Blobfish, once dubbed 'world's ugliest animal,' named fish of the year in New Zealand
Once dubbed the "world's ugliest animal," the blobfish – scientific name Psychrolutes marcidus – has been named New Zealand's Fish of the Year in a competition created by the conservation nonprofit Mountains to Sea.
MORE: Fish species thought to be extinct for 85 years rediscovered
"The blobfish had been sitting patiently on the ocean floor, mouth open, waiting for the next mollusk to come through to eat," the competition's creators wrote in a press release. "He has been bullied his whole life and we thought, 'stuff this, it's time for the blobfish to have his moment in the sun.'"
The campaign was created to raise awareness about the environmental impacts of destructive bottom trawling – a fishing method that involves dragging a large, weighted net along the ocean floor to catch fish and other marine life – and the species it endangers, according to the nonprofit.
Blobfish are considered deep-sea species and are often found in cold, dark habitats between 1,970 and 3,940 feet deep in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans.
They are generally known as a "pale pink gelatinous blob with a droopy, downturned mouth and large, sagging nose," according to National Geographic.
MORE: Scientists baffled over hundreds of fish 'spinning and whirling' dead onto South Florida shores
But their unusual appearance and physiology may be designed to withstand extreme pressure in the ocean depths, scientists say.
In 2013, the blobfish was voted the world's ugliest animal species in a campaign created by the Ugly Animal Preservation Society. The nonprofit aims to raise awareness for threatened species that may not be aesthetically pleasing and therefore potentially less likely to be researched or protected.
"Uglier animals are neglected," the mission statement for the Ugly Animal Preservation Society states.
MORE: World's Ugliest Dog competition won by Scamp the Tramp
The blobfish is considered a vulnerable species due to overfishing and habitat destruction.
Blobfish, once dubbed 'world's ugliest animal,' named fish of the year in New Zealand originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
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Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Yahoo
BBC Studios Unscripted Boss on Tom Hanks, Stanley Tucci Series and the Recipe for U.S. Success
The Americas, narrated by Tom Hanks, on NBC. [Stanley] Tucci in Italy on National Geographic. Walking With Dinosaurs, narrated by Bertie Carvel (The Crown, HBO's upcoming Harry Potter series), on PBS. These series are just the latest star-studded factual offerings from BBC Studios Productions, one of the British and global media industry's most respected production outfits that is part of BBC Studios, the main commercial arm of U.K. public broadcaster BBC, that have taken the U.S. by storm. Of course, there has also been Prehistoric Planet, executive produced by Jon Favreau, and OceanXplorers with James Cameron. And there is more to come involving big names, as Disney has unveiled that National Geographic has greenlit a new documentary series under the working title Meet the Planets, that is being developed by Ryan Reynolds' Maximum Effort and BBC Studios. More from The Hollywood Reporter Busan Film Festival to Honor Jafar Panahi as Asian Filmmaker of the Year Anne Hathaway Shares First Look at 'The Devil Wears Prada 2' 'Dune' VFX House DNEG's Immersive Experiences Unit Names NBCU's Jeff Lehman Exec Producer (Exclusive) Bottom line: Shows from BBC Studios Productions, which includes the world-renowned Natural History Unit, the Documentary Unit, the Science Unit, wholly owned label Voltage, and third-party distribution relationships, regularly feature Hollywood creatives and do well on U.S. screens, as well as worldwide. And they have just received six Primetime Emmy nominations and 11 Daytime Emmy nominations. Secrets of the Neanderthals and The Secret Lives of Animals are nominated for the latter. In terms of Primetime Emmy nominees, The Americas are in the running for the Outstanding Narrator Award for Hanks and the Outstanding Music Composition for a Documentary Series or Special Emmy for Hans Zimmer. Tucci in Italy is up for the honors for outstanding hosted non-fiction series or special and outstanding cinematography. And Planet Earth – Asia was nominated in the Outstanding Music Composition for a Documentary Series or Special category and Outstanding Narrator for Attenborough. But what is the recipe for factual success at BBC Studios Productions? Key ingredients are scale and breadth, collaborations and partnerships, and specialism, or craft, Kate Ward, managing director, Unscripted Productions at BBC Studios Productions, tells THR. 'I think that factual programming is really having a moment, and we're really seeing that moment,' she argues. 'Big dramas have incredible power and zeitgeist and are, obviously, a huge part of the ecosystem. But what factual does as a genre is that we really passionately believe it's there to change perspectives and start conversations. And because it hasn't always been at the front of the schedule in the U.S., when it does, it feels really special.' Take The Americas, for example. 