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DEPARTMENTS FEATURES
3 QUESTIONS
Sebastian Junger on the
impacts of war
30 A 9,0 0 0 -YE AR LOVE AFFAIR
Alcohol is one of the most universally produced and enjoyed substances in
history, and it has helped shape who we are.
VISIONS
By Andrew Curry Photographs by Brian Finke
EXPLORE
$IWKFHQWXU\B.C. Greek
What we eat, what we wish drinking cup depicts
we could eat, and why an after-dinner
eating bugs isnt so bad drinking party,
known as a
symposion.
STARTALK
From asteroids to zombies
with Whoopi Goldberg and
Neil deGrasse Tyson
EL SEWHERE
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BABY BOOMERS
(BORN 19451965)
FOR US
Theres a virus out there that hasnt been talked about much, and
you may not have heard about it. A virus thats serious, like HIV.
Its hepatitis C (Hep C). It can hide in your body for years, even
decades, without symptoms. And it isnt tested for in routine blood
work. If left untreated, Hep C can cause liver damage and even lead
to liver cancer.
The good news is: if you have Hep C, it can be cured. Ask your
healthcare provider at your next appointment to be tested for Hep C.
Its the only way to know for sure.
HEP C HOPE, KNOW FOR SURE, GILEAD and the GILEAD logo are trademarks of Gilead Sciences, Inc.
All other trademarks referenced herein are the property of their respective owners.
2016 Gilead Sciences, Inc. All rights reserved. UNBC4089 11/16
| F R O M T H E E D I TO R | W I D O W S R I G H T S
W H AT W I D O W S martyr, prey. Toensing and Gorney From the day that Clare
Tumushabes husband died, his
LOS EA N D K E E P found that storybut they also found
women of incredible strength ghting
relatives challenged her right
to her home, her cropland,
generations of repressive tradition. and even her children. But
Tumushabe fought back. Here
About one million American women In Uganda, after Clare Tumushabes she carries her daughter Jemi-
become widowed each year. For many of husband died, his relatives told her that ma as she heads out to plant
sweet potatoes near her home
us who have been there, it was a singular, they were taking her six children and the in Ugandas Mukono District.
searing experience. land where she grew her familys food
But we are the lucky ones: In many and that she would become the third wife
parts of the world, losing ones husband of her husbands oldest brother.
is about much more than coping with To summarize Tumushabes answer:
grief, loneliness, or nancial upheaval. no way. She worked with a legal team
A husbands death may plunge a woman from a U.S.-based nonprofit called
into a state of widowhoodenforced International Justice Mission to make
by cultural, social, or legal bondsshe sure Ugandas laws, which prohibit
cannot leave. Widows are cast out. Their exactly this behavior, were enforced.
possessions, their land, and even their It was a long and ugly battle, but today
children can be taken from them. Tumushabe has her children and home
Photographer Amy Toensing, with a and isnt in a forced marriage. One of
grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis the men who attacked her went to jail.
Reporting, has publicized widows plight I believe that there is hope, said Alice
since she rst shot the story in India in Muhairwe Mparana, a lawyer who aided
2005. For this article we sent Toensing Tumushabe. We are not 100 percent
and writer Cynthia Gorney back to India, there, but we have begun. On behalf of
as well as to Uganda and to Bosnia and the 259 million widows around the world,
Herzegovina, to continue the project. these are heartening words indeed.
They went, as Gorney writes, to un-
derstand the way societies can force a
jarring new identity on a woman whose
husband has died: pariah, exile, nuisance, Susan Goldberg, Editor in Chief
DEPUTY EDITOR IN CHIEF: Jamie Shreeve. MANAGING EDITOR: David Brindley. EXECUTIVE EDITOR PRESIDENT AND CEO Gary E. Knell
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HOW WE SHOW
A L L S I D E S O F WA R
In the National Geographic documentary
Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise
of ISIS, journalist and Oscar-nominated
director Sebastian Junger,RHUVDORRN
LQVLGH6\ULDVFLYLOZDU+LVODWHVWERRNTribe,
LVDERXWFRQLFWKRPHFRPLQJDQG:HVWHUQ
VRFLHW\VODFNRIFRKHVLRQ
PHOTO: STEFAN RUIZ. THIS INTERVIEW WAS EDITED FOR LENGTH AND CLARITY.
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Residential Mortgage Licensee #4127 Dept. of Financial and Professional Regulation; KS: Licensed Mortgage Company MC.0025309; MA: Mortgage Lender License
#ML 3030; ME: Supervised Lender License; MN: Not an offer for a rate lock agreement; MS: Licensed by the MS Dept. of Banking and Consumer Finance; NH: Licensed
by the NH Banking Dept., #6743MB; NV: License #626; NJ: Licensed Mortgage Banker NJ Dept. of Banking, 1st (and/or 2nd) mortgages only; NY: Licensed Mortgage
Banker NYS Banking Dept.; OH: MB 850076; OR: License #ML-1387; PA: Licensed as a 1st Mortgage Banker by the Dept. of Banking and licensed pursuant to the PA
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Quicken Loans Inc. All rights reserved. Lending services provided by Quicken Loans Inc., a subsidiary of Rock Holdings Inc. Quicken Loans is a registered service mark of Intuit
Inc., used under license.
I VISIONS
Canada
In Manitobas Wapusk
National Park, a polar
bear and her four-
month-old cub nestle
by a willow tree. Hun-
gry mothers and cubs
exit their birthing dens
each springat the
same time seal pups
are born on pack ice in
nearby Hudson Bay.
PHOTO: DAISY GILARDINI
Czechia
Braids of frost adorn
beech and spruce
trees on a ridge in the
West Beskids. The
discontinuous range
part of the ecologically
important Carpathian
Mountainsalso spans
Poland and Slovakia.
This section has been
protected since 1973.
PHOTO: JAN BAINAR
Antarctica
Whats black and white
and bred all over?
Plneau Island, where
gentoo penguins mate
each spring. Here, a
thousand or so of
WKHELJLJKWOHVV
birdsaverage size:
12 pounds, 2.5 feet
tallget acquainted
during a snowstorm.
PHOTO: DAISY GILARDINI
O Order prints of select National Geographic photos online at NationalGeographicArt.com.
| V I S I O N S | YO U R S H O T. N G M .C O M
ARTISTIC LIBERTY
AT T H E TA B L E
By Nina Strochlic
39
of paintings
from the age
of exploration
featured
VKHOOVK
28%
of paintings
from the age of
enlightenment
featured
lemons
26%
of paintings
from the age of
enlightenment
featured
grapes
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| E X P LO R E | F O O D
U N I T E D S TAT E S
OF CORN
By Catherine Zuckerman
Food for thought: How does one ingre- emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Gar- An artistic representation
dient become linked to one place? den, when the rst written account of of the U.S. features corn
in many formsincluding
Thats one question artists Henry a tomato outside of the Americas was cobs, kernels, and chips.
Hargreaves and Caitlin Levin had in documentedin Tuscany.
mind when they hatched their food For their map of the United States
map seriesa collection of country and (above), Hargreaves and Levin chose
continent maps made using ingredients as their medium an assemblage of corn
synonymous with those regions. Think varieties and corn-derived products.
India rendered in spices, New Zealand And with good reason: Today no oth-
in kiwifruit, South America in citrus. er country produces more of the crop,
In some of these cases and in many which made its way north from Mexico
others around the globe, the foods most some 7,000 years ago and thenthanks
commonly associated with a place arent to its high adaptability and versatility
actually native to that spot. Tomatoes, proliferated.
for example, come from South Ameri- Indeed, says Iowa State University
ca, yet today theyre an integral part of agronomist Mark Licht, corn now grows
Italian cuisine. That association began throughout the U.S. in every state from
before 1548, says Peter Raven, president New Hampshire to Hawaii.
MONICA SERRANO, NGM STAFF. SOURCE: DAVID KARP, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE
P A RE N T A G E KE Y
Seed parent
(female)
Pollen parent
(male)
Mutation
Pomelo Mandarin**
(C. maxima) (C. reticulata)
Likely extinct
parent hybrids
6RXURUDQJH
0H\HUOHPRQ (C. aurantium)
(C. x meyeri)
6ZHHWRUDQJH
(C. sinensis)
*UDSHIUXLW %ORRGRUDQJH
(C. paradisi) (C. sinensis)
*RESEARCHERS CONTINUE
7DQJHOR TO DEBATE WHETHER
(C. x tangelo) KUMQUATS ARE INDEED
IN THE CITRUS GENUS.
**MOST PURE MANDARINS
HAVE A SMALL PROPOR
TION OF POMELO GENES.
| E X P LO R E | F O O D
COPYRIGHT 2017 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY SUSAN McCONNELL, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC YOUR SHOT
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Neil deGrasse Tyson: Youre one of 12 could. If they had a big enough brain
people, is it, who have won the Tony, and opposable thumbs.
the Oscar, the Emmy, and the Grammy? WG: What does that system look like?
Thats crazy, girl!
Whoopi Goldberg: I think there are NT: Theres the macho version of it,
more of us than 12, but thanks. And where you get your nukes and you blow
youyou know, youre like the smartest it out of the sky.
man on the Earth. People are like, I love WG: But doesnt that mean that other
him! I hated science before he started stu is raining down?
talking. When you nd somebody who
can explain to you those things which NT: Thats what Im saying. Were really
you think youre too dumb to under- good at blowing stu up and less good
stand, its a magnicent thing. at knowing where the pieces will fall. So
the kinder, gentler way is to nudge it o
NT: So do you have any question for me? its current course. It will still be there on
Neil deGrasse Tyson is Is there any science question that has another orbit, but you get to have it not
the host of StarTalk, airing plagued you? hit us this time around.
Mondays through February WG: Well, I do want to know: Every cou- WG: So the idea of a laser destroying the
6 at 11/10c on National ple of years we hear that some asteroid is asteroid is out?
Geographic. His new book
heading our way. Whats happening that
StarTalk: Everything You
Ever Need to Know About
suddenly were seeing it more and more? NT: One idea is, as the asteroid is moving
Space Travel, Sci-Fi, the through space, you beam lasers on one
Human Race, the Universe, NT: We have a greater capacity than side of it. You vaporize that side of the
and Beyond, is available ever before to monitor asteroids that asteroid, it outgasses, and that creates
wherever books are sold have close approaches. For me the a recoil to push it in the other direction.
and at shopng.com/startalk. danger zone is, are you coming closer Both of these are trying to change its
WILLIAM CALLAN, CONTOUR
BY GETTY IMAGES
to Earth than the orbit of the moon? I orbital path.
count that as an invasion of our space. WG: There are satellites all around,
Get the hell out of my living room, right? right? Why cant a satellite be used to
Or my backyard. shoot it?
WG: Right.
