreneur

Author of Innite Progress: How the Internet and Technology Will End
Ignorance, Disease, Poverty, Hunger, and War
Since technology grows exponentially, not in a linear way, we will see
dramatic improvements in our way of life in just a few years. Though it
took us 4,000 years to get from the abacus to the iPad, in 20 years we will
have something as far ahead of the iPad as it is ahead of the abacus. This
means that soon we will be able to solve all problems that are fundamentally technical. These problems include disease, poverty, hunger, energy,
and scarcity. If you can live a few years more, there is a real chance you
will never die, since mortality may be just a technical problem we solve. All
these advances will usher in a new golden age, freed from the scourges
that have plagued humanity throughout our history.

THERE IS A REAL CHANCE YOU WILL NEVER DIE,

SINCE MORTALITY MAY BE JUST A TECHNICAL
PROBLEM WE SOLVE. Byron Reese

HOW WE WILL BE POWERED

WITHIN 50 YEARS

Michael Brune, Executive Director, the Sierra Club

Author of Coming Clean: Breaking Americas Addiction to Oil and Coal
Within 50 years the world should be able to achieve a 100 percent clean
energy economy. Within the next couple of decades, every time you turn
on a light or power up your computer, every bit of that electricity will come
from clean, renewable, carbon-free sources. Soon after that, solar and
wind will displace nuclear as well, at which point well be getting 100 percent of our electricity from renewables. By 2030 we should be able to cut
transportation oil use in half and then cut it in half again a decade later.
Once were finally fossil-fuel free, well not only see our climate stabilize but
well also rest secure knowing that we can get all our power from sources
that are safe, secure, and sustainable. Its already within our grasp.
ART: OLIVER MUNDAY

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3 Questions
Nominate someone for 3 Questions at nationalgeographic.com/3Q.

How I Felt to Be First

On November 14, 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges walked
past an angry crowd to become the first child to integrate
a public elementary school in the American South. Now
a mother, grandmother, and activist, the lifelong New
Orleans resident heads the Ruby Bridges Foundation
and travels all over the United States to tell her story.
DID YOU EVER TALK TO YOUR MOTHER ABOUT HOW
SHE FELT, SENDING YOU TO SCHOOL THAT FIRST DAY?

We never really spoke about it. My parents denitely

displayed courage. Im the mother of four. Im very
protective, but I just dont think that I possess that kind
of courage. I know it was a different time, but as African
Americans, my parents knew that if they wanted to see
change in their lifetime, they had to step up to the plate to
make that happen. And as we know, lots of people did that.
Lots of people who made those bold sacrices lost their
lives. I remember driving up to the school, seeing all these
people screaming. But in New Orleans thats what we do
at Mardi Gras. I thought wed stumbled upon a parade.
And so I really wasnt afraid at all.
YOUR FOUNDATIONS MISSION IS TO EMPOWER
CHILDREN TO ADVANCE SOCIAL JUSTICE AND RACIAL
HARMONY. HOW DO YOU HELP CHILDREN DO THIS?

I just draw from my own experience. I guess that six-yearold is still inside of me. Once my school was integrated and
I was there with white kids and a few black kids, it really
didnt matter to us what we looked like. Now I reach out to
different communities and bring their kids together.
A STATUE OF YOU WAS RECENTLY DEDICATED AT YOUR
FORMER SCHOOL. HOW DOES THAT MAKE YOU FEEL?

My school was hit by Hurricane Katrina, and they were going

to tear it down. I worked hard to get it on the National Register of Historic Places. Im really proud of that, and of the
statue. I want to inspire kids. There are all kinds of monuments to adultsusually dead and usually white. But we
dont often lift up the extraordinary work of children.
PHOTO: REBECCA HALE, NGM STAFF

EXPLORE
Planet Earth

A Geothermal First?
Can the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean be the first to go green?
Montserrat is trying. Nearly 20 years after the Soufriere Hills volcano
began eruptingrendering much of the island nation uninhabitable and exiling two-thirds of the populationthe same geological
forces could provide reliable, renewable geothermal energy.
Like much of the Caribbean, this British overseas territory runs
on costly oil and gas imports. But as on other islands, plate tectonics and volcanic activity bring magma close enough to the surface
for geothermal wells to tap into the heated reservoirs just below.
A single well can cost several million U.S. dollars, though. Last
year, with U.K. funding, University of Auckland researcher Graham Ryan and an international team of scientists and engineers
mapped two promising spots. Initial findings suggest theres
enough geothermal juice there to power the grid, warrant a third
welland maybe even sell to neighbors. Jeremy Berlin

Generator
Electricity

3
Condenser

Warmwater Wells
Underground reservoirs are usually
a complex system of porous rocks
and heated water. That makes the
drilling process (shown generally
here) a major challenge on Montserrat and other Lesser Antilles
islands with geothermal potential.
Hot water

Steam
separator

Cool water
Steam

Ground

Natural water reservoir

Very hot water is brought to

the surface, turning to steam
as pressure decreases.

At a power plant, steam is

separated from water.

Steam flows through a

turbine, powering a generator
that produces electricity.

Cool water is pumped down

into a natural reservoir.

PHOTO: CARSTEN PETER. GRAPHIC: SAMANTHA WELKER

For people with a higher risk of stroke due to

Atrial Fibrillation (AFib) not caused by a heart valve problem

ELIQUIS (apixaban) is a prescription medicine used to reduce the risk of stroke and blood clots in
people who have atrial brillation, a type of irregular heartbeat, not caused by a heart valve problem.

IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION:

Do not stop taking ELIQUIS for atrial brillation
without talking to the doctor who prescribed it for
you. Stopping ELIQUIS increases your risk of having
a stroke. ELIQUIS may need to be stopped, prior
to surgery or a medical or dental procedure. Your
doctor will tell you when you should stop taking
ELIQUIS and when you may start taking it again. If
you have to stop taking ELIQUIS, your doctor may
prescribe another medicine to help prevent a blood
clot from forming.
ELIQUIS can cause bleeding, which can be serious,
and rarely may lead to death.
You may have a higher risk of bleeding if you take
ELIQUIS and take other medicines that increase your
risk of bleeding, such as aspirin, NSAIDs, warfarin
(COUMADIN), heparin, SSRIs or SNRIs, and other
blood thinners. Tell your doctor about all medicines,
vitamins and supplements you take. While taking
ELIQUIS, you may bruise more easily and it may
take longer than usual for any bleeding to stop.

Get medical help right away if you have any of

these signs or symptoms of bleeding:
- unexpected bleeding, or bleeding that lasts a
long time, such as unusual bleeding from the
gums; nosebleeds that happen often, or
menstrual or vaginal bleeding that is heavier
than normal
- bleeding that is severe or you cannot control
- red, pink, or brown urine; red or black stools
(looks like tar)
- coughing up or vomiting blood or vomit that looks
like coffee grounds
- unexpected pain, swelling, or joint pain; headaches,
feeling dizzy or weak
ELIQUIS is not for patients with articial heart valves.
Spinal or epidural blood clots (hematoma). People
who take ELIQUIS, and have medicine injected
into their spinal and epidural area, or have a
spinal puncture have a risk of forming a blood
clot that can cause long-term or permanent loss of
the ability to move (paralysis).

I was taking warfarin.

But ELIQUIS was a better nd.
I TAKE ELIQUIS (apixaban) FOR 3 GOOD REASONS:

1
2
3

ELIQUIS reduced the risk of stroke better than warfarin.

ELIQUIS had less major bleeding than warfarin.
Unlike warfarin, theres no routine blood testing.

ELIQUIS and other blood thinners increase the risk of bleeding which can be
serious, and rarely may lead to death.

Ask your doctor if ELIQUIS is right for you.

This risk is higher if, an epidural catheter is placed
in your back to give you certain medicine, you take
NSAIDs or blood thinners, you have a history of
difcult or repeated epidural or spinal punctures.
Tell your doctor right away if you have tingling,
numbness, or muscle weakness, especially in your
legs and feet.
Before you take ELIQUIS, tell your doctor if you
have: kidney or liver problems, any other medical
condition, or ever had bleeding problems. Tell
your doctor if you are pregnant or breastfeeding,
or plan to become pregnant or breastfeed.
Do not take ELIQUIS if you currently have certain
types of abnormal bleeding or have had a serious
allergic reaction to ELIQUIS. A reaction to ELIQUIS
can cause hives, rash, itching, and possibly
trouble breathing. Get medical help right away if
you have sudden chest pain or chest tightness,
have sudden swelling of your face or tongue,
have trouble breathing, wheezing, or feeling
dizzy or faint.

You are encouraged to report negative side effects

of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit www.fda.gov/
medwatch, or call 1-800-FDA-1088.
Please see additional
Important Product Information
on the adjacent page.
Individual results may vary.

Visit ELIQUIS.COM
or call 1-855-ELIQUIS

2014 Bristol-Myers Squibb Company

432US14BR01976-03-01 01/15

IMPORTANT FACTS about ELIQUIS (apixaban) tablets

The information below does not take the place of talking with your healthcare professional.
Only your healthcare professional knows the specics of your condition and how ELIQUIS
may t into your overall therapy. Talk to your healthcare professional if you have any questions
about ELIQUIS (pronounced ELL eh kwiss).
What is the most important information I should
know about ELIQUIS (apixaban)?
For people taking ELIQUIS for atrial brillation:
Do not stop taking ELIQUIS without talking to
the doctor who prescribed it for you. Stopping
ELIQUIS increases your risk of having a stroke.
ELIQUIS may need to be stopped, prior to surgery or
a medical or dental procedure. Your doctor will tell
you when you should stop taking ELIQUIS and when
you may start taking it again. If you have to stop
taking ELIQUIS, your doctor may prescribe another
medicine to help prevent a blood clot from forming.
ELIQUIS can cause bleeding which can be serious,
and rarely may lead to death. This is because
ELIQUIS is a blood thinner medicine that reduces
blood clotting.
You may have a higher risk of bleeding if
you take ELIQUIS and take other medicines
that increase your risk of bleeding, such as
aspirin, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs
(called NSAIDs), warfarin (COUMADIN), heparin,
selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)
or serotonin norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors
(SNRIs), and other medicines to help prevent or treat
blood clots.
Tell your doctor if you take any of these medicines.
Ask your doctor or pharmacist if you are not sure if
your medicine is one listed above.
While taking ELIQUIS:
you may bruise more easily
it may take longer than usual for any bleeding
to stop
Call your doctor or get medical help right away
if you have any of these signs or symptoms of
bleeding when taking ELIQUIS:
unexpected bleeding, or bleeding that lasts a long
time, such as:
unusual bleeding from the gums
nosebleeds that happen often
menstrual bleeding or vaginal bleeding that is
heavier than normal

bleeding that is severe or you cannot control

red, pink, or brown urine
red or black stools (looks like tar)
cough up blood or blood clots
vomit blood or your vomit looks like coffee
grounds
unexpected pain, swelling, or joint pain
headaches, feeling dizzy or weak
ELIQUIS (apixaban) is not for patients with
articial heart valves.
Spinal or epidural blood clots (hematoma).
People who take a blood thinner medicine
(anticoagulant) like ELIQUIS, and have medicine
injected into their spinal and epidural area, or have
a spinal puncture have a risk of forming a blood clot
that can cause long-term or permanent loss of the
ability to move (paralysis). Your risk of developing a
spinal or epidural blood clot is higher if:
a thin tube called an epidural catheter is placed in
your back to give you certain medicine
you take NSAIDs or a medicine to prevent blood
from clotting
you have a history of difcult or repeated epidural
or spinal punctures
you have a history of problems with your spine or
have had surgery on your spine
If you take ELIQUIS and receive spinal anesthesia or
have a spinal puncture, your doctor should watch
you closely for symptoms of spinal or epidural
blood clots or bleeding. Tell your doctor right away
if you have tingling, numbness, or muscle weakness,
especially in your legs and feet.
What is ELIQUIS?
ELIQUIS is a prescription medicine used to:
reduce the risk of stroke and blood clots in people
who have atrial brillation.
reduce the risk of forming a blood clot in the legs
and lungs of people who have just had hip or knee
replacement surgery.
(Continued on adjacent page)

This independent, non-prot organization provides assistance to qualifying patients with nancial hardship who
generally have no prescription insurance. Contact 1-800-736-0003 or visit www.bmspaf.org for more information.

IMPORTANT FACTS about ELIQUIS (apixaban) tablets (Continued)

treat blood clots in the veins of your legs (deep
vein thrombosis) or lungs (pulmonary embolism),
and reduce the risk of them occurring again.
It is not known if ELIQUIS is safe and effective in
children.
Who should not take ELIQUIS (apixaban)?
Do not take ELIQUIS if you:
currently have certain types of abnormal bleeding
have had a serious allergic reaction to ELIQUIS.
Ask your doctor if you are not sure
What should I tell my doctor before taking
ELIQUIS?
Before you take ELIQUIS, tell your doctor if you:
have kidney or liver problems
have any other medical condition
have ever had bleeding problems
are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. It is not
known if ELIQUIS will harm your unborn baby
are breastfeeding or plan to breastfeed. It is
not known if ELIQUIS passes into your breast milk.
You and your doctor should decide if you will
take ELIQUIS or breastfeed. You should not do both
Tell all of your doctors and dentists that you are
taking ELIQUIS. They should talk to the doctor
who prescribed ELIQUIS for you, before you have
any surgery, medical or dental procedure. Tell
your doctor about all the medicines you take,
including prescription and over-the-counter
medicines, vitamins, and herbal supplements.
Some of your other medicines may affect the way
ELIQUIS works. Certain medicines may increase your
risk of bleeding or stroke when taken with ELIQUIS.

the same time. Do not run out of ELIQUIS. Refill

your prescription before you run out. When leaving
the hospital following hip or knee replacement,
be sure that you will have ELIQUIS (apixaban)
available to avoid missing any doses. If you are
taking ELIQUIS for atrial fibrillation, stopping
ELIQUIS may increase your risk of having a stroke.
What are the possible side effects of ELIQUIS?
See What is the most important information
I should know about ELIQUIS?
ELIQUIS can cause a skin rash or severe allergic
reaction. Call your doctor or get medical help right
away if you have any of the following symptoms:
chest pain or tightness
swelling of your face or tongue
trouble breathing or wheezing
feeling dizzy or faint
Tell your doctor if you have any side effect that
bothers you or that does not go away.
These are not all of the possible side effects of
ELIQUIS. For more information, ask your doctor or
pharmacist.
Call your doctor for medical advice about side
effects. You may report side effects to FDA at
1-800-FDA-1088.
This is a brief summary of the most important information about ELIQUIS. For more information, talk
with your doctor or pharmacist, call 1-855-ELIQUIS
(1-855-354-7847), or go to www.ELIQUIS.com.
Manufactured by:
Bristol-Myers Squibb Company
Princeton, New Jersey 08543 USA
Marketed by:

How should I take ELIQUIS?

Bristol-Myers Squibb Company

Princeton, New Jersey 08543 USA

Take ELIQUIS exactly as prescribed by your

doctor. Take ELIQUIS twice every day with or
without food, and do not change your dose or
stop taking it unless your doctor tells you to. If
you miss a dose of ELIQUIS, take it as soon as you
remember, and do not take more than one dose at

and
Pzer Inc
New York, New York 10017 USA
COUMADIN is a trademark of Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharma Company.

2014 Bristol-Myers Squibb Company

ELIQUIS is a trademark of Bristol-Myers Squibb Company.
Based on 1289808A1 / 1289807A1 / 1298500A1 / 1295958A1
August 2014
432US14BR00770-09-01

EXPLORE

Us

Today just
over half of
U.S. teens get
their drivers
license by
age 18.

First
Drive
Delayed

Portion of
age group
with a license

If Jack Kerouac were writing today, he might title his book Off the Road. After six
decades of growth in driving, Americas love affair with the automobile has hit a
ditch. More teens and young adults are waiting to get their first drivers license
or opting not to get one at all. In 2009 people ages 16 to 34 drove 23 percent
fewer miles than in 2001. Some say theyre too busy to get a license. Others cite
cars cost and hassle or the benefits of biking, walking, and taking mass transit.
A 2013 study by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute
found vehicle registration down 6 percent since 2008, when the recession hit.
But the decline may be about more than economics. Online and mobile technologieswhich fuel telework, e-commerce, and ride sharingare also factors, says a
study by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. In 21st-century America, cars
arent freedom machines anymore, says Cotten Seiler, author of Republic of Drivers. Theyre just a way to get around. Of course, since younger drivers average
more auto accidents, fewer of them could mean safer roads. Jeremy Berlin

100%
77

73

71
59%

55

56

50

35

Ages
16-19

1963

70+

1983
Peak for 16- to 19-year-olds

2003

2012

PHOTO: LAUREN GREENFIELD, INSTITUTE. GRAPHIC: LAWSON PARKER

SOURCE: FEDERAL HIGHWAY ADMINISTRATION

The Holy Land Revealed

Taught by Professor Jodi Magness
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL

off

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18

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RY

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T I ME O
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BY JA N U

Unearth Ancient Secrets

from the Holy Land
With a rich history stretching back over 3,000 years, the Holy
Land (the area in and around modern-day Israel) is a sacred
land for three major faiths and the setting for defining events in
religious history. And with the help of information uncovered at
various archaeological sites, historians have shed intriguing new
light on our understanding of this areaand its powerful role in
religious history.
Comb through these remains for yourself with The Holy
Land Revealed, an unforgettable experience that will add new
dimensions to your understanding of the millennia-long story
of this dynamic region. Delivered by archaeologist and Professor
Jodi Magness, these 36 lectures give you an insiders look at
ruins, artifacts, documents, and other long-buried objects that
will take you deep beneath the pages of the Bible.

Offer expires 01/18/15

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The Land of Canaan

The Arrival of the Israelites
JerusalemAn Introduction to the City
The Jerusalem of David and Solomon
Biblical Jerusalems Ancient Water Systems
Samaria and the Northern Kingdom of Israel
Fortications and Cult Practices
Babylonian Exile and the Persian Restoration
Alexander the Great and His Successors
The Hellenization of Palestine
The Maccabean Revolt
The Hasmonean Kingdom
Pharisees and Sadducees
Discovery and Site of the Dead Sea Scrolls
The Sectarian Settlement at Qumran
The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Essenes
The Life of the Essenes
From Roman Annexation to Herod the Great
Herod as BuilderJerusalems Temple Mount
Caesarea MaritimaHarbor and Showcase City
From Herods Last Years to Pontius Pilate
GalileeSetting of Jesuss Life and Ministry
Synagogues in the Time of Jesus
Sites of the Trial and Final Hours of Jesus
Early Jewish Tombs in Jerusalem
Monumental Tombs in the Time of Jesus
The Burials of Jesus and James
The First Jewish Revolt; Jerusalem Destroyed
MasadaHerods Desert Palace and the Siege
Flavius Josephus and the Mass Suicide
The Second Jewish Revolt against the Romans
Roman JerusalemHadrians Aelia Capitolina
Christian Emperors and Pilgrimage Sites
Judaism and Synagogues under Christian Rule
Islams Transformation of Jerusalem
What and How Archaeology Reveals

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EXPLORE

Science

A First
for Fish
Love them or hate them,
genetically modified foods are
making their way into grocery
stores. Soybeans and corn
have been for sale in the U.S.
since the 1990s. Now, if the
FDA gives the green light,
the first GM edible animal,
a farmed fish known as
AquAdvantage salmon, could
one day join their ranks.
Developed by Canadian
scientists, the fish (right) is
an Atlantic salmon with two
tweaks to its DNA: a growth
hormone gene from the large
king salmon and genetic
material from the eel-like ocean
pout, to keep that growth
hormone activated. The fish,
which is female and sterile,
should reach maximum size
quickly in the land-based tanks
where it would be raised. To
help feed a hungry planet, the
GM technology could be used
in other species, says spokesman Dave Conley: Many of
its benefits have been downplayed or ignored.
Still, the company was fined
for environmental violations,
and critics worry the fish could
escape into the wild and create
new problems. The FDA has
yet to approve it for human
consumption. If allowed, says
Ocean Conservancy chief
scientist George H. Leonard,
its imperative it be labeled, so
consumers can vote with their
wallets. Catherine Zuckerman

VANGUARD 1, FIRST SOLAR-POWERED SATELLITE

The size of a cantaloupe and weighing about three pounds, Vanguard 1

was the rst solar-powered satellite and an important U.S. entry in the
space race. Playing catch-up after the Soviet Unions 1957 launches of
Sputniks 1 and 2, the U.S. sent Vanguard 1 into orbit on March 17, 1958.
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev
derided the compact satellite as a
grapefruit. Yet the much larger
Sputniks fell from orbit and burned up
on reentry in 1958, while Vanguard 1
remains aloft today. It stopped transmitting in 1964, after its last solar cells
gave out. But it still holds the title of
oldest articial satellite in space and is
projected to remain in orbit about 240
more years.Tim Wendel
PHOTOS: ALEXI HOBBS (TOP); NASA GLENN RESEARCH CENTER

2014 NGC Network US, LLC and NGC Network International, LLC. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CHANNEL and the Yellow Border design are trademarks of National Geographic Society; used with permission.