'We hope it's giving Americans a shared view of the natural world of life on their doorstep, sometimes at the end of their street, which in a world that can feel fragmented and challenging is something that brings people together,' Ward argues. 'Bringing people together is something that is core to our values and our mission at the BBC.' So, how is her unscripted team at BBC Studios trying to succeed in a crowded marketplace? First, 'we're excited about the scale and the variety of work we're doing for the U.S. market,' Ward shares. 'Our shows represent a range of different styles of factual programming for a range of different broadcasters with a range of different models.' In terms of the scale of productions, she lauds BBC Studios' 'unmatched ambition' and ability to pull off 'epic' shows. 'If you look at The Americas, for example, it took five years to make 180 filming expeditions,' she explains. 'So, we are working at epic proportions in terms of production. How many protein bars did the team have to eat over five years to make this show? As a result, you get that infectious curiosity that just draws you in as a viewer.' The second ingredient of success is expertise. 'We can bring the specialism, the craft we are known for,' to ensure high-quality programming, Ward explains. 'Walking With Dinosaurs can bring real value and an education for children and adults. It's rooted in real science. So it is entertainment and education together, and I think that means it can reach a really, really large audience.' Finally, Ward says it's about collaborations with creatives, producers and distribution partners rather than going it alone. 'Creators bring their own way of storytelling, ambition, passion, and together, we can do extraordinary things. We also have deep partnerships producers, with platforms and broadcasters, from our long-standing, unbelievably special relationship with PBS that we value so deeply to NBC and Universal Television Alternative Studio (UTAS), which was a great experience for us. We also have a whole range of programming for National Geographic and Disney, and we have done great work with the likes of Apple and Netflix.' Strong relationships not only give existing shows a good audience platform but can, of course, also lead to the development of further shows, and shows that stand out, she argues. 'These deep collaborative relationships help us shape and do new things for the U.S. market that's really distinctive,' concludes Ward. Now, how about those Hollywood stars collaborating with the BBC. 'We're working with a range of amazing Hollywood talent – actors, directors, auteurs,' she tells THR. 'Why have these people, often known for their fictional work, been drawn to the factual genre? I believe it's because it allows them to explore the subjects about which they're genuinely passionate and to innovate in a different way of storytelling than they do in their other work, which may predominantly be in scripted. We're super excited about that melding of worlds and that sharing of experience.' How does BBC Studios attract such big names in the always-fierce battle for talent? 'It's about storytellers, trust and mutual respect,' Ward tells THR. 'I believe that they are coming to the BBC, because we have the trust, the legacy, the consistent quality, and the specialism that we have built over the years. 'That is really, really important and critical when we're working with other storytellers.' For BBC Studios Productions, working with famous personalities with a shared passion, along with fan appeal and bases, is key too, not least to give series the desired broad reach. But importantly, the creative collaborators must make real sense – or viewers will smell a rat. 'We're looking for those meaningful connections and that creativity,' Ward explains. 'But it is important to approach this through the lens of two storytellers coming together in true partnership, and it always has to be authentic.' Take Tucci, for example. 'Stanley is an incredible storyteller, and to be part of that storyteller's journey through Italy, which he is passionate about, is so exciting, and we're so proud of what we were able to create together,' Ward says. 'Or when you think about Tom Hanks' role on The Americas: Tom's passion for the subject really shines through. If that wasn't the case, the audience would know the difference.' In other words: you couldn't just take a random famous face and attach it to a BBC Studios Productions documentary or other factual series without a real interest or connection. 'This is factual programming. So, there have got to be real, authentic, passionate connections to the subjects, storytellers who immerse you and take you on that journey,' Ward explains. 'These storytellers can start those conversations, change perceptions, take you to worlds and times that you didn't know about. So, we will always be looking for that authenticity and that connection between us and storytellers in a creative partnership.' Thanks to BBC Studios, U.S. audiences, along with British and global viewers, have also fallen in love with such British voices as the legendary naturalist David Attenborough and historian Lucy Worsley (Lucy Worsley's Holmes vs. Doyle). 