NT: By the time its close enough for sat-
NT: A few times a decade we get an ellites that are in low Earth orbit to hit it,
asteroid the size of a small building or its too late. When I talk about changing
a large car coming in between us and the path, Im talking about seven orbits
the moon. Maybe thats enough for you in advance. Say the asteroids on a 10-
to say, Hey, lets build an asteroid de- year orbit and on the seventh orbit, 70
fense system. Because you know the years from now, its going to hit Earth.
dinosaurs would have done that if they Im going to deect it today so that in
3+2727,027+<:+,7(7581.$5&+,9(5,*+7
THIS INTERVIEW, DRAWN FROM A STARTALK TAPING, WAS EDITED FOR LENGTH AND CLARITY.
| S TA R TA L K
1-844-528-0184
d^
| E X P LO R E | B A S I C I N S T I N C T S
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PRIVATE COLLECTION
34 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C F E B RUA RY 2 0 1 7
Outside a chicheria in Lamay, Peru, in the Sacred Valley of the Inca
Empire, Lucio Chvez Daz drinks a glass of chicha frutillada, a corn
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of today are a historical exception; alcoholic beverages have long
been doctored with everything from pine needles to tree resins
to honey. Ancient Greek warriors even grated goat cheese onto
their beer. When the Inca drank chicha out of wooden cups called
keroslike this 17th-century onethey often stirred not straw-
berries but psychoactive herbs into the beer.
PHOTOGRAPHED AT MUSEO INKA DE LA UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL
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38 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C F E B RUA RY 2 0 1 7
potable alcohol. Thats a form of fermentation. more likely. But that response to alcohol seems
Most modern makers of beer, wine, or sake use to be specic to humans and perhaps apes.
cultivated varieties of a single yeast genus called The reason may be a critical gene mutation
Saccharomyces (the most common is S. cerevisi- that occurred in the last common ancestor of
ae, from the Latin word for beer, cerevisia). But African apes and us; geneticists recently dated
yeasts are diverse and ubiquitous, and theyve the mutation to at least 10 million years ago. This
likely been fermenting ripe wild fruit for about change in the ADH4 gene created an enzyme that
120 million years, ever since the rst fruits ap- made it possible to digest ethanol up to 40 times
peared on Earth. faster. According to Steven Benner, a co-author
From our modern point of view, ethanol has of the study and a biologist at the Foundation for
one very compelling property: It makes us feel Applied Molecular Evolution in Alachua, Florida,
good. Ethanol helps release serotonin, dopa- the new improved enzyme enabled our ancestors
mine, and endorphins in the brain, chemicals to enjoy more of the overripe bounty on the forest
that make us happy and less anxious. oor, without suffering ill effects.
To our fruit-eating primate ancestors swinging You could say we came out of the trees to get
through the trees, however, the ethanol in rotting a beer, Benner says. But the point wasnt to get
fruit would have had three other appealing char- drunk. That would come much later, once we g-
acteristics. First, it has a strong, distinctive smell ured out how to make the stuff in quantity.
that makes the fruit easy to locate. Second, its
easier to digest, allowing animals to get more of a We Settle Down and Farm for Booze
commodity that was precious back then: calories. Flash forward millions of years to a parched pla-
Third, its antiseptic qualities repel microbes that teau in southeastern Turkey, not far from the
might sicken a primate. Millions of years ago one Syrian border. Archaeologists there are explor-
of them developed a taste for fruit that had fall- ing another momentous transition in human
en from the tree. Our ape ancestors started eat- prehistory, and a tantalizing possibility: Did al-
ing fermented fruits on the forest oor, and that cohol lubricate the Neolithic revolution? Did beer
made all the difference, says Nathaniel Dominy, help persuade Stone Age hunter-gatherers to give
a biological anthropologist at Dartmouth Col- up their nomadic ways, settle down, and begin
lege. Were preadapted for consuming alcohol. to farm?
Robert Dudley, the University of California, The ancient site, Gbekli Tepe, consists of
Berkeley physiologist who rst suggested the circular and rectangular stone enclosures and
idea, calls it the drunken monkey hypothesis. mysterious T-shaped pillars that, at 11,600 years
The primates that ventured down out of the trees old, may be the worlds oldest known temples.
got access to a brand-new food source. If you can Since the site was discovered two decades ago,
smell the alcohol and get to the fruit faster, you it has upended the traditional idea that religion
have an advantage, Dudley says. You defeat the was a luxury made possible by settlement and
competition and get more calories. The ones that farming. Instead the archaeologists excavating
stuffed themselves were the most likely to suc- Gbekli Tepe think it was the other way around:
ceed at reproductionand to experience (while Hunter-gatherers congregated here for religious
eating) a gentle rush of pleasure in the brain. That ceremonies and were driven to settle down in or-
buzz reinforced the appeal of the new lifestyle. der to worship more regularly.
A truly drunken monkey, Dudley points out, Nestled inside the walls of some smaller enclo-
would be an easy target for predators. In spite sures are six barrel- or trough-shaped stone ves-
of widely reported anecdotes, theres very little sels. The largest could hold 40 gallons of liquid.
scientic evidence of animals in the wild ever The archaeologists suggest that they were used to
getting enough alcohol from fermented fruit brew a basic beer from wild grasses.
to exhibit drunken behavior. A satised glow is Analyzing residues from several of those tubs,
today to take hallucinogens: to induce an al- is solid. In 2004 he published evidence of a cock-
tered state that puts them in touch with the spir- tail made of rice, hawthorn berries, honey, and
it world. But researchers here think something wild grapes at Jiahu, a site in China just a few
else was going on too. The organizers of the feast, thousand years younger than Gbekli Tepe. The
they say, were using the barbecue and the booze people there had only recently made the tran-
brewed from wild grains as a reward. Once the sition to farming. Yet the combination of ingre-
partygoers arrived, they pitched in to erect the dients, plus the presence of tartaric acid, a key
sites massive pillars, which weigh up to 16 tons. chemical signature of wine, convinces McGov-
The outlines of the deal have changed little in ern that Jiahu farmers were already concocting
the thousands of years since. If you need some- sophisticated mixed beverages: Its the earliest
one to help you move, you buy them pizza and evidence for beer, wine, and mead, all in one.
a couple of beers, says German Archaeological The domestication of plants is driven for-
Institute researcher Jens Notroff. ward by the desire to have greater quantities of
The idea thats gaining support at Gbekli alcoholic beverages, McGovern says. Its not
Tepe was rst proposed more than half a centu- the only factor driving forward civilization, but
ry ago: Beer, rather than bread, may have been it plays a central role.
the inspiration for our hunter-gatherer ancestors
to domesticate grains. Eventually, simply har- We Drink It for Our Health
vesting wild grasses to brew into beer wouldnt Alcoholic beverages, like agriculture, were in-
have been enough. Demand for reliable supplies vented independently many different times,
pushed humans rst to plant the wild grasses and likely on every continent save Antarctica. Over
44 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C F E B RUA RY 2 0 1 7
the millennia nearly every plant with some sug- Bazis houses had its own nanobrewery.
ar or starch has been pressed into service for By 3150 B.C., long before the re that wiped out
fermentation: agave and apples, birch tree sap Tall Bazi, the ancient Egyptians had progressed
and bananas, cocoa and cassavas, corn and cacti, beyond home brew: They were maintaining
molle berries, rice, sweet potatoes, peach palms, industrial-scale breweries of the sort that were
pineapples, pumpkins, persimmons, and wild eventually used to supply workers building the
grapes. As if to prove that the desire for alcohol great Pyramids at Giza. Beer was such a necessity
knows no bounds, the nomads of Central Asia in Egypt that royals were buried with miniature
make up for the lack of fruit and grain on their breweries to slake their thirst in the afterlife.
steppes by fermenting horse milk. The result, In ancient Babylon beer was so important that
koumiss, is a tangy drink with the alcohol con- sources from 500 B.C. record dozens of types, in-
tent of a weak beer. cluding red beer, pale beer, and dark beer.
Alcohol may afford psychic pleasures and spir- Indirectly, we may have the nutritional bene-
itual insight, but thats not enough to explain its ts of beer to thank for the invention of writing,
universality in the ancient world. People drank and some of the worlds earliest citiesfor the
the stuff for the same reason primates ate fer- dawn of history, in other words. Adelheid Otto,
mented fruit: because it was good for them. an archaeologist at Ludwig-Maximilians Uni-
Yeasts produce ethanol as a form of chemical versity in Munich who co-directs excavations at
warfareits toxic to other microbes that com- Tall Bazi, thinks the nutrients that fermenting
pete with them for sugar inside a fruit. That anti- added to early grain made Mesopotamian civi-
microbial effect benets the drinker. It explains lization viable, providing basic vitamins missing
why beer, wine, and other fermented beverages from what was otherwise a depressingly bad diet.
were, at least until the rise of modern sanitation, They had bread and barley porridge, plus may-
often healthier to drink than water. be some meat at feasts. Nutrition was very bad,
Whats more, in fermenting sugar, yeasts make she says. But as soon as you have beer, you have
more than ethanol. They produce all kinds of nu- everything you need to develop really well. Im
trients, including such B vitamins as folic acid, convinced this is why the rst high culture arose
niacin, thiamine, and riboavin. Those nutrients in the Near East.
would have been more present in ancient brews
than in our modern ltered and pasteurized vari- We Always Go Too Far
eties. In the ancient Near East at least, beer was a And then, of course, there is the other side of
sort of enriched liquid bread, providing calories, the story. There are the lengths to which people
hydration, and essential vitamins. throughout history have gone to go on a bender.
At Tall Bazi, a site in northern Syria, a German Before the Celtic ancestors of the French
excavation revealed a clutch of about 70 houses learned to produce wine themselves, they im-
overlooking the Euphrates River that were aban- ported it from the Greeks, Etruscans, and Ro-
doned during a sudden re almost 3,400 years mans. In a wheat eld at the end of a winding
ago. The long-ago catastrophe was a blessing for mountain road in central France, at an archae-
archaeologists: The re forced Tall Bazis resi- ological site called Corent, I get a taste of this
dents to ee in the middle of daily tasks such as dependency. My guide is Matthieu Poux, a
cooking. It thus captured for all time a moment Franco-Swiss archaeologist with a crew cut, blue
in the towns everyday life. aviator shades that match his shirt, and a rm
In each house, usually close to the front door, handshake. All around us the extinct volcanoes
the excavators found a huge, 50-gallon clay jar of Frances Massif Central stab the sky.
sunk into the oor. Chemical analysisby Zarn- At Corent, Poux leads some 50 French archae-
kow againrevealed traces of barley and thick ologists and students who are uncovering the
crusts of oxalate in the jars. In effect, each of Tall foundations of a major Celtic ceremonial center
40 Cassava beer
00 ca 4000 B.C.
B.
Ancient brewers made a potent
C.
Potato chicha
ca 13,000 B.C.
Wild potatoes show up this
early at a Chilean archaeo-
ORJLFDOVLWHWRGD\WKH
Mapuche people ferment
Searching for proof them into a powerful brew.
