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Articles by Andrew Howley
From Frozen Children to Bog Bodies: These Natural Mummies Reveal How People Lived and Died Thousands of Years Ago
Tollund Man is the name given to the startlingly well-preserved remains of a man who lived the in the 5th century BCE and was unearthed in a Danish peat bog in 1950. The anaerobic conditions of the bog preserved his remains down to his stubbled chin—and the rope noose, visible at left, that ended his life. Credit: Arne Mikkelsen, Museum Silkeborg Content Warning: This feature contains discussion and images of ancient human remains.
Andrew Howley
All around the world, extreme conditions have kept ancient human remains shockingly well preserved.
Natural Mummies Hold Memories of Life and Land
Content Warning: This feature contains discussion and images of ancient human remains. The study and display of mummies are deeply entangled with the history of colonialism and the commodification of human remains. Please proceed with discretion. On the frozen, windswept peaks of the Andes, conditions are not great for survival—not for humans or any other living things. Much of the mountains’ small amount of water is locked up as ice.
Good News: You Can’t Ever Be Disconnected From Nature
Skip to main content Surrounded by large buildings, elaborate infrastructure, and intricate technology, it can be easy to feel disconnected from nature. And we might be emotionally or intellectually disconnected. But we can’t ever really be physically disconnected from it. Part of the reason is that we can’t separate from our own bodies, and those bodies are teeming with nature. Four humans in a high-tech capsule on the far side of the moon are still surrounded by life and utterly infused with it.
Cities as Ecosystems: Rethinking Infrastructure with Nature as Mentor
Skip to main content Modern cities are incredible feats of engineering, but many are also brittle, siloed, and unsustainable. Buildings consume vast amounts of energy, water, and materials. Water, waste, and power infrastructure systems are often designed in isolation, without feedback loops, redundancy, or reciprocity. We treat buildings like items set apart, instead of what they could be: participants in a larger ecosystem. So we asked a new question: What if buildings behaved like organisms?
How Protecting Land Preserves Nature’s Inspiration
Skip to main content When it comes to protecting biodiversity, biomimicry is both a reason to do it, and a way to do it well. It’s a reason to do it, because intact ecosystems serve as living libraries of natural adaptations and strategies we can learn from today, and will learn more from in the future as the rest of our knowledge, skills, and tools continue to develop.
Paleobiomimicry - The Biomimicry Institute
Skip to main content When “life finds a way” … we should learn from it. The real-life Jurassic world––and every prehistoric world––was full of life, giving rise to species with incredible adaptations and strategies just like the species of today. And with 99% of species of the past now extinct, think of how much there is to learn. The tricky part is figuring it all out.
Should other animals & parts of nature be "granted" rights?
Skip to main content The MOTH Festival of Ideas drew ideators of all kinds to New York University Law School last week. There were scientists, lawyers, artists, and at least a few biomimics. The call was simple: come together to discuss perspectives and pathways through the issues of humans recognizing more-than-human rights.
Data, Predictive Maintenance Promise Operational Benefits
The water and wastewater industry is under growing pressure from expanding populations, aging infrastructure, falling revenues, and extreme weather events caused by climate change. Although new infrastructure will play a large role in positioning the industry for a more sustainable, resilient future, utilities now have the opportunity to harness and use data to improve the performance of existing assets, helping them achieve operational goals.
Novel Approaches to Achieving Research Goals: Increasing Accessibility to Field Data
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NeanderSmalls: Were Cave Kids Artists, Too?
A series of eye-opening discoveries has taken the scientific opinion of whether Neanderthals made art from an authoritative “no” to an impressed “yes!” Could a new approach reveal even more about our closest hominin relatives? Studies in February of 2018 gave ages of 65,000 years to cave art in Spain. Since the arrival of modern humans is well represented in the archaeological record of this region around 35,000 years ago, the makers of this art appear to have been Neanderthals.
National Geographic Blog - Voices – Ideas and Insight From Explorers
Join a LIVE Twitter chat with explorer, @PaulSalopek, October 7 at 11:00 am EDT using #NatGeoLive. Over tens of thousands of years, our ancestors spread out by foot (for the most part) across the entire globe. Over about seven years, Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent @PaulSalopek is making the same journey, the same way. Paul started in Ethiopia and in the past two years has covered 4,000 miles, getting himself up to the Republic of Georgia.
National Geographic Blog - Voices – Ideas and Insight From Explorers
After several headline-generating genetics stories over the past few years, it’s well known that just about every human family tree with some roots outside of Africa has a few Neanderthals sitting on its branches. So maybe it’s a bit of familial pride that has many more people accepting the idea that these bulky ancient humans with the short foreheads weren’t slow, hulking brutes, but normal people, pretty much just like us.