EXPLORE

Wild Things

Magellanic
chicks
conceived
by artificial
insemination
thrive 13
weeks after
hatching.

Hatching
a First for
Penguins

These captive Magellanic penguin chicks are pioneers: Theirs is the first penguin
species to produce young via artificial insemination. Success took more than a
decade, as researchers acquired detailed knowledge of Magellanics reproductive
biology. The near-threatened species was an ideal candidate for artificial insemination trials, says Justine OBrien, scientific director of SeaWorlds reproductive
programs. Thats because the birds are easy to work with, and theyre closely
related to endangered species such as Galpagos and African penguins.
Now that the method has worked with Magellanics, researchers hope it can
one day be employed with endangered penguin species. The ultimate goal, says
OBrien, is to use it to maintain genetically diverse captive penguin populations
and perhaps even replenish depleted populations in the wild. Jane J. Lee

WHO SPLIT FIRST?

The announcement jolted the gelatinous world: The comb jelly lineage
was likely the rst to split from the common ancestor of all animals.
Scientists long believed that sponges broke off rst, some 600 million
years ago. Resolving the question could help explain how nervous systems evolved, says the University of Floridas Leonid L. Moroz. Comb
jellies (right) have nerve cells; sponges dont. If comb jellies split rst,
they may have the oldest neurons of any extant species, says Heather
Marlow of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory.JJL
PHOTOS: EMILY BERL (TOP); ALEXANDER SEMENOV

150 years
of helping the
world thrive

A legacy of firsts
In 1865, the American Midwest
was a blank canvas, poised for
transformation. Our founder saw
the potential and began his trade
business there, storing and moving
grain on a revolutionary scale.
It was the first milestone in our rich
history of innovation, and 150 years
later, our firsts have given way to
new markets, new ingredients and
new ways of transporting food.
Weve pioneered agricultural systems
that yield sustainable crops and
increase farmer incomes. And as we
approach a future with even higher
stakes, were behind the innovations
that are shaping a nourished world
that can thrive.
Learn more at cargill.com/150

1865
5

The
e first grain
warrehouse

1991

t champion
The first to
humane cattle
c
practices

Cargilll was born into the uncertainty of postCivil W

War America as a single storage site in
Iowa. W
W. W. Cargill followed the construction
of the new railroad, expanding his network to
help fa
armers move their grain to market.

When we broughtt Dr. Temple Grandins systematic

ideas to life in our beef processing facilities, we helped
al standards across the industry.
define new ethica
A renowned expe
ert in animal science, Grandin drafted
a blueprint that promotes more peaceful and insightful
s, and in effect, safer and more
handling methods
nutritious produc
cts.

1940
0

1998

The
e first hybrid
tran
nsport ship

The first floating,

offshore port in India

To tran
nsport food across vast lakes and down
windin
ng rivers, the world needed a better boat.
Cargilll entered the shipbuilding industry to create
it, fusing the nimble towboat and big barge into
er and more cost-efficient ship.
a faste

In Kutch, India, im
mport demand for fertilizer is high,
used by farmers to
t withstand the regions long droughts.
Because the Gulff of Kutchs waters are quite shallow, we
designed a floatin
ng structure stationed miles from land.
With integrated cranes,
c
the port unloads vital resources
from large vessellslater transferred to shore by ferry
while simultaneou
usly loading other cargo for export.

1967
7

2013

The
e first to deliver crops
with
h newfound efficiency
We cha
anged the food industry when we filled
an entire trainall 115 carswith Illinois corn,
renderring it more affordable for consumers and
profita
able for farmers. On one of our earliest trips
to Lou
uisiana, we moved over 400,000 bushels for
half the costand in record time.

t achieve sustainable
The first to
palm oil certifi
c
cation
Our Hindoli palm plantation was the first to achieve
official Indonesia Sustainable Palm Oil (ISPO) certification.
d as the model of sustainability for the
Not only is it cited
industry nationwide, but also, it serves as the benchmark
site for ISPO audiitor training. Today, Cargill is actively
moving toward an
nother major first: a 100% sustainable
supply chain for palm
p
oil across the globe.

The Firsts Issue

Chocolate to Europe
1519

st

The Aztec introduce

chocolate to Hernn Corts,
who later takes cacao pods
back to Europe.

Printing press
1439

THERES A FIRST TIME for everything. In fact we are so iinundated

by rsts that its easy to lose sight of when the milestones ttook place.
Some rsts happened earlier than you might think: The rst successful
patients
cesarean in the United States was performed in 1794by the p
husband. Others occurred in an order that seems unexpected: The moon
was mapped centuries before the ocean oor.

1350 RENAISSANCE 1650

The Western
Hemisphere is shown
for the rst time.

Scientic map
of the moon
1679
Giovanni Cassini draws
lunar landscapes seen
through a telescope.

The Chinesse discover

gunpowder wh
hile looking
for an immorttality elixir.

A.D. 400 M
MIDDLE AGES 1400

1650 ENLIGHTEN

Eyeglasses
13th century

Olympic Games
776 B.C.
Domesticated
livestock
9000 B.C.

Dutch engineer Cornelis

Drebbel reportedly
waterproofs the craft
with greased leather.

Piano
circa 1700
Bartolomeo Cristofori
allegedly creates the
modern piano.

Murasaki Shikibu, a
Japanese noblewoman,
writes The Tale of Genji.

Gu
unpowder
9th ce
entury A.D.

Early wheels are used

as pottery turntables
and to transport
goods via sledges.

Complete world map

1507

Major literary work

by a woman
1010

Wheel
3500 B.C.

Humans learn
to control re.

Otto von Guericke invents

the air pump, which he
uses to study light and
sound in a vacuum.

Submersible
1620

C.
EARLIEST IDEAS 500 B.C

Fire
One million
years ago

Air pump
1650

This technology
revolutionizes the
manufacture of books.

The rst use of

wearable spectacles
is recorded in Italy.

Competitions are
closely linked to festivals
honoring the god Zeus.

Sheep and goats

are tamed in the
Middle East, then
pigs and cattle.

Paper money
12th century

Unive
ersity
859
The Uniiversity of al Qarawiyyin
in Moroc
cco is founded by a
woman, F
Fatima al Fihri.

Chinese merchants
begin using paper
money to avoid having
to carry heavy coins.

Diving-bell patent
1691
British astronomer
Edmond Halley
(of comet fame)
receives the patent.

Sextant
mid-1700s

A tool is designed t
longitude by measu
the angular distance
between the moon an
a nearby star.

Skyscraper
1885
Chicagos steel-frame Home
Insurance Building is built,
ten stories high.

Human ight
1783
Non-tethered human
ight takes place in a
hot-air balloon that rises
500 feet above Paris.

Man on the moon

1969

Satellite in space
1957

Photograph
1826

The Soviet Union launches

the beach-ball-size Sputnik 1,
the rst articial satellite
to orbit Earth.

Taken in France, the rst

photo is titled View From
the Window at Le Gras.

1957 SPACE AGE 1980

1760 INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 1900

Sign language
1770s

Phone call
1876

Abb Charles Michel de lpe

invents the rst widely used sign
language for the deaf.

Cosmonaut Yuri
Gagarin orbits Earth
for 108 minutes.

Internet
1969
Data are sent
between California
universities,
setting the stage
for the Internets
development.

Map of the seaoor

1977
National Geographic
grantees create the
rst complete
topographic map.

Electric wheelchair
1953

Postage stamp
1840

George Klein invents a

motorized chair to assist
quadriplegic veterans.

Penicillin
1928

Benjamin Franklin and

his son invent a way to
protect buildings from
lightning strikes.

Email
1971

Alexander Fleming
accidentally discovers
the antibiotic in a
petri dish.

Programmer Ray
Tomlinson sends
this message:
QWERTYUIOP.

Smartphone
1993
IBMs Simon is the
rst cellular phone to
have personal digital
assistant features
such as email.

Voyager 1
2013
The spacecraft is
the rst humanmade object to
venture into
interstellar space.

1914 WAR & POSTWAR 19

954 1971 INFORMATION AGE

U.S. C-section
surgery
1794
Elizabeth Bennett and
her baby girl are ne after
Bennetts husband, a physician, performs nations
rst successful C-section.

Human in space
1961

German chemist Felix

Hoffmann synthesizes
aspirin in the laband
two weeks later, heroin.

The rst stamp features

Queen Victorias prole
and cost just a penny.

NMENT 1800

to nd
uring
e
nd

Aspirin
1897

On the telephone he
invented, Alexander
Graham Bells rst
words to his aide are
Mr. Watson, come
here, I want to
see you.

Lightning rod
1752

American Neil Armstrongs

words as he becomes the rst
person to walk on the moon:
Thats one small step for a man,
one giant leap for mankind.

Oral contraceptive
1951

Adhesive bandage
1920

Chemist Carl Djerassi

creates the pill by
synthesizing hormones
from yams.

Organ tra
ansplant
1954

Cloned mammal
1996

First successfful
procedure mo
oves a
kidney from on
ne twin
to another.

Dolly the sheep is

cloned from a
mammary cell and
named for Dolly Parton.

Earle Dickson, a cotton

buyer, invents this for his
accident-prone wife.

Permanent
articial heart
1982
The Jarvik-7 is successfully
implanted in a human, who
lives another 112 days.

KELSEY NOWAKOWSKI, NGM STAFF. GRAPHIC: LVARO VALIO

EXPLORE

Ancient Worlds

RUSSIA

CANADA

CHINA

PANTHALASSIC
OCEAN

JAPAN

SPAIN
U.S.

EQUATOR

AFGHANISTAN
BRAZIL

ARGENTINA

INDIA
AUSTRALIA
SOUTH AFRICA

Present-day country boundaries and shorelines are superimposed on the Pangaea of 250 million
years ago. Some areas of the modern world arent seen; their continental crust formed later.

First
Came
Pangaea

Hot off the presses in 1915, Alfred Wegeners book The Origin of Continents
and Oceans sent tremors through the foundations of earth science. The
German meteorologist was the first to weave together multidisciplinary
evidence to support a then controversial theory of continental drift.
While perusing a world atlas in 1910, Wegener pondered whether the
shapes of the continents corresponded by mere coincidence. He later
pieced them into a single primordial continent he called Pangaea,
Greek for all Earth. Wegener theorized that this massive landform had
existed until roughly 250 million to 200 million years ago, when todays
continents began to creep apart.
For biologists, this explained the related plant and animal species on
lands divided by oceans. For paleontologists, the theory fit with mesosaur
fossils found in both South Africa and Brazil. To geologists, Wegener pointed
out similar land formations on separate continents and suggested, among
other things, that South Africas Cape Fold Belt range once joined up with
Argentinas Sierra de la Ventana.
Wegeners work was rejected by leading geologists who had a stake in
long-standing, competing theories of Earths evolution. Critics complained
that he had failed to explain the exact mechanism that would have driven
the drifting motion. Wegener agreed with that point, writing in 1929 that the
Newton of drift theory has not yet appeared. The next year Wegener died,
at age 50. It would take 30 more yearsand geophysicists conclusion
that plate tectonics results in continental driftfor Wegeners theory to be
vindicated. Karen de Seve
JEROME N. COOKSON, NGM STAFF. SOURCE: RON BLAKEY, COLORADO PLATEAU GEOSYSTEMS

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Basic Instincts
A genteel disquisition on love and lust in the animal kingdom

The First Time

For humans, sexual initiation can be a big dealobsessed about, romanticized. The loss of virginity, its said, leaves one forever changed.
Tell me about it, says the male hump-winged grig. The rst female he mates with takes not just his innocence but bites of his body.
Grigs are cricket-like insects whose annual mating season involves
what behavioral ecologist Scott Sakaluk calls an unusual form of
sexual cannibalism. To entice a female grig, a male makes a call by
rubbing his forewings together, an act called stridulation. The male
then seals the deal by letting the female munch on his hind wings
during sex and lap up the hemolymph, the bug version of blood. One
night hes a virgin. The next night hes been chewed on, Sakaluk says.
Why do some males get several of these grisly trysts (which are
seldom, if ever, fatal) but others get none? The call is key. When
Sakaluks colleague Geoff Ower compared the insects calls, he found
fundamental differences between the sound made by grigs that had
mating success and those that did not.
Being a sex snack can sap the strength a male grig needs for
stridulation, Sakaluk says. By the end of mating season, theres only
a few left calling. Those are the males that have gotten superlucky
and they are chewed right down to the nub.Patricia Edmonds

HABITAT

Forests of northwestern U.S.

and southwestern Canada
STATUS

Vulnerable
OTHER FACTS

In the insect order that grigs

share with grasshoppers
and katydids, there are three
North American grig species.

The mating of
hump-winged
grigs involves
an unusual
form of sexual
cannibalism.

PHOTO: PIOTR NASKRECKI

The passion of all

the explorers, for
what they do, is aweinspiring. Their work
teaches respect for
animals, different
cultures, lifestyles...
I wanted to support
National Geographic
to make sure this
work continues long
after Im gone.
Cecilia Sestak, who
included National Geographic
in her estate plans.

LEAVE A WISE LEGACY.

By including National Geographic in your estate plans you can pass on the values that have guided
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Naming National Geographic as a beneciary in your will, retirement plan, life insurance policy, or
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For more information about making a bequest to National Geographic:
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VISIONS

national geo graphic January

Costa Rica
Waking up on a tree
branch near Guayacn
de Siquirres, a redeyed tree frog peers
through a gold-striped,
semitransparent eyelid.
The scarlet eyes on
this toxic, three-inchlong amphibian might
be an example of
startle colorationa
defense strategy some
animals use to ward
off predators.
PHOTO: INGO ARNDT

Bulgaria
Fatme Inus wears face
paint, tinsel, and manyhued sequins on her
wedding day in Ribnovo.
The colorful tradition,
which symbolizes status change, is called
gelina. Its practiced
by Bulgarian-speaking
Muslimsalso known as
Pomakswhose wedding celebrations span
two days and involve
hundreds of villagers.
PHOTO: SEAN GALLUP,
GETTY IMAGES

O Order prints of select National Geographic photos online at NationalGeographicArt.com.

China
Seen from a flowering
hillside, the Honghe
Hani Rice Terraces are
a mosaic of color: green
shrubs, red duckweed,
and blue sky reflected in
the irrigated fields. The
Hani people have farmed
these 41,000 acres
now a World Heritage
siteon the slopes of
the Ailao Mountains for
13 centuries.
PHOTO: IMAGINECHINA/CORBIS

Legal Notice

If You Own Property With GAF Timberline

Roong Shingles Made Between 1998 and 2009,
You Could Receive Benets from Class Action Settlements
Settlements have been reached with
Building Materials Corporation of America
(known as GAF Materials Corp.) (GAF)
involving Timberline roong shingles
(Shingles). The lawsuits claim a defect
that might cause the roong Shingles to
prematurely crack, split or tear. GAF
claims that the Shingles were not defective
and that GAFs warranty appropriately
covers any problems.
The Settlements include two Classes
covering Shingles made: (1) between
1999 and 2007 at GAFs plant in Mobile,
Alabama and (2) between 1998 and 2009 at
other GAF manufacturing plants.
Am I included?
You may be included if you own any
property in the United States with
Timberline Shingles made during the
relevant time periods.
What do the Settlements provide?
The benets you may be eligible to receive
are based on: (1) the location of your
property, (2) where your Shingles were
made, (3) the date your Shingles were
installed and the date on which you make
a claim, (4) the type and extent of damage
to your Shingles, and (5) the size of your
roof.
You may be eligible to receive: (1)
replacement shingles (comparable to
the Shingles installed) and/or (2) a cash
payment. The Settlements will not reduce
the benets you may be entitled to under
any existing GAF warranty.

The attorneys representing the Classes are

asking the Court for attorneys fees (up to
$6,890,000 in total) and costs and expenses
(up to $1,115,000 in total). Counsel will also
request an incentive payment for the Class
Representatives. The payment of costs and
expenses, and the incentive awards, will be
paid by GAF and will not reduce the benets
under the Settlements.
The attorneys representing the Class
covering Shingles made in Mobile are
also asking for a portion of the additional
benets going to Class Members with
property outside South Carolina. These fees
will not be paid by GAF and would in these
instances reduce the benets to some Class
Members.
How can I make a claim?
In order to get benets, you need to le a
claim. You can nd out how to le a claim
by visiting www.RoofSettlement.com or
calling 1-866-759-6518. You can le a
claim over the next seven years after the
effective date of the Settlements.
What are my rights?
If you do nothing, you will be bound by the
Settlements and the Courts decisions. If
you want to keep your right to sue GAF, you
must exclude yourself from the Classes by
March 16, 2015. If you stay in the Classes,
you may object to the Settlements by March
16, 2015. The Court will hold a hearing
on April 22, 2015 to consider whether to
approve the Settlements. You or your own
lawyer may appear at the hearing at your
own expense, but you do not have to attend.

