Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,

the past brought to life by those who were there.

This week the liberation of Paris from the Nazis in 1944.

It's been one of the most marvelous sites I've ever seen coming down the boulevard into the heart of Paris.

Also we'll be trying to find the missing children from El Salvador's civil war.

For the first few years I just cried every night.

I would look up at the stars and ask for a sign that my family was alive,

but that sign never came.

Plus the legendary Brazilian president who took his own life apparently to prevent a military takeover and the man who

wanted to become a cyborg.

People had talked about it in terms of science fiction and saying this will be possible in the future but we thought well let's

go for it.

That's all coming up later in the podcast but first a moment in the history of our human concern

for the balance of the world's ecosystems.

With rewilding initiatives becoming popular around the world just now, we're going back to

1995 and the start of one of the most famous and most contentious wildlife

restoration projects of them all. This wasn't about putting cuddly pandas back into

bamboo forests or cheeky otters being returned to newly cleaned rivers.

No, this was a much harder cell because not everyone loves wolves.

Alex Last now tells the story of when Gray Wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the USA,

and he's been speaking to the biologist Doug Smith, who's the Wolf Project Leader at Yellowstone. It was magical and you knew you were being part of history.

It was magical and you knew you were being part of history.

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