The snow lotus is threatened by over-harvesting for use in traditional medicines. Photo courtesy of Jan Salick.

Most people are familiar with Chinese traditional medicine enough to know that ginseng and gingko can be used to treat various ailments. Yet they may not be aware that roses, peonies, and Boston ivy are in their backyard thanks to China as well. China has a rich botanical heritage that is not well-recognized by the rest of the world. It is under increasing threat as China grows.

National Geographic’s Committee for Research and Exploration has focused quite a bit on botanical research projects in China since Dr. Peter Raven of the Missouri Botanical Gardens became its chairman. Many of the projects they fund go without popular reporting. It is hard for plant collectors to compete against folks who study lions or sharks. Botany is rarely the stuff of headlines. Yet these projects are critical for biodiversity and threat assessments. Much of what scientists conducting  these projects have found highlights China’s unique botanical heritage and raises concerns that special efforts should be made to protect it.

Dr. Raven (of the Missouri Botanical Gardens) and the Chinese government are trying to draw attention to a crisis. As writer John Roach reports in his news report, “... in February 2008 China officially unveiled its own plant conservation strategy.”

This effort, however, is rowing against a strong current. As Roach points out, “within three years China hopes to revert nearly 37 million acres (15 million hectares) of farmland to forest. That’s an area bigger than England…” The needs of the Chinese for food and space will only continue to grow.

Protecting the environment is a complex issue for China. Hard choices are being made every day. Is China doing enough to stay green?

Francisco Estrada-Belli poses at the bottom of a Maya chultun, an underground storage chamber, at Cival. Photo courtesy of Francisco Estrada-Belli.

The Society for American Archaeology is holding its annual conference in Vancouver, Canada from March 26 through March 30 and I’m lucky to be here, along with what I overheard are 8,000 other people interested in the subject. Over the course of four days there are somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 presentations covering anything from million year-old rhino teeth from Chinese caves to how to teach soldiers in Iraq about archaeology using playing cards. This is the kind of place where I come to look for stories.

Fortunately, I have a lot of help. Aside from my colleague Christina Elson, who is also here at the conference, there are scads of archaeologists here who have received research grants from the Society’s prestigious Committee for Research and Exploration. Most are thankful for the support they’ve received and are eager to help.

Here’s how a day at a conference like this goes:

I started off the day having breakfast with Francisco Estrada-Belli, a charming and energetic fellow who has received eleven grants from the Society for his research on the Maya. He’s currently doing great work at several different Maya sites; a lot of it relates to National Geographic’s August 2007 cover story on the Maya. That breakfast made me miss grantee Jon Erlandson’s presentation on a Viking longhouse at Hrisbru, Iceland, but I caught the presentations of others working on the same project. The longhouse was a boat-shaped building apparently covered with turf. You can see still see some old turf-covered farm buildings in Iceland today.

Lunch was with five-time grantee Bill Folan, a veteran of some fifty years of archaeological research in Mexico. National Geographic funded him to work at Calakmul, a major Maya site with over 6,000 structures. He’s currently working at Oxpemul, a site relocated by another grantee, Ivan Šprajc.

After lunch I wanted to be in two places at the same time. Grantee Mike Parker Pearson was speaking about Stonehenge in one room at exactly the same time that grantee Gregory Possehl was speaking about the complexities of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex in another. I opted to listen to Possehl, because I wanted to hear him say “Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex” five times fast. I think I made the right choice. There was good stuff in that session, including a presentation on Jiroft in Iran.

From there I plunged into a session organized by a new grantee, Chris Norton. The topic was early humans in East Asia and Australasia. It was great to hear about Chris’s research in person. As I was leaving the session I bumped into another grantee whose work I have been interested in for a long time. It was Paul Tacon, who was funded by National Geographic to explore the Wollemi region of the Blue mountains in Australia in search of early aboriginal rock art.

Every one of these grantees had a story to tell, in fact they all had many stories. I’ll be thinking hard about how to get their stories to you. In the meantime, I’d better prepare myself for tomorrow!

Like this mandible, some of the bones of small-bodied people found in Omedokel Cave in Palau were embedded in calcite flowstone created by water dripping though limestone. Such embedding can occur quickly, but the older bones in Omedokel Cave were dated by radiocarbon to 2300 years ago. Bones from another cave, Ucheliungs, were dated to 2900 years ago, a time when the Pacific was first being colonized. Photograph by Chris Sloan/© 2008 National Geographic

Peculiarities found in prehistoric human bones discovered in July 2006 on Palau have caused much head-scratching for National Geographic grantee Lee Berger and his colleagues over the last year. See the story at National Geographic News and the scientific paper at PLoSOne. 