Firm evidence for early consumption of alcohol comes from analysis
of ancient chemical residues; the earliest so far is from China. Other
dates are estimated from indirect evidence, such as when a plant
XVHGWRPDNHDOFRKROUVWDSSHDUVLQWKHDUFKDHRORJLFDOUHFRUG
Emergence of Homo
sapiens, who most likely Earliest evidence of Earliest evidence of grape Earliest evidence
consumed naturally alcoholic beverages, wine, at Hajji Firuz, in the of barley beer, at
fermented fruits at Jiahu, China Zagros Mountains of Iran Godin Tepe, Iran
1 2 3 4
200,000 B.C. 8000 7000 6000 5000 4000
alcoholic drink.
60
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6 00
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a wheat-and-barley beer produced evidence of a fermented beverage.
6000 B.C. by the state in industrial quantities It was made of rice, grapes,
DVHDUO\DVB.C. hawthorn berries, and honey.
AFRICA
Sorghum beer
ca 6000 B.C.
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sap of wild palms.
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JASON TREAT, RYAN T. WILLIAMS, AND DAISY CHUNG, NGM STAFF
A 9,000 -YEAR
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UNIVERSITY PENNSYLVANIA 49
Since it began in 1810 as a wedding celebration for the Bavarian
crown prince, Munichs Oktoberfest has grown into one of the
worlds largest festivals, with more than six million visitors crowd-
ing its tents each year to drain one-liter mugs of beer. Bavaria has
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Law, passed in 1516, ushered in a global trend toward uniformity by
restricting brewers to water, hops, and malt (and later yeast, after it
was discovered). These days some craft brewers are pushing back,
experimenting with ancient additives and unusual yeasts.
A 9,000 -YEAR LOVE AFFAIR 51
The Drinking World
People in wealthy regions with long drinking traditions, such as Europe,
tend to drink the most. Abstainers are more often found in the Middle East
and Southeast Asia, where laws or tradition limit consumption.
Spirits
Wine
Beer
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and regional capital. In the second and rst cen- Roman vintners, whose elite Roman clients
turies B.C. it was home to as many as 10,000 preferred white wines, tended vast plantations
people. The town had a marketplace, a temple, of red wine grapes for the Celtic market; traders
taverns, a theater, and hundreds of houses. moved the wine across the Mediterranean, in
Corent, Poux says, is a vivid example of alco- ships that carried up to 10,000 amphorae each,
hols role as cultural glue, social lubricant, and and then sent it north on small river barges. By
status symboland inciter of violence. Theres the time it reached Corent months later, its value
no need for sophisticated analysis to determine had multiplied a hundredfold. One contempo-
what the inhabitants preferred to pour. Around rary claimed the thirsty Celts would trade a slave
140 B.C., eight decades before Julius Caesars for a single jar.
invasion, Corents elites developed a ferocious Wine was the focus of elaborate rituals that ce-
taste for Roman wine. The evidence, in the shape mented the status of the tribal leaders. Things of-
of shattered clay wine jars, or amphorae, is so ten got rowdy. The ceremonies were pompous,
abundant that it crunches underfoot as Poux officialand brutal too, with sacricial victims
leads me across the site. Archaeologists have and sword ghts breaking out over portions of
uncovered at least 50 tons of broken amphorae meat, Poux says. Warriors drank heavily before
here; Poux estimates that 500 tons more remain battle and went into battle drunk. Amphorae
on the hilltop. werent merely opened; they were beheaded with
Bending down, he plucks a palm-size chunk of swords. By paving their streets with the broken
red clay ecked with black volcanic glass from jars, Poux says, the rulers of Corent aunted their
the dirt and hands it to me. We have millions of wealth and power.
amphora sherds, all imported from Italy, he says. By his calculations, the Celts living here went
This one has obsidian in ityou can tell it came through 50,000 to 100,000 wine jars over the
from the countryside near Mount Vesuvius. course of a century, the equivalent of 28,000
52 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C F E B RUA RY 2 0 1 7
bottles a year of expensive, imported Italian red. A Taste of Our History
And wine was primarily drunk by elites, Poux Its been 24 hours since Zarnkow mashed to-
says. We have to assume lots more beer and gether barley, bread, and milled grain in a wide-
mead was drunk by commoners. mouthed laboratory pitcher. The mixture spent
Still, by todays standards, the quantities may the night sitting on a table next to his desk, cov-
not sound impressive. The modern world is ered by a paper plate.
awash in booze, and ever since the perfection of When Zarnkow icks on the lights, I can im-
distillation in the Middle Ages, weve consumed mediately see that the slop has come alive, thanks
a lot of it in concentrated form. Worldwide, to yeast from the sourdough. Muddy sediment at
people age 15 and over average about a drink a the bottom of the pitcher resembles wet muesli.
dayor more like two if you include only drink- Every few seconds, a large bubble of carbon diox-
ers, because about half of us have never touched ide percolates to the top through a scummy lay-
a drop. In the United States, alcohol abuse kills er of foam. A translucent gold liquid, resembling
88,000 Americans and costs $249 billion a year, the wheat beer brewed in massive steel tanks at
according to estimates by the Centers for Disease the brewery next door, rests in the middle.
Control and Prevention. Zarnkow says the inspiration for the brew
Millions of years ago, when food was harder to came from a 5,000-year-old song. A hymn to
come by, the attraction to ethanol and the brain Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of beer, it sounds
chemistry that lit up to reward the discovery of a lot like the technical brewing manuals lining
fermented fruit may have been a critical survival Zarnkows office shelves. Ninkasi, when your
advantage for our primate ancestors. Today those rising bread is formed with the noble spatula, it
genetic and neurochemical traits may be at the has an aroma like from mellow honey, one re-
root of compulsive drinking, says Robert Dudley, cent translation reads. To let the fermenting vat
whose father was an alcoholic. produce loud sounds, you place it appropriately
Throughout history, ethanols intoxicating on a sublime collector vat.
power has made it an object of concernand He and I look at the bubbling pitcher, in my
sometimes outright prohibition. And through case a little uneasily. Theres no added carbon
the ages, says Rod Phillips, author of Alcohol: A dioxide, no hops. Its not ltered. Its not to Eu-
History, most societies have struggled to strike a ropean tastes, Zarnkow warns me, managing my
balance: Allow people to drink because it makes expectations as he strains some Sumerian home
them happy and is a gift from the gods, but pre- brew through a coffee lter. But back then, the
vent them from drinking too much. alternative wasnt tea or coffee or milk or juice or
The ancient Greeks were a good example. A soft drinks. This is much more tasty than warm
crucial part of their spiritual and intellectual life water lled with microorganisms.
was the symposium fueled by winewithin lim- I pour a few ngers into a imsy plastic cup.
its. Mixing wine with water in a decorated vessel Bits of grain oat to the top.
called a krater, Greek hosts served their (exclu- I take a cautious sniff.
sively male) guests a rst bowl for health, anoth- I sip.
er for pleasure, and a third for sleep. When this The beer is both tart and sweet, bready with a
bowl is drunk up, wise guests go home, the comic hint of sour apple juice at the end. Its actually
poet Eubulus warned in the fourth century B.C., pretty good. If I close my eyes, I can almost imag-
according to one translation. The fourth bowl is ine it changing the world. j
ours no longer, but belongs to violence; the fth
to uproar; the sixth to drunken revel; the seventh
Photographer Brian Finke has shot stories for the
to black eyes. The eighth is the policemans; the magazine on the science of taste, food waste, and
ninth belongs to biliousness; and the 10th to mad- meat. Andrew Currys last feature was on Trajans
ness and the hurling of furniture. Column in Rome. He lives in Berlin.
53
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55
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ne hundred miles northeast of Boston Harbor, a half dozen
endangered sei whales lunge and roll, sleek white bellies ash-
ing in the gray North Atlantic. At the top of each lunge, they
throw open tremendous, beaklike maws to strain masses of tiny
copepods from the water, which gushes down the sides of their
pleated throats. Off the port side of the Plan b, an expedition ship operated by
philanthropist Ted Waitt, a school of herring chases the same crustaceans, roil-
ing the surface. Meanwhile, on a rocky ledge 50 feet below, scientists from the
ship watch pollacks, cod, and cunners feed among long ribbons of golden kelp.
Cashes Ledge is the highest undersea moun- scientists and conservationists to set aside some
tain in the Gulf of Maineand a remarkable of the last pristine places in Americas seas. From
movable feast. As the tides wash over its gran- Cashes in New England to the cold-water coral
ite ridges and flat-topped banks, they drive forests in the western Aleutian Islands of Alaska
internal waves of warm surface water laden with to the Cortes and Tanner Banks off San Diego,
plankton into the depths. The down-welling these advocates envision a chain of U.S. ma-
waves allow groundsh on the bottom to eat rine sanctuaries linked to a global network large
as lustily as sh in the middle of the water and enough to save and restore the oceans.
whales, herring, and seabirds at the surface. Tides Since Theodore Roosevelts time, the U.S. has
and topography have conspired here to preserve set aside more than 1,200 marine protected areas.
a vestige of the riches that once dened the Gulf They cover a quarter of all U.S. seas. But they ar-
of Maine, until shing depleted them. ent halting the rapid decline of marine life, says
Cashes is essentially a time machine to the Robin Kundis Craig, a University of Utah law pro-
coastal New England of 400 years ago, says fessor and ocean specialist. In the vast majority
Jon Witman, a trim-bearded Brown University of protected waters, at least some shing or other
marine ecologist who has studied the hot spot resource extraction is allowed. Are we more in-
for more than three decades. Oceanographer terested in preserving our marine resources, or
Sylvia Earle, a National Geographic explorer-in- are we more interested in exploiting them? Craig
residence, calls Cashes the Yellowstone of the asks. We really havent settled this question.
North Atlantican American treasure worth Late last summer President Barack Obama
saving, even if we cant go visit in an RV. tried to settle it in two places, using his authority
As the oceans suffer from overshing, pol- under the Antiquities Act, which allows the pres-
lution, and the mounting impacts of climate ident to protect public areas that are historically
change, Earle is part of an effort by marine or scientically signicant. First he quadrupled
62 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C F E B RUA RY 2 0 1 7
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sive economic zone, within 200 nautical miles of 0 mi 600 0 E R
the coast: national monuments and national 0 km 600 A M
marine sanctuaries. Monuments may offer stron-
ger shelter against overshing and other threats.
Most protected waters are in four Pacic monu-
ments rst created by President George W. Bush.
