July 22, 2019

Saturday, July 20, was the 100th anniversary of the birth of the famed New Zealand mountain climber Sir Edmund Hillary in 1919. Hillary was one of the first two men to reach the top of Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world, and return. On May 29, 1953, he and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa tribesman from Nepal, reached the summit, which at the time was thought to be 29,002 feet (8,840 meters). Its official height now is 29,035 feet (8,850 meters). Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom knighted Hillary for his achievement. Hillary died on Jan. 11, 2008.

Sir Edmund Hillary, left, and Tenzing Norgay, right, became the first two men to reach the top of Mount Everest and return. Hillary was born 100 years ago on July 20, 1919. Credit: AP/Wide World

Hillary made his first five expeditions on Himalayan peaks after World War II (1939-1945). He climbed part of the way up Everest in 1951 and 1952. He recounted a 1953 climb in the book, High Adventure (1955). In 1957 and 1958, he blazed a trail from McMurdo Sound in Antarctica to the South Pole for Sir Vivian Fuchs’s transantarctic expedition.

In 1953, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay climbed Mount Everest in the Himalaya range on the frontier of Tibet and Nepal. Credit: © Robert Preston, Alamy Images

In 1960, Hillary headed an expedition, which was sponsored by our own World Book Encyclopedia, to climb 27,824-foot (8,481-meter) Mount Makalu I (also in the Himalaya). The expedition tested the ability of human beings to live without oxygen at high altitudes. The climbers also searched for but did not find evidence of the Yeti, a hairy beast said to live in the Himalaya and other mountainous areas of central and northeastern Asia. With the author Desmond Doig, Hillary wrote High in the Thin Cold Air (1962) about the expedition.

New Zealand mountain climber Sir Edmund Hillary shows an artist’s illustration of the legendary Yeti. Hillary hoped to discover proof of the Yeti’s existence on a 1960 expedition to the Himalayas sponsored by World Book Encyclopedia. Credit: © Bettmann/Getty Images

Hillary was born in Auckland, New Zealand. His first job was in apiculture (beekeeping). Following his successful ascent of Mount Everest, Hillary spent much of the rest of his life supporting environmental causes and sponsoring humanitarian work in Nepal, building clinics, hospitals, and schools.

June 12, 2019

A recent reexamination of an important fossil discovery shows that Denisovans, a mysterious group of prehistoric people in Asia, lived in the high-altitude environment of the Tibetan Plateau long before the ancestors of modern Tibetans and Nepalese arrived. The fossil, a Denisovan mandible (lower jawbone) fragment, proves that these ancient humans were the first hominids to settle in that harsh environment where altitude sickness is a constant danger. The scientists studying the fossil also believe that modern people living on the Tibetan Plateau owe their survival to these Denisovan ancestors.

This virtual reconstruction shows details of the Denisovan mandible found on the Tibetan Plateau in 1980. It is some 160,000 years old. Credit: © Jean-Jacques Hublin, MPI-EVA, Leipzig

Chinese scientists recently reexamined the mandible fossil, which was excavated in Tibet in 1980. The jawbone fragment containing a few teeth was unremarkable. However, the scientists were hoping to determine the age of the fossil and extract proteins and genetic material using techniques that were not yet invented in the early 1980′s. The scientists were surprised when dating methods showed the fossil was about 160,000 years old. Scientists had previously believed that the early human populations alive at the time could not survive the harsh environment of the Tibetan Plateau.

The Denisovan mandible was found in this Tibetan Plateau cave, a tourist site and Buddhist refuge, in 1980. Credit: © Dongju Zhang, Lanzhou University

Analysis of proteins extracted from the jawbone fossil showed that it belonged to the mysterious Denisovans, a population previously known only from a few skeletal remains found in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia. Denisovan DNA has similarities to that of the modern indigenous (native) peoples of Australia, New Guinea, the southern Philippines, and other Pacific Islands. Denisovans contributed up to five percent of the genetic material of some people living in these regions today.

