We are here in the Vanuatu Archipelago,
a cluster of volcanic islands in the Pacific,
about 1,000 miles east of northern Australia.
Below, the village of Endu on the island of Ambrym.
A year ago, most of it was destroyed by a tropical storm
of phenomenal force.
But the village also has to endure to the periodic fallout
of volcanic eruptions.
Punctuated by catastrophes,
time does not seem to have found a grip on the community.
We met Chief Mael Moses,
here with members of his large family.
This is Clive Oppenheimer,
a volcanologist from Cambridge University,
who brought us to this place.
Chief Mael Moses, you're the head of this beautiful village of Endu,
just a few kilometers from the volcano crater.
You visited the crater and looked yourself into the inferno,
-into the raging fire. -Yeah.
How did you feel when you went there?
Uh...
I felt very frightened to look at the fire.
Secondly, I feel that I was not in the island of Ambrym.
I thought I was somewhere else.
And, uh... the other thing,
I feel that-- how powerful that fire is.
Do spirits live in the fire?
That's how we believe, that spirits are in the fire.
The fire is burning through that spirit.
We believe that the fire is burning through that spirit.
I read that there was a big eruption in 1968,
and that there were rituals performed to stop the eruption.
And then tourists were not allowed for three years afterwards
to visit the crater
because it was seen that somehow the tourists had started the eruption.
Is that...?
Well, we believe that because we thought that the spirits
that are in the volcano...
if they look at you, they don't know who is this. Okay?
But if they look at one of us, they know that, uh,
because we are more or less related to the volcano,
then they will just be quiet.
Sometimes we say that tourists won't go up there. Okay?
Because you are foreigners to that spirit, the volcano.
Once I dreamt about volcano, I saw people in that fire.
People and women and men.
They're cooking their food in there.
So, it makes me believe that there is somebody who is--
their spirits are there.
The molten rock, is that part of the spirit?
The lava expresses the anger of the devil
who are living in that fire, volcano.
Do the ancestors, then, live under the volcano?
Yes, we believe that anybody who dies here goes to the volcano,
and that volcano has become their village,
where you can talk to them and they can talk to us.
-Can you talk to the volcano? -I'm not, because, you know,
I'm not related to the volcano.
But one of my brothers is. He was talking to the volcano.
His father-- His father, when he goes up to the volcano,
and if he wants to smoke, he just calls out
and the fire will come down, and take the fire
and light his cigarette or pipe or something like that.
And if you brother talks to the volcano,
is he allowed to tell you what the volcano has said,
-or is it just a secret? -No, it's a secret for him. Yes.
-Do you try and get the secret out of him? -I've got some.
But Chief Mael Moses is worried
about the loss of their ancient culture.
He asked us to follow him to a ritual site in the jungle.
Once upon a time, our people were cannibal.
They see somebody, and they would like to attack him
and kill him so that they use it for meat.
And this how they demonstrate it.
Many people here have lost the dance.
They have lost the idea of dancing.
Yes.
The custom dance that you're going to see this afternoon,
just my family will perform the dance.
This a happier dance. The happiest dance.
After we have gone through a long suffering,
then we are happy to go back and dance
and to express ourselves.
I studied here ten years ago with some colleagues,
scientists from Vanuatu.
For you, is it strange to imagine that someone would come here to work,
to study how the volcano works, how it erupts?
I'm very surprised to hear that you people are very interested
in the volcano. Yeah.
I always ask myself,
"Why do these people want to do with that fire?"
Okay?
When looking at this, going in the helicopter yesterday,
I was wondering, "Why this man is going--
wanting to do with that volcano, eh?"
Yes, I don't know why you are so interested in volcano.
In a way, this film started for me ten years ago in Antarctica.
I was doing a film about scientists on this continent
which took me to Mount Erebus, an active volcano,
one of the three in the world
where you can look straight into the magma of the inner earth.
Magma is the heated molten rock from which lava can be extruded.
It was on Erebus, 12,500 feet above sea level,
that I met a strange and wonderful tribe of volcanologists,
some of them overcome by altitude sickness.
This close to the boiling magma, which frequently explodes,
we were briefed on the etiquette of how to deal with the stuff.
One very important thing to keep in mind
when you're on the crater
is that the lava lake could explode at any time.
If it does, it's vital to keep your attention
faced toward the lava lake
and watch for bombs that are tracking up into the air,
and try to pick out the ones that might be coming toward you
and step out of the way.
The last thing you want to do is turn away from the crater
or run or crouch down.
Keep your attention toward the lava lake, look up,
and move out of the way.
What really impressed me was seeing these scientists
toiling up the side of the volcano with such heavy loads.
The temperature on this particular morning
was minus-25 degrees Fahrenheit.
My face is frozen.
One of them stood out.
Despite having that fantastic lava lake down there,
with all that energy,
we still have to bring old petrol generators up to the crater rim.
Man vs. machine, chapter 53.
Professor Clive Oppenheimer on Erebus.
Hands in pockets.
Waiting for it to start spontaneously.
I think he'll be waiting a long time.
Have you ever seen two men kiss on the top of Erebus before?
I like working with Harry.
Is that all right? Thank you.
It was easy to start a friendship with him.
On one of our first days together,
he insisted upon training his own camera on me.
Let's turn it off, yeah? Okay?
Do you see them only in destructive terms, volcanoes?
