The Explorers: A Century of Discovery Page #4

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And no one can say what strange

creatures we may someday discover here.

Off the Mediterranean coast of Turkey,

National Geographic has helped

explore an ancient ship

that was wrecked here 3,400 years ago.

Now a word about

what we're doing today.

We're working in the upper part of the

wreck and finding it

just thick with amphoras and

ingots and so forth.

And so I want you to

just to hand-fan down...

George Bass is from

Texas A & M University.

One of the world's leading

nautical archeologists,

He has been completely absorbed

by a small plot of seabed

some 150 feet down.

Slowly, the evidence mounts up.

Bass and his team have

gained unprecedented knowledge

of such an ancient ship.

It was about 50 feet long

and carried goods of at

least seven different cultures,

including pottery, ivory, tin,

and the oldest glass ingots ever found.

But the principal cargo was copper

some 200 ingots,

each weighing about 60 pounds.

When combined with tin,

such ingots make bronze,

and the wreck did prove to be of

the Late Bronze Age

the oldest shipwreck known.

In 1986 an expedition from Woods Hole,

Massachusetts,

sought to explore the most celebrated

shipwreck of modern times

A luxury liner that sank in 1912

with a loss of more than 1,500 lives.

For years the grave of the Titanic has

fascinated Dr. Robert Ballard.

Now he has pinpointed the wreck

and hear echoes of tragedy.

Here lies Titanic, seen again by human

eyes after 74 dark and silent years.

Ballard leached Titanic with Alvin,

a manned submersible

designed for deep-sea research.

Knowing that Titanic could be

desecrated by salvagers,

Dr. Ballard felt it necessary

to leave a plaque here asking

that she be left intact.

But only a year passed before a rival

expedition reached the wreck

and took objects from Titanic.

Someday we may see beneath the waves

with godlike ease

and penetrate countless mysteries.

There is a great void

in the story of early man.

And this tantalized a scientist named

Louis Leakey

are lured him to a place in Africa

called Olduvai Gorge.

And now I'm down

at the bottom of the gorge.

My feet are resting on the black

lava which formed

the old land surface on

which these lake beds formed.

And here behind me are the earliest

part of the Olduvai series,

deposits that were formed just

nearly two million years ago.

It was here that, in 1931,

we first found examples of

simple tools like this,

Just a water-worn pebble with a jagged

cutting edge stone tools

that go back to a very,

very remote past in time,

nearly three times as old as

anything previously found.

Who were the men who made these tools?

Where did they live

and how did they live?

And that was the problem

that Mary and I went out to look for.

We wanted the answer: Who these men?

In 1959 Leakey and his wife, Mary,

found the fossil jaw of Zinjanthropus,

a primitive form of ape-man

who lived one-and-three-quarter

million years ago.

The find stunned the scientific world.

For 30 years the Leakeys had

faced skepticism and ridicule.

Now at last they found support

as National Geographic

underwrote their research.

Melville Bell Grosvenor made a

commitment to the Leakey's work

that would endure for a

quarter of a century.

Leakey's son Richard

also became a leading scientist.

In 1984 a team led by Richard Leakey

found the nearly complete skeleton

of an early human

one-and-a-half

million years old.

The Leakey legacy endures

the now accepted ideas

that man evolved in Africa,

That he is far older

than we once thought,

and that more than one kind

of man-like creature

lived at the same time.

Louis Leakey's interest in human

origins took fascinating turns.

As his urging

Jane Goodall began her epic study

of chimpanzee behavior in the wild.

Goodall's study led to a

new appreciation of the

similarities between

chimpanzees and man.

The chimps form distinct family groups

They use tools and

sometimes even wage war.

And over the years Jane Goodall came

to regard many of them as friends.

Another of Leakey's disciples

sought to study

the mountain gorilla in Rwanda.

With extraordinary patience,

Dian Fossey at last succeeded

in winning the trust of these powerful

but extremely shy creatures.

At such moments of contact

Dian was deeply moved

by the gorillas gentleness and trust.

One of her favorites was "Digit",

so-called because of his twisted,

broken finger.

In December 1977 Digit was

killed by poachers,

probably to sell his hands as souvenirs.

Later, other mountain gorillas in Dian's

study group were also slaughtered.

Finally, Dian herself was murdered by

persons unknown,

quite possibly poachers.

As much as any recent event,

her death foreshadowed a desperate

new era in the age of ecology.

We are led to ask:

If we cannot protect wild creatures,

can we save ourselves?

In the remote highlands of

Papua New Guinea

there lives a group

of endangered people.

They call themselves the "Hagahai".

Until a few years ago no outsiders

knew of their existence.

And they have been so isolated

they have not developed antibodies

to protect them against

common diseases.

Dr. Carol Jenkins is a

medical anthropologist.

She first came here to document

the Hagahais decline.

She returned to try to save them.

As part of a medical team,

Jenkins is fighting a desperate

battle against her own grim statistics

This baby is special because it's

the only one that's lived this year.

There have been eight babies born

since '87 began.

There have been eight babies is about

two months old

and it's the only living baby.

The Hagahai are so vulnerable,

only the most wrenching

changes can help them.

Trained to observe such cultures,

Carol Jenkins finds herself helping

to profoundly alter this one.

As tropical rain forests give way

to human demands,

there is danger on every hand.

This is the richest,

most complex ecosystem on earth.

From it have come many of our drugs,

our food plants, our useful chemicals.

Can we survive without this

blessing of diversity?

As the century of

discovery comes to an end,

a century of destruction

could be beginning.

And of all living creatures

only man has the power to decide

what the future holds

for the planet Earth.

Often quietly and in

unspectacular ways,

the task of discovery goes on.

And technology can make

explorers of us all.

A few years ago Jean Mueller

was a librarian.

Seeking a new challenge,

she went to work for

Palomar Observatory in California.

Jean works on the

Second Palomar Sky Survey,

a project partially sponsored by

National Geographic.

Its goal is to make a photographic

map of the heavens

that shows more detail

than we have ever seen before.

On a mountaintop in the dead of night,

Jean often sees what no one

has ever seen before

an image on a newly developed

glass plate 14 inches square.

Each pinpoint on the plate is a star,

possibly a galaxy

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