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Analysis of the Tibet jawbone shows that the Denisovans were well-suited to a high-altitude environment. They possessed a genetic adaptation that enabled them to withstand the physical effects of hypoxia (insufficient levels of oxygen in the blood) caused by high altitudes. Today, the indigenous people of Nepal and Tibet also possess this genetic adaptation. Scientists now believe that the modern inhabitants of the Tibetan Plateau inherited this adaptation from Denisovan ancestors of the distant past.

October 29, 2015

On October 29, Nepal’s first woman president, Bidhya Bhandari, is congratulated by outgoing President Ram Baran Yadav (left), while Prime Minister K.P. Oli (right) looks on. Bhandari had just taken the oath of office in a ceremony in Kathmandu, Nepal. (Credit: © Narendra Shrestha, EPA/Landov)

Nepal’s parliament made history on Wednesday when it elected Bidhya Devi Bhandari as the Himalayan country’s first woman president. Bhandari is a women’s rights campaigner who helped ensure representation for women in the government under a constitution passed in September 2015. The new constitution mandates that either the president or the vice-president must be a woman, and that one-third of the seats in parliament are reserved for women. Under Nepal’s constitution, the role of president is largely ceremonial; a prime minister heads the government.

Bhandari is Nepal’s second elected president since the country abolished its monarchy in 2008. The country’s transition to democracy was neither easy nor quick. The process began in 2008 after voters elected a Constituent Assembly to write a new constitution. The assembly could not agree on the constitution’s contents, however, and the group was abolished in 2012. The process began anew in 2013, but it took until September 2015 for the second assembly to finally agree on a constitution. Aside from ensuring representation for women in Nepal’s government, the new constitution also created a bicameral (two-house) legislature and divided the country into seven provinces. Tensions remained, however, as some minority groups expressed concern that they would be underrepresented in the new government.

November 26, 2013

The remains of what may be the oldest known Buddhist shrine have been found in southern Nepal, an international team of archaeologists has reported. The remains of a wooden structure, which dates to about 550 B.C., were discovered inside the younger Maya Devi temple in Lumbini, Nepal, the traditional birthplace of the Buddha, the teacher who founded Buddhism. The findings are the first archaeological evidence connecting Buddha’s birth and the Buddhist religion to the 500’s B.C.

Buddhism is one of the world’s major religions. At various times, Buddhism has been a dominant religious, cultural, and social force in most of Asia. Today, Buddhism has about 350 million followers. Most live in Tibet and other regions of China, and in Japan, the Korean Peninsula, Sri Lanka, and mainland Southeast Asia.

The Buddha (center) and eight spiritual leaders called bodhisattvas appear in a painting from the 1300′s. (Buddha Amitabha with the Eight Great Bodhisattvas, a hanging scroll with ink colors and gold on silk; The Avery Brundage Collection, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, CA)

According to Nepalese tradition, the Buddha was born as Siddhartha Gautama in 623 B.C. Earlier archaeological evidence of Buddhist activity in Lumbini dated back only to the 200’s B.C. Lumbini lies near sites in northeastern India that are significant in the Buddhist tradition. These sites include Bodh Gaya, where Siddhartha Gautama is said to have gained spiritual enlightenment; Samath, where the enlightened Buddha first preached; and Kusinagara, the place of his death.

The archaeological team, headed by Robin Coningham of Durham University in the United Kingdom and Kosh Prasad Acharya of the Pashupati Area Development Trust in Nepal, have been working at the Maya Devi site since 2011. Their findings, published on November 25 in the journal Antiquity, included evidence of multiple temples buried within Maya Devi. One of the older temples appeared to have included an enclosure with trees growing in its center. This arrangement is consistent with a traditional layout of Buddhist temples. Scientists used radiocarbon dating and another dating technique called optically stimulated luminescence to analyze charcoal and sand samples found at the temple site. Both types of analysis indicated that the temple dated back to the 500’s B.C.

Additional World Book articles:

• Bodhisattva
• Dharma
• Nirvana