No, I... I do not. Uh...
Something different. It's good that they are there.
And the soil we are walking upon, uh, is not permanent.
There's no permanence to what we are doing...
no permanence to the efforts of human being,
no permanence to art, no permanence to science.
There is something of a crust that is somehow moving,
and it makes me fond of the volcano to know that our life,
human life, or animals,
can only live and survive
because the volcanoes created the atmosphere that we need.
Do you have a sense of the different kinds of volcanoes and different eruptions?
I know you filmed on La Soufrière de Guadeloupe many years ago,
which is a very--
Well, do you sense differences in the activity here with...?
Yeah, La Soufrière was very volatile.
It was all the way back in 1976
when I first filmed a volcano.
This was on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe.
The mountain was expected to explode at any moment,
and 70,000 people were rapidly evacuated.
The fear was intense
because of the memory of an event that took on apocalyptic proportions.
It was known that, in 1902,
on the neighboring island of Martinique, Mount Pelée exploded.
The signals that La Soufrière issued in Guadeloupe
were almost identical to what had happened.
It was measured in 1902.
So, everybody was afraid it would explode,
and it would explode with very, very massive force,
many times an atomic bomb, Hiroshima-size.
So, I was not interested in the volcano.
I was interested in one single man who refused to be evacuated.
Uh-huh.
A different attitude towards death.
75 people-- 75,000 people being evacuated,
and he stayed on.
I actually found him-- I find him sleeping.
I had to wake him up on camera.
And what was wonderful-- he was very philosophical.
A very poor black farmer.
And I sensed that, after a while,
he didn't feel so comfortable with us anymore,
and he sat up and started to tie his worn-out tennis shoe.
And then, all of a sudden, he sings a song against the camera,
and I knew that was that. So, go away, we'd better get out.
We met in Antarctica
during the shoot of Encounters at the End of the World,
and I knew a little bit about you. I'd seen some of your movies
when I was a youngster,
and I knew something of your reputation.
And we, in our field team,
we were anxious that you were going to have us propelled
down towards the lava lake.
There was some concern that you would be looking for lengths of rope
with which we could be lowered down within meters of this fiery lake
on Mount Erebus, volcano.
And instead, you were interested in what we were doing
and why we were doing it.
For me, there is no personal excitement to go down.
There's a curiosity. Yes, I would love to see it from close up.
But since it is too dangerous, it would be silly.
We have, in some ways, similar...
Um, you know, we both-- As a volcanologist,
of course, there's a risk doing the measurements,
and you ask yourself, "Well, is it worth dying to get this measurement?"
And the answer is no, if you look at it in those terms.
But you're always trying to evaluate
how far you're going to tolerate the risk.
I mean, even here, the volcano could explode now
and we could all be hit by one of these five-meter bombs.
I'm the only one in filmmaking who is clinically sane,
-taking all precautions. -That's very clear. Oh, absolutely.
I mean, you wouldn't still be here if you were insane.
You would've been consumed long ago by a pyroclastic current
or a gas flare or a grizzly bear or whatever.
So, it's quite clear that you're sane.
I never doubted that for a moment from our first encounter.
Deposited out from the volcanic gas.
Very nice.
-That's a good swoosh. -Yeah, a good swoosh.
-We're very blasé about all of this. -Yes.
But let it come at us. We'll face it and step aside.
We would often discuss the life and work of a French couple,
Katia and Maurice Krafft.
They were famous for capturing incredible images of volcanoes.
But this meant that they had to get dangerously close to their subject.
Too close, as it would eventually turn out.
They were both instantly killed by a pyroclastic flow in Japan,
together with 41 other people.
This is the very avalanche of super-heated gases that killed them.
What is rushing down this slope at over 100 miles per hour
has a temperature of more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit.
I spent a very formative part of my youth in Indonesia.
I came to Toba when I was 19 years old.
And actually, in Indonesia, I feel like it's my second home.
I've come back intermittently over the years,
but I immediately feel at home.
The smell of the kretek clove cigarettes, the sights, the sounds.
It's a very special place to me.
And I think my career as a volcanologist
was partly formed from that first visit as a 19-year-old.
Indonesia was the right place for an aspiring scientist.
In fact, there's no country in the world that has more volcanoes than this one.
Clive Oppenheimer took us to Mount Sinabung.
It had been relatively quiet the last few years.
The area we are shooting in right now had been declared a restricted zone,
with no access allowed to anyone.
But, as we found farmers working there, we felt reasonably safe.
Eerie relics remained, though, from an eruption in 2010.
Feeling that this was distant enough in time,
no one was expecting what happened next.
Fortunately, this eruption did not hurt anyone,
and we quickly left the area.
Only a few days later, we saw this on Indonesian television.
Seven people were killed in the very spot where we had had our camera.
In order to prevent such catastrophes,
Indonesia has set up numerous early warning systems.
This is the Babadan Observatory,
which monitors Mount Merapi,
one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world.
And each of these stations is a seismometer somewhere on Merapi,
a different distance, five, six kilometers from the summit?
Yeah, that's true. So, we have a summit station.
We have a short east station,
we have short station in Babadan Hill.
And also we have on the west of station.
And these real-time data provide one of the most important parts
of a volcano-monitoring program for assessing what the volcano is doing.
-It's the heartbeat of the volcano. -Exactly.
This one is the electronic distance measurements.