'She also brings that authentic connection,' highlights Ward. 'Lucy is so popular in America, and she does it so brilliantly.' Ward vows to continue on the path of bringing factual hits to the U.S. and the world. 'Scale, specialism, and collaboration are part of the secret sauce of how we're approaching the business,' she tells THR. 'And we feel super privileged to be able to bring those together and provide a melding of creativity and what that does for people who love factual storytelling or find it. That is a really, really powerful and exciting proposition.' Best of The Hollywood Reporter 'The Studio': 30 Famous Faces Who Play (a Version of) Themselves in the Hollywood-Based Series 22 of the Most Shocking Character Deaths in Television History A 'Star Wars' Timeline: All the Movies and TV Shows in the Franchise Solve the daily Crossword
National Geographic
a day ago
- National Geographic
The first Europeans weren't who you might think
Genetic tests of ancient settlers' remains show that Europe is a melting pot of bloodlines from Africa, the Middle East, and today's Russia. Three waves of immigrants settled prehistoric Europe. The last, some 5,000 years ago, were the Yamnaya, horse-riding cattle herders from Russia who built imposing grave mounds like this one near Žabalj, Serbia. DANUBIAN ROUTE OF YAMNAYA CULTURE PROJECT, NATIONAL SCIENCE CENTER, POLAND Photographs by Rémi Bénali This story appears in the August 2019 issue of National Geographic magazine. The idea that there were once 'pure' populations of ancestral Europeans, there since the days of woolly mammoths, has inspired ideologues since well before the Nazis. It has long nourished white racism, and in recent years it has stoked fears about the impact of immigrants: fears that have threatened to rip apart the European Union and roiled politics in the United States. Now scientists are delivering new answers to the question of who Europeans really are and where they came from. Their findings suggest that the continent has been a melting pot since the Ice Age. Europeans living today, in whatever country, are a varying mix of ancient bloodlines hailing from Africa, the Middle East, and the Russian steppe. (Modern Europe's Genetic History Starts in Stone Age) The evidence comes from archaeological artifacts, from the analysis of ancient teeth and bones, and from linguistics. But above all it comes from the new field of paleogenetics. During the past decade it has become possible to sequence the entire genome of humans who lived tens of millennia ago. Technical advances in just the past few years have made it cheap and efficient to do so; a well-preserved bit of skeleton can now be sequenced for around $500. The result has been an explosion of new information that is transforming archaeology. In 2018 alone, the genomes of more than a thousand prehistoric humans were determined, mostly from bones dug up years ago and preserved in museums and archaeological labs. In the process any notion of European genetic purity has been swept away on a tide of powdered bone. Analysis of ancient genomes provides the equivalent of the personal DNA testing kits available today, but for people who died long before humans invented writing, the wheel, or pottery. The genetic information is startlingly complete: Everything from hair and eye color to the inability to digest milk can be determined from a thousandth of an ounce of bone or tooth. And like personal DNA tests, the results reveal clues to the identities and origins of ancient humans' ancestors—and thus to ancient migrations. The horsemanship the Yamnaya brought to Europe lives on in their native region. A rider at the Zaporizhzhya Cossack Museum on Ukraine's Khortytsya Island demonstrates the acrobatic skills that made the Cossacks such feared warriors from the 1400s on. Three major movements of people, it now seems clear, shaped the course of European prehistory. Immigrants brought art and music, farming and cities, domesticated horses and the wheel. They introduced the Indo-European languages spoken across much of the continent today. They may have even brought the plague. The last major contributors to western and central Europe's genetic makeup—the last of the first Europeans, so to speak—arrived from the Russian steppe as Stonehenge was being built, nearly 5,000 years ago. They finished the job. In an era of debate over migration and borders, the science shows that Europe is a continent of immigrants and always has been. 'The people who live in a place today are not the descendants of people who lived there long ago,' says Harvard University paleogeneticist David Reich. 