Thousand-Year-Old Rock Art Likely Served as a Gathering Point for Llama Caravans Crossing the Andes

Hundreds of years before the Inca road system connected a sprawling empire, a more modest network of trails linked the small communities that lined the mountains and coastlines of South America. These trails, snaking through the Andes, supported a vibrant network of llama caravans, which may have been the driving force behind elements of cultural continuity that have been shared by different South American societies for the last millennium—and perhaps even longer.

“These caravanners were the lubricant for more than just trade goods,” says Nicholas Tripcevich, a research associate and lab manager at the University of California, Berkeley. “They served an important role linking people. They probably spread information, stories.”

Read more at Smithsonian Magazine. 

Science Explains How the Iceman Resists Extreme Cold

Finland’s Arctic circle might not seem like a great place to run a marathon barefoot and in shorts—unless you’re Wim Hof. Hof, better known as “The Iceman,” has attained roughly two dozen world records by completing marvellous feats of physical endurance in conditions that would kill others. Yet even he was understandably nervous the night before his 26-mile jaunt at -4 degrees Fahrenheit.

“What did I get myself into?” he recalls thinking. But from the moment his bare toes hit the snow, he began to feel “surprisingly good.”

The 59-old Dutchman has climbed Mount Everest in Nepal and Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania—Africa’s tallest peak—wearing shorts. “I’ve done about anything I can fantasize about in the cold,” Hof said in an interview. He holds the Guinness World Record for longest swim under ice, and has also endured the extremes of dry heat, running a half marathon through the Namib Desert without drinking any water.

Read more at Smithsonian Magazine.

Lost shark seen for first time in a decade – in a fish market

The Ganges river shark is so rare that there has been no confirmed record of the species for a decade – and very few ever. But a series of photographs taken at a fish market in Mumbai, India, show the species is still around, and in a unexpected place.

“It’s a species that’s never really been seen in the western Indian Ocean,” says Rima Jabado, founder and lead scientist of the Gulf Elasmo Project – a shark research and conservation organisation – in the United Arabic Emirates.

Read more at New Scientist.

How Culture Guides Belugas’ Annual Odysseys Across the Arctic

The belugas were due to arrive in droves, but Gregory O’Corry-Crowe was nervous. Just a few years into a postdoctoral biology fellowship, O’Corry-Crowe had taken this opportunity in 1998 to fly to remote Somerset Island in the Canadian Arctic with a pair of seasoned biologists. Would the whales show up?

The whales were not shy about announcing their arrival. After a few days of relatively quiet seas, they roused him in the early hours—night this far north was only a dim concept in the summer—with a “cacophony of noise” caused by their blowing, flapping and humming in the water. O’Corry-Crowe rolled out of his sleeping bag at the seaside camp to a vista of about 1,500 beluga whales.

Read more at Smithsonian Magazine. 

In the Maldives, the Virtues and Limitations of Pole-and-Line Tuna Fishing

KELSEY MILLER, fisheries researcher with a global advocacy group, wobbled for balance on a 50-foot fishing boat as silvery tuna flew through the air towards her. It was 2014, and as the vessel pitched off the coast of the Maldives, a collection of atolls several hundred miles southwest of the southern tip of India, a dozen or so fishermen working in the stern pulled the fish from the water one by one with fishing poles, flipping their catch towards the boat’s bow.

There is one thing that all sides can agree on: Bycatch is a problem for the fishing industry everywhere.

When the fishermen took a break, Miller and her colleagues went to work, hastily counting, weighing, and measuring the fish — along with any other sea creatures, from juvenile sharks to mahi-mahi, that were incidentally caught in the process. The team was conducting research for a study, published in PLOS One last spring, on “bycatch” — the myriad unintended sea creatures captured by fishermen, typically in massive nets as they pursue a commercial species. As the study notes, Miller and her colleagues with the International Pole and Line Foundation, a U.K.-based tuna conservation group that advocates for the less impactful fishing technique, spent more than 100 days monitoring accidental catch — and found surprisingly little.

Read more at Undark. 