So, we have a reflector in the summit of Merapi.
Then we're measuring every morning.
By this measuring, we're plotting the cone.
So, it's measuring-- It's firing a laser pulse
to a mirror five, six kilometers away,
the light bounces back and you've measured the distance.
And that can show whether the volcano is inflating
because magma is rising into the cone. Is that--
That's right. That's the idea for the electronic distance measurements.
In a worst-case scenario,
I imagine the observer is at risk if there's a pyroclastic flow.
If it's too late for the observer to evacuate,
are there any options left?
Yeah, that's the emergency.
Then, if it is emergency, we have a bunker.
It's a thick door.
-Yeah. -After you.
We put the food and also oxygen.
We hope that they can survive for one month.
It reminds me of the eruption of Mount Pelée in 1902
that killed nearly 30,000 people in the city of Saint-Pierre
as the pyroclastic flows reached it.
And the only survivor lived because he was the baddest guy in town.
He was a criminal. I think he stabbed a prison officer
through the cheek with a pencil,
and he was put in solitary confinement in a bunker-like cell.
All the other prisoners perished, but he survived,
albeit badly burnt, because there was a tiny grill window in the cell,
and he subsequently joined the Barnum & Bailey Circus
and was exhibited as a celebrity,
as the sole survivor of this eruption.
So, in 2010, the monitoring was absolutely crucial
in forecasting the eruption and its escalation.
The first indication was seismic.
A lot of volcanic earthquakes.
This indicates that there is magma moving.
Also, supported by these electronic distance measurements.
And the gas measurements?
Of course.
I know this looks pathetic, like a shoebox
with a baked bean tin stuck on the end,
and it also looks like it's pointing at the ground,
rather than at the volcano summit over here.
But it's something I'm very proud of. It's something that we built in Cambridge.
There's a little window here, and a mirror and some lenses,
connected to an ultraviolet spectrometer.
The device measures the emissions of sulfur dioxide from the volcano
as the gases rise above the summit,
and this is a very important parameter
in many volcano-monitoring programs around the world.
And the forerunner of this device we had working here in 2010,
and it played an important role in the hazard assessment,
and it's conservatively estimated at something like 20,000 lives were saved
because of the effective monitoring of Merapi in 2010
and the evacuation that followed.
I'm very happy to see that it's still working. Uh...
I hold, along with some colleagues, the patent for the original prototype,
which we designed more than ten years ago now.
So, this technology is now found on volcanoes around the world,
and it's revolutionized the monitoring of gas emissions from volcanoes.
It's my baby. I'm really glad to see it.
I haven't seen it for two years, and here it is, still working.
Obviously, there was a scientific side to our journey.
But what we were really chasing was the magical side:
the demons, the new gods.
This was the itinerary we had set for ourselves,
no matter how strange things might eventually get.
Here in the palace of the Sultan of Jogjakarta,
dignitaries are charged with the task of reconciling the goddess of the ocean
with the demon of the volcano.
The sultan himself does not participate in the procession.
We marveled at his parked Mercedes, wrapped in a bubble of plastic,
as if the conceptual artist Christo had just been here.
The procession stops for a ritual close to the ocean.
This will be a reenactment of the sexual union
between an ancient sultan and the Queen of the Sea.
A doctoral student of Clive's, Adam Bobbette,
functioned as our guide.
Every year, they have to reproduce this by giving rituals--
by doing rituals in this site and then giving offerings
to the South Sea from the sultan, including his body parts--
fingernails, hair, clothes--
which they launch into the ocean to appease the Queen of the South Sea.
As a part of their sexual union,
they also created a kind of monster
that ended up occupying the volcano.
So, this hole is where they will give offerings,
because this is the site of the sexual union
between the Goddess of the Sea and the first sultan.
I think it's coming right now. It's a box.
This is it.
And now the offerings to the ocean.
The following day, we witnessed the ritual at the volcano.
Merapi, on this morning, was not enshrouded in clouds.
After the ceremony, the crowd went right for the flower petals,
an auspicious souvenir.
More strange magic.
Another bewildering alignment,
this time between a building and the volcano,
here, barely visible, as if floating in the clouds.
The odd edifice is still under construction.
Inside, we found nobody
in an empty chair pretending to watch TV.
On the floor above, we met a few carpenters.
Yes, I am one of the workers building this place.
What is it? What are you building?
I built this.
The owner had a dream. After that, he built this building.
A building to be used for prayer.
It looks like a chicken?
It's actually a dove, not a chicken.
But maybe it's also related to Merapi?
Maybe the owner thinks that way, pointing it towards Mount Merapi.
I'm only an ordinary worker
who goes home after working hours.
But it still looks like a chicken, right?
Yes, most people say it's like a chicken.
They call it the Chicken Church.
-A soap opera filmed a scene here. -Yes.
It became popular after the soap opera was shot.
Last Saturday, someone from Surabaya who saw the show,
wanted to see the location, so they came here.
Odder still is the fact that, in this mostly Muslim country,
this is a Roman Catholic church.
Under the floor, it even has its own catacombs,
maybe as a shelter for hermits,
as protection against volcanic fallout.
Of all the many volcanoes in Indonesia,
there is no single one that is not connected
to a belief system.
For the locals, all this volcanic landscape
bears magical names.
The Night Market of the Ghosts,
the Flying Foxes,
the Dancing Place of the Spirits.
