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Classifying the world’s tallest, thickest, biggest, and oldest trees can be an extreme challenge. For the National Geographic "Extreme Trees" poster, featured in several of the magazine’s international editions, we took a look at what counts when measuring. Trees grow, limbs fall, ways of measuring change, and new trees are discovered, so figuring out which trees to highlight wasn’t easy.
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 team has found that Cheung Ek was settled around 300 B.C. and played an important part in the emergence of Southeast Asia’s first great economy, the mysterious Indian-influenced civilization known as Funan. Centered in the lower Mekong floodplain, Funan flourished from about the first to the sixth century and eventually gave rise to the well-known kingdom of Angkor, which culminated in the 13th century.
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.
Ancestry.com
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