Blockbuster biopic The King’s Speech ruled the Oscars last night, garnering awards for Best Actor, Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. The film presents the tale of Britain’s King George VI (Colin Firth), a temperamental heir whose lifelong struggle with a debilitating stammer cast him as an unlikely monarch. Ultimately, it is a speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush) whose unorthodox methods enable the king to conquer his impediment and become the voice that inspires a nation on the verge of War World II.

Today, an estimated one percent of the population---or one in 100 people---stutters. To find out just how far speech science has come since the 1930s, we talked to Vivian Sisskin of the University of Maryland’s Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences. Here's what we learned:

Halloween is the time when humans can get a taste of what it is like to roam the streets as an animal. And this Halloween, the newest way to assume the guise of a beast is by climbing into an animal-print full-body “morphsuit.”

To see what it is like to straddle the line between human and animal, I took up my editor’s invitation to put on a $65 zebra suit and gallop around our nation’s capital. (On one excursion, I was joined by a colleague in a leopard suit.)

My conclusion is that even in this odd suit, I became a player in what scientist E.O. Wilson calls “biophilia” – an innate love that humans have for animals. (Either that, or people just love weird stuff). Aside from an unfortunate episode at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History, in which my head-to-toe mask caused guards to call me aside and insist that I remove the head mask, I was met with outpourings of love from tourists and residents. It is unclear how zebras would respond: I made an attempt to find one at the National Zoo but did not succeed.

The following photos offer the high points from my walk (and pedicab ride) on the wild side. —William Shubert

TOUCHDOWN ZEBRA! In an ode to his black-and-white striped cousins on the football field, the zebra signals score during a pedicab ride by the Washington Monument.

The Nabataeans hewed this partially completed tomb from a rock outcrop in the Arabian desert. Photo: Hubert Raguet, Look at Sciences. 

Lots of people know of Petra, capital of the long-lost Nabataeans. It’s the red sandstone city, carved into Jordan’s cliffs, where Indiana Jones found the Holy Grail.

But Hegra, another large city of this ancient civilization of caravan traders, is far less known. Called Al Hijr in Arabic, it is in northwestern present-day Saudi Arabia. Twenty-nine of its 111 monumental tombs have dated inscriptions; most of Petra’s are curiously bare. The Hegra carvings allowed archaeologists to date both cities to about 2,000 years ago. Later the Nabataeans vanished into the Roman Empire, and Hegra lapsed into ruin. Locals, believing the pre-Islamic city cursed, long discouraged visitors, as did the restrictive Saudi government. But the Saudis relented, and in 2008 Al Hijr became Saudi Arabia’s first UNESCO World Heritage site. Archaeologists are now welcome, and tourists are too. —Chris Carroll

It may not look like much, but this toe is a royal digit of King Tut's father, Akhentaten. More importanty, perhaps, is that its story tells why it is important to put things back where they belong. Photograph courtesy of Frank Rühli.

From time to time something happens that should be noted because it provides a great example of what there should be more of. I'm talking about the return to Egypt of King Tut's dad's toe. According to a press release from Egypt's Supreme Council on Antiquities, the toe had been missing since 1907.

The back story is that Dr. Frank Rühli, a Swiss radiologist and mummy expert, became aware of the toe's existence and arranged to return it to Egypt. This happy event occurred just days ago. According to Rühli, the toe came into the possession of Professor R. G. Harrison of Liverpool in the late 1960s. In 1966 Harrison published a study of a mummy from Valley of the Kings tomb KV 55 and argued that the body was that of Akhenaten, the likely father of King Tut. It was only weeks ago that Dr. Zahi Hawass of the Supreme Council published the results of an analysis that supported Harrison's identification of KV 55 as Akhenaten by comparing the DNA of the KV 55 mummy to that of King Tut.

The return of the toe comes in the context of a growing clamor for the return of remains and artifacts—stolen or removed under questionable circumstances—to their places of origin. The Maori want mummified heads returned from museums around the world just as badly as the Greeks want the Elgin marbles to the Parthenon. Although Akhenaten's toe is a small thing, the gesture of returning it is grand and should be applauded. It points the way for private citizens, museums, and governments to redress some wrongs that have certainly occurred in the past.—Chris Sloan

Lee Berger brought attention back to South Africa's amazing record of human fossils after the end of Apartheid. Here he examines a bone fragment in a cave in the islands of Palau in the Pacific Ocean. Despite that project's unhappy ending, Berger remains one of the most active and enthusiastic paleoanthropologists. Photo by author.