Back to Lake Toba,
where Clive Oppenheimer's scientific journey began.
This is the largest volcanic crater lake on Earth.
It extends something like 100 kilometers off into the distance.
Frankly, it's too big to film.
We should've booked a ticket on the International Space Station
to look down from above and appreciate its vast scale.
The eruption occurred something like 74,000 years ago.
This was a monstrous, stupendous volcanic eruption,
one of the very largest that we've documented
in all of Earth history for a single event.
The skies would've been darkened,
there would've been a conflagration across this part of Northern Sumatra
as the pyroclastic currents spread out radially around the crater,
igniting all of the tropical vegetation.
The eruption produced something like 15,000 cubic kilometers of ash and pumice
that was pumped high into the stratosphere
and spread across the globe.
Enough pumice came out to bury everyone in the United States to head-height.
It's something like 10,000 times larger
than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.
It's 100,000 times greater
than the Eyjafjallajökull eruption in Iceland in 2010
that disrupted global aviation.
This was the stupendous event in Earth history.
And there's even a theory that the eruption
almost wiped us out as a species.
Based on the genetic pedigree of living humans,
we can say that there was a bottleneck in human numbers around this time period.
And the link is between the climate change wrought by the eruption,
the decimation of tropical vegetation
that was the resource base for our ancestors.
Perhaps there were as few as 600 of our species left on Earth.
We would've been classified as an endangered species.
Somehow, we rebounded.
This theory is very controversial, however.
And that's because there's a very limited amount of evidence
this far back in time.
In particular, there are very few human fossils
to try and establish cause and effect.
If we want to find human fossils from 74,000 years ago,
we'd better go to Ethiopia, we'd better go to the Afar Region.
This is part of the Danakil Depression,
300 feet below sea level.
In terms of average year-round temperature,
this is the hottest place on our planet.
During summer,
temperatures hardly ever dip below 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
Working conditions are only tolerable in mid-winter,
and even then it is extremely hot.
On top of that, this is an area of tribal warfare,
and you can only enter it accompanied by armed soldiers.
This depression is only part of a long, stretched rift,
continuing down through all of East Africa.
In millions of years, the rift will widen
until a strip of the continent breaks off,
drifting into the Indian Ocean.
In such places, volcanoes form.
This particular one, Erta Ale,
is one of the three in the world where magma is directly exposed.
Erta Ale is also important for its significance to early man.
A great amount of obsidian, a volcanic glass,
was extruded from the crater.
Look at that. It's translucent at the edges.
Beautiful flake.
And very sharp still. You could probably shave with that.
Obsidian is very hard and brittle,
and therefore fractures with extremely sharp edges.
So sharp, in fact, that up until the 1980s
eye operations were performed with obsidian scalpels,
sharper than any steel.
This amazing material has attracted early humans to this landscape
as far back as hominids a million years ago.
At this site, a team of paleontologists
are extracting artifacts and remains of our direct ancestors,
the first Homo sapiens,
who emerged in this area 100,000 years ago.
What is amazing to me is the fact that the remains are found
almost directly at the surface.
And more so, why this particular spot
and not back there where the goats are roaming?
This grid was apparently a tool manufacturing site.
Hundreds of obsidian chips are strewn about.
Dr. Yonatan Sahle, an Ethiopian scientist,
has excavated this prehistoric workshop.
And where did your passion come from? How did you fall into this field?
Well, I had-- I studied history for my bachelor's degree.
And that's when I started to fall in love.
So, history was not deep enough for me.
I wanted to look further back in time
and find out what is it, really, that makes us human.
We are a very unique species.
In a way, we interact and we collaborate
and we cooperate and we produce, we modify our environment.
But at the same time, we fight and destruct,
and we are even a danger to other species and the planet,
the fate of the planet as well.
So, we are a very interesting species.
So, I wanted to get at the root of all this
and see, in deep time, what underlies all these processes.
We're sifting through the trash of humans
from 50 to 100,000 years ago.
Do you think we have another 100,000 years on planet Earth?
I would say that, you know, another thousand years,
we will be in a very critical situation,
and so we will have to learn from our mistakes
and we'll have to work toward improving the condition of our planet
so that it can have the carrying capacity to allow our species to perpetuate.
If you had a time machine that could go
to only one time period in the past, when would it be?
It would be exactly this time period
because this is...
I believe this is when we started to look like us, um,
and when we, uh,
as a species, um, started.
And so, this is before we became--
we acquired different skin colors.
This is before we acquired different languages
and we spread across different geographies.
So, this is where I want to be, right at the root.
So, I would love to express my...
uh, my fascination to this ground
by kissing it.
And here I go.
Professor Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley,
leads the team here.
We were immediately captivated by his wild style of explaining things.
So, look at the...
powder.
It blows in the wind, it's very fine grain,
it's all floodplain, it's all silt.
But it all started as volcanic rock from the highlands,
from the rift margin,
ground up over millions of years, distributed out here,
and redistributed by the Awash River.
If you die today,
your body will decompose on the floodplain.
If the hyenas don't chew all the bones up,
the next time the river floods, this soft, silty material
will be carried in,
and it will encase your bones.
Let's go.
Oh, we're gonna call this the Werner Herzog Highway.
And what we're doing here is opening up a space for the cars...
so we can come through with a full crew tomorrow morning...
to recover the additional pieces of the hominid
that we found just up on top there, on the eroding sediments.
