4.8.26

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome. This is Marsha for RADIOI, and today I will
be reading National Geographic Magazine dated March twenty twenty six,
which is donated by the publisher as a reminder. RADIOI
is a reading service intended for people who are blind
or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
printed material. Please join me now for the continuation of

(00:22):
the article I began last time, entitled searching for Ghosts
by Grayson Schaeffer. The hooke himself killed an elephant near Congombe,
then sold the tusk to a Congolese trader in Luena
for a mere three hundred and sixty thousand kwanzas about

(00:43):
four hundred dollars, only to quit when he realized hunting
the animals brought more suffering than gain. By midafternoon, boys
was sampling pile after pile of witty elephant dung for
shipping to the Geneticis. We bivouacked in the open, only
to realize we'd forgotten rice or papasta for the eighteen
mile return. Night temperatures dropped into the thirties. The hoogave

(01:06):
lit a fire for warmth. At dawn, he picked up
the elephant's trail almost immediately. Tracking creatures as big as
elephants still requires keeping an eye out for subtleties. Hair
and mud rubbed into bark. Ten feet up a tree
highlighted a scratching post and a crossing of the Chelamba River.
The men huddled with boys and agreed. The tracks indicated

(01:30):
that the larger herd of twenty we'd been following had
met a group of twenty four more elephants. The two
groups socialized before the group we'd been tracking moved up river,
and they were upset, dragging their front feet to show
they knew they were being followed. Tracking is one of
humanity's original sciences, built on inference and empathy. It requires

(01:51):
fundamentally the same intellectual abilities as modern physics and mathematics,
wrote Louis Liebenberg. In the art of tracking, the trackers
must protect themselves into the project themselves into the elephant's mines.
Reading intent from pattern, these elephants move like a herd
that has been hunted. A grown elephant has no natural predators,

(02:13):
but this group displays an extreme fear of humans, now
behaving like weary antelope, feeding at night and seeking cover
by day. Boys paused at a peculiar pile of dung,
pinning a curved wreath of Bracastigia greens to the ground.
He speculated it was a communicave from a bull, a
warning to others. It sounded like superstition, but the wreath

(02:37):
did look deliberate, and elephants often behave in mysterious ways.
Finally we reached the first of Dost's camera traps. It
was destroyed, the tree uprooted, boys sat down, looking defeated,
and rolled a cigarette. Costa opened the camera's battered case
and scrolled through the memory card only black swamp and

(02:57):
dark night. The ghost elephants had torn down the camera
without stepping in front of it. A few days later,
Klyuyo went on a walk to retrieve all the other
memory cards from Dosts cameras, swapping in fresh cards and batteries.
Among ten thousand frames of blowing leaves, roan antelope, and

(03:18):
inky darkness, there were only a handful of photos of
a single middle aged elephant. She looked at the camera,
then waddled out of frame. DNA and dung samples were
sent back to Stanford, where researchers helped answer at least
one question one hundred percent Savannah elephant, determined ecologist Giordana
meyer Morgan, who runs the genetic testing program. We have

(03:42):
a population that we didn't even know existed that high up.
Yet the preliminary analysis showed that these elephants are genetically
distinct from anything else we've sequenced, said conservation geneticist Katie Solari,
who was working with Meyer Morgan on the project. It
seems they've been isolated for centuries. The findings suggest these

(04:03):
ghost elephants survived Angola's war by never leaving, adapting instead
by becoming invisible. I need to see where those elephants were,
said Meyer Morgan. Mapping their location and movements will help
determine which migration corridors need protection. After our two day transact,
boys left and the team rallied back to the airport

(04:25):
in Luena to collect Dost, who was thrilled to have
captured any elephant photos at all. We decided next to
visit Colugo's home village of Kutiti, two hundred twenty miles
south at the confluence of the Kuando and Quambo rivers,
to investigate just how widely the elephants had vanished and