'There are no indigenous people—anyone who hearkens back to racial purity is confronted with the meaninglessness of the concept.' Yamnaya artifacts from their homeland in Russia and Ukraine include a four-foot-tall anthropomorphic stela from 3000 B.C. featuring axes and horses. YAVORNITSKY NATIONAL HISTORICAL MUSEUM, DNIPROPETROVSK, UKRAINE Thirty-two years ago the study of the DNA of living humans helped establish that we all share a family tree and a primordial migration story: All people outside Africa are descended from ancestors who left that continent more than 60,000 years ago. About 45,000 years ago, those first modern humans ventured into Europe, having made their way up through the Middle East. Their own DNA suggests they had dark skin and perhaps light eyes. Europe then was a forbidding place. Mile-thick ice sheets covered parts of the continent. Where there was enough warmth, there was wildlife. There were also other humans, but not like us: Neanderthals, whose own ancestors had wandered out of Africa hundreds of thousands of years earlier, had already adapted to the cold and harsh conditions. The first modern Europeans lived as hunters and gatherers in small, nomadic bands. They followed the rivers, edging along the Danube from its mouth on the Black Sea deep into western and central Europe. For millennia, they made little impact. Their DNA indicates they mixed with the Neanderthals—who, within 5,000 years, were gone. Today about 2 percent of a typical European's genome consists of Neanderthal DNA. A typical African has none. As Europe was gripped by the Ice Age, the modern humans hung on in the ice-free south, adapting to the cold climate. Around 27,000 years ago, there may have been as few as a thousand of them, according to some population estimates. They subsisted on large mammals such as mammoths, horses, reindeer, and aurochs—the ancestors of modern cattle. In the caves where they sheltered, they left behind spectacular paintings and engravings of their prey. DNA recovered from ancient teeth and bones lets researchers understand population shifts over time. As the cost of sequencing DNA has plummeted, scientists at labs like this one in Jena, Germany, have been able to unravel patterns of past human migration. MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY About 14,500 years ago, as Europe began to warm, humans followed the retreating glaciers north. In the ensuing millennia, they developed more sophisticated stone tools and settled in small villages. Archaeologists call this period the Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age. In the 1960s Serbian archaeologists uncovered a Mesolithic fishing village nestled in steep cliffs on a bend of the Danube, near one of the river's narrowest points. Called Lepenski Vir, the site was an elaborate settlement that had housed as many as a hundred people, starting roughly 9,000 years ago. Some dwellings were furnished with carved sculptures that were half human, half fish. Bones found at Lepenski Vir indicated that the people there depended heavily on fish from the river. Today what remains of the village is preserved under a canopy overlooking the Danube; sculptures of goggle-eyed river gods still watch over ancient hearths. 'Seventy percent of their diet was fish,' says Vladimir Nojkovic, the site's director. 'They lived here almost 2,000 years, until farmers pushed them out.' In Sweden, ancient rock carvings (enhanced with modern red paint) echo cultural shifts brought by migrants—starting with hunter-gatherers who came from Africa in the Ice Age and followed retreating glaciers north. Their DNA is still prevalent, especially in southern Baltic countries. Over millennia, migrating humans have used the Danube River, seen here at a narrow gorge between Serbia and Romania, as a highway from the Fertile Crescent into the heart of Europe. The site of Lepenski Vir, nearby in Serbia, was a haven for fishing hunter-gatherers—until farmers took over around 6000 B.C. The Konya Plain in central Anatolia is modern Turkey's breadbasket, a fertile expanse where you can see rainstorms blotting out mountains on the horizon long before they begin spattering the dust around you. It has been home to farmers, says University of Liverpool archaeologist Douglas Baird, since the first days of farming. For more than a decade Baird has been excavating a prehistoric village here called Boncuklu. It's a place where people began planting small plots of emmer and einkorn, two ancient forms of wheat, and probably herding small flocks of sheep and goats, some 10,300 years ago, near the dawn of the Neolithic period. Within a thousand years the Neolithic revolution, as it's called, spread north through Anatolia and into southeastern Europe. By about 6,000 years ago, there were farmers and herders all across Europe. It has long been clear that Europe acquired the practice of farming from Turkey or the Levant, but did it acquire farmers from the same places? The answer isn't obvious. For decades, many archaeologists thought a whole suite of innovations—farming, but also ceramic pottery, polished stone axes capable of clearing forests, and complicated settlements—was carried into Europe not by migrants but by trade and word of mouth, from one valley to the next, as hunter-gatherers who already lived there adopted the new tools and way of life. But DNA evidence from Boncuklu has helped show that migration had a lot more to do with it. The farmers of Boncuklu kept their dead close, burying them in the fetal position under the floors of their houses. Beginning in 2014, Baird sent samples of DNA extracted from skull fragments and teeth from more than a dozen burials to DNA labs in Sweden, Turkey, the U.K., and Germany. Many