Burials Unearthed in Poland Open the Casket on The Secret Lives of Vampires

Need to get rid of a pesky vampire? Thanks to Hollywood, you probably know the drill: Wear garlic around your neck, don’t go out at night without a cross, and for Pete’s sake, never invite a debonair stranger into your house. Remember, you can tell if someone is undead by whether they have a reflection in the mirror, and if things go south, make sure you have a wooden stake or some means of decapitation handy.

Actually, these fiction- and film-driven fantasies bear little resemblance to the centuries-old beliefs and practices that some Polish villagers turned to in an effort to ward of the misfortunes that befell them. By excavating graves from a 17th century Polish cemetery, anthropologists are finding that people attempted to protect themselves from the occult using vastly different methods than those portrayed in horror films.

Read more at Smithsonian Magazine. 

Ancient warriors killed and ate their dogs as rite of passage

The remains of roasted, chopped and defleshed dog skulls in the Eurasian steppe are providing evidence of a bizarre rite of passage for young boys from 4000 years ago – one that might have echoes in the foundation myth of ancient Rome.

“The nature of this ritual was that they killed and then consumed very large numbers of dogs and some wolves with them,” says David Anthony at Hartwick College in New York.

Anthony and his Hartwick colleague Dorcas Brown analysed the bones of at least 64 different dogs and wolves. The remains came from a Bronze Age site roughly 3900 to 3700 years old, at the ancient village of Krasnosamarskoe in present-day Russia.

Read more at New Scientist.

Poaching Isn’t the Cheetah’s Only Problem

Ehsan Moqanaki once spent two years taking pictures of a cat. It wasn’t just any cat, though: It was an Asiatic cheetah, a critically endangered mammal that used to roam across lands spanning from India to Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula. In a camera-trap study published in 2010, Moqanaki and other researchers set up cameras over miles of territory in Iran’s Kavir National Park and Kavir Protected Area to try to track the number of these rare felines left in the region.

What they found was 18 photos of the same male cat, sometimes nearly 40 miles between camera trap stations. That was surprising, because the ungulate-rich region should have been great territory for the graceful and speedy cats. But Moqanaki, a researcher with the Iranian Cheetah Society and the lead author of a study recently published in Animal Conservation, suspects that the cheetah population has dwindled over time in the Kavir areas due to a lack of connectivity.

Read more at Smithsonian Magazine.

Arctic Search-and-Rescue Missions Double as Climate Warms

Joe Karetak heard broken propeller shrapnel whiz through the air as the blade of the sinking helicopter—sent to rescue him and his son, Joe Jr.—hit the ice. The chopper crashed into the floe somewhere outside the hamlet of Arviat on the western shore of Hudson Bay in Nunavut, Canada, a long way from everywhere. The pilot was frantically trying to get out of the cockpit. Twenty feet across the open water created by the crash, Karetak was powerless to help. He had already spent nearly 24 hours lost in a boat in the Arctic Ocean, and adrift on an ice floe, in frozen clothes at minus 70°F.

“This can’t be happening,” thought the Inuit hunter, then 53 years old. “This is just unbelievable.”

The pilot managed to kick open the door and started swimming through the water toward him. Karetak reached out his harpoon and pulled the man onto the ice. He immediately wrapped him up in a parachute and sleeping bags, trying to save the man who had come to rescue him and his son. “I tried to heat him up with my body, talking with him to keep him from shock,” Karetak says.

Read more at National Geographic Adventure.

Castaway Ghost Spiders Flew to Robinson Crusoe Island

Arachnophobes might be shocked to learn that some spiders can fly hundreds of miles across the ocean.

Two million years ago, airborne arachnids colonized remote Pacific islands by ballooning, a technique in which spiders use their silk as a kind of kite that can carry them long distances. (Read about spiders that can fly without silk—and steer in midair.)

These so-called ghost spiders likely landed on Robinson Crusoe Island (map), roughly 400 miles off Chile, where they blossomed into several new species. And now scientists have identified at least three previously unknown to science, a new study says.

Read more at National Geographic.