(04:46):
try to learn what a future may hold for the animals.
The two mile wide floodplain is rich with wildlife, including cheetahs, crocodiles,
and antelope, but elephants, which once roamed in large herds,
had off but disappeared. The trip took fifteen hours in
a land cruiser packed with ten people in their gear.
The joke a Christian led the group. The crew in hymns,

(05:10):
but grew frustrated when they missed their harmonies. At the
river crossing, a team of business women from Louena had
just finished trading with local fishermen. They stacked thirty eight
gunny sacks of dried catfish and tigerfish six tons in all,
plus one monitor lizard. Angelina Kafuti, thirty seven, and her
friends chartered a cheery red Soviet Chiaz truck to haul

(05:35):
their goods back to Luena. Government subsidized fuel prices had
just jumped, squeezing margins to almost nothing. When you need
to survive, Kafuti told me, you need what you find,
what must be done. The limitations of local trade helped
keep the ecological impact small. Terrible roads and low tech
harvest methods allow only sustainable small scale farming with better

(05:59):
infra structure, bigger trucks could strip the floodplain. Bear the
same logic govern's fishing. A few nylon gill nets across
a narrow channel can wipe out and tire runs. One
reason pockets of the country are still a haven for
wildlife is that there isn't any easy way to pursue
large scale economic exploitation of the natural world. Fishermen George

(06:24):
noguga Was has worked this river for twenty years now.
His niece Rosa Kusweko said their catch had stayed steady,
proof that the war's interruption of development had created small
opportunities for conservation. The question is whether small opportunities are
big enough for elephants. Crossing the Quando Quambo confluence required

(06:48):
a five mile long slog through grasses and oxpos. Kalouejo
poled a fourteen foot masivi dugout fast and narrow enough
to slice through the reeds. He'd been conscripted as a
boy ferryman during the war, caring supplies for the rebels.
In two thousand and four, he saw his first elephant,

(07:09):
a bull his father had shot both to protect crops
and to feed the village. After the war, He also
tried life in Luanda, working as a plumber and electrician
before returning to Kutiti. This valley was always full of elephants,
he said through Costa. During the war, hunting was controlled.
They would take the big ones for tusks, and the

(07:30):
meat went to chosen villages. After the war, everything changed.
For a while. Elephants were still here, but then they disappeared.
While Kloejo sped ahead, the rest of us pulled a fat,
white fiberglass boat, passing traditional woven fish traps beside miles
of nylon gill nets held afloat with cut up flip

(07:52):
flops and Astrocola bottles. Costa fried a purple hair ensnared
snarl in one of the nets as malachite kingfishers flashed
through but papyrus stalks. A green bee eater darted through
the reeds. Kutti, a village of about a hundred people,
isn't on Google Maps. There's no cell signal, no internet,

(08:16):
not even a radio. News arrives only when someone comes
back from town two days away. We arrived on a Sunday,
as the boys changed from church clothes into soccer uniforms.
Christianity and older animist traditions shape daily life. Kloayo's battle
cattle lounged under racstigia trees. His youngest daughter ran to

(08:39):
greet us. An elder Gusto Luis Kavolo fifty six remembered
the old days, wherever you walked there were animals, elephants everywhere.
They didn't run from you. Hunting was controlled. Not everyone
could hunt, it was managed. He gestured toward the forest.
Now the animals know to hide. Whether the ghost Elfens

(09:00):
of Angola were hurt more during the war or afterward,
it's clear that they're on the brink. They've retreated as
far as they can go beyond the two ridgeless rivers
upstream into the hinterlands known in Portuguese as the Terrace
do Fimmundo lands at the end of the world, where
few people live. Boys dream of protecting the animals and

(09:24):
making them comfortable around humans again. Coincides with the rise
of a new kind of conservation model in Wonky policy circles.
It's called OECM other Effective area based Conservation Measures, and
it focuses on conserving wildlife, habitats and ecosystems without formal
governmental protections, often by putting them under the oversight of