This week's announcement of a new species of human ancestor from South Africa will start another round of debates in paleoanthropology. Whether the fossils named Australopithecus sediba represent a new species and whether they have been assigned to the right group will be questioned, as well as whether or not they have anything to do with the human lineage that led to us. This week's announcement will also be another chance for Lee Berger, an American paleoanthropologist whose career has been marked by what to many other scientists would have been knock-out blows from the media and his peers.

Students excavate a kiln at Cheung Ek, Cambodia. Photo courtesy of Phon Kaseka

Cheung Ek is infamous for being the site of a Khmer Rouge killing field—some 20,000 Cambodians were murdered here between 1975 and 1979. Yet Cheung Ek also has a much older history, and today a team of archaeologists led by Phon Kaseka of the Royal Academy of Cambodia is investigating what lies beneath this once horrifying landscape.

The big news in the journal Science tomorrow is the discovery of the oldest human skeleton—a small-brained, 110-pound female of the species Ardipithecus ramidus, nicknamed “Ardi.” She lived in what is now Ethiopia 4.4 million years ago, which makes her over a million years older than the famous “Lucy” fossil, found in the same region thirty-five years ago.

Buried among the slew of papers about the new find is one about the creature’s sex life. It makes fascinating reading, especially if you like learning why human females don’t know when they are ovulating, and men lack the clacker-sized testicles and bristly penises sported by chimpanzees.

One of the defining attributes of Lucy and all other hominids—members of our evolutionary lineage, including ourselves—is that they walk upright on two legs. While Ardi also walked on two legs on the ground, the species also clambered about on four legs in the trees. Ardi thus offers a fascinating glimpse of an ape caught in the act of becoming human.

The problem is it is doing it in the wrong place at the wrong time—at least according to conventional wisdom, which says our kind first stood up on two legs when they moved out of the forest and onto open savanna grasslands. At the time Ardi lived, her environment was a woodland, much cooler and wetter than the desert there today.

So why did her species become bipedal while it was still living partly in the trees, especially since walking on two legs is a much less efficient way of getting about?

Zinjanthropus has changed quite a bit in appearance since this species was found 50 years ago. Art by Peter Bianchi © National Geographic.

Fifty years ago, Louis and Mary Leakey discovered the remains of Zinjanthropus boisei, a member of the human lineage researchers now call Paranthropus boisei or Australopithecus boisei.

National Geographic ran a story on the discovery of "Zinj" in 1961. It was hailed as a missing link. Now we know that this species was an evolutionary dead end. It may be that it was too specialized, in this case for heavy chewing. Big teeth and massive jaw muscles may have been the wrong thing to invest in, as opposed to big brains, for instance. 

Hiram Bingham was 36 years old when he first climbed Machu Picchu in
1911 and set up camp in the ruins. Photo by E.C. Erdis.

Hiram Bingham is a household name around National Geographic. It is one of those bigger than life names, like Peary, Leakey, and Powell, that will always be associated with a place. In Bingham's case, the place is Machu Picchu. Archaoelogist Christina Elson posts here on some of the complexities that have emerged in the wake of Bingham's achievements.—Chris Sloan

Pharaoh Tutankhamun's skull defines his general appearance. Its anyone's guess what his skin color was. This particular model (right) was prepared from a CT-scan-based "cast" of his skull (left) without knowing its identity. Reconstruction by Michael Anderson. Photos in composite © 2007 Michael Anderson and Mark Thiessen © 2007 National Geographic Society.

I’ll never forget attending opening night of the King Tut exhibit in Los Angeles in June 2005. As I approached the exhibit entrance with Elisabeth Daynes, the French sculptor who created a likeness of King Tut for the cover of National Geographic magazine, we passed a patch of animated demonstrators whose placards read “King Tut’s Back and He’s Still Black.” A few steps further I was informed by other National Geographic staff attending the event that Dayne’s sculpture, which she had traveled from Paris to see on display, was out of the show.

I was disappointed, but not surprised. Every time the magazine’s art department attempted to depict ancient Egyptians, we received letters complaining about their appearance. This was despite every effort of talented artists and hard-working researchers to be accurate and fair. For the King Tut reconstruction we went to the extreme of commissioning a second model by a team that was not informed of the identity of the skull cast we provided. Their results confirmed that the cover image was as reasonable as forensic reconstructions of individuals can be. One can quibble about the shape of Tut’s nose and ears, and the color of his eyes and skin, but hard bone determined his general appearance. Judging from the demonstrators outside the exhibit in Los Angeles, we were once again unable to please everyone.

