(Photographs by Cory Richards)
Posted on 10/07/2012 3:21:14 AM PDT by Renfield
The skull, a human skull, was perched atop a crumbly boulder in the remote northern reaches of the Nepalese district of Mustang. Pete Athans, the leader of an interdisciplinary team of mountaineers and archaeologists, stepped into his harness and tied himself to a rope. He scrambled up the 20-foot boulder, belayed by another climber, Ted Hesser.
~~~snip~~~
But more intriguing than the skull itself was where it fell from. The boulder Athans scaled sat directly below a soaring cliff, tan rock streaked with bands of pink and white. Toward the top of the cliff were several small caves, painstakingly hand-dug from the brittle stone. Erosion had triggered the partial collapse of the cliff face, dislodging the skull. Now the same tantalizing question was on everyone’s mind: If a skull tumbled out, what remained up there?
Mustang, a former kingdom in north-central Nepal, is home to one of the world’s great archaeological mysteries. In this dusty, wind-savaged place, hidden within the Himalaya and deeply cleaved by the Kali Gandaki River—in spots, the gorge dwarfs Arizona’s Grand Canyon—there are an extraordinary number of human-built caves....
(Excerpt) Read more at ngm.nationalgeographic.com ...
(Photographs by Cory Richards)
Ping
Watch the Program: Cave People of the Himalaya
See the full National Geographic television special:
http://www.pbs.org/programs/cave-people-himalaya/
Do we ever get to see documentaries on such historical and exotic finds as are being uncovered in Mustang?
I read all the time of ancient and mysterious discoveries in far away lands, but few if any documentaries on them ever seem to get on TV.
I guess our culture is doomed forever now to have Dancing With the Stars and the Kardashians as predominent teaching and mind-expansion tools in the mass media.
Leni
I linked to a special on this that apparently aired on PBS.
Ping
Cave People of the Himalaya
In the 1990s, a high Himalayan cave in Upper Mustang, Nepal was discovered to contain 42 ancient people, buried on wooden bunk beds. American archaeologist Dr. Mark Aldenderfer believes there must be more burial caves, but the challenge is how to find them deep within cliff faces in the cold and inhospitable environment of the Himalaya. He enlists the world’s best technical climbers to do the searching. Aldenderfer’s theory is the funerary caves were carved out by the earliest people to have settled in the Himalaya. If he can find their remains and extract their DNA, he’ll learn who these people were and what brought them to the toughest parts of the planet to live.
National Geographic’s cameras capture the rare moments of discovery as they unfold. First, the 7-year-old on the expedition finds a human bone along a riverbed. Then, a series of burial caves are discovered above the riverbed, with human remains spilling forth from dangerously eroding caves. Bioarchaeologist Jacqueline Eng begins laying the bones out anatomically to count the number of individuals in the cave. The climbers, led by seven-time Everest mountaineer Pete Athans, recover bones from a total of 27 individuals: adult men, women, adolescents, even infants, along with their goats, cows and a horse. Wood inside the caves provides the clue that bunk beds must have housed the bones at one time. ...”
See the full National Geographic television special:
http://www.pbs.org/programs/cave-people-himalaya/
For later
Netflix has LOTS of documentaries. Watch them whenever you like.
The following site has lots of docs of every category that you can watch for free (from Nat Geog, Nature, many others). It also has some looney left conspiracy crap docs.
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/category/nature-wildlife/
Leni
You are correct. The history and science channel have been reduced to reality shows that are merely insipid. About the only shows worth watching are old movies and How It’s Made.
So many opportunities for learning wasted.
I prefer to watch docs on TV rather than on the internet....and I scarcely want to pay to watch, either.
I wonder if there isn't enough audience anymore for science and discovery shows due to the ever-more dumbed-down lumpen masses walking around like zombies with plastic phones growing out of their ears and electronic pads grafted onto their fingers.
Leni
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Thanks Renfield. |
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