(09:46):
indigenous peoples and local communities. In a place like Angola,
the re emergence of a native Apex species like Laxodonta africana,
the African savannah elephant prevalent in the region, would be
the most visible sign of a healthy ecosystem, and OECM
involves the kind of coalitions that Costa has painstakingly built

(10:10):
through his outreach to different rural communities for the past decade.
At the same time, the country has other priorities in rebuilding.
Twenty three years on from war. Reconstruction in larger cities
like Luanda is only just getting up to speed. Range
rovers in shiny Lexus g X five fifties share the
roads with Kiwisiki's stacked high with mattresses and white land

(10:34):
cruisers plastered with demining NGO logos, glass and steels. Skyscrapers
rise by the dozen. Last summer, the city hosted the
US Africa Business Summit, with twelve African Heads of state
in attendance, their jets lined up on the tarmac, and
China recently built the Angle LANs, a gleaming new terminal

(10:58):
doctor Antonio Agostino Nato International Airport at the edge of town,
but it remains to be seen if wildlife conservation would
become a focus of Van Gola's renaissance. By the last
day of our expedition, still not having cited any elephants,
we regrouped on the banks of the Quando to make
one final camp. It being Sunday, le Joge was off

(11:21):
by himself reading his Bible. Kalueyo had stayed with his
family for the evening and would meet up in the morning.
I faded early after a long day on the river.
The middle of the night brought the sudden sound of
shouting and chanting, and then something about snakes. A venomous
puff adder had slithered under Costa's tent, squirming against his
bare leg. Thankfully he wasn't bitten. We were still two

(11:44):
days from help. Next the kaleioscopic beauty of hidden swamps
deep in the inaccessible bog lands of Russia, one photographer
for found a way to capture a stunning moment of change.
The abundant swamps speckled across Russia are constantly in flux
and more form each year as an increasingly warming climate

(12:05):
melts more of the permafrost, covering roughly two thirds of
the country. Slumping the soil creates a lattice work of
depressions that eventually fill with water and transform into cerulean
ponds called thermokarst lakes. Well, while some of Russia's marshes
lie within an hour or two of major cities like
Saint Petersburg or Tever, they're still hard to get to,

(12:29):
requiring specialized ATVs with oversized balloon like tires to traverse
the water logged terrain. Moscow based wildlife photographer Alexey Karatonov
first visited the bogs of the Saint Petersburg region on
the country's border with Finland eight years ago, just looking
for a weekend getaway, but what he found left transformative. Suddenly,

(12:53):
he says, you're in a wonderland. The blue water contrasting
with the changing foliage prompted him to launch a drone
and capture sure the psychedelic scenes from above. Every year since,
he's traveled to swamps across the country to document the
abstract beauty of these unexplored landscapes. This by Jennifer Lehman.
Next article The Vikings who vanished. New archaeological clues are

(13:17):
shedding light on one of history's most perplexing mysteries. What
happened to the isolated Norse colonies of Greenland that disappeared
in the Middle Ages. This article by Neil Schey. The
first time I met Michael Nielsen, he had just returned
from a summer spent excavating a Viking site in southern Greenland,

(13:37):
not far from where he lived as a child. Most
sites on the island seemed to be swiftly disintegrating their
buried artifacts, melting into a kind of brown sludge, but
this particular wet marshy site had created what archaeologists called
good preservation conditions. With a wide grin, he retrieved a
small plastic bag containing a tiny wooden horse that hit

(13:59):
easy and is a massive palm. It was dark and damp,
the grain gleaming after many centuries hidden in the earth,
so cool, Nielsen said, turning the horse to catch the light.
In the basement of the Greenland National Museum in the
capital Nuuk. Whoever carved it had gone to great trouble
to shape knots into the main tiny nubs along a

