HEALING JOURNEYS - The World's Most Remote People, What They Can Teach the World

"Giving a microphone to the world’s most remote people" PBS Newshour 2/23/2014

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SUMMARY:  How can the modern study of global change benefit from ancient knowledge?  Special correspondent John Larson reports on the new ways indigenous communities around the world are connecting with one another to share observations and sustain their native cultures.

JOHN LARSON (for Newshour):  You’re aboard a motorized canoe traveling the headwaters of the Amazon – on the Urabamba River, of Peru.  Now, you travel the Giraffe River, a tributary of the White Nile in South Sudan.

And now?  You are navigating the Stewart of Canada, a tributary of the longest, free flowing river on earth: the Yukon, of North America.

JOHN LARSON:  All of the these are among the most remote rivers in the world, and the indigenous people who live along them are being connected, at least in part, by one man.

JON WATERHOUSE, tribal leader and environmentalist:  “We had a couple of canoes and we were going to go down the river, and talk to people in every village along the way.”

Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council – the largest international organization of indigenous people in the world

ANTHROPOLOGY - 1.8 Million-Year-Old Human Skull and Possible Reverberations

"1.8 million-year-old skull may revise understanding of human evolution" (Part-1) PBS Newshour 10/18/2013

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JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour):  Now to an important finding of ancient fossils that could rewrite the latest thinking about human evolution and is the subject of scientific debate.

Jeffrey Brown has the story.

JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour):  The 1.8 million-year-old skull is the most complete ever found of a human ancestor from what's known as the human genus Homo.

It was unearthed in 2005 below a medieval village in the former Soviet republic of Georgia.  Now, after eight years of research, the scientists who found it say it may show that human evolution followed a more straightforward line than has been thought and that fossils currently identified as different species may actually be variations within a single species.

DAVID LORDKIPANIDZE, Georgian National Museum:  This new discovery shows that many features which we previously thought as variability and diversity could be lumped in one group.

JEFFREY BROWN:  The skull was discovered with other partial remains, marking the earliest evidence of human ancestors moving out of Africa.

MAN:  The species that we thought were different species in Africa now we realize probably are variants of the same species.

JEFFREY BROWN:  Other scientists were more cautious in making that leap, though, even as they acknowledged that the new findings, published in the journal "Science," were spectacular, indeed.

"'Mind-boggling' skull discovery offers researchers a view into the ancient past" (Part-2) PBS Newshour 10/18/2013

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SUMMARY:  The discovery of a 1.8 million-year-old skull at Dmanisi in Georgia has revolutionized scientists' idea of human evolution.  Paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University joins Jeffrey Brown to discuss what these ancient remains teach us about our ancestors and origins.