of the samples were too badly degraded after spending millennia in the heat of the Konya Plain to yield much DNA. But then Johannes Krause and his team at Germany's Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History tested the samples from a handful of petrous bones. The petrous bone is a tiny part of the inner ear, not much bigger than a pinkie tip; it's also about the densest bone in the body. Researchers have found that it preserves genetic information long after usable DNA has been baked out of the rest of a skeleton. That realization, along with better sequencing machines, has helped drive the explosion in ancient DNA studies. Excavations at the 10,300-year-old site of Boncuklu in Turkey have revealed that people were living there during the transition to farming. The person buried here under the floor of a home likely would have farmed small plots of domesticated wheat, and may have herded goats and sheep, while continuing to forage. The Boncuklu petrous bones paid off: DNA extracted from them was a match for farmers who lived and died centuries later and hundreds of miles to the northwest. That meant early Anatolian farmers had migrated, spreading their genes as well as their lifestyle. They didn't stop in southeastern Europe. Over the centuries their descendants pushed along the Danube past Lepenski Vir and deep into the heart of the continent. Others traveled along the Mediterranean by boat, colonizing islands such as Sardinia and Sicily and settling southern Europe as far as Portugal. From Boncuklu to Britain, the Anatolian genetic signature is found wherever farming first appears. Those Neolithic farmers mostly had light skin and dark eyes—the opposite of many of the hunter-gatherers with whom they now lived side by side. 'They looked different, spoke different languages … had different diets,' says Hartwick College archaeologist David Anthony. 'For the most part, they stayed separate.' A woman harvests wheat by hand near Konya, Turkey. Farmers from Anatolia brought agriculture to Europe starting nearly 9,000 years ago. Within a few millennia, farmers and herders dominated most of the continent. Across Europe, this creeping first contact was standoffish, sometimes for centuries. There's little evidence of one group taking up the tools or traditions of the other. Even where the two populations did mingle, intermarriage was rare. 'There's no question they were in contact with each other, but they weren't exchanging wives or husbands,' Anthony says. 'Defying every anthropology course, people were not having sex with each other.' Fear of the other has a long history. About 5,400 years ago, everything changed. All across Europe, thriving Neolithic settlements shrank or disappeared altogether. The dramatic decline has puzzled archaeologists for decades. 'There's less stuff, less material, less people, less sites,' Krause says. 'Without some major event, it's hard to explain.' But there's no sign of mass conflict or war. After a 500-year gap, the population seemed to grow again, but something was very different. In southeastern Europe, the villages and egalitarian cemeteries of the Neolithic were replaced by imposing grave mounds covering lone adult men. Farther north, from Russia to the Rhine, a new culture sprang up, called Corded Ware after its pottery, which was decorated by pressing string into wet clay. The State Museum of Prehistory in Halle, Germany, has dozens of Corded Ware graves, including many that were hastily rescued by archaeologists before construction crews went to work. To save time and preserve delicate remains, the graves were removed from the ground in wooden crates, soil and all, and stored in a warehouse for later analysis. Stacked to the ceiling on steel shelves, they're now a rich resource for geneticists. Bones and artifacts some 7,700 years old found at Aktopraklik, a Neolithic village in northwestern Turkey, offer clues to the early days of agriculture. DNA extracted from the skulls of people buried here has helped researchers trace the spread of early farmers into Europe. BURSA CITY MUSEUM, TURKEY Corded Ware burials are so recognizable, archaeologists rarely need to bother with radiocarbon dating. Almost invariably, men were buried lying on their right side and women lying on their left, both with their legs curled up and their faces pointed south. In some of the Halle warehouse's graves, women clutch purses and bags hung with canine teeth from dozens of dogs; men have stone battle-axes. In one grave, neatly contained in a wooden crate on the concrete floor of the warehouse, a woman and child are buried together. When researchers first analyzed the DNA from some of these graves, they expected the Corded Ware folk would be closely related to Neolithic farmers. Instead, their DNA contained distinctive genes that were new to Europe at the time—but are detectable now in just about every modern European population. Many Corded Ware people turned out to be more closely related to Native Americans than to Neolithic European farmers. That deepened the mystery of who they were. Masked figures at the annual carnival in Ottana, a village on the Italian island of Sardinia, act out human mastery over animals, a theme