March 2005 Archives

Lisa Ling - Host, National Geographic Explorer As you first enter the endless series of metal gates and security checks at California State Prison, Sacramento (SAC), there are a few rules. You do not wear blue—that’s for inmates. You do not carry a cell phone—that’s a security risk. And if you are taken hostage your freedom will not be negotiated if it means releasing a prisoner.

California State Prison, Sacramento (SAC)

This was our introduction to SAC—a level 4, maximum-security men’s prison near Sacramento, California. The facility houses close to 3,500 men, locked up for the most heinous crimes—murder, rape, child molestation, assault…the list goes on. Inside this fortress, and others like it, exist the most extreme of environments—a place where society's rules don't apply and where everything is all about respect. Inmates live by a code of silence imposed on them by other inmates. It's a dangerous and secretive world to which even prison officials aren't privy. Though the job of prison officials is to control the facility, they are the first to admit that it’s the inmates who really control things. I have a fascination with the corrections system in America. There are an estimated 2 million people incarcerated in the U.S.—that’s more than anywhere else in the industrialized world. From past stories and law enforcement contacts I had learned that within U.S. prisons there is a covert culture that has evolved behind bars. I wanted to understand what goes on within prison walls and learn about this secret world that the inmates don’t acknowledge publicly. Our cameras were allowed exclusive and unprecedented access—for one month nowhere in the prison was off-limits. The bizarre prison culture was more violent and terrifying than anything I had ever expected. You always say you never want to end up in prison—this experience really revealed why. There’s no such thing as just going in and doing your time. There is a whole language, economy, and system of justice that all the inmates must know. In prison you go in and you have to fight to defend yourself. You always have to maintain respect for yourself and others and project a strong image. We quickly learned that prison life revolves around race. If you don’t ally with people who share your skin color, you are targeted for assault. If you are white, even if you are Jewish, you need to align with the Aryan brotherhood or the Nazi Lowriders or one these white power groups. One of the weirdest rules is that white inmates don’t let each other drink out of a drinking fountain after a black person has drunk out of it. If a black inmate goes to use the latrines and it’s in the Hispanic area, he must ask permission. They walk in pairs and one stands guard while the other uses the facilities. Many rival Hispanic gangs will become allies once they enter prison. Currently the white and Hispanic inmates are amicable, but alliances change frequently.

Just setting foot in another race’s territory without permission is grounds for attack

Just setting foot in another race’s territory without permission is grounds for attack. If a white inmate enters an area belonging to a black gang, chaos often ensues. In fact, while we were in the prison, the alarm would go off every so often signaling a fight or a riot had broken out. That happens pretty much everyday. You never know what to expect. When everything seems the calmest, that’s when things break out. The leaders of the various racial groups are called “shot-callers,” but even getting inmates to admit that they exist is almost impossible. The identity of leaders of all the different gangs and factions must be protected at all costs. When we explained to the inmates that we were trying to report a story on prison culture, most of them refused to talk. The inmates are afraid—they know that if they are seen on camera revealing any secrets they could be killed immediately. People die in prison all the time. They are murdered and stabbed and attacked every day. During the month we spent at SAC there were several deaths. Although some people agreed to speak to us off camera, much of what we learned came from inmates who were in protective custody (PC). These inmates are considered “rats” by the rest of the prisoners and will never be able to return to the general population. Because they have revealed the secrets of the system, they will remain in PC until they are released or until they die. PC inmates share a facility with the most loathed prisoners: child molesters and rapists. All inmates in the primary facility have been instructed to kill a PC individual if ever their paths cross.

In SAC, some people are serving life sentences and so there is a “nothing to lose” kind of attitude.

Even though the inmates were tightlipped about the culture, system, and the rules, when you mention that kids will see this, more of them were inclined to speak. As one inmate said “there ain’t nothing cool about this place.” In SAC, some people are serving life sentences and so there is a “nothing to lose” kind of attitude. When you get put into a prison for armed robbery, and you are forced to mix with people who are in for multiple homicides, and when every single person around you has made a career out of crime, you are inevitably going to learn to commit more crimes and exactly how to do it. It makes you wonder whether confining these groups together is the best solution.