So, we'd like to pull the cars in as close as we can get
so we can get all the equipment there.
And we'll start an extraction process to pull that hominid out.
How phenomenally lucky are we to have arrived now
and you've found this 100,000-year-old human?
This does not happen very often.
These hominid fossils are very, very rare.
Finding an artifact, that's easier,
because during any hominid's lifetime, they can make dozens, thousands,
of stone-age calling cards scattered all over the landscape.
But they only have one skeleton, one dentition.
They only die once. So, think about it.
Acres and acres of eroding sediment.
How in the world can we find the place
where this dead person's bones came to rest
and arrive just at the geological moment
that erosion is carving these sediments out,
exposing these ancient surfaces,
with the monkeys and the hippos and everything else,
thousands of bones and artifacts all over the surface?
And there's one guy, one guy in the world.
If I had to say, "Get that guy out here on the surface.
He's gonna find the hominid." You know who that is?
That is Kampiro Kayrento,
the world's greatest fossil finder.
Oh.
This is Kampiro Kayrento.
He is one of the world's experts, if not the world's expert.
He's the guy I want on the aircraft to find things.
He can recognize what's an antelope, what's a carnivore,
what's a fish, what's a baboon, what's a zebra,
what's a giraffe, what's a rhino. He's got all that.
Not from the whole animal, because you never find the whole animal.
You find pieces of animals, pieces of the bones of animals.
He knows what they are.
You got anything, Tim?
More pieces for the puzzle.
Cranial vault piece, freshly out of the ground.
That one needs to be squirted off.
This bone is beautifully preserved,
completely silicified, completely fossilized.
So, we've got now a number of different elements.
The most diagnostic and important one, ultimately, will be this one here,
which is... the top...
of the left orbit.
So to sort of place it in Clive's head...
-Whereabouts? -Other side. There you go.
Okay.
I'm looking into the eye of a Paleolithic hominid that lived here.
So, it's a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.
Yeah, no one's gonna argue that those two pieces fit back together.
That's a nice fit.
In evolutionary terms, here in the Middle Awash,
we have six million years' worth of rocks.
The ones on the bottom have small-brained early bipeds.
These are close to the top of the succession.
These are much more like you and I.
They have chins, vertical foreheads.
We still have a lot to learn about them, but the importance for humanity
is that this is the right time, 100,000 years ago,
and the right place, Africa,
according to the archeology and the genetic evidence...
to know the people who were the ones
who expanded from Africa to Asia,
to Europe, and then beyond.
While these people were living here in tropical Africa,
dining on hippos, Europe was locked under ice.
Let's go get more pieces. Are we ready to rock 'n' roll?
Let's get brushes.
We've taken all of the surface-exposed bone off the surface.
We suspect there's going to be sub-surface bone in here.
We've maximized where we think it is,
and now it's a matter of going to the casino
and rolling the dice
and hoping we're gonna get some nice human anatomy,
fossilized for 100,000 years, right out of this unit.
We're just gonna brush and find bone.
Whoa! There's a piece of bone right there.
That one's not identifiable, but it might join other ones
and become identifiable. So, that's a keeper.
Every single piece of bone is a keeper.
See the piece?
So, that's a limb bone shaft.
I can't tell which limb bone. It's one of three.
It's tibia, humerus or femur.
Here we go. That's a nice shaft piece.
Again, it's tibia-- It's one of the major long bones.
It's this one, this one or that one.
You can see these things are-- they're completely turned to stone.
They're completely fossilized,
so they're brittle.
And when erosion comes and exposes them,
they just shatter.
And so, we have to be careful to get all of the shattered pieces.
My skeleton has 206 bones. Same with this person.
They're human.
But now we're looking for literally probably 4,000 pieces
because all of those bones each shattered.
I can already see something that discriminates you and I,
which is, we've been here the same amount of time.
You've pulled out half a dozen of these bone fragments.
I haven't found anything.
There's clearly an expertise that goes with this business.
But the greatest thing about the game
is the combination of the expertise and the luck.
Like Las Vegas.
Viva Las Vegas!
Courtesy of Bizayu.
Bizayu! Got a limb bone shaft. Thank you.
What's wrong over there, Clive?
-Ohh! -Ohh!
Whoo!
Check it out!
Clive.
Where does it fit in?
Check it out. This is a distal humerus.
Definitely hominid.
It is right down at the end of your upper arm bone.
So, if we were to place this in our anatomy,
we'd set it up something like that.
I figured out, Tim, I'm holding the brush wrong.
There's got to be something wrong with my technique.
Come on, Clive, move over into the hot place there.
I'm moving K.K. out. This is your chance.
-You don't think it's too hot for me? -This is your chance.
You got to get in here, man. This guy's finding everything.
I was right there.
He planted it.
It's just to make me look bad, isn't it?
-I'll stick to volcanology. -Brush, man, brush!
He's going to lose this race.
Piece after piece after piece after piece.
Maybe we'll get it all back together again.
If we're lucky. If Clive would just find something!
-I'm not gonna give up. -Come on, Clive.
Huh? Look at...
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Whoa! Bingo!
- Is it a human? - Yeah.
All right! He's got it.
Clive scores!
It's such a relief.
Just out of the dirt,
where it's been 100,000 years, maybe.
A little piece of my direct ancestor, perhaps.
