Image by Jonah M. Kessel/The New York Times.

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By JONAH M. KESSEL

Disillusioned with China’s urban dream, a young man set off on a 15-year walk and rediscovered his family’s ethnic Miao traditions.

The Carthaginian general Hannibal is remembered for his march across the Alps with thirty-seven elephants, but scholars have long disputed exactly which route he took over the mountains. ILLUSTRATION COURTESY UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE / UIG / GETTY

Nature appreciation in these pages frequently has to do with dirty things that are simply fascinating. Related topics we care about such as conservation, as often as not have to do with dirty things; as in, things that need to be cleaned up. Here is another slightly odd appreciation of dirty things that fits the dirty but fascinating and useful category:

Searching for Signs of Hannibal’s Route in DNA from Horse Manure

BY MARGUERITE HOLLOWAY

More than two thousand years ago, thirty-seven elephants from heat-shimmering latitudes ascended Europe’s highest mountain range, tramped though snow and across ice, and breathed the thin air of high altitudes. Those that survived the perilous journey met with a bitter winter and war, as the Carthaginian general Hannibal, who had urged them through the Alps, battled the emergent Roman Republic. Continue reading →

Barack Obama reaches around the headdress of chief Joseph Medicine Crow to place a 2009 presidential medal of freedom around his neck. Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP/The Guardian

The history and rights of Native Americans in the United States have held interest for us over the years, with our last story mentioning a tribe being early last month, in reference to buffalo hunting near Yosemite. Yesterday, the great Crow tribe historian, war chief, and historian Joseph Medicine Crow, who was also a second world war veteran, a holder of the presidential medal of freedom, and a nominee for the congressional gold medal, passed away at 102 years old. Aisha Gani reports for the Guardian:

Medicine Crow, who was raised by his grandparents in a log house in a rural area of the Crow Reservation near Lodge Grass, Montana, wore his war paint beneath his second world war uniform.

As a child, Medicine Crow listened to stories about the Battle of Little Bighorn – the conflict that pitted federal troops led by Lt Col George Armstrong Custer against native Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. He translated for his great uncle, White Man Runs Him, when white reporters came to interview him about the battle, and would go on to become a lifelong emissary between the Crow community and white Americans.

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