(14:20):
graceful neck. They lent the animal a studying kind of life.
Many similar horses have been found at sites in Greenland,
and as far as anyone can guess, they were children's toys.
Like many other elements of the Viking story, the horses
are hazy and hard to place. Were they amulets as
well as toys? Did they have some spiritual power? Did

(14:42):
the Vikings really not horses? Mane that way? The horse
was still in good shape, and yet it had been
found in a midden or trash heap hy Nielsen, an
archaeologist and a curator at the museum, had no idea.
Greenland's Viking settlers had arrived on the enormous island more
than a thousand years before. They'd fared well, then floundered,

(15:02):
then vanished, leaving few clues to the utter collapse of
their culture. Here. There's just so much we don't know
about them, he told me, a smile spreading over his face.
It's a huge mystery. It's just super exciting. Here is
what we do know. Around the year eighty one thousand,
a bed of Vikings or Norse as they are often called,

(15:23):
sailed west from Iceland in search of new land and
fresh opportunity. They were led by an outlaw named Eric Thorvaldsun,
better known to us as Eric the Red, whom the
historian Eleanor Beakloch describes as a hot tempered serial killer.
Thorvaldsen had discovered the island whilst serving a sentence of

(15:44):
exile for murder, and according to medieval records, he named
the ice blanketed new territory Greenland, an early experiment in branding.
It worked, and slowly the colonies spread through the Serpentine
Fiords of southwestern Greenland, where settlers clung to narrow metals
between the sea and the great ice sheet that dominates

(16:05):
the interior. They survived, perhaps even thrived for half a millennium,
carving out large farms, building immense buyers and barns, and
even raising churches with walls several feet thick. Then, sometime
in the mid fourteen hundreds, the Norse colonies in Greenland
went dark and their citizens disappeared. Records from the Middle Ages,
filled with details on the beginnings of the colonies and

(16:28):
stories from their middle years, were silent on the ending.
If the Greenlanders all died in some apocalypse, plague, say,
or warfare, their cousins in Europe apparently failed to notice.
And if they all fled the enormous island, there's no
mention of why or where they went. The whole thing
here is that well informed people in Europe had no

(16:48):
idea what happened to the Greenlanders, said National Geographic explorer
Thomas McGovern, a professor of archaeology at Hunter College in
New York City whose worked on the so called Norse
problem for more than forty years. What this suggests is
that they didn't get out, and the subtext is they
all went extinct. Greenland's Norse have long occupied a special

(17:10):
place among history's list of disappeared peoples, as mysterious as
the collapse of the ancestral Puebulens formerly called the Anasazi
in the American Southwest and the much later disappearance of
the first English colonists at Roanoke in what is now
North Carolina. McGovern told me the Norse story looms today
in part because it doesn't fit with our modern sense

(17:33):
of who Vikings were. Isn't it isn't a made for
TV tail, flush with warriors, raiders, gold and victory. Instead,
most Norris were simple farmers. Slowly, though archaeologists, including McGovern
and Nielsen are assembling a compelling new theory that explains
their fate, one that links the end of their world
with ours. When Nielsen was growing up among the fiords

(17:57):
of southern Greenland, he didn't think much of the ruins
that lay scattered along the shore lines and hillsides. He
understood vaguely that they were ancient barns and houses and churches,
and that the Norse had built them long ago, probably
using horses and sledges to drag the huge stones across
the rugged landscape. For Nielsen and most Greenlandic kids, he

(18:17):
knew the ruins had little to say. They were just
old rock piles, skinned in lichen, feathered with grass, maybe
a little haunted. If anything, the lesson they offered was
one of failure. They were the relics of people who
hadn't survived in the hard, cold Fjords. Contrary to the
violent pop culture vikings of our time, the Norse who

(18:38):
settled Greenland were the last and a great wave of
westbound European settlers who had carried their culture from the
fiords and heath lands of Norway, Denmark and Sweden to
a series of cold and remote outposts the Yorkney Islands,
the Pharaohs Iceland. In all these settlements they outlasted centuries
of disease and famine, bad weather, and bad kings. Today