National Geographic Blog - Voices – Ideas and Insight From Explorers
Lucy Cooke, lunatic for love of bizarre animals, National Geographic Explorer, and founder of the Sloth Appreciation Society has a valentine for the world. It is a bucket of sloths. You can see it above. Most of the Internet-viewing world finds this heart-meltingly adorable. I on the other hand am freaked out by sloths and see this as roughly comparable to a portable version of the terrifying toothed and tentacled pit that nearly devoured Han Solo.
National Geographic Blog - Voices – Ideas and Insight From Explorers
Over 2011 and 2012, Paul Colangelo camped on Todagin Mountain with its large herd of endangered Stone’s Sheep for five months to tell the story of the herd and document its habitat use, using specialized camera equipment to record the movements of the sheep across the plateau. Learn more in his earlier posts: Surviving Todagin. His story continues below. Two were laid out on a blue tarp. Dead, but their bodies intact. Mouths open and heads lowered, their legs splayed as if in mid horizontal trot.
National Geographic Blog - Voices – Ideas and Insight From Explorers
Inspired by the words and actions of the many explorers who came to NG headquarters last week for the 2012 Explorers Symposium, we pass on these words of wisdom from 19th-century American naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, with a photo of Explorer-in-Residence Mike Fay who is currently planning his next megatransect across a vast swath of disappearing wilderness.
Large-Scale Art Makes Tiny Creatures ‘Impossible to Ignore’
Human-sized butterflies will be arriving across the U.S. over the next year. The first have already alighted on an airport tower in Springdale, Arkansas.
Restoring Ancient Natural Areas Is Giving New Life to Old Cities
Harini Nagendra has spent more than a decade studying the growth and functioning of cities in Southeast Asia, supported in part by grants from the National Geographic Society in 2006 and 2011. In her new book, Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future she focuses in on the booming modern city of Bangalore, India.
Fridtjof Nansen: Modern Explorers Retrace His Steps
“Thomas Ulrich and I left home 12th of April. We started from the North Pole 1st of May and headed south towards Frans Josef Land with a weight of 170 kilos in our kayaks. (We used plastic kayaks instead of sleds, to be able to paddle when the ice melted later in the season, they worked extremely well).” Thus began explorer Børge Ousland’s report back to the National Geographic Society of his 2007 expedition.
First Sighting of Rare Whale in New Waters
While more than 125 National Geographic Explorers gathered at Society headquarters in Washington, D.C. this week for the 2017 Explorers Festival, hundreds more continued their Explorer activities in the field around the world. Emerging Explorer Asha de Vos for one, has been busy publishing a paper announcing the first sighting of the little-known Omura’s whale in the waters of Sri Lanka.
Second Cave Chamber Reveals Spectacular New Homo Naledi Skull and More
The first fossils of Homo naledi, discovered in 2013 and described as a new species of hominin in 2015, have just been dated to coming from only 236,000 to 335,000 years ago—close to the origins of our own species. (Read: Did This Mysterious Ape-Human Once Live Alongside Our Ancestors?) What does it mean for prevailing models of the human family tree? And what about the contentious idea that they intentionally disposed of their dead deep in caves?
Latest Okavango Wilderness Project Expedition Kicks Off
When they put the sticker on the Land Rover, you know things are about to get good. The first expedition for 2017 of the National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project is about to begin, and the final preparations are being made as the team loads up gear for a new season of exploration and outreach in the Angolan highlands. This is the latest leg of a multi-year effort to explore and protect the headwaters of the rivers that drive the annual explosion of life in the legendary Okavango Delta.
Hokulea Visits the Pitcairn Islands
[From an official press release by the Polynesian Voyaging Society.] After 11 full days on the ocean, Hawaii’s iconic sailing vessel Hokulea and her crew arrived yesterday on Pitcairn Island for the first time in nearly 20 years. During their one-day visit with the Pitcairn community, the crew engaged with one of the families the crew met when Hokulea last visited in 1998. The canoe departed Pitcairn last night and is expected to reach her next stop in the Marquesas Islands in about 10 days.
Intriguing Burials, Artifacts Unearthed at Ancient Egyptian/Nubian Site
National Geographic explorers Michele Buzon and Stuart Tyson Smith are co-directors at Tombos, an archaeological site located at the Third Cataract of the Nile River in modern-day Sudan. Tombs dating to the New Kingdom (mid-18th Dynasty) through the Napatan period are present, documenting the interaction and entanglement of Egyptian colonists and local Nubians during these major sociopolitical changes in the region.
Unleashing the Wild Soul of the Cat
It’s Big Cat Week on Nat Geo Wild once again. And this year, the big cats are coming home. Well, kind of. They’re actually already here. As National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence Dereck and Beverly Joubert reveal in their latest film, Soul of the Cat (airing Wednesday, February 22, 2017, at 10 p.m. EST), our sweet little domesticated cat companions don’t differ much in spirit from their ancient ancestors or giant living relatives.