dating to the early days of domestication. DNA of Europe's first farmers still dominates the genes of modern Sardinians. One bright October morning near the Serbian town of Žabalj, Polish archaeologist Piotr Włodarczak and his colleagues steer their pickup toward a mound erected 4,700 years ago. On the plains flanking the Danube, mounds like this one, a hundred feet across and 10 feet high, provide the only topography. It would have taken weeks or months for prehistoric humans to build each one. It took Włodarczak's team weeks of digging with a backhoe and shovels to remove the top of the mound. Standing on it now, he peels back a tarp to reveal what's underneath: a rectangular chamber containing the skeleton of a chieftain, lying on his back with his knees bent. Impressions from the reed mats and wood beams that formed the roof of his tomb are still clear in the dark, hard-packed earth. 'It's a change of burial customs around 2800 B.C.,' Włodarczak says, crouching over the skeleton. 'People erected mounds on a massive scale, accenting the individuality of people, accenting the role of men, accenting weapons. That's something new in Europe.' It was not new 800 miles to the east, however. On what are now the steppes of southern Russia and eastern Ukraine, a group of nomads called the Yamnaya, some of the first people in the world to ride horses, had mastered the wheel and were building wagons and following herds of cattle across the grasslands. They built few permanent settlements. But they buried their most prominent men with bronze and silver ornaments in mighty grave mounds that still dot the steppes. By 2800 B.C, archaeological excavations show, the Yamnaya had begun moving west, probably looking for greener pastures. Włodarczak's mound near Žabalj is the westernmost Yamnaya grave found so far. But genetic evidence, Reich and others say, shows that many Corded Ware people were, to a large extent, their descendants. Like those Corded Ware skeletons, the Yamnaya shared distant kinship with Native Americans—whose ancestors hailed from farther east, in Siberia. Within a few centuries, other people with a significant amount of Yamnaya DNA had spread as far as the British Isles. In Britain and some other places, hardly any of the farmers who already lived in Europe survived the onslaught from the east. In what is now Germany, 'there's a 70 percent to possibly 100 percent replacement of the local population,' Reich says. 'Something very dramatic happens 4,500 years ago.' Until then, farmers had been thriving in Europe for millennia. They had settled from Bulgaria all the way to Ireland, often in complex villages that housed hundreds or even thousands of people. Volker Heyd, an archaeologist at the University of Helsinki, Finland, estimates there were as many as seven million people in Europe in 3000 B.C. In Britain, Neolithic people were constructing Stonehenge. To many archaeologists, the idea that a bunch of nomads could replace such an established civilization within a few centuries has seemed implausible. 'How the hell would these pastoral, decentralized groups overthrow grounded Neolithic society, even if they had horses and were good warriors?' asks Kristian Kristiansen, an archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. A clue comes from the teeth of 101 people living on the steppes and farther west in Europe around the time that the Yamnaya's westward migration began. In seven of the samples, alongside the human DNA, geneticists found the DNA of an early form of Yersinia pestis—the plague microbe that killed roughly half of all Europeans in the 14th century. Unlike that flea-borne Black Death, this early variant had to be passed from person to person. The steppe nomads apparently had lived with the disease for centuries, perhaps building up immunity or resistance—much as the Europeans who colonized the Americas carried smallpox without succumbing to it wholesale. And just as smallpox and other diseases ravaged Native American populations, the plague, once introduced by the first Yamnaya, might have spread rapidly through crowded Neolithic villages. That could explain both their surprising collapse and the rapid spread of Yamnaya DNA from Russia to Britain. 'Plague epidemics cleared the way for the Yamnaya expansion,' says Morten Allentoft, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, who helped identify the ancient plague DNA. But that theory has a major question: Evidence of plague has only just recently been documented in ancient Neolithic skeletons, and so far, no one has found anything like the plague pits full of diseased skeletons left behind after the Black Death. If a plague wiped out Europe's Neolithic farmers, it left little trace. Whether or not they brought plague, the Yamnaya did bring domesticated horses and a mobile lifestyle based on wagons into Stone Age Europe. And in bringing innovative metal weapons and tools, they may have helped nudge Europe toward the Bronze Age. When construction of Stonehenge began about 3000 B.C., Britain was inhabited by Neolithic farmers. A millennium later, when it was finished, the Neolithic population had been replaced by descendants of the Yamnaya—perhaps because the latter