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One urgent reason to But persuading the public and politicians to
save great seascapes presents a special challenge:
protect strategic places While they belong to all Americans, just like
parks on land, few people will ever see them in
in the sea is invisible: person. We can hike into the Grand Canyon, but
climate change. it takes a submarine to visit the Northeast Can-
yons and Seamounts, along and beyond the edge
of the continental shelf. Last year more than four
the size of the Papahnaumokukea Marine Na- million people visited Yellowstone, and some of
tional Monument in northwestern Hawaii, to them walked right up to the bison (a bad idea).
more than half a million square miles. Only rec- But most Americans will never swim with a sei
reational or subsistence shing is allowed in the whale on Cashes other than vicariously, through
monument. Its a sanctuary for endangered blue the images captured by scientists and National
whales and monk seals; apex predators such as Geographic photographers.
tuna and sharks; and some of the worlds north- To top it off, one of the urgent reasons to pro-
ernmost and healthiest coral reefs, which are tect strategic places in the sea is invisible too.
among the most likely to survive global warming. Climate change has begun to compound the pol-
Three weeks later, Obama also created the lution and overshing that have wiped out an
rst marine monument off the U.S. East Coast, estimated half of all commercial sh since 1970.
the 4,913-square-mile Northeast Canyons and The oceans are absorbing most of the heat caused
Seamounts, 130 miles southeast of Cape Cod. by our carbon emissions and 30 percent of the
Conservationists had proposed a much larger carbon dioxide itself. Sea surface temperatures
monument. And they had argued strongly that are at record highs. The water has become 30 per-
Cashes Ledge should be protected too. But the cent more acidic since the industrial revolution.
shing industry opposed them on both counts. Those changes may be invisible, but increas-
After Donald Trumps election as president, ingly, the effects are not. The Gulf of Maine is
some industry spokesmen suggested that even warming faster than almost any other ocean
the areas Obama did designate might be in play region on Earthand on Machias Seal Island, a
again. While no president has ever revoked a popular destination for bird-watching tours, puf-
monument designation, the struggle to protect n chicks are starving to death by the hundreds,
special places in the oceanand the ocean as a as their normal prey, hake and herring, avoid the
wholehas clearly entered an urgent phase. tepid shallows. In southeast Florida the higher
ocean temperatures have boosted the toxic al-
IT WAS HARD ENOUGH, in the 1870s, for Amer- gae blooms that emptied beaches and hotels last
icans to buy into protecting the bizarre and summer. And around the world, many of the
beautiful features of Yellowstone, writes the largest, most colorful coral gardens have gone
park ranger-turned-author Jordan Fisher Smith. tombstone gray. The worst coral bleaching on
People simply didnt believe the fantastical sto- record was triggered in 2014 by ocean warming
ries from beyond the frontier of gold canyons, caused by greenhouse gases, says C. Mark Eakin,
prismatic springs, and erupting hot geysers. The coral reef watch coordinator for the National
photographs of William Henry Jackson and the Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and
paintings of Thomas Moran helped make the then exacerbated in 2015 by El Nio.
case. Congress established the park in 1872, en- Yet the ocean is still home to treasure troves
suring that America would someday be dened, of biodiversity, and evidence is mounting that
as Century magazine editor Robert Underwood protecting such signicant local areas builds re-
Johnson believed, as much by the landscapes it silience to climate changeand can even help
saved as by the infrastructure it built. regenerate what has been lost. Some of the best
66 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C F E B RUA RY 2 0 1 7
A PA R K
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70 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C F E B RUA RY 2 0 1 7
Protecting key areas
builds resilienceand
can even help restore
whats been lost.
the surviving portion 90 feet landward. For more
than a decade after the hurricane, the displaced
reef groaned and creaked like a lost soul. Finally
it attached to its new bottom and quieted down.
Then in 2005, just as new elkhorns had begun to
grow, a spike in ocean temperatures bleached
corals in parts of the eastern Caribbeaninclud-
ing 80 percent of Buck Islands regrown elkhorns.
When Steneck returned to Buck Island in 2014,
during an overall assessment of the reefs of the
eastern Caribbean, his expectations after being
away for a decade were grim. Indeed, along the
northern side, enormous coral haystacks were still
lifeless; diving among them was like swimming
through a petried forest. But on the southern
side, Steneck got a big surprise: gorgeous young
elkhorns, the healthiest he encountered among
all 52 sites in his 15-island study. Living coral cov-
ered 30 percent of the southern reef, compared
with an average of 18.5 percent for the greater
eastern Caribbean. At Buck Island, Steneck found,
large numbers of parrotsh, blue tangs, and other
herbivorous sh were gobbling the algae and sea-
expanding the monument to 19,015 acres. weed that can choke coral growth. And so coral
Along with the loss of the shery, Buck Islands cover had increased.
reefs have been subjected to an array of other Parrotsh are popular eating on St. Croix;
assaults. In the 1970s and 80s a deadly bout of the Saturday market is full of their vivid colors.
white-band disease struck the elkhorn corals, the But after Clintons expansion of the monument,
main reefbuilders, as central to the monuments managers banned all shingwith pot, net, line,
identity as Joshua trees are to their namesake or spearwithin the new limits. It was a hugely
park in southern California. All but 5 percent of controversial decision, but one that many local
the elkhorns succumbed, leaving coral research- shermen now support, as Buck Islands reefs
ers feeling as if they were on deathwatch. I was show clear signs of coming back.
a coroner at that point, says Robert Steneck, a While sh stocks havent rebounded to histor-
University of Maine oceanographer who has ic levelsgroupers in particular are still so rare
studied Buck Island since the early 1970s. that in six years one study counted only three of
In 1989 Hurricane Hugo lashed Buck Island themthe sh on Buck Islands south reef today
with 25-foot waves and 150-mile-an-hour winds, are among the most abundant and biggest in the
destroying part of the southern reef and inging region, according to coral reef ecologist Peter
72 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C F E B RUA RY 2 0 1 7
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74 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C F E B RUA RY 2 0 1 7
The Buck Island
monument benets
animals that range far
outside its boundaries.
CAN MARINE PARKS LIKE BUCK ISLAND help the
larger ocean recover? Consider Pulley Ridge in
the Gulf of Mexico, the deepest light-dependent
coral reef in the continental U.S., and another
place conservationists would dearly love to see
designated a marine monument. Scientists be-
lieve that sh larvae born on Pulley Ridge are
carried by currents around Floridas southern
coast to the Florida Keys National Marine Sanc-
tuary, where they replenish the stocks of threat-
ened sh. If Pulley Ridge were protected, the Keys
would benet too.
At Buck Island scientists are researching the
elkhorns surprising resilience, with a view to
transplanting coral colonies to climate-bleached
reefs elsewhere. These biological assets are the
sources for us when we get smarter, says Zandy
Hillis-Starr, chief of resource management there.
If wildlife managers can help wolves and bison
resurge in Yellowstone, she says, they can help
sharks and groupers rebound in the sea.
Maybe they can even help cod. Back aboard
the Plan b, marine biologist Witman is checking
and snorkel past boulder-size brain coral on the his GoPro footage from Cashes Ledge. In the Gulf
underwater trail. What they cant do is sh, an- of Maine today, the cod stock is estimated to be
chor in the lagoon, or camp on the island. less than one percent of what it was in colonial
Superintendent Joel A. Tutein was a 10-year- times, in spite of decades of catch limits. Witman
old boy watching from a boat when Washington watches abundant cunners and fat pollacks sway
dignitaries came to the island in 1962 and donned to and fro with the waves and the kelp. For every
swimsuits and dive masks for the underwater 10 minutes of footage, he sees two or three cod
dedication. He has watched various marine- swimming through. It doesnt sound impressive
protection efforts for half a century toonone but its more than 30 times what hed see else-
more wrenching than the shutdown of the is- where in the Gulf of Maine. And it makes setting
lands shery. But in the nearly 14 years since, aside a place where the sh can never be caught
the community has rallied around Buck Island sound like a pretty sensible idea. j
in ways that pull people together instead of
pulling them apart, Tutein says. Ecotourism &\QWKLD%DUQHWWDQHQYLURQPHQWDOMRXUQDOLVWKDVZULW-
has become an important business: Buck Island WHQWKUHHERRNVRQZDWHULQFOXGLQJRain: A Natural and
attracts around 50,000 visitors a year. Cultural History.6KHOLYHVLQ*DLQHVYLOOH)ORULGD
Snorkeling
With the
President
The man who has protected more of the sea than
anyone in history is entirely at ease in it. You see
that right away. In September, just months before
he was set to leave the White House, President
Barack Obama slipped into the middle of the
Pacic Ocean wearing only ns, trunks, a mask,
and a snorkel. The sun shimmered on Midway
Islands, a remote speck of reef halfway between
California and China. A rainbow of colors from
shallow mounds of coral rippled in the clear
water. The seas usual constituents were there
algae-munching surgeonsh, spectacled parrot-
sh, jacks, urchins.
That morning Obama had arrived on Midways
Sand Island to show off Papahnaumokukea
Marine National Monument, which his admin-
istration had just transformed into the worlds
largest protected area at the time, a stretch of packed its 2.4 square miles during World War II.
sea more than twice the size of France. Before They dredged reefs for submarines and lined
his swim, while ghost crabs skittered across the them with mines. Today invasive emerald bee-
sand, the president strolled alongside owering tles it past non-native ironwood trees that were
naupaka and spoke of the marine worlds hold planted as windbreaks a century ago by workers
on him. He attributed his calmwhat critics laying telegraph cable. And yet Midway feels not
call his aloofnessto being born in Hawaii and just wild but primal, hosting three million birds,
knowing what its like to jump into the ocean the worlds largest albatross colony, sea turtles,
and understanding what it means when you see spinner dolphins, and rare ducks.
a sea turtle in the face of a wave. Then Obama Obama entered a shallow sea moving with
wanted to jump in the ocean again, right there. yellow-tinged buttery sh and wrasse. Sea cu-
National Geographic photographer Brian Skerry cumbers stood on end because theyd recently
was invited along. spawned. Endangered monk seals sunned them-
They left on boats and tied them to an orange selves nearby. Sometimes the president stood
buoy above a splash of purple rice coral. Midway is on sand near the coral to ask questions of Skerry
magical but not pristine. More than 5,000 people and a guide. But just as often he moved alone,
76 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C F E B RUA RY 2 0 1 7
0,':$<,6/ $1'6 )RUDJX\ZKRLVPDQDJHGWR nobody knew where he was, Obama once said.
WKHVHFRQGDQGLVDOZD\VLQVXLWVDQGWLHVEHLQJRXWLQ It was Roosevelt, a lifelong outdoorsman, who
the middle of the ocean had to be a real treat, says
signed the Antiquities Act in 1906 and used it to
SKRWRJUDSKHU%ULDQ6NHUU\+HKRSHVWKLVLPDJHRI
%DUDFN2EDPDVQRUNHOLQJZLOOGUDZDWWHQWLRQWR protect the Grand Canyon, Devils Tower in Wyo-
RFHDQFRQVHUYDWLRQHRUWV ming, and other majestic places, some of which
later became national parks. With Congress
in gridlock and the oceans pressured by over-
slowly investigating the life below him or, at shing, pollution, and climate change, Obama
times, swimming hard and fast with the uidity turned to the same executive authority.
of an athlete, the leader of the free world embrac- At an oceans conference weeks later, Obama
ing a brief moment of actual freedom. still seemed entranced by the Pacic. He harked
Obama gets the draw of wild places. When back to his swim as a reminder of the seas resil-
chang at the straitjacket of the presidency, he ience. I saw it, Obama said. It was right there
spoke wistfully about a predecessor known for evidence of the incredible power of nature to
his conservation efforts. Teddy Roosevelt would rebuild itself if were not consistently trying to
go up to Yellowstone Park for like a month, and tear it down. Craig Welch
L I F E A F T E R LO S S 79
BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA On the
20th anniversary of the massacre of
thousands of Bosnian Muslim men in
6UHEUHQLFD$GYLMD=XNLLVVKLHOGHGIURP
the sun as she lays to rest the remains
of her husband, Alaga. Forensic experts
are still working to identify victims.