Berger found the bones, mostly the fragmented skeletons of many individuals, in two island caves, Omedokel and Ucheliungs, not far from Palau’s capital, Koror.

While analysis of these bone caches is still in its early days (it will take decades to complete), Berger thinks it is likely that the bones are the remains of islanders brought into the caves for burial long ago.

One might ask why Berger, an American researcher at Wittswatersrand University in South Africa, is leading a dig in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It is because it was he who, while on vacation in July 2006, stumbled upon the unusual bones in steamy Ucheliungs Cave. Inside the cave, he flicked on his flashlight. “It illuminated a scene from out of a horror movie or an archaeologist’s dream,” he said. “Thousands of fragmentary human remains were scattered about the cave floor.”

By August of 2006, funded by the National Geographic Society, Berger and a small crew of anthropologists, geologists, and archaeologists, including Palauans, were back in the caves. The team dug a one meter by one meter test pit in the cave floor, and soon realized that the bones were not only spread wide, but deep. They collected almost 1,200 bone samples.

Here are the results: The oldest bones dated (by radiocarbon) were from people that died between 2,900 and 1,400 years ago. They were all tiny humans. Berger and his team were perplexed by the odd mixture of traits they saw. Some of the traits were used by scientists to classify prehumans and others were used to classify Homo sapiens.

To make a long story short, this led the scientists to entertain a maverick idea; the primitive traits in the earliest Palauans are not archaic at all, but rather a consequence of a type of extreme shrinking never observed in humans before.

Small-bodied Homo sapiens abound today in places like the Andaman Islands and the Ituri Forest of Africa. But their heads and faces are large and well within the normal range set for modern humans. Berger and his colleagues suggest that when the early Palauans shrank, their heads and faces shrank in proportion to their bodies, producing faces much smaller than those of living pygmoid groups.

But, according to Berger, this is not the case with the Homo floresiensis, knick-named the hobbit. It may have experienced the same type of shrinking as the Palauans. If Berger and his colleagues are correct, then some small-bodied human ancestors with these “primitive” traits, including the hobbit, may have them because they are small, not because they are primitive.

If these early Palauans turn out to be everything Berger and his colleagues claim they are—and not children, as the report at Nature.com  suggests—then either the little folk crossed 370 miles of shark-infested deep ocean to get to Palau or large folk did it and, due perhaps to insular dwarfism, became dwarfed once they arrived. Neither scenario can be proved at this early stage of study, but either way, it was a fantastic voyage.

This photo compares a modern human female mandible with one of the small ones from Palau. The vertical depth of the jaw and the reduced chin are two "archaic" features Berger points to. Photo by Stephen Alvarez/© 2008 National Geographic.

Despite the tranquil beauty of Rapa Iti's bay and surrounding mountains, this landscape was the setting for violent confrontations between groups competing for resources in a degraded and overstretched environment. Photo courtesy of Doug Kennett.

One of the most fascinating stories about the Peopling of the Pacific I encountered while helping to develop the magazine article on that topic this month (see Pioneers of the Pacific) is the story of Rapa Iti. It was told to me early on by Doug Kennett, an archaeologist whom National Geographic had funded to study the island back in 2001.

Rapa Iti is a tiny island in French Polynesia (in the middle of the Pacific Ocean). It takes a lot of effort to get there. At last report, a supply ship visits every other month and that's pretty much it. The reason why it is so interesting is that because it was so difficult to access, it was only colonized once—around 1200 A.D.—and was never contacted again until Europeans stumbled across it in 1791.

Rapa Iti can be seen as a sort of controlled experiment, or as Kennett called it, a "well-bounded microcosm," to see what happens if you deposit a few souls on an small island  (35 square kilometers) and leave them there for a few hundred years.

I'm not going to go into the details here, but when Europeans arrived they encountered about 1500 people living in "heavily fortified hilltop communities." What seems to have occurred prior to this is that the island's first colonists rapidly altered the swamp forest and  surrounding environs and replaced it with taro agriculture. This led to rapid and extensive soil erosion from hill slopes. This in turn led to pond agriculture, since nutrients had been flushed from slopes into the valley bottoms. Soon after this, folks were competing for land and dividing into opposing groups. They built hilltop fortresses, complete with pallisades and defensive ditches, that overlooked their fields. By the 1700s there were as many as 15 of these forts in operation. That's not much more that a couple square kilometers per group.