carried plague. That might not have been the Yamnaya's most significant contribution to Europe's development. Their arrival on the continent matches the time linguists pinpoint as the initial spread of Indo-European languages, a family of hundreds that includes most languages spoken from Ireland to Russia to the northern half of India. All are thought to have evolved from a single proto-Indo-European tongue, and the question of where it was spoken and by whom has been debated since the 19th century. According to one theory, it was the Neolithic farmers from Anatolia who brought it into Europe along with farming. Another theory, proposed a century ago by a German scholar named Gustaf Kossinna, held that the proto-Indo-Europeans were an ancient race of north Germans—the people who made Corded Ware pots and axes. Kossinna thought that the ethnicity of people in the past—their biological identity, in effect—could be deduced from the stuff they left behind. 'Sharply defined archaeological cultural areas,' he wrote, 'correspond unquestionably with the areas of particular people or tribes.' The north German tribe of proto-Indo-Europeans, Kossinna argued, had moved outward and dominated an area that stretched most of the way to Moscow. Nazi propagandists later used that as an intellectual justification for the modern Aryan 'master race' to invade eastern Europe. Partly as a result, for decades after World War II the whole idea that ancient cultural shifts might be explained by migrations fell into ill repute in some archaeological circles. Even today it makes some archaeologists uncomfortable when geneticists draw bold arrows across maps of Europe. 'This kind of simplicity leads back to Kossinna,' says Heyd, who's German. 'It calls back old demons of blond, blue-eyed guys coming back somehow out of the hell where they were sent after World War II.' Yet ancient DNA, which provides direct information about the biology of ancient humans, has become a strong argument against Kossinna's theory. First, in documenting the spread of the Yamnaya and their descendants deeper and deeper into Europe at just the right time, the DNA evidence supports the favored theory among linguists: that proto-Indo-Europeans migrated into Europe from the Russian steppe, not the other way around. Second, together with archaeology it amounts to a rejection of Kossinna's claim that some kind of pure race exists in Europe, one that can be identified from its cultural artifacts. All Europeans today are a mix. The genetic recipe for a typical European would be roughly equal parts Yamnaya and Anatolian farmer, with a much smaller dollop of African hunter-gatherer. But the average conceals large regional variations: more 'eastern cowboy' genes in Scandinavia, more farmer ones in Spain and Italy, and significant chunks of hunter-gatherer DNA in the Baltics and eastern Europe. 'To me, the new results from DNA are undermining the nationalist paradigm that we have always lived here and not mixed with other people,' Gothenburg's Kristiansen says. 'There's no such thing as a Dane or a Swede or a German.' Instead, 'we're all Russians, all Africans.' From his base in Berlin, Andrew Curry writes about archaeology and other subjects. Rémi Bénali lives near Arles, France, where he photographed a Roman boat for the April 2014 issue.
National Geographic
2 days ago
- National Geographic
A century ago, there was a race to make the first color photos. Now there's a race to save them.
The revolutionary invention of autochromes changed photography. As those pictures decay, they're revealing a new kind of beauty. First digitized in 2008 (left), this 1937 photo of a dance performance in Mississippi was created using Dufaycolor, an early color-film product. By 2023, it had been transformed by a form of chemical deterioration known as vinegar syndrome. Photograph by J. Baylor Roberts, National Geographic Image Collection In the early 1980s, the late National Geographic Society photographer turned archivist Volkmar Wentzel was delving through storage when he stumbled onto something both breathtaking and heartbreaking: a box of delicate glass panels, most of them the size of postcards, displaying color images captured in the early 20th century. Many were deteriorating, their once crisp scenes speckled with ghostly snowflakes, obscured by halos, and otherwise rendered surreal by time and neglect. They were autochromes, the products of a turn-of-the-20th-century race to capture the world in all its color. And now the race was on to preserve them, even as time transformed them in extraordinary ways. Introduced in 1907 by French inventors Auguste and Louis Lumière, autochrome technology was revolutionary in its day, relying on a light-sensitive silver emulsion covered with a fine layer of potato starch. That powdery extract—then popular as thickener, adhesive, and fabric stiffener—was crucial to capturing the chroma of the era. Microscopic particles dyed green, orange, and violet were scattered across a plate and sealed on with varnish. When light struck the plate through a camera's open shutter, each colored granule blocked a range of wavelengths corresponding to colors of the visible spectrum, exposing the emulsion