AL
MONTH 2016
UGANDA Christine Namatovu and her
son Andrew bring solace to each other
in the house Namatovus in-laws tried to
seize when her husband died. Pushing
ZLGRZVRWKHLUSURSHUW\LVFRPPRQ
practice in this region; Namatovu, with
the help of lawyers, fought back.
BY CYNTHIA GORNEY
PHOTOGRAPHS BY AMY TOENSING
1. RETURNING TO LIFE
Vrindavan, India
L
ong before sunrise the widows of
Vrindavan hurried along dark,
unpaved alleys, trying to side-
step mud puddles and fresh cow
dung. Theres a certain broken
sidewalk on which volunteers
set out a big propane burner
every morning and brew a bathtub-size vat of tea.
The widows know they must arrive very early,
taking their place on rag mats, lifting their sari
hems from the dirt, resting elbows on their knees
as they wait. If they come too late, the tea might
be gone. Or the puffed rice might be running out
at the next charitys spot, many alleys away. I
cant rush in the morningIm not well, a wid-
ow complained. But we have to rush. You dont
know what you will miss.
It was 5:30 a.m., a cool dawn, a sliver moon. A
few widows had wrapped themselves in colorful
saris, but most wore white, in India the surest
signier of a woman whose husband has died, is nominally the role of pilgrims and priests, the
perhaps recently, perhaps decades ago. In the widows earn hot meals, and perhaps nighttime
dim light they moved like schools of sh, still sleeping mats, by singing these chants over and
hurrying together, pouring around street cor- over, sometimes three or four hours at a time.
ners, a dozen here, two dozen there. They live in shelters too, and in shared rental
No one has reliably counted the number of rooms, and under roadside tarps when no indoor
widows in Vrindavan. Some reports estimate accommodation will admit them. Vrindavan is
two or three thousand, others 10,000 or more; about 100 miles south of Delhi, but the widows
the city and its neighboring towns are a spiri- come here from all over India, particularly the
tual center, crowded with temples to the Hindu state of West Bengal, where allegiance to Krishna
god Krishna and ashrams in which bhajans is intense. Sometimes they arrive accompanied
devotional songsare chanted all day long by by gurus they trust. Sometimes their relatives
impoverished widows who crowd side by side bring them, depositing the family widow in an
on the oor. The sanctity of bhajan ashrams is ashram or on a street corner and driving away.
sustained by steady chanting, and although this Even relatives who dont literally drive a widow
84 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C F E B RUA RY 2 0 1 7
INDIA Communities of widows in temple cities draw Hindu women from Nepal and Bangladesh as well.
Bangladeshi widow Bhakti Dashi, 75, has lived for a quarter century in the back of a temple in the riverside
spiritual center of Navadwip, West Bengal. Alongside others who have left home or been pushed away by
their families, she sings prayers inside, for hours at a time, in exchange for her lodging and food.
from the family home can make it plain every day as they have for generations. None of us wants to
that her role among them has endedthat a wid- go back to our families, a spidery woman named
ow in India, forever burdened by the misfortune Kanaklata Adhikari declared in rm Bengali from
of having outlived her husband, is physically her bed in the shelter room she shares with seven
alive but socially dead, in the words of Delhi other widows. We never talk to our families. We
psychologist Vasantha Patri, who has written are our family.
about the plight of Indias widows. So, because She sat cross-legged atop the bedsheet, even
Vrindavan is known as a city of widows, a pos- though her limbs were contorted by age and dis-
sible source of hot meals and companionship and ease and she was able to walk only by bending
purpose, they also come alone, on buses or trains, over almost double and shuffling. Her white sari
L I F E A F T E R LO S S 85
was draped loosely over the top of her head; in widows she has found begging because their
India the shearing of a new widows hair was families sent them away, we asked whether Gau-
once common practice, to announce the end of tam had ever imagined what she would change if
her womanly appeal, and the widow Adhikari she were given the power to protect women from
appeared to have been recently reshorn. I keep these kinds of indignities. As it turned out, she
it this way because my hair was his, she said, had. I would remove the word widow from the
and squinted at her guests, the foreigner and the dictionary, she said. As soon as a womans hus-
young interpreter, as though perplexed by the band is gone, she gets this name. This word. And
question. A barber comes and cuts it for me. A when it attaches, her lifes troubles start.
womans greatest beauty is in her hair and her The charitable organization of an Indian-born
clothes. Once my husband was not there, what British business magnate, Raj Loomba, prodded
would I do with it? the UN into sanctioning an annual widows day.
How old was she now? Ninety-six. Isolation and invisibility make it hard even to g-
And how old when her husband died? ure out how many widows there are in the world;
Seventeen. the most ambitious data gathering has come
from the Loomba Foundation, which provides
I WAS IN VRINDAVAN because photographer widows support internationally and recently es-
Amy Toensing and I were visiting extraordinary timated the total number at around 259 million,
communities of widows, over the course of a with caveats about how poorly many countries
year, in three very different parts of the world. It track their own widows presence and needs. The
was not private grieving we set out to explore, but June 23 date was Loombas idea too. This was the
rather the way societies can force a jarring new day his father died in India, Loomba has written,
identity on a woman whose husband has died: and although more than 60 years have passed
pariah, exile, nuisance, martyr, prey. since then, the kinds of stories he tells about what
When the United Nations in 2011 designated happened nexthis widowed mother shunned as
June 23 as International Widows Day, the official inauspicious at celebratory events, marked for
explanation was a somber one: that in many cul- life as an omen of bad fortunewere repeated ev-
tures widows are so vulnerableto abusive tra- ery day by Vrindavan women Toensing and I met.
ditions, to poverty, to the aftermath of the wars A widow must not dress in colors or make her-
that killed their husbandsthat widowhood itself self pretty, because that would be inappropriate
must be regarded as a potential human rights to her new role as eternally diminished mourn-
calamity. The women Toensing and I met, like the er. A widow must eat only bland food, in small
caseworkers and volunteers trying to help them, portions, because richness and spice would stir
became our teachers in the minutiae of special passions she should never again experience.
cruelties. In Bosnia and Herzegovina we spent a These are fading Hindu rules, largely dismissed
month with one of historys singular concentra- by educated Indians as relics of another century,
tions of war widows, women who have spent two but they are still taken seriously in some villag-
decades searching for and burying the scattered es and conservative families. Meera Khanna, a
remains of more than 7,000 slaughtered men. In Delhi writer who works for a widows advocacy
Uganda we learned the phrase widow inheri- organization called Guild for Service, observes
tance, which for Ugandans does not mean the that the stigmatizing of widows comes not from
estate a widow receives; it means that the in-laws the Vedas, the Hindu scriptures, but from gener-
illegally seizing all her inherited property assume ations of repressive tradition.
they are inheriting her too, as sex partner or wife In the Vedas nowhere is it ever said the wid-
for whichever relative they choose. ow has to live a life of austerity, she told me.
And in Vrindavan, listening to a social work- Theres a line that says: You, woman. Why are
er named Laxmi Gautam describe with fury the you crying for the man whos no more? Get up,
86 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C F E B RUA RY 2 0 1 7
take the hand of a living man, and start life anew. In many cultures widows
We planned our visits to Vrindavan, and Vara-
nasi, a city northwest of Kolkata that also draws
are vulnerable to abusive
thousands of widows, to coincide with a simple traditions, to poverty, to
campaign: making it possible, during celebratory the aftermath of wars
festivals, for widowed women to join in. This is
more subversive than it might seem. All over In- that killed their hus-
dia the holidays of Diwali and Holi are occasions bands, making widow-
of public joy and merriment. Diwali includes
gifts, bright lights, and reworks; Holi is car-
hood itself a potential
ried into the streets so people can play Holi, as human rights calamity.
Indians say, inging brilliant powders and water
at each other.
For a woman expected to live out her remain-
ing years in muffled dignity, nothing about worker who would like to strike widow from
this kind of exuberance used to be considered the dictionary. Gautams home usually houses a
acceptable. Once you become widowed, they say few widows unable to nd lodging, and when I
you are not allowed to do any festivals, a chari- asked what labels might suit these women better,
ty worker named Vinita Verma told me. But we it was obvious shed considered this before too.
want these ladies to be a part of society. They Mother, she said. If shes not a mother, shes a
have a full right to live their lives. daughter, perhaps a sister. Shes also a wife. Its
Verma is vice president of Sulabh Internation- just that her husband is not alive.
al, an Indian organization that provides support It seems important to remember too: The
services and small monthly stipends to widows Vrindavan widows can be erce. It takes stamina
in shelters in Vrindavan and Varanasi. A few to chant for three hours without break, to squat
years agotentatively at rst and then on a bold- on a hard temple oor, to bustle through unlit
er scaleSulabh began arranging Diwali and muddy streets in search of the next meal and hot
Holi events for widows in the two cities. Even in tea. When I arrived, in November 2015, Diwali
private, indoors, some of the women needed time was about to begin, and one afternoon I followed
to learn to relax among holiday owers and Holi Verma as she prepared for the Sulabh events,
powders, Verma said. They felt, If I touch this which would include a boisterous outdoor pro-
red color, some bad thing will happen to me. cession, reworks on the river, and a thousand
But by 2015 the holiday festivities in the cit- new saris for the widows to wear and keep as
ies of widows, as Vrindavan and Varanasi are their ownin any colors they might fancy. The
sometimes labeled in the media, were mov- saris were a gift from Sulabh, and a Vrindavan
ing purposefully outdoors. No denunciations store had them stacked on display; widows in
appeared in the Indian media, and when the charitys stipend program were to arrive in
Toensing and I were in India, the only complaint groups over the course of a few hours, examining
we heard about plans for the widows festivities and choosing as skillful Indian sari-shoppers do.
was that they made for photogenic show with Inside the sari store my interpreter and I
little substancethat what the widows really watched the rst widows push their way toward
need are more comfortable lodgings, meals they the stack, study the saris, and summon the shop-
dont have to sing for, families that will take them keeper. I like those on that other rack better, a
home, communities that wont label widowed woman said. Cant we choose from those?
women useless and inauspicious. No, the shopkeeper explained, those were
The real change has to come from the societ- for sale. Humph, a widow said. She ngered
ies that produced them, said Gautam, the social the cloth of a charity sari. Not especially good
L I F E A F T E R LO S S 87
INDIA The exuberance of Holi, the
KROLGD\WKDWLQFOXGHVLQJLQJFRORUHG
powders, was until recently thought
inappropriate for widows. Aid groups,
defying traditional prejudices against
widows, now invite them to join celebra-
tions like this Holi party in Vrindavan.