If anyone ever questioned whether environmental health has anything to do with war, well here's an experiment that provides strong evidence. Conservation is not just about protecting the birds and the bees, it is about protecting us from each other. Thanks, Doug, for bringing this to our attention.

For video interviews from experts on the Peopling of the Pacific, see this link and for some great maps that tell the story, see this link.

Pharaoh Tutankhamun's skull defines his general appearance. Its anyone's guess what his skin color was. This particular model (right) was prepared from a CT-scan-based "cast" of his skull (left) without knowing its identity. Reconstruction by Michael Anderson. Photos in composite © 2007 Michael Anderson and Mark Thiessen © 2007 National Geographic Society.

I’ll never forget attending opening night of the King Tut exhibit in Los Angeles in June 2005. As I approached the exhibit entrance with Elisabeth Daynes, the French sculptor who created a likeness of King Tut for the cover of National Geographic magazine, we passed a patch of animated demonstrators whose placards read “King Tut’s Back and He’s Still Black.” A few steps further I was informed by other National Geographic staff attending the event that Dayne’s sculpture, which she had traveled from Paris to see on display, was out of the show.

I was disappointed, but not surprised. Every time the magazine’s art department attempted to depict ancient Egyptians, we received letters complaining about their appearance. This was despite every effort of talented artists and hard-working researchers to be accurate and fair. For the King Tut reconstruction we went to the extreme of commissioning a second model by a team that was not informed of the identity of the skull cast we provided. Their results confirmed that the cover image was as reasonable as forensic reconstructions of individuals can be. One can quibble about the shape of Tut’s nose and ears, and the color of his eyes and skin, but hard bone determined his general appearance. Judging from the demonstrators outside the exhibit in Los Angeles, we were once again unable to please everyone.

The reasons for this dissatisfaction are complex. Confusing notions about ‘race’ and a concern that scholars ignore Africa’s contribution to civilization seem to be at the heart of it. There is still some debate about the skin color of ancient Egyptians, but most experts agree that, from Alexandria in the north to the Sudanese border, ancient Egyptians would have looked much as they do today.

Our story about ancient Egypt’s 25th dynasty in the February issue of National Geographic provides an opportunity to look again at questions about the appearance of ancient Egyptians and whether Egypt’s, ergo Africa’s, contribution to civilization has been ignored. If you’d like to comment on our story or this topic, here’s the place.

Before you respond on the skin color issue, I recommend that you review how scientists currently view race at http://www.understandingrace.org.

Above: The image sent by a reader who was curious to know what this strange-looking lizard was. Photo by Rebecca Reeder-Hunt

One of the reasons I started this blog was  to share some of the experiences I have dealing with National Geographic-funded scientists in my daily work, but also to let you have some access to them as well. I'm glad that some of you are taking advantage of that.

Today we have a photo taken by Rebecca Reeder-Hunt in the Hawaiian Islands. Here is her query: 

"In June 2006 I was wandering around the island of Lanai early one morning.  A rustling in the bushes caught my attention in the total silence of early a.m., and I shot a couple of pictures of two what-I-called geckos fighting.  However, when I cropped and enlarged the photos on my computer, I realized that the dark creature looked different than any lizard or gecko I'd seen before: the light eyes, the extremely long middle toes, the ridge on its back, and even the visible rib cage...  I have searched the web for hours trying to fins anything that looked like this guy, but to no avail...."

Well, Rebecca, it did not take long to get an answer. First of all, I asked Dr. Tim Watkins, a program officer and herpetologist at National Geographic's Committee for Research and Exploration what your creature was. He replied that there are no native lizards on the Hawaiian Islands, so we know that it is an introduced lizard. To find out what kind, he referred me to Dr. Jonathan Losos at Harvard Univerisity, who is an expert in island lizards. His reply:

It's Anolis carolinensis, an introduced species to Hawaii native to the southeastern United States.

Turns out this is the kind of "chameleon," properly called an anole, is available in many pet stores and is  hard not to step on in Florida and other southeastern states. I remember having these as pets when I was a kid. I thought it looked familiar! Thanks for the question and thanks to Dr. Watkins and Dr. Losos for the identification.

Above: Masiakasaurus was voted one of the most bizarre dinos by National Geographic editors for its weird forward-projecting teeth. This is an image of the computer model as it was taking shape. Art by Pixeldust Studios.