beneath to countless tiny dots of variously filtered light. Some autochromes—early 20th-century color photos on glass plates—now have freckles from oxidizing silver particles, as in this undated, unidentified landscape. Unknown Photographer, National Geographic Image Collection After a few chemical baths in a darkroom, the transparency that appeared on glass was, seen up close, a pointillistic mosaic. But pull back and shine light through the plate—covered with another glass layer, for protection—and a vivid, painterly image emerged. National Geographic magazine's first full-time editor was an autochrome champion, commissioning and procuring glass plate works from photographers around the world. Because exposure times were long, much of early color photography consists of still lifes and landscapes, but National Geographic acquired dynamic images of life as it's lived: of crowded bazaars in Albania, of masked dancers in Tibet, of riders atop brightly garbed elephants in India. Autochromes, together with similar processes involving glass plates, remained the primary means of making color photos until the 1935 debut of Kodachrome film, with its layers of emulsion that were themselves photosensitive. In the film era, the Society's glass plates were not carefully preserved. Wentzel, during more than 40 years as a National Geographic field photographer, saw value in the old photos while many of his peers were focused on innovation. When the Society thinned its collection in the 1960s, he rescued plates from the trash, taking them home for safekeeping and eventual return to the archive. Others simply moldered, forgotten, until Wentzel rediscovered them in off-site storage upon becoming the Society's first official photo archivist, in 1980. A Syrian desert patrol on camelback visits the ruins of Palmyra in a 1938 Dufaycolor. This version was scanned in 2012, before its acetate film began visibly degrading. Photograph by W. Robert Moore, National Geographic Image Collection In the past 13 years, the telltale blotch of vinegar syndrome has set in. 'Dufays' and autochromes are kept in cold storage today, which slows but doesn't halt such deterioration. Photograph by W. Robert Moore, National Geographic Image Collection Wentzel made it a mission to preserve, catalog, and exhibit the old photos, and today National Geographic's Early Color Photography Collection comprises some 13,000 plates, including one of the world's largest assemblages of autochromes (the largest is at the Musée Albert-Kahn, outside Paris). But as with many remaining early color photos, National Geographic's have been altered by light, heat, humidity, and improper handling. Plates have cracked and fissured. Oxidizing silver particles have created radiant, amoeba-shaped orange blotches. On the autochrome descendants known as Dufaycolors, violet bruises are evidence of 'vinegar syndrome,' a chemical decay affecting layers of film between glass. Named for its telltale scent and contagious from plate to plate, vinegar syndrome is 'a plague amongst photographic archives,' says Sara Manco, director of the National Geographic Society's photo and illustration archives. Degrading always sounds bad, but they're also developing, from documentary objects into a weird science-history project. Rebecca Dupont , National Geographic image archivist It all sounds rather tragic, but the blemishes also have given many of the plates a strange new beauty. No longer pristine documents of history, they've become testaments to the ravages of time: abstracted, fragmented, and obscured, like so many ancient and admired artifacts. What's more, says image archivist Rebecca Dupont, witnessing the deterioration—a process that will only ever play out once—offers lessons about the science behind these objects. 'If you think about it, photography is still a relatively new medium, only 150 years old,' Dupont says. And the objects in the collection 'haven't yet reached the end of their lives. They're in a special stage right now where we get to see what happens to them.' (These 18 autochrome photos will transport you to another era.) Exposure to humidity caused this Dufaycolor to fade and its film base to shrivel. As National Geographic archivist Sara Manco says, 'We'll never know what that image was like.' Photograph by Rudolf Balogh, National Geographic Image Collection Even as the plates continue to deteriorate, some measure of permanence has been achieved. With a 2020 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Manco and a team of archivists spent three years digitizing the entire collection. These days, the originals are carefully organized in temperature-controlled storage. Those afflicted with vinegar syndrome are sequestered, and many broken ones have been painstakingly pieced together. Despite all that care, the archivists know they can't preserve the plates forever—and they're OK with that. 'Degrading always sounds bad, but they're also developing, from documentary objects into a weird science-history project,' Dupont says. 'Are the images we're looking at being lost? Or are they just being changed into something new?' A version of this story appears in the August 2025 issue of National Geographic magazine.