Happy Anniversary, Photo Ark! 10 Years, 6,300 Animals Photographed
Take that as a rock-musician-style compliment, a statement of the obvious, or an affront to whatever you think separates us as humans (language? mind? soul? denim?), but it’s the basic category of life on Earth that we all fall into. And we share that category with a practically limitless number of other species. Every time someone looks closely at the animal life in a particular area, new species are discovered. Frogs are really good at popping up this way.
There Are Hominid Fossils Waiting to Be Discovered!
The tents are up. The generators are purring. The clothes have dried from the adventure of a gear rescue during a quick but powerful South African thunderstorm. We’re sitting quietly at last, in collapsible chairs, and suddenly Elen Feuerriegel’s Australian accent excitedly breaks the silence.
Instead of Destroying Earth, CERN’s Hadron Collider Inspires Epic Run
In the unassuming countryside outside Geneva, Switzerland, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider gives particles the world’s largest racetrack to zip around. It’s about 17.5 miles in circumference, only 2 inches wide, and varyingly 50 to 100 feet underground, depending on the height of the hills above it. A particle completes the route in 0.0000889 seconds.
Albino Otter Proves to Be as Adorable as You’d Hope
If you spent a good amount of time studying, photographing, and protecting otters in the wild, how long do you think it would be before you saw an albino one? Try more like 40. Hans Ring is one of Sweden’s top wildlife photographers. He first began studying otters in the middle and southern parts of his country in the 1970s as they were nearing local extinction. During the ’80s, he was part of the rehabilitation efforts that brought them back. He now takes part in otter inventories every year.
A Voice From the Cave: Lee Berger on the NG Weekend Radio Show
Over the course of the three-week-long Rising Star Expedition in November, Lee Berger posted individual updates by the minute on Twitter, and we had blog posts and videos almost daily, revealing chapters of the story right as they happened.
Secrets of Stunning Ocean Photography
“Only about two percent of the ocean is currently protected,” says National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Dr. Enric Sala. “The rest is being disrupted by overfishing, pollution, climate change, and species extinctions.
‘Clockwork Lion’ in London Cries, “Time Is Running Out for Big Cats”
Time is running out for big cats. That’s the message of a new statue in London’s Trafalgar Square, commissioned by Nat Geo Wild and about to be auctioned to raise money for National Geographic’s Big Cats Initiative.
The Ocean and Our Explorers Need You
This week, comment to NatGeo on Facebook or Twitter with “#donate $10” and give your support to Pristine Seas. The ocean covers more than 70 percent of the surface of Earth, but only 2 percent of that is officially protected. National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Enric Sala is exploring the ocean’s most untouched areas in hopes of raising that number to 10 percent. This requires him and his team to spend a lot of time at sea.
#PhotoArk to Illuminate St. Peter’s Basilica
Watch LIVE with Joel Sartore as his #PhotoArk images are broadcast onto St. Peter’s Basilica, December 8 at 1p.m. EST/6p.m. UTC. Follow @NatGeo on Twitter and Periscope to see what he sees. With habitat loss, poaching, and climate change looming like a new flood to threaten the world’s animals with extinction, National Geographic photographer, Joel Sartore, gave himself a mission: photograph every captive animal species on Earth before it goes extinct, preserving them all in a Photo Ark.
Chat With Paul Salopek Friday at 1p.m. EST
A few weeks ago in the Out of Eden Walk blog, as he was making his way across the Republic of Georgia on foot at three miles per hour as part of his worldwide perambulation, National Geographic Fellow, Paul Salopek, described experiencing the storytelling equivalent of Russian nested dolls.
Next LIVE Twitter Chat With Epic Walker @PaulSalopek
Join a LIVE Twitter chat with explorer, @PaulSalopek, October 7 at 11:00 am EDT using #NatGeoLive. Over tens of thousands of years, our ancestors spread out by foot (for the most part) across the entire globe. Over about seven years, Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent @PaulSalopek is making the same journey, the same way. Paul started in Ethiopia and in the past two years has covered 4,000 miles, getting himself up to the Republic of Georgia.
What Can We Learn From Homo naledi’s Skull?
After the excitement of Homo naledi’s discovery and extraction from deep in a narrow cave in South Africa, and the implication that these non-humans may have intentionally carried their dead deep into the earth, we are left with the bones themselves, what they tell us about these creatures, and what new questions they inspire.
Homo naledi’s Nike-Ready Foot
After the excitement of Homo naledi’s discovery and extraction from deep in a narrow cave in South Africa, and the implication that these non-humans may have intentionally carried their dead deep into the earth, we are left with the bones themselves, what they tell us about these creatures, and what new questions they inspire.