Which is your favorite bizarre dinosaur? For me, it's National Geographic magazine's December issue covergirl, Dracorex hogwartsia. What a great name! And what a mug!

Believe me. It was no simple task selecting which dinosaurs would make the cut as the most bizarre of the bizarre. Here's the group we ended up using in the article:

Deinocheirus, Amargasaurus, Carnotaurus, Dracorex, Spinosaurus, Masiakasaurus, Styracosaurus, Nigersaurus, Epidendrosaurus, Tuojiangosaurus, Parasaurolophus

One of these bizarre stars was also the subject of a press conference at National Geographic Society headquarters today. Explorer-in-Residence Paul Sereno announced new information about Nigersaurus, a dinosaur discovered in Niger that he has been studying for some years.

Are the creatures we picked really the most bizarre? I’m sure some of you may have a different opinion. Let's hear it. If you want to send in a picture, send it to stonesbonesnthings@gmail.com and I'll post it.

Today the World Net Daily reported that Dr. Eilat Mazar claims to have discovered Nehemiah's tower. This blog has addressed the question of how a non-expert might evaluate such claims of biblical discoveries. If one reads the news report carefully, it is not clear whether Dr. Mazar is making the inferential leap between finding Persian era pottery at the site and the site being Nehemiah's tower or if it is the media that is presenting it this way. Whatever the case (and I will try to find out) this is a good example of a sensational find that it is hard for a non-expert to evaluate. So, let's put it to the test.

In an earlier blog, Eric Cline provided some guidance. One of his comments was:

"...as a general rule of thumb, I would also say that it would be prudent to be wary of anyone with a web site or multiple publications who claims to have been able to “solve” more than one biblical mystery or locate more than one of the missing biblical objects or places."

Well, this makes number two for Dr. Mazar. Her first was King David's Palace.

And Phillip Davies, who recently commented on the same blog, made the following useful observation:

"I would like to add to Eric Cline's comment the observation that a number of 'sensational' biblical discoveries are claimed by professional archaeologists who are funded by groups interested not in objective discovery but vindication of the Bible—such as recent claims about 'David's palace' in Jerusalem. However, in such cases proper academic discussion usually follows and the initial claims are challenged and even modified."

Dr. Mazar's announcement may fall into this category since she is a professional archaeologist funded by the Shalem Center .

So, what are we to think? Is Dr. Mazar just an incredibly lucky archaeologist? How much of what we are hearing is the media and how much is Dr. Mazar? Is she motivated to make what appear to be sensational announcements because of her funding affiliation?

If we take the advice of Dr. Cline and Dr. Davies, a nonexpert would have to be cautious regarding the idea that Nehemiah's Tower has been found. What do you think?

Above: In 1978, National Geographic magazine covered a major study of the Shroud of Turin involving, among many others, Air Force scientists John Jackson (kneeling) and Eric Jumper (tying), who contended that the Shroud image was produced by a projection of some sort, rather than paint or physical contact with a body. Photo by Victor Boswell.

I’m glad I’m not an archaeologist. If I were, I’d probably have gone insane by now from all of the craziness that pervades the field. Searches for Noah’s Ark, the Ark of the Convenant, Lost Tribes of Israel, Jesus’s Tomb…you name it. It must drive them nuts. So you can imagine my despair when the first person to actually send me an image on this blog, along with a question, sent me a picture of the Shroud of Turin. My heart stopped. But I braced myself and read the message from LeShawn Pulowski. I was relieved to find that the message contained a coherent and logical question. Here’s what it said:

“I am not a scientist but I have eyes. I wish they could explain the lack of distance between the front of the image and the back. I placed a blanket on my head there was an 8-inch gap of where my face would have touched the front and where my head would have touched the back. Looking at the PHOTOs there is less than 2 inches…. I would just like someone to explain the lack of distance between the face and the back.”

You can see in the photo above what LeShawn is talking about. A negative image of the Shroud is being held by the unidentified fellow at left. The bright blob (said to be blood) at the top of Jesus’s head in the image, and the semicircle that ascends above it, is the beginning of the reverse side of the shroud—and the back of Jesus’s head. I agree with LeShawn. There’s no space there for the top of Jesus’s head. And I can’t figure out how an emanation, as proposed by some scientists who studied the Shroud in 1978, could make that problem go away.

[Note from Editor, Nov. 25. See blog entry below from CWendt, Nov. 25 for comment on the above.]