MONTH 2016
To the terrible residue was gentle. Remains of Uzunovis husband,
Ekrem, had been identified by laboratory
left for widows of war testing, the voice said. The remains were small.
a new burden was added: A partial skull. Nothing else. If Uzunovi wished
To rebury and mourn a burial, in the new memorial cemetery, that
could be arranged.
the Srebrenica remains No.
in individual gravesites, For three months she told no one. In the
nighttime, that was the difficult part. I was alone
they would have to be with my thoughts. From the big man I knew,
identied piece by piece. only a piece of skull. I couldnt imagine. OK, they
killed him. But why didnt they bury him? He was
scattered around. I didnt know where. Where
were those bones? Where was he?
quality, another widow said. Could you please That initial call came in 2005, a decade
move over? another widow said, and the widow after Bosnian Serb forces killed more than 7,000
she was elbowing said, Why should shethere Bosnian Muslim menthe number remains
was already enough space, and another widow in dispute, but this is the gure on record at
said the breath of the widow beside her smelled the International Court of Justiceduring a
foul, that she smoked too many bidis, the strong single week of the three-year Bosnian war. From
Indian cigarettes tied together with string. It took July 11 to July 19, 1995, the men were killed in
longer than expected to get everybody attended and near the town of Srebrenica, on the eastern
to, and I watched one quartet of widows walk out edge of the Balkan nation of Bosnia and Herze-
without new saris, harrumphing to each other. govina. Some were forcibly separated from their
As if our time had no value, one said. families and bused to execution sites; most were
The Diwali procession and riverside reworks shot as they tried to escape to safer Bosnian
would prove very grand, full of singing and Armyheld territory. Ekrem Uzunovi, whom
sparklers and saris both white and colored Mirsada had loved since they met at a village
astonishing colors, to an outsiders eye: sapphire, dance when she was 15, was wearing black trou-
scarlet, lime, magenta, saffron. Many Indian news sers and a T-shirt the last time she saw him, and
photographers came. Smoke swirled, reworks lit in his backpack carried a loaf of bread she had
the river pink, oating oil lamps made glowing baked that morning. He bent down to kiss their
circles in the moving water, and in spite of this my son, turned away, and ran. He thought he might
sharpest Vrindavan memory is of those four digni- escape by hiding in the woods.
ed widows disdaining their gift saris and march- Their son was two. Ekrem was 27. In Tuz-
ing out the door. They stayed close to each other, la, the city in which Uzunovi and many other
wrapped in widow white, chuckling, and when Srebrenica war widows were resettled, there is
they stepped off the sidewalk together to cross the today a two-room office whose inside walls are
busy street, the traffic stopped to let them pass. covered to the ceiling with photos of dark-haired
Bosnian men like Ekrem, all dead or presumed
dead. Stacked albums hold thousands more,
2. BURYING THE PAST
and in the photos the men are smiling or smok-
Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina
ing or looking celebratory with drinks held out
WHEN THE FIRST CALL CAME from the foren- mid-toast. The photos also show boys barely in
sic identication center, Mirsada Uzunovi was their teens and men old enough to have been
home with her 13-year-old son and so willed Ekrems grandfather. Uzunovi: In every yard
herself to stay calm. The voice on the other end there was the same scenethe men running out
90 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C F E B RUA RY 2 0 1 7
Widows and the Law
There are about 259 million widows, and nearly half live in poverty, according to the United Nations.
Even where laws protect their rights, widows are sometimes mistreated. In parts of Africa, the Middle East,
and Asia, widows can suer discrimination, sexual assault, and the seizure of their property and children.
Property and inheritance Equal inheritance rights are Inheritance rights are not No data
rights are protected by law protected by law, but cultural equally guaranteed under
and adequately enforced and religious customs can the law, or widows have
for widows and widowers. override rights for widows. no inheritance rights.
A F R I C A India
Uganda
SOUTH
AMERICA
AUSTRALIA
of their houses. Women and families were crying coffin-by-coffin burial of remains identified
for them, and the men didnt react or anything; during the previous year and approved by fam-
they were walking toward the woods, not looking ilies for intermenttakes place at a vast hillside
back. There was this blackness, with the forest cemetery established solely for the Srebrenica
behind it. A river of men. Yes, I have had night- dead. The cemetery is in a village called Potoari,
mares, especially during this time of the year. Af- a few miles from Srebrenica; the rst 600 coffins
ter my psychotherapy it didnt get easier. But my were buried in 2003, as investigators and DNA
doctor gave me pills, for July, so I can cope. I still examiners were learning the full horror of what
have dreams. But its better, because of the pills. had happened to the bodies of the dead.
When we met, inside the hillside Tuzla Now, in the rst week of July 2015, the 20th
house where Uzunovi and her son still live, it anniversary was a few days away. Former U.S.
was July. Every July 11, in large part because president Bill Clinton was coming, Uzunovi had
of the relentless efforts of a network of be- been told, along with other international dignitar-
reaved Bosnian women, a group funeralthe ies. Uzunovi was 41 now and regrettably familiar
1*00$366285&(25*$1,6$7,21)25(&2120,&&223(5$7,21$1''(9(/230(17 L I F E A F T E R LO S S 91
with the cemetery in midsummer, its beautiful
green undulations, its exhausting rows of head-
stones, its open grass for gravesites not yet dug.
She had sat through many July 11 Potoari buri-
als already: her brother, her grandfather, three
uncles, four cousins, men from Ekrems family,
husbands of other widows. Every year until this
one she had said not Ekrem, not yet; when the
forensic center telephoned a second time, in
2007, and informed her that her husbands hip
and femur bones had been identied, Uzunovi
had declined again to proceed with a funeral.
There was still not enough of him.
But I have been carrying such heavy baggage
on my shoulders, Uzunovi said to me and my
interpreter, pouring thick Bosnian coffee into our
cups. She had been painting a wall that morning
and wore a paint-splattered sweatshirt and blue
jeans, her black hair pulled into a ponytail. She
looked drained and composed. Ive waited too
long, Uzunovi said. I need to close the chapter.
I cannot wait anymore. This year, at the Potoari
ceremonies, she would bury her husband.
92 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C F E B RUA RY 2 0 1 7
BOSNIA A small building in Tuzla houses the Women of Srebrenica group, which continues to demand an
accounting of the men slaughtered by Bosnian Serb forces during one week of the Bosnian war. Founder
+DMUDDWLZKRVHKXVEDQGDQGVRQZHUHNLOOHGLQWKHPDVVDFUHVLQNVEDFNLQH[KDXVWLRQGXULQJ
preparations for the anniversary commemoration. Behind her: faces of the dead and those still missing.
of all the missing; the monthly street protests victims; two headstones mark their graves. There
to insist that each mans remains be found, the were 6,241 nished graves before this latest deliv-
killers prosecuted, and the word genocide ery of the dead. The new green coffins now lined
attached forever to the Srebrenica killings up inside the memorial centerin Islam green
have been the work of the women. I have to say is a sacred colornumbered 136. The remains
theyre all heroes, Amra Begi, an official at the of Ekrem Uzunovi lay in coffin 59, and on the
Srebrenica-Potoari memorial center, told me cloudless warm morning of the funeral Mirsada
the day before the 20th-anniversary funeral. We Uzunovi found the headstone with his name,
didnt know what strong women our mothers are. the freshly dug grave. The relatives with her had
Begis father and grandfather were among the brought folding chairs, and for a while she sat on
L I F E A F T E R LO S S 93
BOSNIA Best friends from childhood,
married to brothers killed in the Bosnian
war, Fata Leme (at left) and Hamida
Leme now live and garden with four
other war widows in the village of
6NHMLL7KLVEHDXWLIXOODQGVFDSH)DWD
says, actually brought so much evil.
one and received people politely, their embraces, her two-year-old daughter, the youngest of her
their murmured sympathies. From a dignitaries six children, and sat down in the fourth row.
tent too far away for her to see clearly, Clintons Tumushabe had once been a more timid wom-
voice could be made out faintly, but Uzunovi an, but her head was now high as she studied the
didnt understand the English and was not espe- courtroom around her; she had been pregnant
cially interested. The voices changed, the prayers with this daughter when her husband dieda
and intonations kept coming, and there was a mo- sharp headache, a hospital unable to revive him
ment of noisy rage when the Serbian prime min- and she was learning how to speak with clarity
ister, in attendance at a July 11 ceremony for the and passion about what happened to her next.
rst time, tried to place owers on a random head- She was summonedmourning, pregnantto
stone and was whistled and jeered so menacingly a meeting of important members of her deceased
that his bodyguards hustled him to a waiting car. husbands family and clan. They informed her
An imam pleaded for respect. The cemetery that the children now belonged not to her but
went silent. The rst of the green coffins could be to them; directed her to keep her hands off all
glimpsed down below, borne by pallbearers; the crops on the household plot, as they also were
imam called for prayer for the fallen, and thou- no longer hers; and presented to her the brother-
sands of people together on the hillsides bent in-lawher husbands oldest sibling, 20 years
simultaneously. Uzunovi did not pray. She got Tumushabes seniorwho would move into the
off her chair, lit a cigarette, sat on the ground by home at once and take her as the third of his wives.
the empty hole in the earth, and waited. Let the The house and three acres Tumushabes hus-
others pray, she thought. She had said so many band had inherited from his father must pass
prayers already, and it was Ekrem she needed to wholly to them, the in-laws said. As the widow,
address: You told me to keep our son safe. Look, Tumushabe, by tradition, was essentially part of
he is 22 years old. He is a university student. He the property, like the coffee bushes and the jack-
is helping to carry your coffin. He will help lower fruit trees.
it into the ground and shovel the dirt on top, and Tumushabe told them this was nonsense. She
then, nally, you will have a place. said she would never take this man into her bed,
that her husband had left papers proving the land
passed to her. The in-laws said she had appar-
3. ENFORCING THE LAW
ently bewitched and stupeed her husband and
Mukono District, Uganda
that she might want to see just how much help he
THE HUMBLE PETITION of Tumushabe Clare would be to her now, from that freshly dug grave
Glorious showeth as follows. In Uganda legal in which he lay. Tumushabe summoned police.
documents are composed in owery, colonial-era She harvested some crops and chopped trees
English, and on a midsummer morning an attor- for rewood. Threats escalated; epithets were
ney named Diana Angwech balanced two thick directed at the children. One day a man from
les on her lap, thumbing pages, reviewing. The her husbands family appeared on the property
improvised courtroom was a small red building shouting that today Tumushabe would die, and
between a corn patch and a stand of banana because Tumushabes hand was cut during the
trees, an hours drive from the capital, Kampa- encounter by a pangaa broad-bladed African
la. Inside, on the concrete oor, a few wooden macheteDiana Angwech had an assault charge
benches faced the magistrates desk, which atop with which to haul one of Tumushabes tormen-
its clean surface displayed only a calendar, a tors into court.