It's quite heavy. It's, uh, fossilized.
One skeleton from Kenya.
One skeleton from two meters up,
500 meters away, in the Middle Awash.
And this one.
That's how rare even partial skeletons of human ancestors are
in that time interval.
Just the first surface sweep,
we've probably got another 30 pieces of this individual,
and all of this came out in about 30 minutes
of simply sweeping.
As these piles that we've swept up go through the sieve,
we're gonna have a bunch of other pieces of bone
that escaped the brushing but won't escape our sieve.
Hopefully, we'll see a cranium take shape,
and we'll come to know the anatomy of this person.
I just-- What a phenomenal cornucopia
for half an hour's work with a dustpan and brush.
It's just-- just sensational.
One of three in Africa ever recovered.
Your timing was very good.
What? Wait a minute.
There's a Konso dance going on here in the background.
-It's gonna be good. -This is gonna be good.
-Moya! -Moya means, in Afarinia, "head."
Got the moya.
Whoo!
We got a moya!
The extraction begins.
This fragment is of particular importance,
as it is part of the cranium.
Time for a Shakespearean moment, perhaps,
to soliloquize on... my deep ancestry.
I can see the curvature.
It's the biggest piece we have so far.
As dusk came, we made our way to the volcano.
Looking into the magma at night,
the interior of our planet reveals its strange beauty.
Compared to Ethiopia,
Iceland's history is a mere blip in time.
Less than 1,200 years ago,
it was settled by Norsemen.
All of Iceland is volcanic,
including the Westman Islands to the south.
Out of nowhere, in the early morning hours
of January 23, 1973,
a trench of fire opened
right at the edge of the town of Heimaey.
The eruption occurred without any previous warning signs.
As bad as it looks, no one lost their lives here.
The fishing fleet had just returned to harbor
and rescued many of the inhabitants.
Forty years after the event,
Clive Oppenheimer brought us here.
Grass has grown again,
and there are still curtains in the windows.
But Heimaey was hardly an isolated event.
Not a season goes by in Iceland without an eruption.
This event happened in 2010
and is remembered as the ash cloud that paralyzed air traffic for weeks.
Very quickly, the heat from the eruption
melted the thick ice covering on top of the mountain,
creating enormous floods.
But an event of this magnitude is nothing
compared to earlier eruptions in Iceland.
This area is the site of the so-called Laki eruption.
Beginning on June 8, 1783,
this entire landscape exploded into flames
as far as the eye could see, from horizon to horizon.
The molten rock came up to the surface
and rent open a 27-kilometer-long fissure
that stretches in this direction for something like half of that distance.
Overall, about 140 vents were active,
building up cones above them with fire fountains rising into the air.
And after a few months, the fissure opened up in this direction,
again, another 13, 14 kilometers or so.
And another few dozen vents open up,
and they spewed out lava to the northeast of us.
Everything we see now has been set in stone.
The lava has solidified and frozen. But if we'd been here at the time,
we would've seen jets of fire, fountains of fire,
rising a kilometer-and-a-half into the air
and then cascading down to the ground again.
And that built up the cones, like the one that we're standing on now.
And from the bases of these cones,
lava gushed out at a phenomenal rate.
This is very, very hot lava, very, very fluid,
and it poured down the valleys,
filling them to depths of 100, 150 meters.
These primordial occurrences
influenced the sense of mythical poetry of the Icelanders.
There is a text that defines the spirit of the people.
It exists only in a single manuscript.
For Iceland, it is as important as the Dead Sea Scrolls are for Israel.
The codex was given as a present to the king of Denmark
by an Icelandic bishop in the 17th century.
The Royal Codex, or Codex Regius.
In 1971, Denmark returned it to Iceland.
Knowing that it constituted the soul of the country,
the codex was put on Denmark's largest battleship
and escorted by a whole fleet.
No amount of money in the world would be enough
to purchase this manuscript from Iceland,
although it is battered and crumpled and filled with holes.
In the opening passage, called "The Prophecy of the Seeress,"
there is an apocalyptic vision of the end of the pagan gods.
This seems to describe a huge volcanic event.
"'Neath the sea the land sinketh, the sun dimmeth,
from the heavens fall the fair, bright stars;
gusheth forth steam and gutting fire,
to very heaven soar the hurtling flames.
The fates I fathom, yet farther I see:
of the mighty gods the engulfing doom.
Comes the darksome dragon flying,
Níthhogg, upward from the Nitha Fells.
He bears in his pinions as the plains he o'erflies,
now he will sink."
Right on the border with China lies a volcano
in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea,
better known in the West as North Korea.
It has been inactive for more than 1,000 years,
but it plays a huge role in the imagination of the people.
For millennia, it was considered the mythical birthplace
of the Korean nation.
Today, the socialist government co-opts this myth.
This is the site of pilgrimages.
Out of the mist, we saw a formation of uniformed men with a flag emerging.
We believed they were soldiers,
but it turned out they were university students
come to rejoice in the power that emanates from this place.
And now they are singing in praise of Mount Paektu.
Everything is different in North Korea.
Imagine if these were students at a campus in California.
A unique opportunity presented itself to us.
The near-impervious country opened its doors
to a joint scientific program
between the University of Cambridge and North Korean volcanologists.
And so we were invited to film there.
But everything we saw was an act of presentation,
and we went for it.