(19:00):
you can find not only their fields and farmhouses, but
also their modern descendants. A genetic study in twenty twenty,
for example, showed that as much as six percent of
the population of England carries Viking DNA. An earlier study
revealed that in northern Britain the number might be several
times higher. In Greenland, there is no such legacy. In fact,

(19:22):
Viking DNA is found only in old bones. Some of
the oldest of them were discovered in an ancient cemetery
circling the remains of what might be the very first
church in North America. On a gray day last September,
I bordered a small boat and headed there. Across a
broad blue fiord. South of the Ruins lies a tiny

(19:42):
town called Kasiarsuk, a modern name given by the Inuit.
The inhabitants it considered indigenous to Greenland. The Norse, though
called the place Ratilio. The view hasn't changed much since
their time. It was laid autumn in the fjord. No
other boats on the water, no wind or seals or whales.

(20:04):
Farmhouses at the far shore were so small and low
that it was easy to loose them against the treeless
hills and the great gray mountains rising all around. Farther south,
I could see a small fleet of icebergs gathering as
though to block our escape. Bratihilo sat at the corner
of what the Norris called Aistebuggot, the eastern settlement, where

(20:26):
archeologists have found the remains of some five hundred farms.
According to the Sagas of the Icelanders, a compendium of
stories written down in the Middle Ages, Bratillo belonged to
Erik the Red, and excavations here of unearthed European skeletons
dating back to the turn of the first millennium. This
means they were likely among the original settlers, possibly companions

(20:48):
of Erik Thorvaldsen himself. The farm eventually grew into one
of the largest and most important in Astrygio. Here you
get a sense of what the settlers accomplished and also
they were up against. In Old Norse, bratieu means steep slope,
no doubt, for the way the hills poured down into
the sea. Kasiurok, now home to few dozen shepherds and

(21:12):
their families, occupies a flatish shoulder above the water, and
farther north lie dozens of ruins. Above the ruins are
tundra meadows rising into rock studded ridges, and beyond these
are the mountains, and beyond them is the Inland ice,
the otherworldly ice sheet nearly two miles thick that covers
most of Greenland. Standing at the shore, I noticed a

(21:34):
sense of pressure of being trapped between water and ice.
I wondered if the Norse felt it too. Thorvaldsen and
his fellow settlers sailed from Iceland to Greenland in what's
known as the Medieval Climate Anomaly MCA or Medieval Warm Period.
During this time, which began about eighty nine hundred, temperatures

(21:54):
in the North Atlantic region rose higher than they had
been in previous decades, while it wasn't as warm as
the world we know today. According to McGovern, the MCA
probably decreased sea ice cover and mitigated the violence and
frequency of ocean storms. This was all good for the Norse,
who loaded their open ships with live stock and lumber, children, wool,

(22:17):
and slaves, and headed west, better weather didn't necessarily make
the day's long passage safe. The Sagas report that Thorwaldsen
led a fleet of twenty five ships and only fourteen
survived the crossing. But the MCA is often credited with
easing their migration, helping the settlers find footing in their
new world, perhaps giving them a false sense of security.

(22:39):
The Norse raised sheep and cattle, goats and horses, and
in the early years barley. During the winter, the Fiords froze,
halting ship traffic and pastures were buried in snow. Farmers
crammed their cattle into buyers to protect them from the cold,
and kept them there until spring. The method appears to
have worked barely. By winter's end, the annals were often

(23:00):
so weak they had to be carried out into the meadows.
Farm Life was marginal, in other words, despite the relative
warmth delivered by the MCA. The Norse kept at it, though,
and in Kloserwuk you could walk along the foundations of
their barns and sheep pens and almost feel the sweat
that had gone into their monumental building. The corners of