Quran, and an old Bible held together with string. You work with what the situation brings you,
A guard at the door stepped aside, and the peo- Angwech and her colleagues kept reminding
ple came in, lling the benches beside and behind us, as Toensing and I followed them through
Angwech. The widow Clare Tumushabe carried their rounds in villages of central Uganda: You
96 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C F E B RUA RY 2 0 1 7
commiserate, you counsel, you try to enlighten The Ugandan widow
police officers and village elders, you visit com-
munity forums to explain that bullying a new
was told that her children
widow into giving over her family property is belonged to her late
prohibited even when the bullies are her own in-
husbands family, that
laws. People were in shockOh my God, this
is actually wrong? said a lawyer named Nina her home and crops were
Asiimwe, recalling the rst public talks she gave no longer hers, and that
after joining other Ugandan professionals in the
Kampala office of International Justice Mission she would become her
(IJM), the organization that employs Angwech. brother-in-laws third wife.
They thought it was normal. An injustice, but
normal. OKd by society.
Think of these Ugandans as a widows defense
brigade: attorneys, social workers, and criminal does not easily concede to a widow. The con-
investigators using their nations own justice stitution, rewritten in 1995 and a source of na-
system to undo long-held assumptions about tional pride, promises gender equality. Modern
women who have lost their husbands. IJM is a statutes explicitly extend inheritance rights
U.S.-based nonprot that supports legal advoca- to wives and female children. But in practice,
cy in other countries for impoverished victims of especially in the rural areas that make up most of
violent abuse, and in one sense the agenda of its Uganda, its still widely assumed that only men
employees in Kampala is modest. They operate a should own or inherit land, that widowhood ter-
pilot program, within one large, mostly rural dis- minates a womans social legitimacy, and that
trict east of the capital, that provides free lawyers its up to her husbands family and clan to decide
and caseworkers for victims of a crime known what happens nextwho will take the proper-
throughout eastern and southern Africa as prop- ty, who will take the children, who will have sex
erty grabbingextorting vulnerable people, by with her now. Plus the stigma, Asiimwe said. If
verbal threats or physical attacks, into giving up youre a widow, bad luck. Youre cursed. Youre
possession of land that is rightfully theirs. blamed for the death of your spouse. It could be
For reasons both ancient and modern, wid- that he had several homes, several wives, that he
owed women are the most frequent victims of brought HIV into the house. But when he dies, its
property grabbing in this region of the world. you. You killed him.
More than two-thirds of Ugandas 39 million So with widows as their clients, IJM advocates
people raise at least some of their own food, and in the villages and courtrooms of Ugandas Muko-
holding title to ones own home and attached land no District have an audacious goal: to broadcast
remains a powerful assurance of material security: across Mukono, and perhaps throughout Uganda
meals for the children, rewood for cooking, and beyond, the idea that seizing these womens
crops to sell at market. Because graves are often homes and cropsas well as the assaults, threats,
placed near the home, the person in charge of the forgeries, and verbal abuse this often entailsis
family property also possesses ancestral history, not only wrong but punishable by the courts.
honor, status. And the rapid growth of Ugandas Diplomacy is crucial; in village meetings Asiimwe
population, along with the arrival of mortgage always addresses her elders as my fathers and
banking, are pushing up the value of land. A my mothers. She tells them she knows widow
house and the cropland around it now constitute abuse is typically treated as a family dispute to
potential loan collateral for business investments be worked out among clan leaders or by village
or the accumulation of more land. councils, whose elected heads command respect.
These are things traditional Ugandan culture But their efforts are often inadequate, she
L I F E A F T E R LO S S 97
UGANDA A week after her husbands
GHDWK6RORPH6HNLPXOLGHDQWO\
OOVWKHGRRUZD\RIWKH/XZHUR'LVWULFW
home they shared. Weapon-brandishing
relatives from his sidewho forced their
way in on the funeral dayhave tried
to wrest away the property by force.
UGANDA When widows turn to the law
to battle abuse and property grabbing,
the odds against them can be formida-
ble. Archivist Michael Nyero works in
the records room of the Mengo Chief
Magistrate Court, one of many local
courts overwhelmed by backlogs.
insists, and council heads can be bought off or
threatened. In Luganda, the primary indige-
nous language of the area, she uses blunt words:
okubba, stealing, and kimenya mateeka, crimi-
nal. She implores her listeners to remember the
likely future for a widow who is chased from her
home by panga-brandishing property grabbers:
Her birth family may not take her back, because
they cant afford to or no longer regard her as one
of them. Such a widow may be left to the streets,
perhaps forced into prostitution. Then of course
the society around them is going to face a prob-
lem of insecurity, Asiimwe said. The children
will become street children. People who used to
eat three times a day are going to eat once a day.
Malnutrition will come into play.
The buy-in is slow. A former national police
officer who now directs IJMs Mukono District in-
vestigations said his policing friends were initially
perplexed as he began heading into village con-
stabularies, teaching officers to gather property-
grabbing evidence and take seriously threats of
violence against widows who try to ght back.
Colleagues of his generation would raise an eye-
brow, he told us: What is the issue here? Is this an
important matter?
The threats are so credible and widespread,
in fact, that they are sometimes directed at case
investigators, which is why IJM asked that this
investigators name not be published. And the
cases themselves can be enormously complex.
Uganda sanctions multiple ways to possess land,
both precolonial and modern, so it can be hard to interfering with someone elses business mat-
prove who held ownership rights even before the ters. There is no law in Uganda, or anywhere else,
husband died. Ugandans are wary of wills, such making it criminal to treat a widow as though her
obvious portents of death. Cohabitation relation- life no longer has value. But June 23 marked the
ships are common, even though those arent legal sixth International Widows Day, and in the big-
marriages; many women who regard themselves gest town in Mukono, a grassy square facing the
as wives turn out not to be, for inheritance pur- courthouse was given over to a special commem-
poses. But I believe that there is hope, lawyer oration, with microphones, a uniformed band,
and casework director Alice Muhairwe Mparana hundreds of folding chairs, and a tented seating
told Toensing and me last June. We are not 100 area roped off, as the signpost read, for Honoured
percent there, but we have begun the work. We Widows. Important people rose to speak: the
already have nine convictions this year. police chief, for example; and the head magistrate;
Some of the charges that stuck during the rst and Clare Glorious Tumushabe, who took more
half of 2016: unlawful eviction, criminal trespass, time at the microphone than any of them.
intermeddling, which means impermissibly With help, Tumushabe said, she had remained
102 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C F E B RUA RY 2 0 1 7
UGANDA Joseph Ssenkima (at center), accused of terrorizing a Mukono District widow named Betty
Nanozi, is believed to be one of more than 70 people who destroyed her crops and threatened her sons
life. Since Nanozis husband died, members of his family and their allies have tried to drive her from the
home he willed to her. Police working with International Justice Mission pursued suspects for weeks.
on her family property. I only loved one man, sentence in jail. Tumushabe and the lawyers were
she shouted in Luganda, her voice rising like a exultant. But his siblings were furious, and the
preachers, and the Honoured Widows cheered. lead investigator was worried about the widow
I said to my husbands clan, How would you and her children. We have beefed up security for
give me to another man? I didnt get married to her, he said. And we have looked into going to
a whole clan. the community, to sensitize them. Shes isolated
Three months later Toensing and I got the where she lives. But she is tough and strong. j
news: The man who attacked Tumushabe had
been convicted of assault occasioning actual The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting provided a
bodily harm and was commencing his yearlong grant to support this story.
L I F E A F T E R LO S S 103
Shadow
Cats
Eclipsed by their larger cousins, the worlds
small wildcats deserve their day in the sun.
CARACAL
Consummate predators, some small wildcats can
take down larger prey. The caracal of Asia and
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leaping over nine-foot fences to prey on sheep.
Caracal caracal, photographed at Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, Ohio
104
PALLASS CAT
A famously grumpy expression made this Central
Asian species an Internet star. Conservationists
hope the cats celebrity will help save its habitat
from encroaching farms and other threats.
Otocolobus manul, at Columbus Zoo and Aquarium
By Christine DellAmore
Photographs by Joel Sartore
108 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C F E B RUA RY 2 0 1 7
the population hit 313about half of which were IBERIAN LYNX
old enough to breedthe International Union One of the worlds rarest cats, the Iberian lynx is
for Conservation of Nature upgraded the lynxs slowly increasing in number as scientists release
captive-raised cats and boost populations of
status from critically endangered to endangered. rabbits, the lynxs staple food.
Not far from the olive grove, I duck thankfully Lynx pardinus, at Madrid Zoo and Aquarium, Spain
into the coolness of a drainage tunnel that runs
under the highway. Cars and trucks are the leading
killers of lynx, so Simn and his team are working the question. Everyone knows the Iberian lynx,
with the government to widen these tunnels into he tells me. Its a beloved national gure.
wildlife underpasses. Simn crouches, pointing to Thats not the case for most of the lynxs rel-
animal tracks in the sand. One belongs to a badger, atives. Of the worlds 38 wildcat species, 31 are
he says, but the other is a paw printa lynx! Hel- considered small cats. Ranging in size from the
ena could have trotted through here minutes ago. three-pound rusty-spotted cat to the 50-pound
Back in the sun, I ask Simn what the Spanish Eurasian lynx, they inhabit ve of the worlds
think of their native cat. He pauses, surprised at seven continents (excluding Australia and
S H A D OW C AT S 109
Antarctica) and are superbly adapted to an array example, is the smallest cat in Africa, weighing
of naturaland increasingly unnaturalenviron- less than ve pounds. But its nicknamed the ant-
ments, from deserts to rain forests to city parks. hill tiger because it lives in abandoned termite
Unfortunately, these lesser members of the family mounds and ghts tooth and claw if threatened,
Felidae also live in the long shadow cast by their even jumping in the face of the much larger jack-
larger cousins, the big cats: lions, tigers, leopards, al. The resourceful shing cat of South Asia is a
jaguars, and their kin. These celebrity species at- denizen of swamps and wetlands but can scratch
tract the lions share of attention and conserva- out a living wherever sh are found. Cameras in
tion dollars, even though 12 of the worlds 18 most downtown Colombo, Sri Lanka, once caught a
threatened wild felids are small cats. shing cat stealing koi from an office shpond.
Jim Sanderson, a small-cat expert and program It was a shocker to all of us, says Anya Ratnay-
manager at the Texas-based Global Wildlife Con- aka, the primary researcher at the Urban Fishing
servation, estimates that more than 99 percent of Cat Conservation Project. Theres not a wetland
funds spent on wild felids since 2009 have gone anywhere near this place.
to help jaguars, tigers, and other large cats. As Small wildcats have adopted other clever ways
a result, many small cats are vastly understud- to coexist. In Suriname, Sanderson and his col-
ied or not studied at all. Their skill at eluding leagues photographed ve cat species living in
attention also contributes to their obscurity. the same rain forest: jaguar, puma, ocelot, mar-
The rarely seen bay cat, for example, is na- gay, and jaguarundi. They do this by dividing
tive only to the forests of Borneo and remains as space and time, he says. Each animal has its
opaque to science as it was in 1858, the year of niche, whether its hunting on the ground during
its discovery. All thats known of Southeast Asias the day, like the jaguarundi, or hunting in the
marbled cat comes from a study of a single fe- trees at night, like the margay.
male in Thailand. We have no idea what it eats, Though some small cats are capable of killing
Sanderson says. goats and sheep, they pose no threat to humans.