For more information: 1-866-759-6518 www.RoofSettlement.com

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For more information concerning the appraisal, visit
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Smar t LuxuriesSurprising Prices

LEGAL NOTICE

IF YOU PURCHASED A WELLESSE JOINT MOVEMENT GLUCOSAMINE

PRODUCT YOU MAY BE ENTITLED TO RECEIVE UP TO $15.00 TO $18.00
FOR EACH PRODUCT YOU PURCHASED, NOT TO EXCEEED $100.00.
The United States District Court for the Southern District of California authorized this notice. This is not a solicitation from a lawyer.
Para una notication en Espanol, visite nuestro sitio web, www.WELLESSEJMGSETTLEMENT.com
WHAT IS THIS SETTLEMENT ABOUT? Plaintiff claims that
Defendants, Botanical Laboratories, Inc., Schwabe North America,
Inc., and Botanical Laboratories, LLCs (Defendants), Wellesse
Joint Movement Glucosamine did not provide certain health
benets as advertised, including joint health benets, mobility,
exibility, and lubrication. Defendants strongly deny the allegations
made in the lawsuit. The Court has not decided who is right and
who is wrong. Instead, the parties decided to settle the dispute.
WHAT DOES THE SETTLEMENT PROVIDE? Each Settlement
Class Member who submits a valid claim form may be entitled to
receive cash payment of up to $15.00 to $18.00 for each bottle of
Wellesse Joint Movement Glucosamine purchased prior to October
8, 2014, not to exceed one hundred dollars ($100) in total recovery.
Defendants will make payments of $3.1 million into a Settlement
Fund to reimburse Settlement Class Members for the Wellesse
Joint Movement Glucosamine they purchased, to pay for costs and
expenses of settlement administration not to exceed $580,000.00,
an award of attorneys fees not to exceed $930,000.00, and a service
award to the Class Representatives, not to exceed $3,500.00. In
the event that the dollar amount of approved claims submitted by
Settlement Class Members exceeds the amount remaining in the
Settlement Fund after payment of costs and expenses of settlement
administration, the Courts award of attorneys fees, and a service
award to the Class Representatives, payments on approved Claims
to Settlement Class Members shall be reduced pro rata. In the event
that the dollar amount of approved claims submitted by Settlement
Class Members does not meet or exceed the amount remaining
in the Settlement Fund after payment of costs and expenses of

settlement administration, the Courts award of attorneys fees, and

a service award to the Class Representatives as well as the tallied
amount of all Authorized Claims, the Settlement Administrator
shall divide the remaining cash amount equally by the number of
Authorized Claimants and shall pay each such Authorized Claimant
his or her share of the remaining cash amount.
AM I A CLASS MEMBER? Youre a Class Member if you
purchased a Wellesse Joint Movement Glucosamine product
anywhere in the nation at any time prior to October 8, 2014.
WHAT ARE MY LEGAL OPTIONS? To ask for cash and remain in
the Class, you must mail, fax, or submit online a completed claim
form by February 19, 2015. If you do not wish to participate in the
settlement, you may exclude yourself from the Class by February
19, 2015, or you may stay in the Class and object to the settlement
by February 19, 2015. Visit www.WELLESSEJMGSETTLEMENT.
com for important information about these options.
HEARING ON THE PROPOSED SETTLEMENT: The Court will
hold a Final Approval Hearing on March 19, 2015 at 11:00 a.m.,
to determine whether the proposed settlement is fair, reasonable,
and adequate, to approve attorneys fees and expenses, and any
service award for the Class Representatives. The Final Approval
Hearing will take place at U.S. District Court, Southern District of
California, 940 Front Street, San Diego, CA 92101. You do not
have to attend the hearing.
HOW CAN I GET MORE INFORMATION? For more information
or to view all relevant documents in the litigation, or if you have
questions, visit www.WELLESSEJMGSETTLEMENT.com, or call
1-877-902-6937.

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VISIONS

YourShot.ngm.com

Editors Choice
Daily DozenEditors pick 12 photos from those submitted online each
day. Here are our favorites this month.

EDITORS NOTE

I love the visceral, youthful, and joyful feeling Ujjal captured

[below]. The way he waited for a specic gesture adds emotional
punch to what might have been an ordinary moment.
Jessie Wender, National Geographic senior photo editor
Bogdan Comanescu
Caransebes, Romania
Comanescu was in the Danube Delta
and met an 86-year-old fisherman
named Artiom. The man sat on his
lejanca, a traditional bed thats an
extension of the oven. Comanescu
framed the fisherman in a mirror
surrounded by family photos.

Ujjal Dey
Hyderabad, India
In a park in his hometown Dey
liked to watch kids play in the water
fountains. One summer day right
before sunset, he went inside the
fountain and pointed his camera
toward the sun, then waited for one
of the children to jump.

national geo graphic January

39,000
years ago

Scientists scrape samples for dating from the polychrome

ceiling in Spains Altamira Cave, festooned with animals
painted 19,000 to 15,000 years ago. Abstract symbols on the
ceiling can be traced back at least another 20,000 years.
ALTAMIRA MUSEUM, MINISTRY OF EDUCATION, CULTURE, AND SPORT

The greatest
innovation in the
history of humankind
was neither the stone
tool nor the steel
sword, but the
invention of symbolic
expression by the

FIRST
ARTISTS

35,000

Uncovered in 2008, the Venus gurine from Hohle

Fels Cave in Germany is the oldest undisputed image
of a human being. The loop above her torso suggests
the carving was meant to be worn as a pendant.

ACTUAL SIZE

25,000

Delicately carved from mammoth tusk, the Lady of

Brassempouy was discovered in southwest France in
1894. Whether a lady or a youth, it is among the
oldest representations of a human face.
HILDE JENSEN, TBINGEN UNIVERSITY, GERMANY (LEFT); SISSE BRIMBERG, NATIONAL
GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE, AT MUSE DES ANTIQUITS NATIONALES, FRANCE

ACTUAL SIZE

100,000

Perched near Africas southern tip, Blombos Cave has

yielded some of the earliest evidence of symbolic
expression, including shell beads, engraved ocher,
and ocher-processing kits that are 100,000 years old.

By Chip Walter
Photographs by Stephen Alvarez

t is as if we are walking into the throat of an

enormous animal. The tongue of a metal path
arcs up and then drops downward into the
blackness below. The ceiling closes in, and in
some places the heavy cave walls crowd close

enough to touch my shoulders. Then the flanks

of the limestone open up, and we enter the belly
of an expansive chamber.
This is where the cave lions are.
And the woolly rhinos, mammoths, and bison,
a menagerie of ancient creatures, stampeding,
battling, stalking in total silence. Outside the
cave, where the real world is, they are all gone
now. But this is not the real world. Here they
remain alive on the shadowed and creviced walls.
Around 36,000 years ago, someone living in
a time incomprehensibly different from ours
walked from the original mouth of this cave to
the chamber where we stand and, by flickering
firelight, began to draw on its bare walls: profiles
of cave lions, herds of rhinos and mammoths,
a magnificent bison off to the right, and a chimeric creaturepart bison, part womanconjured from an enormous cone of overhanging
rock. Other chambers harbor horses, ibex, and
aurochs; an owl shaped out of mud by a single
finger on a rock wall; an immense bison formed
from ocher-soaked handprints; and cave bears
walking casually, as if in search of a spot for a
long winters nap. The works are often drawn
with nothing more than a single and perfect
continuous line.
In all, the artists depicted 442 animals over
perhaps thousands of years, using nearly 400,000
square feet of cave surface as their canvas. Some
animals are solitary, even hidden, but most
congregate in great mosaics like the one I am

national geo graphic january

looking at now, in the deepest part of the cave.

Hidden by a rock slide for 22,000 years, the
cave came to light in December 1994, when
three spelunkers named Eliette Brunel, Christian Hillaire, and Jean-Marie Chauvet scrambled
through a narrow crevice in a cliff and dropped
into the dark entry. Since then, what is now
known as the Cave of Chauvet-Pont-dArc has
been ferociously protected by the French Ministry of Culture. We are among the rare few who
have been allowed to make the same journey the
ancient artists did. The age of these drawings
makes youngsters of Egypts storied pyramids,
yet every charcoal stroke, every splash of ocher
looks as fresh as yesterday. Their beauty whipsaws your sense of time. One moment you are
anchored in the present, observing coolly. The
next you are seeing the paintings as if all other
artall civilizationhas yet to exist.
How did such human accomplishment come
to be, so long ago, seemingly out of nowhere?
Until recently it was thought that the drawings
found on the walls of well-known Upper Paleolithic caves in southern Europe like Altamira,
Lascaux, and Chauvet were the expression of a
superior kind of humanuswho had arrived
on the continent, driving out the brutish, artless
Neanderthals who had been living and evolving
there for hundreds of thousands of years.
It turns out that the story is a good deal more
complicated, and more interesting. It begins, as
stories often do, in Africa.

National Geographic grantee Christopher Henshilwood and his team dig for clues to the
origins of modern human behavior at Klipdrift Shelter, which, like Blombos Cave, has yielded
early art. Modern humans roamed the region as far back as 165,000 years ago.

Christopher Henshilwood unwinds his sixfoot-five frame, dusts his hands, and gazes out
over the Indian Ocean. He stands at the very tip
of Africa, and except for the immense, sea-battered rocks 80 feet below, nothing lies between
his boots and Antarctica but 1,500 miles of rolling, white-capped sea.
Not a bad day, he says, in a baritone you
might call godlike, if God had a South African
accent.
True, it has not been a bad day. Henshilwood,
of the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and the University of Bergen, Norway, and
his colleagues have been excavating all morning
here at a site known as Klipdrift Shelter, adding some stone tools and other new finds to the
mounting evidence that modern human beings
have inhabited these hills and shallow caves off
and on for more than 165,000 years. Yet Henshilwood has had better days. Some of his most
memorable discoveries have come from Blombos Cave, 28 miles east of Klipdrift, near an area
where he used to play as a kid. One day in 2000

his team dug out a small block of engraved red

ocher a bit smaller than a flip phone. Ocher is
common in this part of Africa and has been used
for millennia for everything from body paint to
a food preservative. This piece, though, was different: Roughly 75,000 years in the past, some
clever person had carefully etched on it a pattern
of overlapping, parallel, triangular markings.
No one knows the meaning of those marks,
which have since been found on 13 other pieces
of ocher. A signature? Calculations? A primeval
grocery list? Whatever their elusive purpose, they
were 35,000 years older than any other undisputed evidence of symbolic behavior known at
the time.
Controversy dogged the discovery at first.
Some scientists attacked the little rock as a
one-off, nothing but random scratchings or
idiosyncratic doodling. They said it was
Chip Walters most recent book is Last Ape Standing.
Stephen Alvarez photographed Pariss underground
in the February 2011 issue of National Geographic.
first artists

meaningless, says Henshilwood. They said

everything negative you could possibly think.
In time, however, others regarded it as a
breakthrough.
Soon more examples of symbol and ornament were uncovered. Henshilwoods team
discovered the shells of little sea snails called
Nassarius that were some 75,000 years old and
perforated, with evidence they had been strung
together. Other finds were even older. Nassarius
beads have been dated to 82,000 years ago at a
site called Grotte des Pigeons (Pigeon Cave) in
Taforalt, Morocco. At the opposite end of the
Mediterranean, similar beads from two Israeli
caves, Qafzeh and Skhul, were dated to 92,000
and at least 100,000 years ago. Back in South
Africa, a 2010 team led by the University of
Bordeauxs Pierre-Jean Texier reported finding
60,000-year-old engraved ostrich eggshells in
Q Society Grant The research on early art in South
Africa and cave art in Spain was funded in part by
your National Geographic Society membership.

national geo graphic january

Diepkloof Rock Shelter north of Cape Town.

Meanwhile, Blombos itself kept yielding treasures: finely carved and decorated bone tools,
and evidence that as long as 100,000 years ago
the caves inhabitants had methodically ground
ocher into fine powder and mixed it with other
ingredients to make a paste. Stored in abalone
shellsthe earliest known containersit could
have been used as a decorative paint for bodies,
faces, tools, or clothing. In 2009 Henshilwood
reported finding more ocher and rocks marked
with deliberate cross-hatchings, also dating as
far back as 100,000 years.
Compared with the jaw-dropping beauty of the
art created in Chauvet Cave 65,000 years later, artifacts like these seem rudimentary. But creating
a simple shape that stands for something elsea
symbol, made by one mind, that can be shared
with othersis obvious only after the fact. Even
more than the cave art, these first concrete expressions of consciousness represent a leap from our
animal past toward what we are todaya species
awash in symbols, from the signs that guide your

65,000 | 75,000

AF RICA
DEM.
REP. OF THE

CONGO
NAMIBIA

A block of red ocher (above) found in Blombos Cave in 2000 bears a pattern
of cross-hatchings and parallel lines etched by a human hand 75,000 years
ago. At left, Henshilwood holds a red ocher crayon found in nearby Klipdrift
Shelter in 2013. This is where it all began, says Henshilwood.

SOUTH
AFRICA

Diepkloof Blombos and

Klipdrift

progress down the highway to the wedding ring

on your finger and the icons on your iPhone.
Theres something else telling about these
early African and Middle Eastern eruptions of
symbolism: They come, and then they go. The
beads, the paint, the etchings on ocher and ostrich eggin each case, the artifacts show up
in the archaeological record, persist in a limited
area for a few thousand years, and then vanish.
The same applies to technological innovations.
Bone harpoon points, found nowhere else before 45,000 years ago, have been uncovered in
the Democratic Republic of the Congo in sediments nearly twice that old. In South Africa two
relatively complex stone and bone tool traditions
appearthe Still Bay 75,000 years ago and the
Howiesons Poort 65,000 years ago. But the latter lasted just 6,000 years, the former 4,000. Nowhere has a tradition been found to spread across
space and through time, gathering richness and
diversity, until just before 40,000 years ago, when
art began to appear more commonly across Africa, Eurasia, and Australasia. As far east as the

Indonesian island of Sulawesi (Celebes), stenciled handprintsonce thought of as an invention of the European Upper Paleolithicwere
recently shown to be almost 40,000 years old.
It seems unlikely, therefore, that some genetic
switch flipped in our African ancestors to produce the capacity for a new, higher-order level
of cognition that, once it evolved, produced a
lasting change in human behavior.
So how do we explain these apparently sporadic flare-ups of creativity? One hypothesis is
that the cause was not a new kind of person but
a greater density of people, with spikes in population sparking contact between groups, which
accelerated the spread of innovative ideas from
one mind to another, creating a kind of collective
brain. Symbols would have helped cement this
collective brain together. When populations again
fell below critical mass, groups became isolated,
leaving new ideas nowhere to go. What innovations had been established withered and died.
Such theories are difficult to provethe past
holds its secrets close. But genetic analyses
first artists

A young Himba woman applies ocher to anothers

hair on a riverbank in northwestern Namibia. Prized
for its warm red hue, ocher is widely used as body
ornamentation today, as it was by ancient humans.

of modern populations do point to a surge in

population in Africa 100,000 years ago. A 2009
study conducted by Adam Powell, Stephen
Shennan, and Mark G. Thomas of University
College London also provides some statistical support for the power of larger populations
to generate innovation. And research by Joseph Henrich, now at the University of British
Columbia, suggests that as populations shrink,
they have an increasingly difficult time holding
on to the innovations they invented in the first
place. The inhabitants of the island of Tasmania had been making bone tools, cold-weather
clothing, and fishing equipment for 15,000 years
before these advances disappear from the archaeological record some 3,000 years ago. Henrich
argues that when sea levels rose 12,000 to 10,000
years ago and isolated Tasmania from the rest of
the world, the indigenous population of perhaps
4,000 individuals was simply not large enough to
keep the cultural traditions alive.
Why Africas archaeological record grows dim
for 150 centuries is by no means clear. Perhaps
pestilence, natural catastrophe, or a sharp swing
in climate caused populations to collapse. Yet
Francesco dErrico, an archaeologist at the University of Bordeaux, points out that although
harsh conditions might spell doom for some
cultures, others might be spurred on by them.
There is no set formula.
Each region of the globe produced cultures
with a number of different trajectories, says
dErrico. You could have situations where some
short-term chaotic disaster might wipe out a culture in one area, but in another, people were able
to take advantage of the challenge. He likens it
to a recipe. Even if the ingredients are the same,
you dont necessarily get the same outcome.
Let me show you something. Nicholas Conard glances over his shoulder, then carefully
spins the dial on an enormous safe in his office,
housed in a 16th-century German castle at Tbingen University. From the safe he extracts four
small pine boxes and sets them gingerly on the
table in front of me. Within each sits a tiny carving: a horse, a mammoth, a bison, and a lion. All

national geo graphic january

are from a German cave called Vogelherd. They

display a grace and beauty and playfulness that
would make any artist today proud. Yet they are
40,000 years oldpredating the painted masterpieces of Chauvet by 5,000 years.
Jaw-dropping, says Conard, the universitys
scientific director of prehistory. Every piece is
different. But when you look at them, its obvious
they form a coherent whole.
The humans who made these objects were
part of a population that left the African homeland some 60,000 years ago, taking a route
through the Middle East and what is now

HOW DID SUCH HUMAN

ACCOMPLISHMENT
COME TO BE, SO LONG AGO,
SEEMINGLY OUT
OF NOWHERE?
Turkey, along the western fringe of the Black
Sea, and up the Danube River Valley. As far as
we know, nowhere along that journey did they
leave signs of an artistic inclination, not even a
piece of marked ocher. But once settled some
43,000 years ago in the Lone and Ach River Valleys of southern Germany, they suddenly began
to createnot crude etchings but fully realistic
animal figurines carved out of mammoth tusk.
The sources of most of these objects are four
caves: Hohle Fels and Geissenklsterle in the Ach
Valley, and Hohlenstein-Stadel and Vogelherd in
the Lone. Not much more than indentations in
the rock face, the caves could easily be missed
today by someone driving the backcountry
roads that wind through Germanys southwestern mountains. Lush and green today, the Ach
and Lone Valleys 40,000 years ago, at the beginning of a period known as the Aurignacian,
were frigid steppe landscapes, dotted with herds
of horses, reindeer, and mammoths. In spite of
the harsh conditions, the richness of the archaeological sites indicates that population sizes in the

Moscow

Zaraysk
Berlin

E U R O P E

GERMANY

ATLANTIC
OCEAN

Geissenklsterle
and Hohle Fels CZECH REP.
Doln Vstonice
Renne

To Malta

Paris

(SIBERIA),
2,500 mi
(4,023 km)

FRANCE

Hohlenstein-Stadel
and Vogelherd
Lascaux
Chauvet
Brassempouy

Tito
Bustillo
Altamira and
Monte Castillo

RUSSIA

D a n u be

Black Sea

Madrid

SPAIN

TURKEY

Pigeon

Me d

MOROCCO

iterra

nean Sea

Skhul and
Qafzeh

Berekhat
IRAQ
Ram

ISRAEL

400

0 mi
0 km

ASIA

400

NGM MAPS

While Europe is home to famous examples of Paleolithic art such as the paintings at Chauvet,
Lascaux, and Altamira, evidence of modern behavior is far older in Africa and the Middle East.

Aurignacian were growing. The increases could

help explain an apparent flare-up of creativity,
not unlike those seen earlier in Africa. Maybe
the difficulties these European settlers faced, says
Conard, led them to share customs that spread
from one group, and generation, to the next. In
hard times prized carvings and tools could have
smoothed the way toward intertribal marriages,
trade, and alliances and helped spread new
techniques for hunting, building shelters, and
making clothing.
In Hohle Fels, Conards team recently uncovered some objects whose messages are so sexually explicit they might require a parental warning.
One is a carving of a woman with exaggerated
breasts and genitalia, found in 2008 (page 34). At
least 35,000 years old, the Venus of Hohle Fels
is the most ancient figure yet discovered that is
indisputably human. (Two much earlier figurines
from Morocco and what is now Israel may be
natural rocks that vaguely resemble the human
form.) Earlier the team had found a polished rod
of siltstone, about eight inches long and an inch

in diameter, with a ring etched at one endlikely

a phallic symbol. A few feet away from the Venus
figurine, Conards team uncovered a flute carved
from a hollow griffon vulture bone, and in Geissenklsterle Cave found three other flutes, one
made of ivory and two fashioned from a swans
wing bone. They are the oldest known musical
instruments in the world. We dont know whether these people had drugs. But they clearly had
the sex and rock and roll.
Of all the findings to emerge from this period
in Germany, none is more fascinating than the
Lwenmensch (Lionman) of Hohlenstein-Stadel
Cave, a fantastical sculpture nearly 40,000 years
old. The original Lwenmensch fragments
some 200 of themwere discovered in 1939,
on the eve of World War II, by Robert Wetzel,
a professor of anatomy at Tbingen University,
and a geologist named Otto Vlzing. Wetzel had
hoped to work on the pieces of mammoth tusk
when the war ended, but they sat untouched
in a box for 30 years. Then, in 1969, archaeologist Joachim Hahn (Continued on page 56)
first artists

36,000

Discovered in 1994, the Horse Panel and the other stunning

creations in the Cave of Chauvet-Pont-dArc provide an
extraordinary testimony to mans rst steps in the adventure
of art, says Frances Minister of Culture Fleur Pellerin.