There is no other way to see this enigmatic country
other than how it wants to present itself.
In propaganda films seen frequently on North Korean television,
the images display monumental unity and fervent emotion,
all dedicated to the leadership.
One thing that's remarkable and I'm very aware of as I work here
is the sanctity of this mountain.
This has a very long history, going back 5,000 years,
as the mythical birthplace of the Korean people from this volcano.
And through the medieval period and to the more modern period,
this is the sacred mountain of the revolution,
where the struggle was fought against Japanese occupation
70 years ago.
And the spirit of the mountain is in all the Korean people,
and this is something very, very special about this place.
It seems like we're on a tranquil boat trip on a Norwegian fjord,
but actually we're at ground zero
of what was a most monumental volcanic eruption
nearly 1,100 years ago, the so-called Millennium eruption.
The crater here is about three miles across.
And actually these cliffs are all part of the crater rim,
all around us, 360 degrees.
The amount of pumice that came out in the eruption
would be enough to bury the whole of New York City.
Only the highest buildings would poke out of the top.
In a way, if you look at the crater surrounding us
and imagine that once there was a cone built over our heads,
that missing volume alone accounts for a huge amount of rock
and pumice and lava.
So, this has been spewed out over the Korean peninsula,
it's in parts of China, it's in parts of Russia,
and there's even about three inches of ash
that fell over parts of Japan that you can still find today.
Around ten years ago, there was a swarm of earthquakes
that were detected by sensitive instruments
around the mountain,
and that really ignited the scientific interest in the volcano
and whether there might be signs of reawakening.
Over the last few years,
we've built a really strong and unique collaboration
with scientists from Pyongyang
who've worked here for 10, 20 years,
so they have very detailed knowledge of the structure of the volcano.
So, we've learnt a lot from them.
It's very difficult for scientists here to attend international conferences,
so we've really shared our experiences and expertise
to better understand this volcano.
So, two years of data.
Yeah, we've collected two years of seismic data.
Uh, which is pretty incredible. Um...
And the seismometer sitting here will record all the earthquakes.
It looks just like a paint pot linked to a laptop,
and yet that's recorded this unique data service,
so that's really something.
Looks can be deceptive.
It's an incredibly sensitive instrument in there.
So, it records, you know, um, just minor movements.
Even us walking around here will be creating noise.
So, this is Mr. Yun Yong-Gun.
He's the vice-director of the Earthquake Administration
and kind of leads the DPRK side of the project.
The Earthquake Administration of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea
pays special attention to this project of international joint research.
Great importance is given to this mountain
just because around this mountain, our great leader President Kim Il-sung
fought against the Japanese imperialists.
Kim Il-sung, the founding father
of the communist North Korean state,
appropriated the myth of the volcano.
He established his secret military headquarters
in a forest right here at the foot of the mountain,
thus transferring its power and dynamic into his revolution.
This monument is a gateway to the sacred ground.
This group sculpture is about the camping life of the guerillas
in Chongbong Camp.
They were very much moved to put their foot
the first time on the homeland, and they could not sleep.
You can see there are lady guerrillas
who are now sewing the buttons to the clothes.
A guerrilla who is reading a book under the fire.
A little guerrilla is now dreaming about returning back home
after the liberation of their country,
and one of the guerrillas is now playing the pipe.
Those guerrillas are now rejoicing over the sight of Mount Paektu.
From the 21st of July, 1979,
our great leader Generalissimo Kim Jong-il
came to this place and particularly highly appreciated
that that lady, who is now standing in solitude,
was greatly depicted.
This is the biggest lake, number one.
And over there we have the lake number two.
And a little further up, we have the lake number three.
When our great leader Generalissimo Kim Jong-il came here in March, 2003,
he highly appreciated the beauty of these trees.
This is the mosaic mural painting The Glory of February.
The mural painting represents the great leader President Kim Il-sung
and the anti-Japanese hero Kim Jong-suk,
who are celebrating their first birth anniversary
of the great leader Kim Jong-il.
And here, the secret log cabin of Kim Il-sung.
Daily, thousands of people make their pilgrimage
to this humble place.
In the Christian world, this would be like visiting the birthplace of Jesus,
the stable in Bethlehem.
For North Koreans...
the founding father of their revolution still lives on.
Kim Il-sung became president of the nation,
and then president for life.
After his death, he was declared president for eternity.
The propaganda appears to create a quasi-religious experience.
Actually, the life in the secret camp in those days
was so difficult that they had no blankets at all.
That is why the guerrilla soldiers, collected their pad wads
from their own padded clothes,
and then made that blanket for our dear Kim Jong-il.
The birthplace of the socialist revolution
manifests itself in collective formations
of the North Koreans.
In the country's biggest stadium,
more than 100,000 people participate in creating a unique art form.
The picture of the hut in the snow is not a painting.
It is made of human pixels.
And this is how it's done.
A prearranged pattern of color cards is held and flipped over in sync.
Here, the rising sun over the landscape of Mount Paektu.
And here, father and son of the revolution.
All this appears like a cosmic metaphor
for a society aligned in a unified pattern
behind a common ideology.
But in all this display of the masses,
I find an underlying emptiness and solitude.
Because of the North Korean ideology of political and economic self-reliance,
and because of internationally-imposed sanctions,
the country is unique.
The population at large has very limited contact
with the outside world.