Small cats suffer another disadvantage: peo- On the contrary, as predators often at the top of
ples tendency to view them as simply wild their food chain, they help keep ecosystems run-
versions of their own pets. (The domestic cat ning smoothly and prey populationsincluding
considered a subspecies of the wildcatevolved many rodentsin check.
from wildcats in the Fertile Crescent about
10,000 years ago.) The public isnt as awe- OF THE FIVE CONTINENTS roamed by wildcats,
inspired by small cats as by more exotic beasts, Asia has the most to lose. Not only is it home to
says Alexander Sliwa, a curator at Germanys Co- the greatest number of small-cat species14
logne Zoo. This perpetuates the situation that its also where the animals are least understood
little is known about smaller cats, and if you cant and under the greatest threat.
tell people about a cats biology or lifestyle, then Much of Southeast Asias forestland has been
people are not hooked. developed or turned into sprawling plantations
They should be. Small cats are lean feats of evo- for palm oil, a common food ingredient whose
lution, high-performance predators that hit their production has doubled worldwide since 2000.
stride millions of years ago and have changed This is likely devastating for the at-headed cat
little ever since. What they lack in stature, they and the shing cat, both animals that typically
make up for in grit. The black-footed cat, for rely on lowland wetlands for the sh they eat.
The spread of palm oil plantations is such
a concern that Le Parc des Flins, a zoological
Photo Ark is a joint project
of National Geographic and
park outside Paris that houses the most species
Joel Sartore. Learn more at of small cats in the world, has put two shopping
natgeophotoark.org. carts on displayone lled with products made
110 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C F E B RUA RY 2 0 1 7
F R A N C E
Ba y of Bisca y
EUROPE
ASIA
AREA
ENLARGED
illera Cantbrica
Cord P Y
R E N E E
S
AFRICA
ANDORRA
S P A I N
Barcelona
I B E R I A N a
Se
Zarza de i c
ATLANTIC ar ds
Granadilla Madrid e lan
PORTUGAL al Is
Toledo ic
B
OCEAN e ar
Montes
de Toledo al
B
P E N I N S U L A
SIERRA DE ANDJAR
Lisbon NATURAL PARK
Lynx on M o
r e
n a
La Olivilla
Mediterranean
Sea
the Brink S i e r
r a
Crdoba
Linares
with palm oil, the other with products that dont Then I check myself, remembering what Alex-
have it. The items in both cartsice cream, cook- ander Sliwa, the Cologne Zoo curator, had said:
ies, cereallook basically the same. Small cats are very different from house cats, par-
We dont ask people to donate money but to ticularly because theyre always on the go. The
eat less palm oil, says Aurlie Roudel, an educator black-footed cat, for instance, can walk nearly
at the leafy, 175-acre park. 20 miles and eat one-fth of its body weight in
Another threat facing small cats is the illegal food every night. Unlike Fluffy on the couch, it
wildlife trade, particularly poaching for skins, cannot afford to lie around.
furs, and other animal parts, Roudel says. China Neither can conservationists, whove begun to
is a hub for such criminal activities. In large cities lift some species out of obscurity in hopes of sav-
merchants sell clothing and gloves made from the ing them. In 2016 they launched an internation-
skins of small cats. In the 1980s China exported the al effort to study and save Central Asias Pallass
skins of hundreds of thousands of leopard cats, a cat, a species in decline but largely hidden in the
species that ranges throughout Asia. Though de- shadow of the famous snow leopard.
mand for skins has dropped considerably, leopard A lot of our work is putting the Pallass cat on
cats in China are still hunted and killed for prey- the map, says David Barclay, coordinator of the
ing on domestic animals. European Endangered Species Programme for
Leopard cats, I soon discover, are impressive the Pallass Cat. Hes got some help, thanks to the
enough creatures on their own. On this drizzly cat-crazy Internet. The round, uffy feline has
June day, most of the French parks residents are become a hit online because of its grumpy ex-
huddled in their boxes, but the two leopard cats pression and its odd manner of scuttling about its
are out and about, their coats a glossy tapestry mountainous home. Though people are laugh-
of brown and black. One balances expertly on a ing their way through the videos, Barclay says,
log, licking its front paw, while the other chews theyre becoming subconsciously aware.
tall blades of grass, reminding me of my Maine A long-term conservation program in Japan
coon cat back home. has stabilized the population of the Iriomote cat,
MATTHEW W. CHWASTYK, NGM STAFF. SOURCES: IUCN; LIFE+IBERLINCE PROJECT; ALEJANDRO RODRGUEZ AND MIGUEL
DELIBES, ESTACIN BIOLGICA DE DOANA; MIGUEL SIMN, CONSEJERA DE MEDIO AMBIENTE, JUNTA DE ANDALUCA
Shy and rarely seen, the worlds
small wildcats are experts at
avoiding attention. Most remain
little studied and get scant support.
Top row: leopard cat, jaguarundis, melanistic (black) Asiatic golden cat
0LGGOHURZ$VLDWLFZLOGFDWOHRSDUGFDW*HRUR\VFDW
Below: African wildcat
Bottom row: margay, sand cat, rusty-spotted cat, serval
1.6 ft (average)
Domestic cat
Cheetah Puma
Flat-headed
cat
Black-footed cat
3.5 mya
Domestic cat
lineage Lynx
4.2
million 5 mya lineage
years ago Leopard cat Puma
6 mya
lineage lineage
Most recent
common ancestor 8.2 mya
of the living species 7.3 mya 8.1 mya
8.8 mya
Small Cats Advances in genotyping and sequencing reveal that Earths 31 small
in the cat species hail from seven distinct lineages, each named for the rst
discovered species in the line. While modern cheetahs and pumas are
Spotlight large in size, they are genetically more closely related to small felines.
a critically endangered subspecies of the leopard Lpez Fernndez allows both rabbit hunters
cat that lives only on Iriomote Island. Cartoon (when rabbit numbers are plentiful) and lynx on
cats plaster the sides of buses, and the animal his nearly 700-acre property. Lpez, whose fami-
even has a brand of sake named in its honor. ly has ranched in the region for four generations,
And in Spains Sierra de Andjar Natural Park, is clearly proud of his land, where cows wander
near where Helena and her fellow lynx live, eco- hilly forests of holm oak and cork, accented with
tourism involving lynx-watching has sprung up blooms of pink oleander.
in recent years alongside rabbit and deer hunt- The lynx is one of the most valuable spe-
ing, traditional mainstays of southern Spain. cies, because it only comes from here, Lpez
We are business partners, Luis Ramn tells me. Not all landowners agree that the cats
Barrios Cceres, owner of the Los Pinos resort, should be protected. Some are wary of govern-
says of the lynx, laughing. They pay the bills. ment interference and dont want lynx on their
Lynx-watching tour groups often base their oper- land. But Lpez believes that the lynx is part of
ations at the country hotel, whose gift shop brims Spains heritage and the country should make
with tchotchkes inspired by the local star. sure it thrives.
On the nearby San Fernando Ranch, Pedro At La Olivilla Breeding Center in Santa Elena,
114 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C F E B RUA RY 2 0 1 7
How Are Small Cats Faring?
Many small cats have adapted well to their changing environments,
but several species are considered vulnerable or endangered.
Endangered Near threatened Andean cat
Vulnerable Least concern
Serval
Marbled cat
African
golden cat
Iberian lynx Marbled cat Bay cat Northern tiger cat Serval African golden cat
Eurasian lynx Asiatic golden cat Southern tiger cat Caracal
Canada lynx Guia
Bobcat *HRUR\VFDW
Andean cat
Pampas cat
Margay
Ocelot
3.1 mya
Ocelot
lineage
5.7 mya
scientists are working around the clock to do just to a video feed of a mother lynx and her four cubs
that. Sitting in front of an array of computer mon- sprawled on the ground, paws tucked close to their
itors, keepers record behaviors of their 41 Iberian tiny faces. Someday these animals will be crucial
lynx on the hour, 24/7. On this hot afternoon, the to the survival of their species. But for now theyre
animalsa mix of breeding females, cubs, and doing what felines do best: taking a catnap. j
juveniles being readied for reintroductionare
mostly resting indoors.
Christine DellAmore, natural history editor for National
The centers veterinarian, Mara Jos Prez, Geographics website, enjoys spending time with her
explains the painstaking lengths taken to prepare own small cat in Washington, D.C.
young lynx for release into the wild: surrounding
Gallery on previous pages: leopard cat, Prionailurus bengalensis, at Angkor Centre
their enclosures with black barriers so they dont see for Conservation of Biodiversity, Cambodia; jaguarundis, Herpailurus yagouaroundi,
at Bear Creek Feline Center, Florida; Asiatic golden cat, Catopuma temminckii, at
people, feeding them rabbits through vegetation-
Assam State Zoo, India; Asiatic wildcat, Felis silvestris ornata, at Omahas Henry
covered tubes, scaring them with horns so they Doorly Zoo and Aquarium; leopard cat, Prionailurus bengalensis, at Angkor Centre
IRU&RQVHUYDWLRQRI%LRGLYHUVLW\*HRUR\VFDW/HRSDUGXVJHRUR\L at Cincinnati
learn to fear cars. I feel privileged to contribute Zoo and Botanical Garden; African wildcat, Felis silvestris lybica, at Omaha Zoos
to the lynx not going extinct, Prez says. Wildlife Safari Park; margay, Leopardus wiedii, at Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Gar-
den; sand cat, Felis margarita, at Chattanooga Zoo; rusty-spotted cat, Prionailurus
At his desk, keeper Antonio Esteban clicks over rubiginosus,DW([PRRU=RR(QJODQGVHUYDOLeptailurus serval, at Fort Worth Zoo.
Modern
Amazonia
In the jungle today, real people face
the clash of tribal lore and modern lure.
120
Living in a makeshift camp near Dourados, Brazil,
the indigenous Guaran-Kaiow people have lost
much of their ancestral land to industrial farming
DQGUDQFKLQJ6RPHRIWKHLUHRUWVWRUHFODLPWKH
long-disputed area have been met with violence.
| P R O O F | A P H OTO G R A P H E R S J O U R N A L
In Tipishca, Perua rainy, remote village near the Curaray Riverhouses are built on stilts to keep water out.
/RFDOVKDYHVHHQDVSLNHLQWUDFDQGSROOXWLRQRQWKHULYHUVLQFHRLOFRPSDQLHVDSSHDUHGLQWKHDUHD
122
Story and Photographs
by Yann Gross
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