40,000

Part human, part lion, the foot-tall gurine from Germanys

Hohlenstein-Stadel Cave was pieced together from some
200 fragments found in 1939. Recent excavations have
added new pieces to the chimeric creation.
YVONNE MHLEIS, STATE OFFICE FOR CULTURAL HERITAGE IN RP STUTTGART

36,000

Later Paleolithic artists mostly depicted herbivores, but

the Chauvet painters often featured erce predators, like
these in the famous Great Panel. In June 2014 UNESCO
voted to designate Chauvet Cave as a World Heritage site.
PANORAMA COMPOSED OF EIGHT IMAGES

THE
BIRTH
OF
ART

MIDDLE PALEOLITHIC/MIDDLE STONE AGE

First impressions

When did art begin? Some scientists regard strikingly sy

axes produced at least a half million years ago as expre
function. But objects created purely for their symbolic o
much younger, appearing rst in Africa and the Middle E

Human and
animal gures
Objects like the volcanic rock
from Israel (left) and a similar
one from Morocco dated to
between 500,000 and 300,000
years ago, may be the earliest
depictions of the human form
or merely natural objects with
suggestive curves.
VENUS OF BEREKHAT RAM
ISRAEL
ACTUAL SIZE

265,000 YEARS AGO

Pigments and
cave art
Pigments turn up at archaeological
sites as old as 300,000 years, but
their use is unknown. Processing
kits discovered in South Africa in
2008, including pigments, shell
containers, and tools, were likely
used to produce colorful paints for
body decoration or skin protection.
ABALONE SHELL CONTAINER
BLOMBOS CAVE, SOUTH AFRICA
6 IN

100,000

HANDPRINT
LEANG TIMPUSENG C

40,00
00
The rst anatomically modern people evolved in Africa
some 200,000 years ago, but undisputed evidence of modern
human behaviorbody ornaments, symbols scratched on
ocher, more complex toolsdoes not begin to
appear for another 100,000 years. Stenciled handprints, such
as the one above from El Castillo Cave in Spain, at least
37,000 years old, send a timeless message: Like you,
I am human. I am alive. I was here.

Personal expression
Sea snail shell beads, with carefully
drilled holes, may have been strung
on clothes or necklaces. A delicate,
engraved eggshell (right) required
practiced artistry. Found from Israel
to South Africa, such ornaments
constitute the rst clear evidence
of self-expression.
SHELL BEAD
BLOMBOS CAVE, SOUTH AFRICA
0.5 IN

ENGRAVE
VED OSTRICH E
KLIPDRIFT SHELTER,
SH
SOUTH AFRICA
A
1 IN

75,000

63,000
0

HANDPRINT (AT LEFT): STEPHEN ALVAREZ; DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, CULTURE, AND SPORT
MEIDAD SUCHOWOLSKI, ISRAEL MUSEUM. HILDE JENSEN, TBINGEN UNIVERSITY, GERMANY. M
WITWATERSRAND, SOUTH AFRICA, AND UNIVERSITY OF BERGEN, NORWAY; GRETHE MOELL PE
STEPHEN ALVAREZ, AT IZIKO MUSEUMS OF SOUTH AFRICA. STEPHEN ALVAREZ. MARIAN VANHA

UPPER PALEOLITHIC/LATE STONE AGE

Creative expansion
Beginning some 43,000 years ago, abstract and realistic art becomes more
widespread in Africa and Eurasia, appearing as far east as Indonesia by 40,000
0
years ago. Early Spanish cave art could be the work of Neanderthals. But by th
he
time of the great paintings of Chauvet Cave, only modern humans remained.

ymmetrical stone hand

essions of style as well as
or ornamental value are
East.

LION HEAD (IVORY)

VOGELHERD CAVE,
GERMANY
1 IN
HORSE (IVORY)
VOGELHERD CAVE, GERMANY
2 IN

35,000

35,000

First
portrait

Firstt ceramic
re
gure

HEAD (IVOR
RY)
DOLN
VSTONICE
E,
CZECH
REPUBLIC
2 IN

VENU
US OF
DOLN
VST
TONICE,
CZECH
CH
REPUBLIC
4.5 IN

BISON (IVORY)
ZARAYSK, RUSSIA
4 IN

26,00
00

26,000

20,000

Handprints
prehistoric
seles?made by
blowing pigments
are a common
feature of Upper
Paleolithic art in
caves in Europe.
The earliest
known example is
from a cave on
the Indonesian
island of Sulawesi
(Celebes).

AVE, INDONESIA

EGGS
EG
SHELL

Neande
erthals had
style to
too. A fox
tooth
th, drilled
per
erhaps to hang
fro
rom a necklace, is
one of many
o
ornaments from
deposits in a cave
that also yielded
Neanderthal tools.
FOX TOOTH ORNAMENT
GROTTE DU RENNE,
FRANCE
1 IN

LIONS FROM GREAT PANEL

CAVE OF CHAUVET-PONT-DARC, FRANCE

ANIMAL ON PAINTED TABLET

APOLLO 11 CAVE, NAMIBIA

RED COW AND HORSE

LASCAUX CAVE, FRANCE

36,000

27,000
,

19,000

First instrument

First writing

GRIFFON VULTURE BONE FLUTE

HOHLE FELS CAVE, GERMANY
8.6 IN (BELOW)

BEADS (IVORY) DOLN

VSTONICE, CZECH REPUBLIC
UP TO 0.7 IN

FLYING BIRD PENDANT (IVORY)

MALTA, RUSSIA
4.6 IN

40,000

2 00
26,000

20,000

Early writing, as
on this cuneiform
tablet recording
barley distribution,
does not appear
until well after the
beginning of
agriculture.

CUNEIFORM WRITING
ON CLAY TABLET, IRAQ
2 IN

5,000

43,000

T OF THE GOVERNMENT OF CANTABRIA, SPAIN. TOP ROW (FROM LEFT):

MIDDLE ROW: CHRISTOPHER HENSHILWOOD, UNIVERSITY OF THE
EDERSEN. MAXIME AUBERT, GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY, AUSTRALIA. BOTTOM ROW:
EREN

TOP ROW (FROM LEFT): H. ZWIETASCH, WRTTEMBERG STATE MUSEUM, STUTTGART, GERMANY. MORAVIAN MUSEUM/ANTHROPOS INSTITUTE, CZECH REPUBLIC (2). H. AMIRKHANOV,
S. LEV, ZARAYSK KREMLIN MUSEUM, RUSSIA. MIDDLE ROW: STEPHEN ALVAREZ. R. F. RIFKIN, UNIVERSITY OF BERGEN, NORWAY. SISSE BRIMBERG, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE.
BOTTOM ROW: HILDE JENSEN, TBINGEN UNIVERSITY, GERMANY (FLUTE). MORAVIAN MUSEUM/ANTHROPOS INSTITUTE (BEADS). KIRIL SHAPOVALOV STATE HERMITAGE MUSEUM,
ST. PETERSBURG (PENDANT). METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART/ART RESOURCE, NY (TABLET)

pulled them out and began to piece them

together like a three-dimensional puzzle.
As he did, an extraordinary work of art
emerged. At nearly a foot high, the Lwenmensch dwarfs all other carvings so far discovered in the German valleys. But what makes
it particularly interesting, says Claus-Joachim
Kind, an archaeologist at the State Office for
Cultural Heritage in Baden-Wrttemberg, is that
it depicts for the first time a creature that was
completely imaginary, part man and part lion.
Its creation required not only an unusually inventive mind, but also impressive technical skills
and an enormous amount of timean estimated
400 hours. This is not something you do in the
evening after work, says Kind.
You can feel the power of the figure when you
look at it, the seamless melding of a stately human and a ferocious animal. Does the sculpture
reflect a wish to bestow a lions power on a human? Or could it represent a shamans special
ability to straddle the spiritual worlds of human
and animal? Hohlenstein-Stadel is the only cave
in the region where archaeologists have found
no everyday tools, bones, or rubbish. It is deeper than the other caves too. Its not difficult to
imagine that within its chambers early hunters
venerated the Lionman and that HohlensteinStadel Cave was an early locus of prehistoric
religion. This was a holy place, says Kind.
Conard thinks these people possessed
minds as fully modern as ours and, like us,
sought in ritual and myth answers to lifes
mysteries, especially in the face of an uncertain
world. Who governs the migration of the herds,
grows the trees, shapes the moon, turns on the
stars? Why must we die, and where do we go afterward? They wanted answers, he says, but
they didnt have any science-based explanations
for the world around them.
Soon after modern humans arrived in Europe,
the continents long-term residents began to die
out. The Neanderthals had emerged in Eurasia
some 200,000 years earlier. Very little evidence
remains that they engaged in symbolic behavior. But the traditional view of Neanderthals as

national geo graphic january

brutish beings incapable of such behavior has

been slowly chipped away. Having never reached
the population densities that may have triggered
the appearance of symbolism in Africa, Neanderthals may never have had much need for it,
or revealed it in ways we dont yet understand.
For decades the debate over the Neanderthals
ability to rise to the standards of their successors
centered on a site in France called Grotte du
Renne, where artifacts normally associated with
Upper Paleolithic modern humansbone tools,

IT IS ALMOST AS IF
SOME ANIMALS WERE
ALREADY IN THE ROCK,
WAITING TO BE
REVEALED BY THE
ARTISTS CHARCOAL
AND PAINT.
distinctive stone blades, and pierced and grooved
animal teeth probably worn as pendantswere
found along with Neanderthal remains. Some
researchers reasoned that although the Neanderthals may have been responsible for this tool
tradition (known as the Chtelperronian), they
were still a species capable only of emulating the
fancy craftsmanship of their new modern human
neighbors, not inventing it on their own.
The more we learn about Neanderthals, including their ability to interbreed with our direct ancestors, the more the copycat explanation for
the Chtelperronian sounds like special pleading.
The record for Neanderthal symbolic behavior
elsewhere may be faint, but it is discernible. Some
scholars argue that Neanderthal skeletons found
in France and Iraq were deliberately buried. Cut
marks recently found on bird-wing bones hint
that Neanderthals used feathers for ornaments
up to 50,000 years ago, and a crisscross pattern
engraved at least 39,000 years ago in the rock of a
Neanderthal cave in Gibraltar suggests they could
think abstractly. And a single red disk painted

on a wall in El Castillo Cave in Spain was recently dated to about 41,000 years ago, tantalizingly close to a time when only Neanderthals are
known to have been in western Europe. Perhaps
they, not us, were the first cave artists.
But most of the cave paintings in southern
France and Spain were created after the Neanderthals disappeared. Why there? Why then? One
clue is the caves themselvesdeeper and more
extensive than the ones in the Ach and Lone
River Valleys of Germany or the rock shelters of
Africa. Tito Bustillo in northern Spain is a half
mile from one end to the other. El Castillo and
other caves on Monte Castillo dive, twist, and
turn into the ground like enormous corkscrews.
Frances Lascaux, Grotte du Renne, and Chauvet
run football fields deep into the rock, with multiple branches and cathedral-like chambers.
Perhaps the explosion of creativity we see on
the walls of these caverns was inspired in part by
their sheer depth and darknessor rather, the
interplay of light and dark. Illuminated by the
flickering light from fires or stone lamps burning animal grease, such as the lamps found in
Lascaux, the bumps and crevices in the rock walls
might suggest natural shapes, the way passing
clouds can to an imaginative child. In Altamira,
in northern Spain, the painters responsible for
the famous bison incorporated the humps and
bulges of the rock to give their images more life
and dimension. Chauvet features a panel of four
horse heads drawn over subtle curves and folds in
a wall of receding rock, accentuating the animals
snouts and foreheads. Their appearance changes
according to your perspective: One view presents perfect profiles, but from another angle the
horses noses and necks seem to strain, as if they
are running away from you. In a different chamber a rendering of cave lions seems to emerge
from a cut in the wall, accentuating the hunch
in one animals back and shoulders as it stalks its
unseen prey. As our guide put it, it is almost as if
some animals were already in the rock, waiting
to be revealed by the artists charcoal and paint.
In his book La Prhistoire du Cinma, filmmaker and archaeologist Marc Azma argues that
some of these ancient artists were the worlds first

animators, and that the artists superimposed

images combined with flickering firelight in the
pitch-black caves to create the illusion that the
paintings were moving. They wanted to make
these images lifelike, says Azma. He has recreated digital versions of some cave images that
illustrate the effect. The Lion Panel in Chauvets
deepest chamber is a good example. It features
the heads of ten lions, all seemingly intent on
their prey. But in the light of a strategically positioned torch or stone lamp, these ten lions might
be successive characterizations of just one lion,
or perhaps two or three, moving through a story,
much like the frames of a flip-book or animated
film. Beyond the lions stands a cluster of rhinoceroses. The head and horn of the top one are
repeated staccato-like six times, one image above
the other, as if thrusting upward, its whole body
shuddering with multiple outlines.
Azmas interpretation fits with that of eminent prehistorian Jean Clottesthe first scientist
to enter Chauvet, only days after its discovery.
Clottes believes the images in the cave were intended to be experienced much the way we view
movies, theater, or even religious ceremonies todaya departure from the real world that transfixed its audience and bound it in a powerful
shared experience. It was a show! says Clottes.
Thousands of years later you can still feel the
power of that show as you walk the chambers
of the cave, the sound of your own breath heavy
in your ear, the constant drip, drip of the water
falling from the walls and ceilings. In its rhythm
you can almost make out the thrum of ancient
music, the beat of the dance, as a storyteller casts
the light of a torch upon a floating image, and
enthralls the audience with a tale. j
MORE ONLINE

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VIDEO

The Search for the

Worlds Oldest Art

first artists

Twins Felix and Viva Torres, seven-and-a-half months old, take in the sights and sounds
of Greenwich Village in New York City. They hear two languages spoken at home.

A babys brain
needs love
to develop.
What happens in

THE
FIRST
YEAR
is profound.

Ginny Mooney comforts her adopted daughter, Lena,

in Fayetteville, Arkansas, after physical and speech
therapy. The six-year-old has behavioral and cognitive
decits, partly from neglect in a Ukrainian orphanage.
She is swaddled for her comfort.

By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee
Photographs by Lynn Johnson

n the late 1980s, when the

crack cocaine epidemic
was ravaging Americas
cities, Hallam Hurt, a neonatologist in Philadelphia,
worried about the damage
being done to children
born to addicted mothers. She and her colleagues,
studying children from low-income families,
compared four-year-olds whod been exposed to
the drug with those who hadnt. They couldnt
find any significant differences. Instead, what they
discovered was that in both groups the childrens
IQs were much lower than average. These little
children were coming in cute as buttons, and yet
their IQs were like 82 and 83, Hurt says. Average
IQ is 100. It was shocking.
The revelation prompted the researchers to
turn their focus from what differentiated the
two groups toward what they had in common:
being raised in poverty. To understand the childrens environment, the researchers visited their
homes with a checklist. They asked if the parents had at least ten books at home for the children, a record player with songs for them, and
toys to help them learn numbers. They noted
whether the parents spoke to the children in an
affectionate voice, spent time answering their
questions, and hugged, kissed, and praised them.
The researchers found that children who received more attention and nurturing at home
tended to have higher IQs. Children who were
more cognitively stimulated performed better on
language tasks, and those nurtured more warmly
did better on memory tasks.

national geo graphic january

Many years later, when the kids had entered

their teens, the researchers took MRI images of
their brains and then matched them up with the
records of how warmly nurtured the children
had been at both four and eight years old. They
found a strong link between nurturing at age
four and the size of the hippocampusa part of
the brain associated with memorybut found
no correlation between nurturing at age eight
and the hippocampus. The results demonstrated just how critically important an emotionally
supportive environment is at a very young age.
The Philadelphia study, published in 2010,
was one of the first to demonstrate that childhood experience shapes the structure of the developing brain. Since then, other studies have
shown a link between a babys socioeconomic
status and the growth of its brain. Despite coming prewired with mind-boggling capacities, the
brain depends heavily on environmental input
to wire itself further. Scientists are now discovering precisely how that development is molded
by the interplay between nature and nurture.
Peering inside childrens brains with new imaging tools, scientists are untangling the mystery
of how a child goes from being barely able to
see when just born to being able to talk, ride a
tricycle, draw, and invent an imaginary friend by
the age of five. The more scientists find out about
how children acquire the capacity for language,
numbers, and emotional understanding during
this period, the more they realize that the baby
brain is an incredible learning machine. Its futureto a great extentis in our hands.
If the metamorphosis of a cluster of cells into

Natasha Alvarez oats in a swimming hole in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, hoping

that a stress-free pregnancy will help her childs brain development in utero.

a suckling baby is one of lifes great miracles, so

is the transformation of that wobbly infant into
a walking, talking toddler capable of negotiating bedtime. While researching this story, I have
watched that miracle unfold before my eyes as
my daughter has gone from a fidgety bundle
with only a piercing cry signaling hunger to a
feisty three-year-old who insists on putting on
her sunglasses before stepping out of the house.
The blossoming of her mental and emotional
abilities has been a string of marvels, deepening my amazement at how deftly a babys brain
comes to grasp the world.
The milestones she has passed would be
recognizable to any parent. At two she knew
enough to realize that she didnt have to hold
my hand when walking on the sidewalk; she
would reach for my hand only when we were
about to cross the street. Around the same age,
she also learned to block the drain in the bathtub
with the ball of her footturning what was to
be a quick shower into a playful bath. Before
she turned three, she was holding lengthy conversations and coming up with rhymes: If the

candy tastes bad, Willy Wonka will be sad.

Despite millennia of child rearing, we have
only a limited understanding of how babies take
such gigantic strides in cognitive, linguistic, reasoning, and planning ability. The lightning pace
of development in these early years coincides
with the formation of a vast skein of neural circuits. At birth the brain has nearly a hundred
billion neurons, as many as in adulthood. As the
baby grows, receiving a flood of sensory input,
neurons get wired to other neurons, resulting in
some hundred trillion connections by age three.
Different stimuli and tasks, such as hearing a
lullaby or reaching for a toy, help establish different neural networks. Circuits get strengthened through repeated activation. The sheath
encasing nerve fibersmade of an insulating
material called myelinthickens along oftused pathways, helping electrical impulses
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee is writing a nonfiction book,
The Spy Who Couldnt Spell. Lynn Johnsons
feature, Vanishing Voices, in the July 2012 issue,
was on the worlds disappearing languages.
first year

Tiffany Painter spends a tender moment with her

six-month-old son, Taevon, at their home in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania. After a breakfast of rice cereal, fruit, and
juice, Taevon will watch music videos while his mother
takes online courses to further her education.