Burk Finley - Associate Producer If you’re a fan of urban legends then last summer you would likely have heard the audacious tale of a monstrous 12-foot, 1000-pound swine, appropriately named “Hogzilla,” that had been shot in a swamp in Georgia. A grainy photograph of the beast strung from a backhoe next to the victorious hunter, spread like wildfire on the Internet triggering worldwide awe and disbelief. It was prime fodder for a bad sci-fi flick. Or, could this beast possibly be real? On October 23, 2004, a team from National Geographic Explorer decided to find out. It took a while to get around the campy notion of investigating a feral hog. But as the first few weeks of preparation for the shoot passed by, I found myself captivated by the mystery of this giant swine, and what it reveals about the larger issue of feral pigs worldwide.

A wild boar piglet in England, where wild boar have recently returned after being extinct for 500 years.

Today more than a billion domestic pigs live among us. There are millions more in the wild and the numbers are escalating rapidly. The animals are increasingly at odds with farmers as they root up crops and pastures in their quest for food. Pigs are exceptionally adaptable animals, and in many places their natural predators have declined or been eradicated altogether, opening the floodgates for a massive population boom. In Texas alone there are two million wild hogs—that’s one hog for every ten Texans. Our team took a detour to Texas, where the fine gentlemen of Kaufman County showed us what it’s like to hunt a feral pig first hand. I will never forget the intensity of chasing the hunters through the briars of East Texas with a load of sound equipment around my shoulders, trying to get the best shots while avoiding the charge of an angry 250 pound pig--with tusks big enough to put more than a hole in your jeans. Hunting hogs is big business. Hunters from around the world come to the southern US to shoot trophy hogs—and the bigger the better. In many cases the owners of these hunting ranges feed the hogs to lure big money clients. Could Hogzilla have just been an over fed hog that had dodged the bullet? We then flew to England where wild boar--locally extinct for hundreds of years—had been recently reintroduced as livestock ultimately destined for European markets. But for the past few years escaped boars have begun repopulating the countryside. Tracking these boars at night and filming these magnificent beasts up close as they move easily through the open grass fields is something one doesn’t get to do every day. And then there was Hogzilla—allegedly a feral pig who roamed the forests and pastures of a 1500-acre fish hatchery, gorging himself on anything he came across. Because of the mystery and controversy surrounding the story, we made it our mission to go to southern Georgia and literally dig this beast up to discover the truth. I had no idea what an olfactory assault this would be.

Wearing PVC suits, a team of scientists and laborers start to dig up Hogzilla's grave.

When we finally arrived in Georgia, the sun was warm, the days were clear, and Hogzilla lay peacefully in his grave. The first tangible connection to Hogzilla himself came at the tip of hunter Chris Griffin’s shovel as it sliced into the sandy clay to reveal a small, extremely odiferous tuft of hair. The dig crew, including a pig DNA specialist and a feral pig expert, knew immediately what they had gotten into from the first whiff. We worked tirelessly in the unrelenting sunshine, sweating in our yellow PVC suits, surgical gloves, and rubber boots as we uncovered the body of the animal. At one point, Erin Harvey, the cameraman, was literally lying on top of the beast to get a masterful shot of the two scientists revealing their discovery. We watched as the scientists exhumed the corpse and reconstructed the body, taking measurements and samples for DNA testing—was Hogzilla a hybrid of wild boar and domesticated pig or a genetic mutant? At the end of the day we all walked away from the site as though we were leaving a freshly discovered Egyptian tomb. We had discovered the truth about Hogzilla. In fact, some of the camera equipment still retains the beast’s special fragrance to this day.

