New detail on the earliest ‘Americans.’ Plus, a ‘new’ Michelangelo; the obscure law behind the Haitian expulsions; Ötzi the Iceman … and why Esther shines amid Biblical queens
|  | Monday, September 27, 2021 | | | | |
| In today’s newsletter, a ‘new’ Michelangelo; the obscure law behind the Haitian expulsions; Ötzi the Iceman; justice for atomic survivors; Lady Liberty‘s shoe size … and why Esther shines amid Biblical queens. | |
 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY DAN ODESS | | By Debra Adams Simmons, Executive Editor, HISTORY
Footprints preserved in the boundless expanses of New Mexico‘s White Sands National Park have drawn the attention of scientists since the early 1930s, when a government trapper spotted a print measuring a stunning 22 inches long and eight inches wide. He was convinced he‘d found evidence for the mythical Bigfoot. (Actually, it was a giant sloth.)
The latest footprint discovery at White Sands has also revealed startling evidence—but of a very different kind.
Researchers have dated sets of human footprints at White Sands (pictured above) to about 21,000 to 23,000 years ago, thousands and thousands of years before the earliest people in the Americas are believed to have migrated from Asia. This discovery appears to be more widely embraced by the scientific community than last year‘s claim for a human presence in Mexico some 30,000 years ago. | | | |
 | | ILLUSTRATION BY KAREN CARR | | These ephemeral appearances of the footprints at White Sands have earned the nickname “ghost tracks.” Each footprint marks the place where an ancient relative once stood thousands of years ago. (Above, an artistic rendering of what life on the shores of now-extinct Lake Otero may have looked like more than 20,000 years ago.)
“[It] just gives us goosebumps,” Kim Charlie, a member of the Pueblo of Acoma, says of visiting the site. Many Native American tribes and pueblos feel a spiritual connection to White Sands, and Charlie is part of a committee in the Tribal Historic Preservation Office that has been collaborating with the research team to ensure the prints“ preservation.
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 | PHOTOGRAPH BY FRANCESCO LASTRUCCI
| | A Michelangelo, just restored: More than 560 years ago, the Renaissance master walked away from his second Pietà. However, after years of restoration, a Florence museum has unveiled The Deposition or the Bandini Pietà. Michelangelo worked on the sculpture (pictured above) between 1547 and 1555, 50 years after his first Pietà, which is in the Vatican. Restorers encountered “numerous microfractures” in the marble, an issue that forced Michelangelo to halt work on it before it was finished, the Italian news agency ANSA reports.
Justice for earliest atomic victims: Thousands of people, many of them not warned, were within 40 miles of the world’s first atomic detonation, in New Mexico in 1945. Nor were they evacuated afterward, even as radioactive fallout dropped for days. For more than three decades, Washington has compensated nuclear workers and people who lived downwind of later nuclear tests. Last week, Nat Geo reports, a resolution was introduced in Congress to include these “downwinders” from the first test, codenamed Trinity.
The obscure law being used against Haitians: When a public health law was enacted in 1944, it was about preventing people with transmissible diseases from entering the United States—not a whole nationality of asylum-seekers. That’s what Erin Blakemore found in uncovering the U.S. argument for forcibly repatriating thousands of Haitians who had gathered in Del Rio, Texas. The policy—and the harm faced by Haitians returning to the dangerous, unstable nation—prompted the U.S. special envoy to Haiti to quit in protest on Wednesday.
A pyramid from the ashes of a volcano: If the eruption of the giant Ilopango volcano hastened the fall of the Maya empire, it wasn’t immediately evident in a town just 25 miles away. For that town, the massive eruption 1,500 years ago hastened construction of a huge Maya pyramid and ceremonial center, a new study shows. “Ancient people were more resilient, flexible, and innovative,” study author Akjira Ichikawa tells Nat Geo.
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 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEXANDRA BOULAT, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION | | Dressed for business: National Geographic’s June 2003 issue featured a diary of photographer Alexandra Boulat's experiences in Baghdad that March, on the eve of U.S. bombing and intervention of Iraq. In this photo, recently chosen for our popular Photo of the Day feature, schoolboys dressed up to greet foreign peace activists. What’s in their hands? Fake automatic rifles.
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 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT CLARK, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION | | Everybody likes Ötzi: The leathery, 5,000-year-old remains of a murdered man—and his secrets—inspire scientists and 300,000 tourists a year to see him, 30 years after his discovery high in the Alps. “Ötzi is, in my eyes, the best investigated human body the whole world has ever seen,” pathologist Oliver Peschel tells Nat Geo. From studying the well-preserved, mummified remains (pictured above), scientists have determined Ötzi was left handed, had 61 tattoos, and wore a size 8 shoe.
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 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY BETTMANN, GETTY IMAGES | | Speaking of shoe size: Lady Liberty, holding her light above New York Harbor, has a shoe size of 879. Construction began this month in 1875 on the Statue of Liberty, and here’s a collection of facts about it—and a delightful animation about the shoe size. (Pictured above, workers building the skeleton and plaster surface of Lady Liberty’s left arm and hand.) Thanks to our Michael Tribble for this factoid at this morning's news meeting.
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 | | BRIDGEMAN/ACI | |
| Queens of the Old Testament: One queen, Bathsheba, manipulated a dying David to get her son declared king. Another, Jezebel, tricked a farmer to help her husband gain more land. Biblical queens had moved into a better light by the time of Esther, who, acting independently, saved the Jewish people in Babylon. “She is guided by her own courage and wisdom,” Guadalupe Seijas writes for Nat Geo’s History magazine. (Above, Esther in a 19th-century painting by Jean-François Portaels.)
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| | Today's newsletter was curated and edited by David Beard and Monica Williams. Jen Tse selected the photographs. Have an idea or link to a story you think is right down our alley? Please let us know at david.beard@natgeo.com. Happy trails! | | | |
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