In Patricia Kuhls lab at the University of Washington, researchers study brain activity in
babies less than a year old using a magnetoencephalography device, which measures
the magnetic eld around a babys scalp, to reveal the pattern of neurons ring.

travel more quickly. Idle circuits die through

the severing of connections, known as synaptic
pruning. Between the ages of one and five, and
then again in early adolescence, the brain goes
through cycles of growth and streamlining, with
experience playing a key role in engraving the
circuits that will endure.
How nature and nurture combine to shape
the brain is nowhere more evident than in the
development of language ability. How much
of that comes hardwired, and how do babies
acquire the rest? To learn how researchers are
answering that question, I visit Judit Gervain, a
cognitive neuroscientist at Paris Descartes University who has spent the past decade probing
the linguistic acumen of children, ranging in age
from days to a few years. We meet on the steps of
Robert-Debr Hospital in Paris, where Gervain
is readying an experiment on newborns.
I follow her into a room down the hall from
the maternity ward. The mornings first subject is wheeled in on a cart, swaddled in a pink
polka-dot blanket, with dad in tow. A research
assistant slips a skullcap studded with buttonlike sensors onto the infants head. The plan is to
image the babys brain while playing a variety of
audio sequences, like nu-ja-ga. But before any
observations can begin, the baby emits a series
of high-pitched cries, making it known he isnt
going to submit. The assistant hurriedly removes
the cap, and the dad cradles the baby.
After they leave, Gervain, who had just become a mother a few months earlier, tells me
that such failures are not uncommon. Another newbornalso accompanied by dadis
wheeled in. Gervains assistant follows the same
protocol, and this time the observing goes off
without a hitch. The baby sleeps through it.
Gervain and her colleagues have used a similar
setup to test how good newborns are at discriminating between different sound patterns. Using
near-infrared spectroscopy, the researchers imaged the brains of babies while they heard audio
sequences. In some, the sounds were repeated in
an ABB structure, such as mu-ba-ba; in others, an
ABC structure, such as mu-ba-ge. The researchers

national geo graphic january

found that brain regions responsible for speech

and audio processing responded more strongly to
the ABB sequences. In a later study they found
that the newborn brain was also able to distinguish between audio sequences with an AAB pattern and those with an ABB pattern. Not only
could babies discern repetition, they also were
sensitive to where it occurred in the sequence.
Gervain is excited by these findings because
the order of sounds is the bedrock upon which
words and grammar are built. Positional information is key to language, she says. If something is at the beginning or at the end makes
a big difference: John killed the bear is very
different from The bear killed John.
That the baby brain responds from day one
to the sequence in which sounds are arranged
suggests that the algorithms for language learning are part of the neural fabric infants are born
with. For a long time we had this linear view.
First, babies are learning sounds, then they are
understanding words, then many words together, Gervain says. But from recent results, we
know that almost everything starts to develop
from the get-go. Babies are starting to learn
grammatical rules from the beginning.
Researchers led by Angela Friederici, a neuropsychologist at the Max Planck Institute for
Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig,
Germany, have found evidence of such comprehension in an experiment with four-month-old
German babies exposed to an unfamiliar language. The children first heard a series of Italian
sentences representing two types of construction:
The brother can sing and The sister is singing.
After three minutes they listened to another set of
Italian sentences, some of which were grammatically incorrect, along the lines of The brother is
sing and The sister can singing. During this
phase the researchers measured the infants brain
activity using tiny electrodes placed on the scalp.
In the first round of testing the babies showed a
similar brain response to both correct and incorrect sentences. A few rounds of training later, the
infants exhibited very different activation patterns
when they heard erroneous constructions.
In just 15 minutes the babies appeared to have

Neural Network

The brain begins developing in the womb and achieves dramatic levels
of growth during the rst few years of life. During this time positive
experiences contribute to building a strong brain architecture.

INTO ADULTHOOD

THE FIRST YEAR

The infant brain has many more synapses

than the adult brain. These connections
rapidly increase after birth, then begin a
natural decline as the brain specializes.
Active connections reinforced by experience stabilize, while weak ones disappear.

Number of
connections
(synapses)
in the brain

E
GH
HI

IV
E

FU
NC
T

IO
N

RY
SO
EN
LA
NG
UA
GE

Peak

IT
N
G
O
C

Adult level
of synapses

0
-4

Birth

1 year

MONTHS

Over time a child

acquires increasingly
complex skills.

Vision
Hearing
Touch

10
YEARS

Symbols, ideas
Social relationships
Verbal ability

Critical thinking
Reective thinking
Considered response

GRAPHIC: LAWSON PARKER. SOURCES: CHARLES NELSON, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL; PAT LEVITT, CHILDRENS HOSPITAL LOS ANGELES.
SYNAPSE DRAWINGS BASED ON GOLGI STAIN PREPARATIONS (19391967) BY J. L. CONEL

15

20

Julien Inzodda conducts a tutorial on spices in her

kitchen in Pittsburgh to stimulate her 20-month-old
daughter, Allie. Its a playful opportunity for the toddler to
learn about color, texture, and taste. Allies favorite is the
pepper sauce, which she describes as hot, hot, hot.

In the neonatal intensive care unit at Texas Childrens Hospital in Houston,

ve-month-old Lucas Guidry watches as mom Sydney (center) holds up a mirror.
Children born prematurely or with an illness are at risk for cognitive delays.

absorbed what was correct. Somehow they

must have learned it, despite not comprehending the meaning of the sentences, Friederici tells
me. At this point its not syntax. Its phonologically encoded regularity.
Researchers have shown that children around
two and a half years old are savvy enough to correct grammatical mistakes made by puppets. By
the age of three most children seem to master
a considerable number of grammatical rules.
Their vocabulary burgeons. This flowering of
language ability comes about as new connections are made among neurons, so that speech
can be processed on multiple levels: sound,
meaning, and syntax. Scientists have yet to unveil the precise map followed by the infant brain
on the path to linguistic fluency. But whats clear,
in the words of Friederici, is this: The equipment alone is not enough. You also need input.
On my way to Leipzig to interview Friederici,
my attention is drawn to a mother and her young
son, engaging in conversation on a shuttle bus
at the Munich airport. What do you see in the
distance? the mother asks as the bus takes us

national geo graphic january

from the terminal to the aircraft. I see a lot of

planes! the kid exults, bouncing. Seated in a
row ahead of me on the flight, the two keep up
an unflaggingly spirited exchange. The woman
stops to answer the boys every question as she
reads him one picture book after another, drawing on what seems like a limitless reservoir of
enthusiasm. When we land, I learn that the mom,
Merle Fairhurst, is a cognitive neuroscientist who
studies child development and social cognition.
It isnt surprising that she is determined to apply
the emerging research on how stimulation can
help the developing brain.
More than two decades ago Todd Risley and
Betty Hart, both child psychologists then at the
University of Kansas in Lawrence, recorded hundreds of hours of interactions between children
and adults in 42 families from across the socioeconomic spectrum, following the kids from the
age of nine months to three years.
Studying the transcripts of these recordings, Risley and Hart made a surprising discovery. Children in well-off familieswhere
the parents were typically college-educated

professionalsheard an average of 2,153 words

an hour spoken to them, whereas children in
families on welfare heard an average of 616
words. By the age of four this difference translated to a cumulative gap of some 30 million words.
Parents in poorer homes tended to make shorter,
more perfunctory comments, like Stop that,
and Get down, whereas parents in wealthier
homes had extended conversations with their
kids about a variety of topics, encouraging them
to use their memory and imagination. The kids
in low socioeconomic families were being raised
on a poor linguistic diet.
The amount of talking parents did with their
children made a big difference, the researchers
found. The kids who were spoken to more got
higher scores on IQ tests at age three. They also

Critical Years

in a foreign language, while getting better at discriminating between native language sounds.
Japanese children, for example, are no longer
able to distinguish between l and r sounds.
In their study the researchers exposed ninemonth-olds from English-speaking families to
Mandarin. Some of the children interacted with
native Chinese-speaking tutors, who played with
them and read to them. The babies were entranced by these tutors, Kuhl says. In the waiting room they would watch the door for their
tutors to come in. Another group of children
saw and heard the same Mandarin-speaking
tutors through a video presentation. And a
third group heard only the audio track. After
all the children had been through 12 sessions,
they were tested on their ability to discriminate

Institutionalized children

Never institutionalized

The amount of brain activity in the earliest years

affects how much there is later in life. These EEG
scans of eight-year-olds show that institutionalized children who were not moved to a nurturing
foster care environment before they were two
years old have less activity than those who were.
Brain electrical activity
Lower

Higher

Moved to foster care

After age 2

performed better in school at ages nine and ten.

Exposing children to more words would seem
simple enough. But language delivered by television, audio book, Internet, or smartphoneno
matter how educationaldoesnt appear to do
the job. Thats what researchers led by Patricia
Kuhl, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, learned from a study of ninemonth-old children.
Kuhl and her colleagues were exploring a key
puzzle of language acquisition: how babies home
in on the phonetic sounds of their native language
by the age of one. In the first few months of their
lives, babies show a knack for discriminating between sounds in any language, native or foreign.
Between six and 12 months of age, however, they
start losing the ability to make such distinctions
SOURCE: CHARLES NELSON, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL

Moved to foster care

Before age 2

between similar phonetic sounds in Mandarin.

The researchers expected the children whod
watched the videos to show the same kind of
learning as the kids tutored face-to-face. Instead
they found a huge difference. The children exposed to the language through human interactions were able to discriminate between similar
Mandarin sounds as well as native listeners. But
the other infantsregardless of whether they
had watched the video or listened to the audio
showed no learning whatsoever.
We were blown away, Kuhl says. It changed
our fundamental thinking about the brain.
The result of this and other studies led Kuhl to
propose what she calls the social gating hypothesis: the idea that social experience is a portal to
linguistic, cognitive, and emotional development.
first year

Tyler Quebodeaux, a single parent, struggles to raise

his three children, aged 20 months to four years, in
Springeld, Oregon. Quebodeaux is attending a program at the University of Oregon to learn how to
provide better nurturing and stimulation for his kids.

At a Waldorf School on Whidbey Island northwest of

Seattle, children play on bales of straw while teachers
supervise. The schools philosophy is that free play is
essential for physical, cognitive, linguistic, and social
development in young children.

After gaining power in Romania in the mid1960s, the communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu
implemented drastic measures to transform the
country from an agricultural society into an
industrial one. To increase the population, the
regime limited contraception and abortion, and
imposed a tax on couples older than 25 who
were childless. Thousands of families moved
from villages to cities to take jobs at govern-

When the researchers conducted an EEG test

of the childrens brains, they found that these
signals were weaker than the signals recorded
from similarly aged children in the general population. It was as if a dimmer switch had been
used to turn their brain activity down, Fox says.
He and his colleagues then placed half of the
kids with foster families that they picked with
the help of social workers. The remaining kids

The baby brain is an incredible

learning machine. Its futureto a great
extentis in our hands.
ment factories. These policies led many parents
to abandon their newborn children, who were
then placed in a state-run institution called a
leaganthe Romanian word for cradle.
It was only after Ceausescu was deposed in
1989 that the outside world saw the horrific
conditions in which these children were living. As babies, they were left in cribs for hours.
Typically their only human contact was when
a caregivereach responsible for 15 to 20 childrencame to feed or bathe them. As toddlers,
they hardly received any attention. The system
of institutionalized care was slow to change, and
in 2001, U.S. researchers began a study of 136
children from six institutions to investigate the
impact of neglect on their development.
The researchersled by Charles Zeanah, a
child psychiatrist at Tulane University; Nathan
Fox, a developmental psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Maryland; and Charles
Nelson, a neuroscientist at Harvardwere struck
by the childrens aberrant behaviors. Many of the
kids, less than two years old when the study began, showed no attachment to their caregivers.
When upset, they wouldnt go to the caregivers.
Instead, they showed these almost feral behaviors that we had never seen beforeaimlessly
wandering around, hitting their heads against the
floor, twirling and freezing in one place, Fox says.

national geo graphic january

stayed at the institutions. The foster families received a monthly stipend, books, toys, diapers
and other supplies, as well as periodic visits by
the social workers.
Fox and his colleagues followed the children
over the next several years and saw dramatic
differences emerge between the groups. At age
eight the children placed with foster families at
age two or earlier showed EEG brain patterns
that were indistinguishable from those of typical
eight-year-olds. The kids who had remained at
the institutions continued to have weaker EEGs.
Although all the children in the study had smaller brain volumes than similarly aged kids in the
general population, the ones who received foster
care had more white matteraxons connecting neuronsthan the institutionalized kids. It
suggests that there were more neuronal connections made in the children who experienced the
intervention, Fox explains.
The most striking difference between the two
sets of childrenevident by the age of fourwas
in their social abilities. We find that many of
the children who were put into our intervention, particularly the children who were taken
out of institutions early, could now relate to their
caregiver in the way that a typical child would,
Fox says. Theres enough plasticity in the brain
early in life that allows children to overcome

negative experiences. And that, Fox says, is the

best news: Some of the debilitating effects of
early deprivation can be addressed with appropriate nurturing, as long as it is provided within
a critical period of development.
A parental training program led by neuroscientist Helen Neville at the University of Oregon in Eugene aims to do just that. The researchers sign up participants from among families
enrolled in Head Start, a U.S. government program that gives a leg up to preschoolers from
low-income families. Parents or care providers
come in for a class every week over a two-month
period. In the first few classes they get tips on
lowering the stress involved in the day-to-day
care of children. As any parent can testify, these
stresses can at times be overwhelming to even the
most Zen-like among us, and they can feel even
more burdensome to parents dealing with financial worries. You find yourself on edge because
you dont have certain things, says Patricia Kycek,
a Eugene mom whos taken the classes.
Parents learn to emphasize positive reinforcement, expressing praise for specific accomplishments. We encourage them to shift the focus
from scolding your child every time they are
doing something wrong to noticing every time
they are doing something right, explains Sarah
Burlingame, a former parent instructor. In later
weeks parents learn how to stimulate the child.
In one activity that they are encouraged to try
at home, the parent asks the child to pick out
various objectsa spoon, a bottle, a penand
guess which will float and which will sink. Then
the child gets to test each prediction in a bucket
of water or in the bathtub.
The children receive training in attention
and self-control in a 40-minute session every week. They work on focusing on a task in
the midst of distractionsfor instance, coloring inside the lines of figures while other kids
bounce balloons all around. Instructors also
teach them to better identify their emotions
through a game called Emotional Bingo, in
which children match states like happy and
sad with facial expressions. In some later

classes the kids learn to practice calming techniques, like taking a deep breath when they
are upset.
At the end of the eight weeks the researchers evaluate the kids on language, nonverbal IQ,
and attention. Through a questionnaire given
to the parents, they also assess how the kids are
doing behaviorally. In a paper published in July
2013, Neville and her colleagues reported that
kids in Head Start who received the intervention showed significantly higher increases on
these measures than those who did not. Parents reported experiencing much lower stress
in managing their children. When you change
parenting and stress level goes down, that leads
to increased emotional regulation and better
cognition for the kids, Neville says.
Tana Argo, a young mother of four, decided
to go through the program to make sure she
wouldnt subject her children to the kind of neglect that she had suffered as a child. I grew
up with a lot of stress and drama, she says. I
told myself, Im going to remember this with my
kids. This wont happen to my kids.
What she learnedshe sayshas altered the
familys dynamic, creating more time for play
and learning. When I visit her at home one afternoon, she describes how happy she felt a few days
earlier when she saw her four-year-old daughterthe youngestplop down on the carpet to
thumb through a childrens encyclopedia. As Im
leaving, I notice the encyclopedia resting on top
of a stack of books, most of them for children.
In the best of circumstances, that stack would
perhaps serve as a wall against the generational
dominoes of poverty and neglect, helping Argos
kids build a future that she never had a shot at. j
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first year

Bursting with a
get-rich spirit
that has made
Nigerias economy
the continents
largest, Lagos
is Africas

FIRST
CITY

Almaz relishes the

growing cultural scene
in Lagos. Here she poses
at the African Artists
Foundation. Lagos is
a very bubbly society,
she says. If you want to
make something happen
really, really bad, come
to Lagos. It will happen,
trust me.

At the end of the workday, vans crowd

into Idumota Market on Lagos Island to
pick up workers returning home to the
mainland, where most Lagosians live.

Young businessmen of the Cigar Club of

Lagos, who are part of the citys rapidly
growing upper class, savor a moment of
relaxation at a hotel on Victoria Island.

Vendors hawk goods at one of many

markets on Lagos Island, demonstrating
the entrepreneurial fervor that has made
Nigerias economy Africas most vibrant.

Lakowe Lakes Golf and Country Estate,

a gated residential community, offers a
posh retreat for the wealthy not far from
the frenzied commercial center.

By Robert Draper
Photographs by Robin Hammond

WHEN HE WAS 15 YEARS OLD,

David Adeoti worked in an Internet caf in bluecollar Satellite Town, where it was almost possible
to see the gleaming towers of Lagos Island less
than ten miles to the east.
Satellite Town was a step up for Adeoti. His
birthplace was off to the north in Orile, a
wretched village of flooded streets and collapsing buildings. Technology had provided his way
out. The Internet caf in Satellite Town was run
as a side business by a banker, who saw that the
boy had a natural facility for computerseven
the shops ancient desktops, which operated at
lurching speeds. The banker paid Adeoti a little
more than $200 a month to run the place. Adeoti
spent his money on courses at a technical institute, determined that the Internet caf would
not be the end of the line for him.
One day in 2010 the shops customers looked
up from the computers to see who had just
walked in the door with the mannered British
accent. His name was Jason Njoku, a bespectacled 30-year-old Londoner who had relocated
to his ancestral homeland of Nigeria. Njoku
asked Adeoti if he could scan some documents.
While Adeoti operated the scanner, the genteel
visitor mentioned that he was trying to find investors for a new business venture and asked the

Robert Drapers last story for the magazine was on

rethinking Romes Emperor Nero. Robin Hammonds
book Condemned: Mental Health in African
Countries in Crisis has won numerous awards.

national geo graphic january

Internet caf manager if he enjoyed his job. They

exchanged cell phone numbers. A few months
later Adeoti inquired about a job and was invited
to Njokus apartment. Adeoti walked inside to
find six young men wedged behind desks with
computer cables snaked around their feet as they
typed. This, Njoku informed Adeoti, was his new
business: an indigenous version of Netflix that
would stream movies to Nigerian computers
and bring Nigerian movies to the world. Njoku
needed someone like Adeoti to convert Nollywood DVDs into a YouTube format. As was
evident by the cramped environs, the project
was perilously low on money. Adeoti signed on
anyway, thinking, Its going to sell itself.
When I met David Adeoti in spring 2014,
he was 24 and wearing an elegant knit shirt
and designer jeans while sitting behind a Mac
laptop in the sleek three-story office that now
houses iROKOtv in Lagos. Njokus company
has about 80 employees, with additional offices in Johannesburg, London, and New York
City. Adeoti makes twice the salary he made as
the manager at the Internet caf. But all this
exposure to money and movies had whetted
his appetite for more of both. I plan on starting my own businesssomething in the film
industry, he told me. He was saving money
to travel to Hollywood. He wants to be a cinematographerand perhaps one day, a Nollywood
studio executive.
Its a very far distance from middle class to

Tobi Ajike, 6, and brother Tomi, 7, attend private school close to their home in Mende Villa Estate
in an upscale area of mainland Lagos. Their father is an architect, their mother a businesswoman.
Asked to describe his city, Tobi says, My Lagos is wonderful, beautiful, lovely, very busy.

being rich, Adeoti said. With a widening grin, he

added, But the middle class, we strive. Everyone
is very desperate to be very rich these days.
Almost anywhere else in the developing
world, such a sentiment would seem pitiably delusional. In Lagos, Nigerias commercial center,
Be Very Rich has all but become the citys motto. The country recently recalculated its gross

African nation teeming with industrious strivers

like Adeoti but also with poverty, despair, and
violence. If anything, the miracle of Lagos is that
its economy gallops onward even when fettered
by the same federal incompetence that allows
terrorism to go unchecked. A lesser city would
be crippled. Then again, in a sense so is Lagos.
Nigerias problem and Lagoss problem is its

LAGOS HAS LONG NURTURED

an elite class only marginally inconvenienced by the
squalor enveloping the city as a whole.
domestic product to take into account sectors
of the economy that barely existed two decades
ago. As a result, Nigeria determined that its GDP
surpassed South Africas in 2012 to become the
continents largest economy. About 15,700 millionaires and a handful of billionaires live in
Nigeria, more than 60 percent of them in Lagos.
As with other African metropolises, oilenriched Lagos has long nurtured an elite class
only marginally inconvenienced by the squalor
enveloping the city as a whole. Now the upper
class is expanding, and despite persistent income
inequality, so is the middle class. The growth of
the latter in Nigeria, according to a 2013 survey
by Ciuci Consulting, a strategy and marketing
firm in Lagos, is driven by the expanding banking, telecommunications, and services sectors,
particularly in Lagos. Nigerias middle class grew
from 480,000 in 1990 to 4.1 million in 2014, or
11 percent of households. Seemingly overnight,
Lagos has transformed itself into a city of Davids
clamoring to become Goliaths.
This is a great African success story. And how
lovely it would be to tell this bright, uplifting tale
while ignoring altogether the dark and demoralizing saga of Nigerias grotesque terrorists, which
has blocked the boomtown narrative from the
worlds consciousness like a lunar eclipse. But Lagos does not exist in a parallel universe, any more
than the Islamic extremist group Boko Haram
does. Both are indigenous to Nigeria, a vast West

national geo graphic january

image. Thats the chief problem. Youd think you

were in a war zone in Afghanistan when you
read what you read about here! But tell me: Have
you felt any threat?
No, I confessed to Kola Karim, the dashing 45-year-old multimillionaire and CEO of
Shoreline Energy International, a food/energy/
telecommunications/construction conglomerate
with more than 3,000 employees. I felt quite safe
in Lagosa pleasant surprise, given that I had
boarded my flight to the city on the same day
that dozens were killed in a bomb blast at a bus
depot in the capital city of Abuja. It was the latest
in a string of terrorist episodes for which Boko
Haram had taken credit. But Lagos had been
spared from such incidents, so far. The violence
felt a country awaylike a bad dream washed
from memory after a mornings shower.
Look, I was invited to the White House a few
weeks ago, Karim went on, his British-educated
diction edged with exasperation. There were
21 of usyoung global leaders of the World
Economic Forum. I told them, Youre always
viewing things from a national security angle
rather than commercial viability. You invite
African businessmen over, and all you want to
know about is al Qaeda. Why are you wasting
my time to come all the way here to listen to the
same old gibberish?
Karim makes it his business to evangelize about
the Lagos miracle in which he has played a notable

A F R I C A

Lagos, Nigerias
largest city and its
commercial center,
lies on the Atlantic
Ocean and hugs
Lagos Lagoon. The
main business districts are on Lagos
and Victoria Islands.

