Why War Zones Need Science Too

Overheard at National Geographic

National Geographic

Science, Society & Culture

4.5 • 10.1K Ratings

🗓️ 16 February 2021

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s a jewel of biodiversity, the so-called Galápagos of the Indian Ocean, and might also hold traces of the earliest humans to leave Africa. No wonder scientists want to explore Socotra. But it’s also part of Yemen, a country enduring a horrific civil war. Meet the Nat Geo explorer with a track record of navigating the world’s most hostile hot spots who’s determined to probe the island—and empower its local scientists before it’s too late. For more information on this episode, visit nationalgeographic.com/overheard. Want more? See Socotra’s wonders—including the dragon’s blood tree—through the eyes of National Geographic explorers. And check out human footprints preserved for more than 100,000 years, which could be the oldest signs of humans in Arabia. Also explore: Learn more about Yemen’s civil war. One Yemeni photographer explains why she looks for points of light in the darkness. And for subscribers, go inside the country’s health crisis and the life of violence and disease the war has brought to many civilians. Also, learn more about Ella Al-Shamahi’s new book, The Handshake: A Gripping History, and visit Horn Heritage, Sada Mire’s website preserving heritage in Somalia, Somaliland and the Horn of Africa. If you like what you hear and want to support more content like this, please consider a National Geographic subscription. Go to natgeo.com/exploremore to subscribe today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	So you can see a skull very clearly up there.
0:05.8	And actually if you look closely, you can see there's a number of other bones, long bones,
0:10.0	bones of the foot.
0:11.0	There's a whole pile of bones here.
0:15.1	This is Ella Al-Shamahi.
0:17.2	She's standing on a rocky hillside next to a big cliff face.
0:20.4	An archaeologist named Ahmed is showing her this narrow opening in the cliff.
0:24.8	It's right at eye level and it looks just big enough that someone could shimmy inside.
0:29.1	But Ella isn't going in.
0:30.5	She's just peaking.
0:31.5	Look at this.
0:32.5	There is a bone here that's a human finger or foot's bone.
0:42.2	Ella is on an island called Sukotra.
0:45.0	And the hole she's looking at, someone used it as a gravesite.
0:48.6	It looks like several people were buried inside this cave a long time ago.
0:52.5	So there's a grave here.
0:54.2	The good thing is this grave looks like it hasn't been disturbed.
0:56.8	It's about to be a grave, but this whole cliff face is full of these graves in these caves.
1:02.7	And quite a few of them have actually been looted quite considerably.
1:05.2	So that's quite sad.
1:07.4	Ella is an archaeologist.
1:09.0	So to her, these graves could hold valuable information.
	...

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