The reasons for this dissatisfaction are complex. Confusing notions about ‘race’ and a concern that scholars ignore Africa’s contribution to civilization seem to be at the heart of it. There is still some debate about the skin color of ancient Egyptians, but most experts agree that, from Alexandria in the north to the Sudanese border, ancient Egyptians would have looked much as they do today.

Our story about ancient Egypt’s 25th dynasty in the February issue of National Geographic provides an opportunity to look again at questions about the appearance of ancient Egyptians and whether Egypt’s, ergo Africa’s, contribution to civilization has been ignored. If you’d like to comment on our story or this topic, here’s the place.

Before you respond on the skin color issue, I recommend that you review how scientists currently view race at http://www.understandingrace.org.

Above: Hiram Bingham photographed this excavation of a human skeleton in a cave at Machu Picchu during the Yale University and National Geographic Society-funded expedtion of 1912.

In the last few days two major contentious situations involving estranged antiquities were more or less resolved. I’m talking about the agreement between the Italian Cultural Ministry and the J. Paul Getty Museum of Los Angeles which arranged the return to Italy of 40 artifacts and the agreement between Yale University and the Government of Peru to return what Hiram Bingham III collected at Machu Picchu almost one hundred years ago.

National Geographic gave its first archaeological grant to Bingham in 1912 to fund his return to Machu Picchu and continued to fund him for several years. What the Society got out of it was a highly popular April 1913 National Geographic Magazine article and a longstanding fruitful relationship with Peru and scientists working there. What Yale got was over 380 museum quality specimens and thousands of other artifacts that it displayed at the Peabody Museum or used for research.

It wasn’t until recently that National Geographic became aware that the Machu Picchu collection at the Yale Peabody Museum was a loan and should have been returned to Peru. Terry Garcia, an executive vice president of the Society, investigated the terms of the agreement with Peru and Yale and one could say he was responsible for triggering a lengthy cascade of events that finally led to the recent agreement.

It took seven years for Yale to come around. Why? Admittedly there are complexities in all cases involving antiquities. In the Getty case, for example, the 40 objects came from different sources and the Getty wasn’t about to hand over objects worth millions without checking to make sure of the facts. But still, it appears that Italy had to threaten to break relations with the Getty Museum before there was action. And Peru had to threaten to sue Yale.

There are numerous other examples of countries that have been less successful in retrieving their heritage, despite threats. The “Elgin” Parthenon Marbles are still in London, aren’t they? And Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, still has not managed the return of the Nefertiti bust from Berlin. These prominent cases may be resolved some day through agreements like the ones reported above.

Another controversial case involves the Persepolis Fortification Archive (see map), a collection of thousands of cuneiform tablets from Iran that are in the U.S. for research. Victims of a 1997 Hamas terror bombing in Jerusalem argue that since Hamas was funded by Iran, the tablets should be seized and sold to raise the $400 million in damages awarded by a court (with Iran not present to contest). National Geographic is funding the scanning of the tablets to facilitate their return to Iran as soon as possible, but at this moment Iran is fearful that its cultural heritage, loaned in good faith to the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago in 1936, will never come home.

All of these situations have a common denominator: the artifacts left their country of origin. In some cases, this occurred illegally and in others there were clear agreements in place. The UNESCO convention (Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property) establishes guidelines which should, in principal, protect the cultural heritage of countries from illegal antiquities trade going forward. There are still problems implementing this, as the Getty situation illustrates, but what about cultural property that left countries illegally or under murky circumstances before 1972, when the convention was ratified? If 114 ratifying countries now agree that “…the transfer of ownership of cultural property is one of the main causes of the impoverishment of the cultural heritage of the countries of origin of such property,” then perhaps more countries and institutions holding such “transferred” artifacts should be more helpful in facilitating the return of cultural material when it is requested.

If you know of any cultural material that should really get back home, let’s hear about it. If you have pix, send them to stonesbonesnthings@gmail.com. —Chris Sloan

In the current issue of Nature you’ll find a much-awaited report on the bodies (as opposed to the heads) of the folks that lived at Dmanisi in Georgia (the former Soviet Republic) about two million years ago. The report was much-awaited because only the heads of four of the individuals discovered there have been thoroughly reported. That left many of us wondering what their bodies were like.

We knew their brains were small and early estimates of their height and weight showed they were small in body as well, but we didn’t have a good sense of their body proportions or skeletal details from the neck down. And the reason why we cared about their bodies so much was that a paradigm was about to be broken.