Urban area

NIGERIA
AREA
ENLARGED

ORILE
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Lagos
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BANANA ISLAND

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Victoria
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Gulf of Guinea

role. Later in the day a French TV station would

be filming Karim playing polo as a way of showcasing the citys prosperity. The following week he
would be at the Milken Institute in Santa Monica,
giving a speech about Africas power sector. Karim
has delivered similar talks at Harvard and Yale,
part of what he refers to as his moral duty to
promote Nigeria and Lagos. When I joked that
he could be making big money on the speaking
circuit, the Lagos entrepreneur solemnly replied,
I will start charging money when the world has
heard our story.
Here is the story, in brief. Following centuries
of tribal rule by territorial kings and emperors
and 99 years of British colonial rule, Nigeria
achieved independence in 1960 and was intermittently ruled by military heads of state until 1999,
when it at last achieved a rickety state of democracy. Among its 36 states, Lagoswhich includes
the sprawling port city of the same namewas
ever the countrys center of power, even when the
federal capital was relocated in 1991 to Abuja,
a 450-mile drive away. Still, Lagos deteriorated
under decades of military rule. Its schools, roads,
and hospitals went to seed. Western investors
kept their distance. When Karim returned from
England to his birthplace in 1996 to build on the
RYAN MORRIS, NGM STAFF. SOURCE: OPENSTREETMAP

family cocoa business, there were very few of his

kind, because, he told me, it wasnt an open
economy, and financial services were few. Back
then the total capital of a bank was maybe two
million dollars. Imagine you want to do business
in Lagos. How much can a bank like that possibly
lend you? Fast-forward to todaytheyll lend you
up to $500 million!
What happened to Lagos stemmed from
a convergence of two phenomena. First, after
knowing only political incompetence, the newly
democratized Lagosians elected a pair of remarkably consequential state governors: former
accountant Bola Tinubu in 1999, and in 2007 his
handpicked successor, Babatunde Fashola, who
has been credited with helping quash an Ebola
outbreak in Lagos. The two executives restored
some fiscal sanity to Lagos while investing in
bridges and expressways. Meanwhile a reverse
diaspora transpired as native Nigerians began
to return home. When the worldwide recession
foreclosed opportunity in Europe and America,
Lagos offered itself as a new frontier for ambitious entrepreneurs. One of them, Lanre Akinlagun, told me, Back in the U.K., all of my friends
started moving back to Lagos. When theyd return to visit, wed meet in a bar, and theyd buy a
africas first cit y

round of shots. But then later theyd come back

and order up bottles of the most expensive stuff.
I told myself, OK, somethings going on here.
On the Atlantic coast and consisting of a
slab of mainland around a lagoon and several
islands, Lagos today is an ad hoc ecosystem
thrashing with wealth seekers. Tourism is largely
absent hereone comes to Lagos strictly to do
businessand yet at the same time it is a strangely
inviting place, a city of optimists.
That is not to suggest that life in Lagos is a
smooth ride. As with all boomtowns, the city is at
pains to keep up with itself. Lagoss population is
growing so fast and is so transient that its impossible to estimate the number of inhabitants more
precisely than between 13 million and 18 million.
The hubs of commerce are the two small islands
of Lagos and Victoria, and only the very wealthy
can afford to live there. While developers swoop
down on every last sliver of marshland, forest, and
landfill (and in the case of the ultra-elite planned
city of Eko Atlantic, 3.5 square miles of land recovered from the ocean), ambitious Lagosians
struggle to reconcile their status consciousness
with the absurd price of central housing and the
20 percent interest that banks commonly charge
for mortgage loans. Invariably, Lagosians settle on
a flat somewhere on the mainland, which means
enduring commutes through grinding traffic that
can exceed two hours each way. Or it means waiting out the gridlock over beers and cigars with
fellow young Turks at a bar somewhere on the
islandsa fraternal spectacle as endemic to Lagos
as the traffic snarls themselves.
I sat one late afternoon in one of those bars
with a half dozen well-dressed bankers in their
30s, a daily congregation of gentlemen who have
perfected the art of boozy time-wasting. One of
them, an especially talkative fellow, told me that
a flat on the island would cost four times the
amount he had paid for his house on the mainland. If I had the right kind of income, of course
Id live on the island, he said. If I lived on the
island, Id go home, check my boys homework
assignments, play some computer games with
them, maybe take my wife out for dinner. During the week I cant do that.

national geo graphic january

Thousands live and work in the sawmill district on mainland Lagos, a patchwork of workshops
and shanties that twice in recent years has been devastated by res. The towers where
Nigerias wealth is made loom across Lagos Lagoon behind the Third Mainland Bridge.

Girls wash dishes and boil peanuts (top) to sell at a decaying housing complex, one of many
cheaply built, low-cost neighborhoods constructed by the Lagos state government more than
three decades ago. In a tiny classroom tucked into a row of shops, Innocent Lewis teaches
adults how to type on keyboards, to improve their job prospects.

The young banker then laughed off his predicament and called out for another round.
A recent survey of middle-class Nigerians
conducted by Renaissance Capital, an investment bank, found that 76 percent of them are
optimistic about the countrys future. Sunniness
of outlook has deep roots in Nigeria, particularly

a young man who, at 18, became an unpaid

apprentice to an electrician and worked odd
jobs to survive. For a time he slept in a bus stop.
He owned what he was wearing and nothing
else. After about four years Chiagozie scraped
together enough money to rent a tiny house
in the mixed-income neighborhood of Ojota,
where he had apprenticed. Save, save, save: Ive

AN AD HOC ECOSYSTEM
thrashing with wealth seekers, Lagos is a strangely
inviting place, a city of optimists.
so in Lagos, a land of traders and settlers, and
thus of industrious disposition. Lagosians believe themselves to be pluckier than the average West African. This is, if anything, a modest
self-assessment. The man I hired to drive me
around during my three weeks in Lagos, Daniel
Sunday, took me one day to the neighborhood
where he was born and raised: Makoko, a fetid
shantytown on stilts in Lagos Lagoon that is
mordantly referred to as the Venice of Africa.
Sunday told me that he left the shabby family
home when he was a teenager and found work
as a bus conductor. He slept on his bosss floor
and after a few years had accumulated enough
money to buy his first car. Now he was married,
with a residence on the mainland, and for two
hours each morning he uncomplainingly chauffeured customers like me around the commercial districts. The motto on Sundays business
card was In God I Trust.
If you give a Nigerian an opportunity, he
will do his best, a 36-year-old man named
Onyekachi Chiagozie proclaimed one hot afternoon as he proudly showed me his mobile electricians workshop. In truth, the hollowed-out
van with the cracked windshield wasnt much
to look at. Chiagozie had bought the used van
for about $4,300, and with it he could drive his
tools all over the city, an enabler and beneficiary
of Lagoss construction boom.
All of this was an improbable outcome for

made the sacrifice, and its started to pay off, he

recalled. I registered my company. People in
the area knew me. Id fix this socket or see why
that light wasnt turning on. The customers grew
to trust me. Then they started getting me good
jobs. Wiring whole houses. Fixing ATMs and
air conditioners. And because in Lagos its very
expensive to have an office, I decided to have the
first mobile workshop in the country.
The owner of the whimsically named Varied Pace Enterprises, Chiagozie beamed as he
told me that he was now married, with a threebedroom house in Ojota and a tract of land
outside the city that he deemed a prudent investment. He shepherded me through the neighborhood, pointing out the houses that he and his
two apprentices were currently wiring. The slum
child had broken through. Another Lagos success storybut an unfinished one, for this was
not nearly enough. Ive been making money,
the electrician told me, but the money is better across the bridge, on the island. And I dont
know the right people there yet.
Banke Meshida Lawal knows the right people. When I visited her at her beauty salon, BM
Pro, on Lagos Island, the young makeup artist
was applying a full makeover to a wealthy client who would soon be attending a wedding in
Chicago. Because Lawal herself could not break
away from her business to fly over for the event,
a colleague was videotaping the procedure, and a
africas first cit y

Cairo
Ca
Cai
C
aiiro
airo
r

EGYPT

SUDAN
Khartoum
Khh rt
Kha
K
rto
toouum
m

Kan
K
Kano
anoo
CTE
D'IVOIRE

NIGERIA

(IVORY COAST)

Lagos
LLag
a ooss

A F R I C A

Abidjan
Abbi
Abi
A
bidj
djan
ddja
jan

KENYA
Population density, 2013

Population

People per square mile

In millions

Nairobi
Nairob
Nai
Na
ro i
DEMOCRATIC
REPUBLIC OF THE

25

150-500

CONGO
TANZANIA

(projected)

25-149
1 to 24

Kinshasa
K sha
Kin
shasa
saa

Year
2030

More than 500

1990

Dar es Salaam

Luanda
a a

Less than 1

ANGOLA

Nigerias Rapid Rise

The population of Lagos, Nigerias business
center, is growing so fast censuses cant
keep up. Estimates put it at between
13 million and 18 million. The countrys
economy has shifted: Banking, telecommunications, and services are thriving;
mining is declining.

Johannesburg
Jooohann
JJoh
annnes
nnes
essburg
burg

$320.3
billion

SOUTH
AFRICA
Cape
Cape Town
Cap
C
Town
own

$522.6
billion*

Africas largest
economies: GDP

Nigeria

Current U.S. dollars

350.6

South
Africa
Egypt

272.0
210.2

Algeria
100

0
2000

2010

*GDP REVISED FROM 2010 ONWARD TO REFLECT

IMPROVED DATA SOURCES AND METHODOLOGY

2013

Nigerias
middle class

4.1

million

Nigerian
consumer
spending
Current U.S.
dollars

middle-class Nigerian
households in 2014

11%
7.6

of current population

$24.4
billion

million

additional
middle-class
households
expected by 2030

2000

2013

RYAN MORRIS, NGM STAFF. SOURCES: STANDARD BANK GROUP;

WORLD BANK; LANDSCAN; UNITED NATIONS POPULATION DIVISION

copy would be sent to one of Lawals beauty reps

in the United States, who would replicate the
makeover on the wedding day. Lawals onetime
fee was more than what it had cost Chiagozie to
buy his mobile electricians workshop.
The makeup artist shares with the electrician
a fierce entrepreneurial motor, though she began
with a leg up on the ladder. Lawals father was
a university lecturer, her mother a radiologist.
While studying English at the University of Lagos, she began doing other students makeup for
a small fee. There was nothing like makeup artistry back thenit was unheard of, she told me.
But when I was traveling to the U.K. on holiday,
Id buy all sorts of makeup, and I was addicted
to the girlie teenage magazines like Marie Claire
and Cosmo. My background was in fine arts, and
that helped me to put together colors and draw
lines. During her postcollegiate year of youth
service mandated by the Nigerian government,
Lawal decided to open a little cubicle in the affluent neighborhood of Ikoyi. In 2000 she did
the makeup for the women in the wedding of
the new presidents son. Press coverage followed.
She moved to a larger studio. More celebrities
requested her services, which now included hair
and nails. Today BM Pro has four branches and
32 employees. Banke Meshida Lawal has what
Onyekachi Chiagozie wants. She occupies the
dead center of island prosperity.
I know that what I do is ostentatious. Its
luxury, Lawal told me. Anyone can get by doing their own makeup themselves. But if they
want that something specialmake it go pow,
give it that extra thingthey come to me. This
is a cash economy, and there are people here
willing to pay the cash.
Smiling somewhat ruefully, the makeup
artist added, The gap is so great between rich
and poor. Im just glad to be on the receiving
end of the cash.
On a sunny Easter morning I climbed aboard
a motorboat docked at Victoria Island and rode
an hour along the coast outside of Lagos until the driver deposited me at the edge of a dirt
trail that led to a beach house crammed with

200 dancing, cognac-swilling young Lagosians.

Everyone was dressed entirely in white, as instructed by the party invitationat least until a
hard rain pummeled the patio, at which point
many stripped down to their swimsuits and
jumped in the pool. They all seemed to know
one another from the same nightclubs, or the
same business deals, or the same university back
in London, or Lawals beauty salon. Few if any
of them likely fraternized with aspiring laborers
like Chiagozie or knew the hard path he had
taken to the middle class.
I stood beside the hip-hop deejay for several
hours, observing this landscape of impervious
beauty and affluencea tableau that could just
as easily be taking place halfway around the
globe, in the Hollywood Hills or the Hamptons.
Where it could not be taking place, I found myself thinking, was more than 700 miles northeast, in the forests of northern Nigeria, where
roughly the same number of individualsyoung
schoolgirlswere being held hostage after Boko
Haram had kidnapped them six days earlier.
The moneyed and the maraudered. Within a
few days the New York Times T Magazine would
publish a lavish spread in celebration of the former (In Lagos, the 1% Takes Stock) even as
#bringbackourgirls hashtag activism sounded
alarms on behalf of the latter. How do the two
worlds coexist? How does Lagos prosper when
upper Nigeria roils with chaos?
It takes effort to discern any connection. But
after a couple of weeks moving through the city,
I began to form questions: If Nigeria is the largest
exporter of petroleum in Africa, how can there
be continual fuel scarcity, such that Lagosians
periodically sit in gas lines for up to four hours?
Why does every building in the citynot just the
low-income hovels on the mainland but also the
sleekest hotels on Lagos Islandrely on generators to supply round-the-clock power? Why do
residents continue to pay for electricity that never
arrives? Why do the citys police set up evening
checkpoints on the bridges and shake down commuters for cash? Why do the top academics at
the University of Lagos carry on with strikes lasting entire semesters? (Continued on page 104)
africas first cit y

Wasiu Hello Sir Ishola, 38, calls himself a hustler. For money and goodwill, he has names
tattooed all over his body. Some of his customers are vacationing professional soccer players
from Europe. Lagos is the place where I see money and where people are merciful, he says.

Kilani Big Ben Ebenezer started his high-end menswear line in 2012. Two years later his bold,
patterned designs won him recognition as best male designer at the 2014 Lagos Fashion Awards.
Lagos is a land owing with milk and honey, he says. Only shine your eyes and see clearly.

In Nigeria its common to ask guests to

wear color-coordinated outts, called
aso ebi, at social events, such as this
wedding at the Yoruba Tennis Club.

Fisherman Monday Enikanoselu, 16, was born and lives in Makoko, a slum in Lagos Lagoon that
began as a shing village of shacks on stilts. He wears eczema cream on his face and a knockoff
Louis Vuitton belt. Lagos will be good to me, he says. Lagos shall prot us all.

Stephanie Igben, 15, resplendent in a bridesmaid dress, is nishing senior secondary school
but has no plans yet to continue her education. Her father is a driver and her mother a businesswoman. She hopes to be an actress. To me, Lagos is a land of opportunities, she says.

Whats wrong with this picture?

Corruption is whats wrongand because
much of it exists on the federal level, Lagos is
largely powerless to overcome it. The striking
professors and the underpaid police are federal employees. That petro-titan Nigeria must
import fuel to attempt to meet consumer demand is the result of the petroleum ministry

a job with contractors, he said. But some of

them arent engineers. Theyre teachers, or something else, and they just happen to have a brother who works in the government. So when a
contract comes their way, they hire a subcontractor. And the subcontractor is able to pocket
a lot of money by using inferior materials. And
they wont hire me, because I insist on using the

LAGOS MAY NEVER BE STOPPED,

but it can be slowed. It is not immune to the
forces paralyzing less fortunate regions of Nigeria.
sitting helplessly by while the countrys refineries deteriorate and gas marketers hold back
production to jack up prices. And the chronic
power outages throughout the city are also the
fault of the bureaucrats in Abuja, according to
Abike Dabiri-Erewa, who serves in the Nigerian House of Representatives. And theyre not
tapping the gas thats there. So the problem is
that the plants arent being powered, the Lagos
representative told me.
Dabiri-Erewa was once a TV reporter. As a
federal lawmaker, she witnesses firsthand the kind
of wanton corruption that the governmentowned Nigerian Television Authority would
never have allowed her to cover. It is a real phenomenon, she said somberly. And its done with
impunity. Someone working in the government
owns a private jet. A civil servant steals a billion
naira [six million dollars] in pension funds, and
hes walking about freely. Not one federal official
has been punished for corruptionnot one! Here
in Lagos theres lots of everyday ingenuity. You
see people surviving by selling oranges or phone
cards. Still, all of this corruption has to be demoralizing for the average Nigerian.
It does more than demoralize: The unscrupulousness comes at the expense of hardworking
Lagosiansunless, of course, theyre willing and
able to play the game. Chiagozie told me that
bureaucratic corruption routinely affected his
livelihood. Most electricians like me are seeking

national geo graphic january

best material. If I were to use inferior material,

the building might collapse, and then the government would arrest me and take my license
away and make me pay for the damage. This
happens all the time.
When I asked Kola Karim if the federal governments sorry reputation made Western investors wary of doing business in Lagos, the
worldly CEO elaborately dismissed it as a nonissue. Companies partnered with companies, not
with bureaucrats, he maintained. What does
government do for you anyway, apart from
charging you more taxes? he said. Look, its
not about who rules anymore. Lagos is a train
that has left the station. And you can only slow
it downyou cant stop it. So it doesnt matter
who comes next. This is the fun of democracy!
Its not about [President] Goodluck Jonathan!
Its about progress! Forget politics!
I left the offices of Shoreline pondering these
words of Karim, a genuine patriot who generously donates time and money to Nigerian
causes. Its difficult to begrudge him his yellow
Ferrari and his vacation homes in Miami and
Marbella, on Spains Mediterranean coast, and
the fact that his children, who live in London,
stand little chance of being kidnapped by Boko
Haram. Still, Karim said it himself: Lagos may
never be stopped, but it can be slowed. It is not
immune to the forces paralyzing less fortunate
regions of Nigeria. And when I observed to

Students at the elite St. Saviours primary school romp with family and friends at the
annual Fun Day celebration. The school in the afuent Ikoyi neighborhood teaches
Englands national curriculum. A shopper (above) peruses the grocery aisles at the
South Africabased Shoprite in the three-year-old Ikeja City Mall.