But the reason I’m writing today isn’t to get the answer to that question. I've figured out that’s a no-win game. Eric Cline, a biblical archaeologist and author of From Eden to Exile: Unraveling Mysteries of the Bible (published by National Geographic), points out why in an article in the Sept. 30 Boston Globe. In that article, Cline says that many religious mysteries, such as the location of the Garden of Eden or the final resting place of Noah’s Ark, will never be solved. Yet the environment created by “faux” archaeologists, largely with the help of media, makes the public think answers may yet be found. This situation exists, Cline asserts, because real scientists in his field are not doing enough to take on the pseudo-scientists (self-proclaimed experts who have no credentials and do not use the scientific method). So things that are a matter of faith become confused with things that are matters of science.

Accompanying Cline’s article is a sidebar which points to some recent—and real—discoveries about the biblical world that are clear and informative. There are other examples in his book, mentioned above, which is well worth the read for anyone interested in sorting out the science from the hype.

I'd like to put a question to Eric Cline and invite him to respond. Last year (2006) three of the top news stories on our web site had a biblical connection. Two concerned the Judas Gospel and one concerned the discovery of Noah's Ark. Clearly biblical topics are popular with NG readers. How can our readers  distinguish between the merits of these discoveries, or any other biblical finds they might hear about?

In December 2005, National Geographic magazine ran a story with gripping  computer-generated graphics of extinct marine reptiles, such as the nothosaur above. The story was six years in the making. © National Geographic

While weaving through the crowds of paleontologists at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s annual meeting in Austin, Texas today I had one of those “blast from the past” moments. It happened when I ran into Robin O’Keefe, an expert on plesiosaurs, a group of ocean-going reptiles that look a lot like the Loch Ness monster. I hadn’t seen Robin in six years or so, and seeing him reminded me of the long chain of events that led to the creation of National Geographic’s Sea Monsters IMAX movie that is now playing in theaters.

It all started way back in 1999 when the magazine decided it wanted to do a story on marine reptiles, the sea monsters that ruled the ocean while the dinosaurs ruled the land during the Mesozoic era (248 to 65 million years ago). This happened largely because we had just run a series of dinosaur stories and I felt that it was time to get other life forms into our paleontology mix. I convinced the Editor-in-Chief that we should break tradition and prepare all the artwork using state-of-the art computer graphics. This would be the first time that the magazine did not use paint to recreate prehistoric creatures. One argument I used was that after the success of Jurassic Park in bringing dinosaurs to life our audience might be enjoy seeing sea monsters in as realistic a way as possible, as if a natural history photographer had gone out and photographed them alive. The other argument was that computer graphics-generated animals would allow us to repurpose the animals for other media, including television, movies, the web, and books.

One of the first things we did was search our records to see what scientists National Geographic’s Committee for Research and Exploration had funded to do research on life in the oceans during the Mesozoic era. Quite a few names came up, including Olivier Rieppel, Betsy Nichols, Hans-Dieter Sues, Ryosuke Motani, Zulma Gasparini, and Robin O’Keefe. Our researchers, photo editors, and writers descended on these folks like a swarm of bees to get the project off to a good start and didn’t let up until our magazine article was finally printed as a cover story in December of 2005.

Right: In the speaker's preparation room at the SVP meeting in Austin, Robin O'Keefe points to a CT image of the gut contents of a plesiosaur that contains the remains of a juvenile icthyosaur, a dolphin-like marine reptile. Evidence of marine reptiles preying on other marine reptiles is extremely rare. Photo by author.

Robin had the distinction of being one of the first scientists we roped into helping us recreate digital models of the marine reptiles we selected. He and I flew to a computer graphics studio in Utah to check progress on the project. He spent a day or two helping the computer graphics guys input limits to the range of motion of limbs, spines, necks, and tails. Little did we know at that time how much work it was going to be before we had images we could print in National Geographic. It was arduous for everyone involved, but I have to say, looking back, that it was a great experience. The article was well-received and many of the art pieces won awards, including the difficult-to-win Lanzendorf Prize for paleo art from the Soceity of Vertebrate Paleontology. And it is also rewarding to see that those sea monster models that Robin and I worked on in Utah, even though they underwent many technical evolutions, have now fulfilled their full mission by appearing in the National Geographic Society’s full suite of media offerings, which includes print, television, the web, books, and now, seven years after the original concept was initiated, an IMAX film.

Did you see the movie? I’d love to hear your comments.