David Hamlin Producer - National Geographic Television and Film When I got the assignment to make a film on "hobbits" my first reaction was, 'didn't someone just do three of these—and win every Oscar ever invented?' I soon learned my mission wasn't to remake one of the most successful movie franchises of all time. My challenge was much more intimidating: tell the world about one of the most amazing archaeological finds of all time—a three-foot tall race of humans that lived just 18,000 years ago. As I began researching the story, I couldn't believe the legends of little people living alongside us could possibly be true. The industrious dwarves of Scandinavia, the deadly kilyakai of New Guinea, the mischievous Leshy of the Baltic—were these myths based on a race of little people? Indonesian and Australian scientists had discovered fossil remains of tiny human beings buried in a limestone cave on the remote Indonesian island of Flores, suggesting that these ancient legends may have been rooted in truth. The scientists hadn't come to Flores searching for a race of "mini-mes." They were looking for early Homo sapiens, modern humans like you and me, who led the first migration to Australia. But when they made their discovery, they immediately knew they were onto something far more special. When I flew to Indonesia to film the discovery for National Geographic all the details were secret. The discovery hadn't leaked to the press and the scientists didn't want to break the story of this new human species until they completed their initial research, published it in a journal, and were fully prepared for the media onslaught that was sure to follow. The journey to Flores was an adventure in itself. After three days of plane flights, each plane smaller than the last, the final flight brought us to the island where we jumped into a jeep for a ride into the central highlands. The jeep brought us to the village of Ruteng from where we trekked up a mountain path to the site of the dig: a cave the locals call "Liang Bua" or "Cool Cave." The cave was nestled in the side of a mountain behind a dense curtain of forest. You would never know it was there, but scientists have been coming here for years seeking fossil remains of modern humans. The cave itself is spectacular—it's not terribly deep, maybe only 100 feet, but it has a gaping mouth about 300 feet wide and 50 feet high. Enormous stalactites hang from the ceiling—some of them the size of cars. Inside the cavernous hole, I found our scientists—Australian scientists Mike Morwood and Bert Roberts and Indonesian scientist Thomas Sutikna—hard at work. When these three men began their work none of them had any idea of the magnitude of the discovery that lurked beneath the surface. Mike is the field team leader and has dedicated his career to searching for a path of human origins on the road to Australia. And if you want to learn about Australian pre-history, you have to go through Indonesia. That's what brought him here originally. Bert is the dating expert: he takes samples of dirt and bone and figures out the age of just about everything. Thomas is a native Indonesian and the man who first uncovered the skeleton in 2003. It's only fitting that a native son made this landmark discovery. His eureka moment was quite surreal. He assumed he had unearthed the bones of a young girl. But once they extracted the fossil, they could tell things weren't adding up: certain skull features and other telltale skeletal evidence revealed this mystery skeleton most resembled our ancient ancestors—not a modern human. She was a full-grown adult woman. But she stood just three and a half feet tall. We started working together and the amazing story of this new species began to unfold before the camera. Without giving too much away, I'll just say this is the coolest evolutionary tale you've ever heard. Imagine a race of full-grown humans the size of preschoolers living alongside us for thousands and thousands of years. Mike says "it's been called the most significant discovery in paleoanthropology in the last 60 years. In, this part of the world, the only thing … similar to this was Dubois's original discovery of Homo erectus back in 1890." "Previously you only had …two species of the genus Homo, erectus and sapiens. Now we have another [Homo floresiensis]." So many questions needed to be answered: How did a race of tiny humans evolve? Where did they come from? How long did they survive? Is it possible modern humans actually lived alongside them? And what about their tiny brains? The fossils indicate that these people somehow mastered fire and used sophisticated tools all with a brain the size of a chimp. The National Geographic Society decided to collaborate with the scientists to answer several of these questions, which became pivotal components of our film. First came the question of how anyone originally got to Flores. One hypothesis was that they used rafts. To see whether the idea held water the scientists built a raft-made of materials available one million years ago-and attempted crossing from the island of Sumbawa to the island of Flores. The most remarkable part of the expedition was imagining our ancient ancestors performing this same crossing one million years ago.

One hypothesis was that they used rafts

Then there was the issue of the tiny human's amazing brain. NG called upon one of world's leading paleoneurologists, Dr. Dean Falk of Florida State University and the cutting edge team at the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology in St. Louis to perform an unprecedented investigation of the her brain. Finally, what did the she look like? If we could stare into the eyes of our petit cousin, would she look anything like us? The renowned paleo-artist John Gurche was asked to put flesh on the bone of the Homo floresiensis skull and bring to life an ambassador of this species. Gurche is a remarkable hybrid of scientist and artist. He doesn't just lay clay over the skull like an art project, he bases his work on a rigorous and broad understanding of how soft tissues and muscles affix to bone, i.e. a skull. He rigorously tries to make sure his representation of a human being that lived 18,000 years ago is valid. Visiting Flores was an amazing journey back in time to the almost unbelievable world of the little people—a bizarre place and time where evolution had downsized some of her creations like the tiny humans and petit elephants while amplifying others—like the gigantic reptiles. Scientist Bert Roberts was right when he said this world was "the real Jurassic Park." I flew home from Indonesia cradling National Geographic's precious footage. It's still hard to believe I was there, documenting a true story. But those tiny bones didn't lie.