Dabiri-Erewa that Boko Harams attacks had

spared Lagos, she waved her hand frantically
and shook her head. This was not, after all, a
far-flung terrorist outfit targeted by American
drone missiles. Boko Haram was born in Nigeria and is devastatingly effective. As were
speaking now, we dont know where theyre going to strike next, she said. And while theyre
planning, the federal government seems to
have no clue.
The city remains, for now, safe and a home for
the bold, where even those who could be forgiven
for despairing are instead eyeing the next rung on
Lagoss golden ladder. I was told about a hustling
fellow named T. J. who apparently had a knack for
acquiringhow, it wasnt entirely cleara reliable
inventory of fashionable used clothes, which he
sold in a grubby stall on Market Street, within
walking distance of the Nigerian Stock Exchange.
The lanky entrepreneur greeted me, sized me up,
and then proceeded to pull out several plastic garbage bags filled with mens shirts.
Even when I was small, I believed there was
something behind me, driving me, T. J. said as
he riffled through the shirts to find something
appropriate for me. Im an incurable optimist.
I dont believe in negativity. My customers, they
love this about me. I cannot call myself a pastor,
but I speak the truth. And the truth is, I love
this country. People here are suffering. Im suffering. And the government, they wont do the
right thing. But its all about attitude. I can feed
myself. And one day Ill do something else.
Still digging in his bag of used clothes, the
salesman said, Right now Im just trying to find
the leverage. j
MORE ONLINE

ngm.com/more

VIDEO

My Lagos

national geo graphic january

A spacious bedroom in the Okafor familys home on Banana Island. The articial
island in Lagos Lagoon, named for its shape, is one of the citys most expensive
neighborhoods and is popular with foreigners working for major corporations.
The Okafors, who grew up in Lagos, trained as lawyers but are now in business.

What we can see is

only a tiny fraction of
what exists. To catch the

FIRST
GLIMPSE
of the shadow universe
around us, scientists are
learning to detect the
other stuff: dark matter
and dark energy.

Death of an Early Star

One of the rst stars in the universe explodes, bursting through
its halo of invisible dark matter and seeding space with carbon,
oxygen, and other elements. This computer simulation shows
that stars might never have formed, and certainly not so soon
100 million years after the big bangwithout the gravitational
force generated by abundant dark matter. Its nature is uncertain.
TOM ABEL AND RALF KAEHLER, STANFORD KAVLI INSTITUTE
FOR PARTICLE ASTROPHYSICS AND COSMOLOGY

Detecting the (Almost) Undetectable

In a Stanford University clean room, research assistant John
Mark Kreikebaum inspects silicon disks that might one day
register the subtle energy signal of dark matter particleswhich
are believed to be ubiquitous but have yet to be observed. To
shield the disks from the noise of cosmic rays, theyll be placed
deep in a mine. When you make a very sensitive detector,
it tends to see quite a bit, explains Stanfords Matt Cherry.

By Timothy Ferris
Photographs by Robert Clark

It used to be said
that cosmologists,
the scientists who study
the universe as a whole,
are often in error but
never in doubt.
Nowadays theyre less often in error, but their
doubts have grown as big as all outdoors.
After decades of research involving new and
better telescopes, light detectors, and computers,
cosmologists can now state with some assurance
that the universe was born 13 billion, 820 million years ago, most likely as a bubble of space
smaller than an atom. For the first time theyve
mapped the cosmic background radiationlight
released when the universe was only 378,000
years oldto an accuracy of better than a tenth
of one percent.
But they have also concluded that all the stars
and galaxies they see in the sky make up only
5 percent of the observable universe. The invisible majority consists of 27 percent dark matter
and 68 percent dark energy. Both of them are
mysteries. Dark matter is thought to be responsible for sculpting the glowing sheets and tendrils
of galaxies that make up the large-scale structure of the universeyet nobody knows what
it is. Dark energy is even more mysterious; the
term, coined to denote whatever is accelerating
the rate at which the cosmos expands, has been
called a general label for what we do not know
about the large-scale properties of our universe.
As a result, cosmologists today find themselves in something like the ignorance that

national geo graphic january

Norma

Centaurus

Coma

Virgo
o

Milky Way

The Invisible Scaffolding of Space

We cant see dark matter, but its gravity sculpts what we do see from our vantage
point inside the Milky Way galaxy. This supercomputer simulation, which looks at our
cosmic neighborhood from the outside, is a realistic, data-driven reconstruction of the
web of dark matter that guided galaxies to their present positions. Where huge dark
tendrils cross, bright galaxies cluster; the Virgo cluster alone includes thousands.
SIMULATION AND RECONSTRUCTION: STEFFEN HESS AND FRANCISCO-SHU KITAURA, LEIBNIZ INSTITUTE
FOR ASTROPHYSICS POTSDAM. VISUALIZATION: TOM ABEL AND RALF KAEHLER

A History Shaped by Dark Forces

Dark matter

The big bang

Dark matter forms

Stars light up

13.8 billion years ago

First seconds of the universe

100 million years after the big bang

Our universe blossoms

from a hot, dense state
smaller than an atom.
Within milliseconds it
inates enormously.

Dark matter also emerges in the

rst second. Interacting with
particles of normal matter only
through gravity, it begins to pull
them together.

Clouds of hydrogen assembled by

the gravity of dark matter collapse
to form the rst scattered stars.
Nuclear fusion inside them creates
heavier elementsand lights space.

Composition of the universe

Dark
Dark matter <1%
energy
Matter <1%
<1%
Radiation 99%*

<1%

afflicted Thomas Jefferson in 1804, when he

enjoined Lewis and Clark to keep an eye out
for woolly mammoths. Jefferson and his contemporaries knew that North America from the
Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean was big
and important, but they had only vague notions
of what might live there.
The first inkling of dark matters pervasive
presence came in the 1930s from the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky. While working at the
Mount Wilson Observatory in southern California, Zwicky measured the speeds at which
galaxies in the Coma cluster, 321 million lightyears from Earth, orbit the center of the cluster.
He calculated that unless the cluster contained
much more mass than was visible, the galaxies
would long since have flown off into space. That
Timothy Ferris wrote about solar storms for the
magazine in June 2012. Robert Clark photographed
an ancient Peruvian tomb for the June 2014 issue.

national geo graphic january

86%
<1%
13%

the Coma cluster had survived for billions of

years could only mean, he surmised, that dark
matter is present in the universe in far greater
density than visible matter. Subsequent investigations have indicated that galaxies never would
have formed in the first place had not the gravity
generated by dark matter gathered primordial
materials together when the universe was young.
Dark matter cant just be inconspicuous normal matter, because there isnt enough of that.
Trillions of dim, normal matter objects surely
are out thereamong them black holes, dwarf
stars, cold gas clouds, and rogue planets ejected
from their birthplacesbut in no plausible scenario do they add up to five times the mass of
the bright stuff. Hence scientists think that dark
matter must be made of more exotic materials.
Theorists working in whats called supersymmetric quantum physics have conjured up lots
of unobserved varieties of matter, one or more
of which might turn out to be dark matter. But

Dark energy

The expansion slows

Dark energy rises

Ever outward

1 billion years after the big bang

4-8 billion years after the big bang

Today

Stars clump into galaxies, galaxies

into clusters along a scaffolding of
dark matter. The mass of all matter,
most of it dark, is so great that its
gravity slows cosmic expansion.

After slowing for billions of years,

the expansion accelerates again.
Why? A mysterious repulsive force,
dubbed dark energy, has begun to
counteract the pull of dark matter.

The universe hurtles

outward toward an
uncertain future.

84%

75%

1%

<1%

13%

15%

<1%
12%

Dark energy
68%

Dark matter 27%

Radiation
<1%

Matter 4%
*Percentages do not add up to 100 due to rounding.

recent experimental results obtained with CERNs

Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva, Switzerland, ruled out some versions of supersymmetry.
The mood among the theorists, says one of them,
is fairly somber. Rather than speculate about the
precise identity of dark matter, most scientists on
the hunt just say theyre looking for WIMPs, or
weakly interacting massive particles.
Evidence of just how weakly dark matter
interacts not just with normal matter but also
with itself has turned up three billion light-years
from Earth, in the Bullet clusterwhich is actually two galaxy clusters in the act of colliding.
Astronomers mapping the Bullet with the aid
of NASAs Chandra X-ray Observatory found
massive clumps of hot gas at its center, which
they attributed to collisions of clouds of normal
matter. But when the astronomers charted the
Bullets gravitational field, they discovered two
more huge concentrations of mass, one for each
of the original clusters, farther from the center
JASON TREAT, NGM STAFF. SOURCE: TOM ABEL

of the collision. They concluded that although

the normal matter frames of the two clusters
were colliding and merging as spectacularly as
two munitions trains, their heavier cargoes of
dark matter were sailing through the carnage
uninvolved and unscathed.
Dark matters aloofness makes it challenging
for experimenters to catcheven if, as some
scientists estimate, dark matter particles are so
commonplace that billions of them pass through
every human being every second. The dark matter detectors currently operating are so technologically sophisticated as to resemble Faberg
eggs constructed for the delectation of future
archaeologists.
One of them, the two-billion-dollar Alpha
Magnetic Spectrometer, is perched on the International Space Station and hunts for evidence of
dark matter particles colliding near the center of
our galaxy. Most of the detectors, however, look
for interactions between particles of dark matter
first glimpse

In the future we might well look back

and say this was where we saw dark matter
annihilation for the rst time.
Tracy Slatyer, physicist, MIT

Message From the Milky Way

A NASA telescope orbiting Earth has detected unusually intense
gamma rays coming from the center of our galaxy. The gamma rays
are represented by the patch of bright colors superimposed on this
picture of the Milky Way. What made them? Physicist Tracy Slatyer
of MIT and her colleagues have a suspect: dark matter particles,
smashing into and annihilating one another near the galaxys core.
NASA GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER/A. MELLINGER, CENTRAL MICHIGAN
UNIVERSITY, AND T. LINDEN, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Distant galaxy

Dark matter

Light from distant galaxy

Its Dark, but

It Bends Light
The gravity of a massive object can bend light
the way a lens does, as Einstein rst realized.
Dark matter, though invisible, can reveal its
presence when its gravitational force greatly
distorts the image of a distant galaxy.

and normal matter here on Earth. Theyre buried

deep underground, to minimize intrusions by
high-velocity normal matter particles flying in
from space. Some consist of a supercooled set
of crystals or a tank of liquid xenon or argon
surrounded by detectors and onionskin layers of
shielding materials, ranging from polyethylene
to copper to lead. (Recently mined lead tends to
be mildly radioactive, so two experimentsone
in Soudan, Minnesota, and the other in LAquila,
Italyuse the melted-down ballast of ancient
Roman shipwrecks. Mined thousands of years
ago, the old lead emits less radioactivity.)
Americas Large Underground Xenon detector, the most sensitive of its kind, is situated in
Lead, South Dakota, right off Main Street and
4,850 feet down by elevator. It started operating in 2013 but came up empty-handed; its
currently resuming the search at a higher sensitivity. Other searches produced ghostly clues,
but none has found definitive evidence of dark

national geo graphic january

Distorted image of
single distant galaxy

matter. The Large Hadron Collider, scheduled

to resume operations in 2015 after a shutdown
for maintenance and upgrades, may attain high
enough energy levels to produce a few dark
matter particles. But the odds are difficult to estimate, because the masses of the sought-after
particles are not well understood. WIMP hunting
is not for wimps.
Weird as the dark matter riddle may be, it
looks almost pedestrian in comparison with the
mysterious phenomenon of dark energy, which
physicist Steven Weinberg calls the central
problem for physics and astrophysicist Michael
Turner nominates as the most profound mystery in all of science.
Turner coined the term dark energy after
two teams of astronomers announced in 1998
that the rate at which the universe was expanding appeared to be accelerating. The astronomers
reached this conclusion by studying a particular

A Dark Matter Lens

The blue shapes outlined
here are really distorted
images of galaxies that
lie far behind the bright
cluster at the center.
Dark matter in the cluster
(not shown) warped the
distant galaxies light as
it traveled toward Earth.

Visible lensing

class of exploding stars that are bright enough

to be seen far away and consistent enough in
brightness to make them useful in charting the
distances of remote galaxies. The mutual tug of
gravity among all galaxies serves as a brake on
the expansion of the universe, and so astronomers expected it to be slowing down. Instead
they found just the opposite: The universe is
expanding ever faster as time goes by and has
been doing so for the past five to six billion years.
Observers today are busily mapping the universe with unprecedented precision, looking
for evidence of just when dark energy emerged
and whether it has since remained constant
in strength or is growing even stronger. They
have the advantage of being able to peer into
the past: When researchers study a galaxy billions of light-years from Earth, they see it as it
looked billions of years ago. They are limited,
though, by the capacity of their telescopes and
digital detectors. Now, as in the past, writing

more accurate cosmological history requires

building better gear.
That call is being answered by projects such
as the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey,
which employs a 2.5-meter telescope at Apache
Point in New Mexico to map cosmic distances at
an unprecedented one percent accuracy. Meanwhile the Dark Energy Survey, using the Blanco
four-meter telescope in the Chilean Andes, is
collecting data on 300 million galaxies. The European Space Agencys Euclid space telescope,
scheduled for launch in 2020, is designed to
make precise measurements of cosmic dynamics over the past ten billion years. Expectations
run high as well for the Large Synoptic Survey
Telescope (LSST), currently under construction in north-central Chile, a few miles from
the Blanco telescope. A squat, photographically
fast 8.4-meter instrument equipped with the
largest digital camera ever made, the LSST is
designed to repeatedly image the depths of the

JASON TREAT, NGM STAFF. SOURCES: TOM ABEL (LEFT); NASA/EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY/M. J. LEE AND H. FORD, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

First to Capture Dark Matter on Earth?

DEAP-3600, maybe the most sensitive dark matter detector yet,
was installed last year more than a mile underground in a nickel
mine in Ontario. Its spherical array of light sensors points inward,
toward a core full of liquid argon. The hope is that dark matter
particles striking argon atoms will trigger tiny ashes of light.

A Survey of Cosmic Repulsion

Dark matter pulls stuff together; dark energy drives it apart. The Dark
Energy Surveys 570-megapixel camera (above), mounted on a telescope in Chile, is designed to image 300 million galaxies in ve years,
including NGC 1365 (right). Peering out eight billion light-years, it
could see how fast the cosmos was expanding billions of years ago
when its acceleration by dark energy is thought to have begun.

observable universe, covering the southern night

sky up to ten times each month.
With such tools, cosmologists hope to reconstruct the history of dark energys emergence
and influence by directly measuring the cosmic
expansion rate throughout the past. At issue may
be nothing less than the future of the universe
and of its study. If we live in a runaway universe increasingly dominated by dark energy,
most galaxies eventually will be driven beyond
one anothers sight, leaving far-future cosmologists with little to observe but their immediate
neighborhood and the blackness of space.
In the nearer future, making sense of dark
energy may require radical improvements in
the way we conceive of space itself. The voids
between the planets and stars were long thought
to be sheer nothingness, although Isaac Newton
admitted that he couldnt imagine how gravity
could keep the Earth spinning around the sun

national geo graphic january

if the space between them was utterly vacuous.

In the 20th century, quantum field theory came
to the rescue by demonstrating that space is
never really empty but instead is suffused with
quantum fields, which are literally everywhere.
The protons, electrons, and other particles often
described as the building blocks of matter are
themselves excitations of quantum fields. Space
looks empty when the fields languish near their
minimum energy levels. But when the fields are
excited, space comes alive with visible matter
and energy. The mathematician Luciano Boi
compares space to the water in a quiet Alpine
pond: invisible when calm but evident when a
breeze ripples its surface. Empty space is not
empty, the American physicist John Archibald
Wheeler once said. It is the seat of the most rich
and surprising physics.
Dark energy may prove him to have been
prophetic on the largest possible scale. To

understand how cosmic space balloonsand

why it now seems to be ballooning ever faster
physicists rely mainly on Einsteins general theory of relativity, composed a century ago. That
theory works well on the large scale but bows out
at the microscopic level, where quantum theory
reigns and the underlying cause of accelerating
cosmic expansion is thought to reside. Explaining dark energy may require something new: a
quantum theory of space and gravitation.
Scientists are confronted by the embarrassing
fact that they dont know just how much energy,
dark or otherwise, space contains. When quantum theorists try to calculate how much energy
resides in, say, a quart of seemingly empty space,
they get a big number. But astronomers calculating the same quantity from their dark energy
observations get a small number. The difference
between the two numbers is staggering: Its ten
to the 121st power, a one followed by 121 zeroes,
REIDAR HAHN, FERMILAB (LEFT); DARK ENERGY SURVEY

an amount far exceeding the number of stars

in the observable universe or grains of sand on
the planet. Thats the largest disparity between
theory and observation in the entire history
of science. Clearly something fundamentally
important about spaceand therefore about
everything, since galaxies, stars, planets, and
people are made mostly of spaceremains to
be learned.
Yet just such conundrums have opened the
doors of discovery before. Einsteins general
relativity theory was invented in part to solve
tiny discrepancies between the predicted and the
observed orbits of the planet Mercury. Quantum
physics sprang in part from little puzzlements
about how heat is radiated. How much may be
learned, then, by resolving todays much deeper
confusions about dark matter and dark energy?
As the physicist Niels Bohr used to say, No paradox, no progress. j
first glimpse

Set upside down to keep its teeth in

place, the skull of a young woman found
in an underwater cave in Mexico has put a
face on the New Worlds rst inhabitants.

New nds, theories,

and genetic discoveries
are revolutionizing our
understanding of the

FIRST
AMERICANS

PAUL NICKLEN

Divers who discovered her

bones named her Naia. A
facial reconstruction reveals
that the rst Americans
didnt look much like later
Native Americans, though
genetic evidence conrms
their common ancestry.
RE-CREATION: JAMES CHATTERS, APPLIED
PALEOSCIENCE; TOM MCCLELLAND
PHOTO: TIMOTHY ARCHIBALD

By Glenn Hodges

The rst face of

the rst Americans
belongs to an unlucky
teenage girl who fell
to her death in a Yucatn cave some 12,000 to
13,000 years ago. Her bad luck is sciences good
fortune. The story of her discovery begins in
2007, when a team of Mexican divers led by Alberto Nava made a startling find: an immense
submerged cavern they named Hoyo Negro, the
black hole. At the bottom of the abyss their
lights revealed a bed of prehistoric bones, including at least one nearly complete human skeleton.
Nava reported the discovery to Mexicos National Institute of Anthropology and History,
which brought together an international team
of archaeologists and other researchers to investigate the cave and its contents. The skeleton
affectionately dubbed Naia, after the water
nymphs of Greek mythologyturned out to be
one of the oldest ever found in the Americas,
and the earliest one intact enough to provide a
foundation for a facial reconstruction. Geneticists were even able to extract a sample of DNA.
Together these remnants may help explain
an enduring mystery about the peopling of
Former Geographic staff writer Glenn Hodges
explores lifes big questions at soundingline.org.

the Americas: If Native Americans are descendants of Asian trailblazers who migrated into
the Americas toward the end of the last ice age,
why dont they look like their ancient ancestors?
By all appearances, the earliest Americans
were a rough bunch. If you look at the skeletal
remains of Paleo-Americans, more than half
the men have injuries caused by violence, and
four out of ten have skull fractures. The wounds
dont appear to have been the result of hunting mishaps, and they dont bear telltale signs
of warfare, like blows suffered while fleeing an
attacker. Instead it appears that these men fought
among themselvesoften and violently.
The women dont have these kinds of injuries,
but theyre much smaller than the men, with
signs of malnourishment and domestic abuse.
To archaeologist Jim Chatters, co-leader of the
Hoyo Negro research team, these are all indications that the earliest Americans were what he
calls Northern Hemisphere wild-type populations: bold and aggressive, with hypermasculine
males and diminutive, subordinate females. And
this, he thinks, is why the earliest Americans
facial features look so different from those of
first americans

The bones of at least 26 Ice Age animalsincluding those of an elephant-like

gomphothere (above)litter the oor of Hoyo Negro, the ooded cave where divers
found Naias remains. The cavern was mostly dry during Naias short life. She may
have fallen to her death while exploring the caves dark passages (right).

later Native Americans. These were risk-taking

pioneers, and the toughest men were taking the
spoils and winning fights over women. As a result, their robust traits and features were being
selected over the softer and more domestic ones
evident in later, more settled populations.
Chatterss wild-type hypothesis is speculative,
but his teams findings at Hoyo Negro are not.
Naia has the facial features typical of the earliest Americans as well as the genetic signatures
common to modern Native Americans. This
signals that the two groups dont look different
because the earliest populations were replaced
by later groups migrating from Asia, as some
anthropologists have asserted. Instead they look
different because the first Americans changed
after they got here.
Chatterss research is just one interesting
development in a field of study that has been
Q Society Grants This research was generously
supported with funds made possible in part by your
National Geographic Society membership.

national geo graphic january

exploding in fresh directions over the past two

decades. New archaeological finds, novel hypotheses, and a trove of genetic data have shed
fresh light on who the first Americans were and
on how they might have come to the Western
Hemisphere. But for all the forward motion,
whats clearest is that the story of the first Americans is still very much a mystery.
For most of the 20th century it was assumed
that the mystery had been more or less solved. In
1908 a cowboy in Folsom, New Mexico, found
the remains of an extinct subspecies of giant bison that had roamed the area more than 10,000
years ago. Later, museum researchers discovered
spearpoints among the bonesclear evidence
that people had been present in North America
much earlier than previously believed. Not long
after, spearpoints dating to 13,000 years ago were
found near Clovis, New Mexico, and what became known as Clovis points were subsequently
found at dozens of sites across North America
where ancient hunters had killed game.
PAUL NICKLEN (ABOVE). ART: JON FOSTER

1 Asian
ancestors

32,000 YEARS AGO

Humans from Eurasia and

East Asia rst populate
western Beringia by
32,000 years ago.