(23:21):
many structures are still almost square, and to day's shepherds
used the same pastures. I spent hours hiking through the ruins,
shivering under several layers, and yet the landscape never looked cold. Instead,
it held a deep summer machine and over this lingered
the scent of lanelin and fresh cut hay. You could
see why Thorwaldsen named it Greenland, even if he knew

(23:43):
summer's color would never last. At one point I climbed
up through meadows, past dozing sheep to a hilltop overlooking
the Fiord. The clouds parted, sunlight peeked through. I unzipped
my jacket. In the distance, a cruise ship appeared, and
inflatable rafts full of tourists in bright red jackets began
racing toward shore. In an hour, they would temporarily double

(24:06):
or triple the population of Cassyruk, all coming as I
had to be haunted among the ruins. I sat back
and tried to enjoy a few more minutes of bright solitude.
But then the clouds closed again and the warmth ran out,
just as it had long ago. For the Norse. Cold
was among the first culprits to be blamed for the Vikings.

(24:27):
Viking colonies collapse in the early seventeen hundreds, a Norwegian
missionary named Hans Egede sailed to Greenland, hoping to find
Vikings and, if necessary, convert them to Lutheranism. By that point,
no one in Europe had heard anything from the Greenlanders
for some three hundred years. They had missed most of
the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Protestant Reformation, and Agede

(24:50):
may have worried that during the long silence they had
fallen back on their ancient pagan ways. When he reached
Greenland's southern Fiords in seventeen twenty one, a Gee Philly
expected to meet Norse, but there were none, not a
single saveable soul. Agete visited their ruins, possibly including Bratihillo,

(25:10):
and he somehow managed to communicate with the Inuit, who
had moved down from northern latitudes into spaces once occupied
by the Norse. Agete later speculated that either the Inuit
killed off the Norse, though he might have had trouble
believing that people he described as savage could do such
a thing, or the cold did the men. Agette was

(25:32):
exploring and writing during what we now call the Little
Ice Age l I, A, a period of dramatic cooling
that followed the medieval climate anomaly. It began in the
early thirteen hundreds and lasted about five hundred years, and
in Europe and the the l I a ushered in colder,
wetter weather that has been blamed for widespread destruction and hardship. Famines,

(25:55):
economic ruined, political upheaval, and possibly even the onset of
the witch burning hiss that surged across the continent have
all been linked to dropping temperatures and the follow on
effects of an unready world. For the Greenlanders, the climate
seems to have changed quickly, with a cold deepening toward
the end of their era. Jet Arneborg, who was for

(26:18):
many years senior researcher at the National Museum of Denmark
and Copenhagen, told me that in the nineteen seventies scholars
began braiding together data on the l Ia with notions
of over exploitation. Their theory the Norse had exhausted the
natural resources around them. They'd overgrazed their livestock, felled the fiords,

(26:39):
meager trees, and otherwise undermined their own farming efforts. They
also seemed to ignore local foods such as fish and
marine mammals. All of this made Norse life fragile, and
when the cold came, it shoved many of them over
the edge into starvation. McGovern summarized it this way. The
old story was these poor, dumbed Norse men go up there,

(27:01):
and they're all mail adapted, and they all died when
it got cold. But slowly, Arneberg explained, climate determination has
yielded to a more nuanced view as more data, paired
with newly applied scientific disciplines including genetics, climatology, and even economics,
have been brought to bear on the Norse problem. It's

(27:23):
interesting to see how the theories have changed, Arneberg said.
Now we know the climate changed very rapidly, but it
wasn't just that. Arneberg herself helped discover one illuminating detail.
In twelve twenty twelve, she and colleagues published the results
of an isotopic analysis of Norse skeletons, including some unearthed

(27:45):
at Brattillo, that showed a profound shift in diet across
decades from terrestrial animals to marine ones. This concludes readings
from National Geographic Magazine for today. Your reader has been Marsha.
Thank you for listening, keep on listening, and have a
great day.