How the Naledi Team Solved a 1,550-Piece Puzzle
The announcement of Homo naledi last week was just the latest phase of a scientific adventure that’s been going on for two years in and around a tiny cave in South Africa. It started in November, 2013, with the three-week long expedition to recover what National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Lee Berger and team at first thought were bones from a single ancient hominin. We lived in tents, swapped theories around a fire, and I wrote about it all daily for this expedition blog.
Join Live Twitter Chat With Explorers in the Okavango Delta
The Okavango delta is possibly as close as Earth comes to having an actual “Land That Time Forgot.” Its waters are undammed and ebb and flow as nature dictates. The largest animals left on land are everywhere. The only signs of humanity visible or audible are those you yourself bring there.
Join a LIVE Twitter Chat With @PaulSalopek, Walking Across the Planet
Join a LIVE Twitter chat with explorer, @PaulSalopek, July 22 at 11:00 am ET using #NatGeoLive. “I am walking across the planet,” says Paul Salopek, National Geographic Fellow. “For more than two years, I have hopscotched over searing lava fields. I have crabbed sideways through alleys in vast migrant slums. I have traversed sun-hammered deserts and scaled peaks in blinding snow. I have swaggered down fashionable boulevards.
Wildlife in London? Deer Me!
In the Americas, people aren’t used to their cities having very deep history. The layers of London would blow many minds. Take for example Richmond Park. It may appear to be a place of wild refuge within the city, a patch of ancient wilderness that somehow escaped man’s boundless reach for millennia. But even here, the human touch has been registered. Richmond Park has been a park for at least 700 years.
High-Tech Mapping Sheds New Light on the Atlantic Seafloor
The ancient Irish may have done it. The Vikings certainly did. And when Columbus made the trip, it ushered in one of the most dramatic periods of change in human history. In 1857, the first transatlantic communication cable had a similar effect. Now, outfitted with the latest in survey and mapping technology, a team of researchers is making that daunting voyage: crossing the Atlantic by ship.
Exploring Civilization Beyond the Walls
Before we’d even become Homo sapiens sapiens, humans lived everywhere from South Africa up to Britain and over to China. There were mountain people, coastal people, people who hunted woolly mammoths, and people who’d never seen a woolly mammoth in their lives. Just like we see with distinct groups of other animals, these differences of experience, adaptation, and expectation would have made for real cultural and even physical differences between populations.
3 Surprising Discoveries From the Archaeology of Food
Deep in the pit, a thin cloud of dust and dirt makes visible the shaft of light shining down from the setting sun. The top of the tomb is opened. Images of the ancient objects inside reflect in the wide eyes of the excavators. The archaeology of food is filling in the gaps between all the grand monuments and intricately crafted objects that occupied researchers and the public for generations.
3 Things to Know About the Origins of Chinese Civilization
Two things everyone knows about China are that it is very big and that it has been around a very long time (by the way, Happy New Year 4713!). The look of the buildings, the style of art, and the form of the language almost seem to be timeless. In presentations at the 2015 Dialogue of Civilizations being held this week in Beijing though, archaeologists are peeling back layers of history and revealing the latest discoveries and theories of the culture’s origins.
Scientists Witness Spectacular Flood Into the Red Sea
Somebody get Moses on the phone. A team of researchers including National Geographic Emerging Explorer Beverly Goodman have witnessed a remarkable Red Sea flooding event of their own (read the scientific paper). Confirming for the first time in nature what had only been seen in lab experiments before, the team watched and recorded as the brown waters from a recent flashflood rushed towards the sea and instead of mixing with it, continued to hug the bottom and flow under the salty water.
Ireland Before St. Patrick
Ireland without St. Patrick is hard to imagine. Ireland without lines of stone walls crisscrossing vistas of grassy rolling hills even more so. No farms, no sheep, no deer. This is Ireland when modern humans first arrived. Killian Driscoll is a National Geographic grantee and part of a team of researchers investigating this remote period on the Emerald Isle (ca. 8000-2500 B.C.) by studying stone tools and the rocks they came from (learn more on the Irish Lithic Landscapes project website).
What’s Living Under These Elephant Seals?
Elephant seals weigh tons, are made of hundreds of trillions of individual cells, and are big enough to spot from the small plane as you come in for a landing on the smaller islands in the Falklands (Malvinas). Standing on one of these beaches, most tourists, including most of the scientists at the recent pan-American Falkland Islands Science Symposium lead by the UK Science and Innovation Network, will stare at these behemoths, transfixed by their arresting presence. Not Ginny Edgcomb.
Pictures: Whale Bone Memorials, by Nature and Humans
In front of Christ Church Cathedral in the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas) town of Stanley rises a four-branched arch made of the lower jaws of two blue whales. It stands as an adornment for the church, a local curiosity and landmark, a memorial to the whaling communities of the past, and a commemoration of the 1933 centennial of British administration of the islands.
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