There are no international phone lines or Internet available to the public,
no radio or television from the outside world.
To our eyes, it is strange to see people
not glued to their cell phones.
There is no advertising anywhere.
Instead, just the ever-present propaganda.
There are no newsstands,
only the official party newspaper on display.
In the subway, in the streets, almost everywhere,
you'll find pictures of the leaders, always in the vicinity of the volcano.
Back on the mountain, we spoke to a historian who was assigned to us.
We asked him about the photos and the precise location
of where they had been taken.
He probably stood exactly at the place you are standing now.
Not this place, but up there on the Janggun Peak.
Yeah. They're famous photos. We know them.
About this monument, it dates back to what time, roughly?
It dates back to the early 20th century.
It was erected by the heavenly people living around this area.
And, according to the inscription on the monument,
they prayed to Mount Paektu and Lake Chon here
to give birth to a prominent person
who can give prosperity and happiness to the Korean nation.
And the person materialized?
You are quite right.
This kind of miserable nation was rescued and saved
just by our great leader, the fearless patriot Kim Il-sung,
who fought against the Japanese imperialists.
And how do you feel, as a historian,
with all the thousands of years behind you,
how do you feel personally? Is there pride? Is there patriotism?
Eh...
My question was meant to elicit a personal response.
However, personal opinions seem to us a mirror image
of the omnipotent ideology of the people and their leadership.
All the Korean people frequently climb up to this mountain,
but every time whenever they climb up this mountain,
they have a new feeling, a solemn feeling,
and at the same time, they make up a new determination
to work harder for the country with patriotism.
And all the Korean people are now singing the song
whose title is "Let Us Go to Mount Paektu."
And it clearly reflects the spirit of the Korean people.
We are back now where we started,
the Vanuatu Archipelago,
this time on Tanna Island in the south.
There is an active volcano here, Mount Yasur.
Similar to North Korea, this volcano has created a new god.
John Frum,
the mythical American G.I. who descended from the clouds.
Each Friday night, the islanders celebrate his cult.
Chief Isaac of this John Frum village
tightly controls the dogma of the new faith.
Different denominations and even a schism in the church
seem to have materialized,
and so we were only allowed to speak to him and his son.
He flies the Stars and Stripes because John Frum is an American
who promises to return with copious cargos of consumer goods.
I understand that John Frum one day will appear to all the people
and that he will bring many things--
chewing gum, fridges, Cadillacs, maybe Boeing airplanes.
He thinks that--
He says that it is a promise that was made one day.
He says that it is a promise made by the spirit
that one day, it will be like the Americans will do all that.
Is John Frum like a god?
Mm-hmm.
John Frum is like a god to us.
The one god?
And--
John Frum is like a god, and it is like--
John Frum is like a gate.
It is like Jesus. You have to pass through before going to God.
What happens when people die?
His believing is that when the dead are buried,
they are in a room...
waiting for the Last Kingdom.
Will they meet John Frum in the Last Kingdom?
So, he thinks that the Last Kingdom,
John Frum is like a walking person, like Jesus.
In the Last Kingdom, it is thought that he'll be searching for people.
His son had direct encounters with John Frum.
You're next in line to be chief of this John Frum village,
and I understand that you have spent time living in the volcano.
You spent some nights there. What were you doing,
and did you speak to John Frum while you were there?
He's answering that yes, he's been there.
He stayed there for one full night.
He had seen someone and he spoke to him.
We-- It's said that John Frum uses the volcano as a portal,
a doorway, to travel from Tanna to America.
Does John Frum live inside the volcano?
He's telling us that John Frum has a special room that he's living in.
But there is one day that we will meet him
in a different form of a person, like Jesus.
When I was on the volcano...
I found it amazing to watch, but also quite terrifying.
How did you feel spending a whole night up in the crater?
Were you afraid?
He's telling us that when he went there
and spent the night, he wasn't afraid
because he knows that that is God,
and He's the one that's allowing him to go there.
So, he went inside the volcano and he saw Him,
and he spoke to Him. They had a conversation.
Are you allowed to tell us what the conversation was about?
He says that the message that the spirit gave to him,
he didn't tell to his father
and even the followers that are following John Frum.
It is only for him.
I'm a volcano man. You can't whisper it to me in my ear?
It is hard to take your eyes off the fire
that burns deep under our feet,
everywhere, under the crust of the continents and sea beds.
It is a fire that wants to burst forth,
and it could not care less about what we are doing up here.
This boiling mass is just monumentally indifferent
to scurrying roaches, retarded reptiles
and vapid humans alike.
When I went there...
I started to walk to the lava lake.
I didn't think that I would see something like what I saw.
And when I looked down there...
I thought that I was looking at the seawater.
But it was red.
And I didn't understand.
I started to think about why there's water there
and the water is red.
I didn't understand.
I thought that perhaps this fire
will someday come to that seawater.
So, I was very frightened.
According to our culture, I think the volcano will...
will destroy everything.
I believe that.
Because I hear about, from various people,
that there are volcanoes around the world.
And I think that, uh... I believe that someday
this volcano will erupt,
and the one at Lopevi,
and they will join together and will burn everybody.
This is what I'm thinking of.
I think everything will melt.
That's what I'm thinking.
Everything will melt.
The stone, the soil...
trees and everything, will melt.
Like water.
And so, I believe that this volcano will destroy this world someday.