ASIA
Malta
ca 24,000 years
yea ago

1
1

1
Verkhoyansk R
a

e
ng

Yana
ARCTIC
OCEAN

North Pole
Sea level:
-394 ft (-120 m
m)
Present-day
shoreline
LE

A population with twothirds East Asian and

one-third Eurasian DNA
becomes isolated in
Beringia. Genetic mutations result in new, unique
DNA markers that are
found in modern Native
Americans but not Asians.

ia

RC

ri

25,000-15,000 YEARS AGO

Be

2 Beringian
standstill

Bering
Sea

ng

ca 32,000

ARC

TI C

CI

Cordilleran
Maximum
Maximu
Ice
ice extent
exte
Sheet
21,000 year
years ago
Laurentide
Ice Sheet

NORTH
AMERICA
1,000

0 mi
0 km

LINES OF EVIDENCE

Paths to a new world

Fresh discoveries are redening our understanding of when and how
humans rst migrated into the Americas. Archaeological evidence
now rmly suggests human occupation began some 15,500 years ago,
not 13,000 years ago, as previously thought. In 2014 advances in DNA
analysis enabled the rst sequencing of a full Paleo-American genome,
at the Anzick site in western Montanaconrmation that the ancestors of
modern Native Americans did indeed originate from a population in Asia.
MARTIN GAMACHE, NGM STAFF; AMANDA HOBBS
SOURCES: DAVID G. ANDERSON, UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE; JAMES CHATTERS, APPLIED PALEOSCIENCE;
E. JAMES DIXON, UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO; ARTHUR S. DYKE, GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF CANADA;
MICHAEL H. GRAHAM, MOSS LANDING MARINE LABORATORIES; JOHN W. IVES AND KISHA SUPERNANT,
UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA; WILLIAM F. MANLEY, UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO; MICHAEL WATERS, TEXAS A&M
UNIVERSITY; PALEOINDIAN DATABASE OF THE AMERICAS; WESTERN CANADIAN FLUTED POINT DATABASE

1,000

3 Coastal route

5 Land route

16,000 YEARS AGO

14,000-13,000 YEARS AGO

Deglaciation along the

northwest Pacic coast
opens a migration route
into the Americas. Genetic
evidence suggests that
fewer than 5,000 individuals disperse south.

Sa
K u ril I s

kh

An interior ice-free corridor opens some 2,000

years after the coastal
route, enabling further
migration across the
continent.

a lin

6 Reverse
migration

13,000 YEARS AGO

Kelp forest ecosystem,

modern distribution

ASIA

ng
Be

n Is
.

Sea level:
-210 ft (-64 m)
Present-day
shoreline

Serpentine
Hot Springs
12,400-12,000 years ago

ARCTIC
OCEAN

ia

ri

Sea level:
-308 ft (-94 m)
Present-day
shoreline

ri

ng

ARCTIC
OCEAN

ia

Be

Aleutia

Bering
Sea

Archaeological nds
suggest that a northward
ow through the corridor
predominated, possibly
because people were
following big game. By
12,000 years ago boreal
forest began to colonize
the corridor, making it
less attractive to large
herbivores.

NORTH
Manis
Lindsay
Lind
say
ca 14,
14,250
250

Schaefer and Hebior

ca 14,350
4
Channell
Ch
Islands

Charlie Lake Cave

Colum
Columbia
River
R
Klamath
Klamat
Anzick
River
Rive
ca 12,650

ca 13,800 years ago

Paisley
sl
Caves
av

Ice-free corridor

Cordilleran
Ice S
Sheet

AMERICA

ca 12,350

Laurentide
Ice Sheet

ca 14,500 and ca 14,800

Meadowcroft

Folsom
Clovis

15,000-14,000

Debra L. Friedkin
kin
15,500-13,200

Page-Ladson
ca 14,400
14 400

Hoyo Negro

Quantity of uted spearpoints dating from 13,000

to 12,000 years ago
Absent

Abundant

ca 12,800

4
4

Huaca Prieta

4 Rapid
expansion

15,000 YEARS AGO

Remains at sites like

Monte Verde, Chile,
suggest that humans
migrated along the coast
and reached the southern
tip of South America in
just a few hundred years.

SOUTH

ca 14,100

AMERICA
4

Arroyo Seco 2
ca 14,000

Monte Verde
14,500-14,250

7 Clovis culture
13,000 YEARS AGO

Hunters develop a
distinctive type of uted
spearpoint and expand
across most of North
America. For archaeologists, these Clovis points
later became the rst
denitive evidence of early
human occupation in the
Americas. More recently,
discoveries at Paisley
Caves, Monte Verde, the
Friedkin site, and others
have pushed back initial
migration estimates by
as much as 2,500 years.

Given that Asia and North America were connected by a broad landmass called Beringia during the last ice age and that the first Americans
appeared to be mobile big-game hunters, it was
easy to conclude that theyd followed mammoths
and other prey out of Asia, across Beringia, and
then south through an open corridor between
two massive Canadian ice sheets. And given that
there was no convincing evidence for human
occupation predating the Clovis hunters, a new
orthodoxy developed: They had been the first
Americans. Case closed.
That all changed in 1997 when a team of highprofile archaeologists visited a site in southern
Chile called Monte Verde. There Tom Dillehay
of Vanderbilt University claimed to have discovered evidence of human occupation dating to
more than 14,000 years agoa thousand years
before the Clovis hunters appeared in North
America. Like all pre-Clovis claims, this one was
controversial, and Dillehay was even accused of
planting artifacts and fabricating data. But after
reviewing the evidence, the expert team concluded it was solid, and the story of the peopling
of the Americas was thrown wide open.
How did people get all the way to Chile before
the ice sheets in Canada retreated enough to allow an overland passage? Did they come during
an earlier period of the Ice Age, when this inland
corridor was ice free? Or did they come down
the Pacific coast by boat, the same way humans
got to Australia some 50,000 years ago? Suddenly the field was awash in new questions and
invigorated by a fresh quest for answers.
In the 18 years since the Monte Verde bombshell dropped, none of these questions have been
resolved. But the original questionWas Clovis
first?has been answered repeatedly, with several sites in North America making their own
claims to pre-Clovis occupation. Some of these
places have been known and studied for years
and have gained fresh credibility in the wake of
Monte Verdes acceptance, but there have been
new finds as well. One location in particular, the
Debra L. Friedkin site in central Texas, might
even be the earliest place of demonstrable human habitation in the Western Hemisphere.

national geo graphic january

In 2011 archaeologist Michael Waters of

Texas A&M University announced that he and
his team had unearthed evidence of extensive
human occupation dating to as early as 15,500
years agosome 2,500 years before the first
Clovis hunters arrived. The Friedkin site lies in
a small valley in the hill country about an hour
north of Austin, where a tiny perennial stream
now called Buttermilk Creek, along with some
shade trees and a seam of chert, a type of rock
useful for toolmaking, made the area an attractive place for people to live for thousands of years.
There was something unique about this

A SITE IN CENTRAL
TEXAS MIGHT BE THE
EARLIEST PLACE OF HUMAN
HABITATION IN THE
WESTERN HEMISPHERE.
valley, Waters says. It was long thought that
the earliest Americans were primarily big-game
hunters, following mammoths and mastodons
across the continent, but this valley was an ideal
place for hunter-gatherers. People here would
have eaten nuts and roots, crawdads and turtles,
and they would have hunted animals such as
deer and turkeys and squirrels. In other words,
people probably werent here on their way to
somewhere else; they were here to live.
But if Waters is right that people were settled
here, in the middle of the continent, as early as
15,500 years ago, when did the first arrivals cross
into the New World from Asia? Thats unclear,
but it appears that people may have been settled
in other parts of the continent at the same time.
Waters says the pre-Clovis artifacts hes found at
Buttermilk Creekmore than 16,000 of them,
including stone blades, spearpoints, and chips
resemble artifacts found at sites in Virginia,
Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Theres a pattern here, he says. I think the
data clearly show that people were in North

America 16,000 years ago. Time will tell if that

represents the initial occupation of the Americas
or if there was something earlier.
Either way, the newest archaeological evidence
comports with an increasingly important line of
evidence in our understanding of the peopling
of the Americas. In recent years geneticists have
compared the DNA of modern Native Americans with that of other populations around the
world and concluded that the ancestors of Native Americans were Asians who separated from
other Asian populations and remained isolated
for about 10,000 years, based on mutation rates
in human DNA. During that time they developed unique genetic signatures that only Native
Americans currently possess.
These genetic markers have been found not
only in the DNA recovered from Naias skeleton
but also in the remains of a child buried some
12,600 years ago in western Montana, on a piece
of land now called the Anzick site. Last year
Danish geneticist Eske Willerslev reported that
an analysis of the childs remains had yielded,
for the first time, a full Paleo-American genome.
Now weve got two specimens, Anzick and
Hoyo Negro, both from a common ancestor
who came from Asia, Waters says. And like
Hoyo Negro, the Anzick genome unquestionably shows that Paleo-Americans are genetically
related to native peoples.
Though some critics point out that two individuals are too small a sample to draw definitive conclusions, theres strong consensus on the
Asian ancestry of the first Americans.
So how and when did the earliest inhabitants of the New World get here? That remains
an open question, but given that people made it
all the way to southern Chile more than 14,000
years ago, it would be surprising if they hadnt
journeyed by boat.
The Channel Islands off the southern California coast are rugged and wild, home to a national
park, a national marine sanctuary, and a training
post for U.S. Navy SEALs. The archipelago also
harbors thousands of archaeological sites, most
of them still undisturbed.

In 1959, while exploring Santa Rosa Island,

museum curator Phil Orr discovered a few
bones of a human he named Arlington Springs
man. At the time, the bones were judged to be
10,000 years old, but 40 years later researchers
using improved dating techniques fixed the age
at 13,000 yearsamong the oldest human remains ever discovered in the Americas.
Thirteen thousand years ago the northern
Channel Islandsthen fused into a single
island were separated from the mainland
by five miles of open water. Clearly Arlington
Springs man and his fellow islanders had boats
capable of offshore travel.
Jon Erlandson of the University of Oregon
has been excavating sites on these islands for
three decades. He hasnt found anything as old as
Arlington Springs man, but he has found strong
evidence that people who lived here slightly later, some 12,000 years ago, had a well-developed
maritime culture, with points and blades that
resemble older tools found on the Japanese islands and elsewhere on the Asian Pacific coast.
Erlandson says that the Channel Island
inhabitants might have descended from people
who traveled what he calls a kelp highwaya
relatively continuous kelp-bed ecosystem flush
with fish and marine mammalsfrom Asia to
the Americas, perhaps with a long stopover in
Beringia. We know there were maritime peoples using boats in Japan 25,000 to 30,000 years
ago. So I think you can make a logical argument
that they may have continued northward, following the Pacific Rim to the Americas.
Beaches along the Pacific coast still teem
with elephant seals and sea lions, and its easy
to imagine hunters in small boats moving swiftly
down the coastline, feasting on the abundant
meat. But imagination is no substitute for hard
evidence, and as yet there is none. Sea levels are
300 to 400 feet higher than at the end of the
last glacial maximum, which means that ancient
coastal sites could lie under hundreds of feet of
water and miles from the current shoreline.
Perhaps ironically, the best evidence for a
coastal migration might be found inland, as
people traveling along the coast would likely have
first americans

BONES AND STONES

Clues to an ancient mystery

Judging from their skulls, Paleo-Americans looked markedly different
from modern Native Americans. Why? Archaeologist Jim Chatters
theorizes that the rst Americans were bold pioneers whose behaviors and physical traits changed as they became more settled.

Paleo-American

Modern Native American

Male, about 12,000 years old; Horn Shelter, Texas

Male, less than 1,000 years old; central Texas

2
3

6
4

5
7

1 Larger, rugged skull

5 Longer, narrower skull

2 Wider-set eyes

6 Inward-angled cheekbones

3 Shorter, broad upper face

7 Outward-projecting face

4 Broader nose

8 Less rounded occipital

Paleo-American

Men and women,

then and now

Modern
Native
American

Skeletal remains suggest that PaleoAmerican men ate better, grew larger, and
lived much longer than women, most of
whom died before age 26. Modern Native
American men have tended to be smaller
than their ancestors, women larger.

NGM ART. PHOTOS: JAMES CHATTERS (ABOVE); DAVID COVENTRY (RIGHT). SOURCE: JAMES CHATTERS

Stone tools discovered at a 15,500-year-old campsite in what is now central Texas provided
clinching evidence that the rst Americans arrived at least 2,500 years earlier than previously
thought. Chert was an essential rock for toolmaking because of the way it akes.

first americans

Tribal leaders gather in Montana to rebury

the 12,600-year-old bones of a boy known
as the Anzick child. His DNA conrmed
that todays Native Americans are direct
descendants of the rst Americans.

national geo graphic january

ERIKA LARSEN

explored rivers and inlets along the way. There is

already suggestive evidence of this in central Oregon, where projectiles resembling points found
in Japan and on the Korean Peninsula and Russias Sakhalin Island have been discovered in a
series of caves, along with what is surely the most
indelicate evidence of pre-Clovis occupation in
North America: fossilized human feces.
In 2008 Dennis Jenkins of the University
of Oregon reported that hed found human
coprolites, the precise term for ancient excrement, dating to 14,000 to 15,000 years old in a
series of shallow caves overlooking an ancient
lake bed near the town of Paisley. DNA tests
have identified the Paisley Caves coprolites as
human, and Jenkins speculates that the people
who left them might have made their way inland from the Pacific by way of the Columbia
or Klamath Rivers.
Whats more, Jenkins points to a clue in the
coprolites: seeds of desert parsley, a tiny plant
with an edible root hidden a foot underground.
You have to know that root is down there, and
you have to have a digging stick to get it, Jenkins
says. That implies to me that these people didnt
just arrive here. In other words, whoever lived
here wasnt just passing through; they knew this
land and its resources intimately.
That seems to be an emerging theme. It appears to be the story not just at Paisley Caves but
at Monte Verde and the Friedkin site in Texas
as well. In each of these cases people seemed
to have been settled in, comfortable with their
environment and adept at exploiting it. And
this suggests that long before the Clovis culture began spreading across North America,
the Americas hosted diverse communities of
peoplepeople who may have arrived in any
number of migrations by any number of routes.
Some may have come by sea, others by land.
Some may have come in such small numbers
that traces of their existence will never be found.
Theres a whole lot of stuff that we dont know
and may never know, says David Meltzer, an
archaeologist at Southern Methodist University.
But were finding new ways to find things and
new ways to find things out. j
first americans

PROOF

A PHOTOGRAPHERS JOURNAL | proof.nationalgeographic.com

national geo graphic January

First Bird
Story and Photographs by
KLAUS NIGGE

T


he eagle is a national symbol, not just

for Americans, but for Germans like
me and many other people too. Photographers tend to portray the birds as
these majestic animals, always soaring
in a blue sky with their plumage perfectly in place.
In the Aleutian Islands in Alaska I found bald
eagles that were wilder and tougher than that. They
were dirty, they were wet, and they fought with
each other, which is not what we expect from our
national symbols. But maybe a bird that can deal
with strong weather and difficult comrades makes
a better source of inspiration.
Around the village of Unalaska and nearby Dutch
Harbor, the largest fishing port in the United States,
the eagles are very much used to people. Fish are
everywhere, and the eagles hang around, looking
for leftovers. They go to fishing boats, where they
search on the decks after the boats come in. They go
to where the fishermen clean their nets. They sit on
the roofs of processing plants.
To make these photographs, I would go to the
wild places outside of town where these habituated
eagles congregated. There I could face the eagles
eye to eye. I could get close to them without using a
blind. They were always fully aware of me. I had to
be careful, I had to study them, and I had to know
what they liked and what they didnt like. You might
have found me lying on my belly, surrounded by 40
eagles.
I have been to the Aleutians seven times, and I
will go again. I am an eagle manI like eagles
so much.
You see, they can fly, and I cannot. j

Days of heavy rain, a common phenomenon in the

Aleutian Islands, have drenched this bald eagle. The
raptors are not as active when it rains.

Two bald eagles aim for the same post.

According to Nigge, the one that lands
rst in such squabbles usually vacates
the perch in order to avoid being raked
by the incoming birds open talons.

PROOF

A PHOTOGRAPHERS JOURNAL | proof.nationalgeographic.com

The bald eagle is an opportunist, says Nigge. Hes a

scavenger. Even if food is stinky and old, hell take it. At
right, eagles still await a free meal near the home of a
woman who used to feed them roadkill and sh scraps.
Below, an eagle inspects the ground for food left by other
birds. Once in danger of extinction in most of the lower 48
states, bald eagles were removed from the endangered
species list in 2007. Their range now extends across most
of North America.

Al e u t
ian

Dutch

Isl Harbor
and
s

ALASKA
(U.S.)

CANADA
PACIFIC
OCEAN

UNITED STATES
Bald eagle
range

0 km

800

NGM MAPS
SOURCE: NATIONAL
AUDUBON SOCIETY

ATLANTIC
OCEAN

800

0 mi

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national geo graphic January

First Bird

Near Unalaska theres a small stream

where eagles often gather. Here one
aims for something oating in shallow
water. You can see how much he
wants to get it, says Nigge. His eyes,
so sharp, point to one place.

In the Loupe
With Bill Bonner, National Geographic Archivist

A Failed First
Though they planted the Union Jack (at far left) upon arrival at the
South Pole in January 1912, members of Robert Falcon Scotts
British Antarctic expedition had found Norwegian flags already
flying there. Roald Amundsens rival expedition had reached the
Pole firstand then departeda little more than a month before.
But Edward Wilson, Scott, Edgar Evans, Lawrence Oates, and
Henry Bowers (left to right) still marked their accomplishment with
this photo. A look through the loupe reveals how they all made it
into the frame: A string to trigger the camera is visible, grasped in
Wilsons mitten.
The portrait was one of their last. None of them survived the
journey home. Within a month Evans had died. A month later Oates,
frostbitten, left the group and never was seen again. The frozen
bodies of the rest were found in their tent, along with the negative
for this photograph, in November 1912. Margaret G. Zackowitz
PHOTO: HERBERT G. PONTING, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE

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