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[birds calling and singing]
[making bird call]
[singing in foreign language]
[Werner] Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian Museum.
The largest elephant ever is here on display.
This is Dr. Steve Boyes.
He has been in search of mysterious ghost elephants that
may be descendants of this one.
[singing in foreign language]
- This is the first time I've seen this elephant,
this grand elephant here at the Smithsonian.
I've dreamt of it 1,000 times.
I carry a photograph of this elephant with me.
For ten years,
I've been in pursuit of its descendants in
the part of Angola I've been working and exploring.
Now, they call it Henry.
Now, Henry is a human name.
And this is interesting because the Nkangala,
the people, the Luchaze of that part of Angola,
they believe and talk about in their mythology of elephants
leaving their bodies to become human.
And, well, this elephant has left his body.
There's nothing in there.
There's just scaffolding.
His skull and tusks were too heavy to mount into the exhibit.
But we get to go and see the, the real skull,
the original skull and tusks, the, to meet Henry,
this grand elephant, the largest elephant ever recorded,
the biggest living land animal.
And, I can't believe I'm standing in front of him,
the greatest elephant ever.
[singing in foreign language]
[Werner] And here are the actual tusks of Henry.
The Smithsonian allowed us to take them out and film
them in its storage.
There are miles of shelves with collected specimens
that are never seen by the public.
And here is the skull of Henry.
The label from 1955 identifying the hunter,
Josef Fenykoevi, is still attached.
The continent of Africa.
Henry was killed in Angola,
not far from the highlands where Steve Boyes
has been searching for the ghost elephants.
It is a plateau of over 4,000 feet elevation.
Its eastern part is almost uninhabited.
It is called the Water Tower of Africa.
The locals have another name for it,
the Source of Life.
Annually, this water tower supplies ten times the average
freshwater use of the state of California.
Some of Africa's major rivers have their sources there.
In the north,
the Congo that ends up in the Atlantic,
in the east,
the Zambezi that flows to the Indian Ocean.
All the tributaries that flow south form the gigantic
wetlands of the Okavango Delta.
Where the water runs down from the water tower,
valleys are carved into the plateau.
Here, in almost impassable wetlands,
the water collects in source lakes and rivers.
[singing in foreign language]
And now, what is almost unimaginable for us,
the uninhabited highlands,
the forest stretching out in the distance,
where all this water comes from,
is about the size of England.
Steve Boyes and his team have discovered there almost
200 species new to science.
Everything they have found is unique to this place.
[Steve] Look at us.
[Werner] We accompanied Steve Boyes to Namibia,
about 1,000 miles south of the Angolan highlands.
Here, he has been in contact for years with
some Bushmen trackers,
the best remaining in the world.
These tribal people are the most marginalized community in
Namibia, even though its government is working
to improve this.
The terms "San" and "Bushman" originated as derogatory labels
in the colonial era but are now widely used.
These people, Steve hopes,
will make his dream come true to find the
elusive ghost elephants.
This quest is it almost going after the white whale?
The unknown, the mysterious?
- This is, it's, it is a bit like Moby Dick,
where I don't even know if these elephants exist the
way I imagine them.
[Werner] Could it be that they are your imagination,
that you are after ghosts that don't exist?
- I am after ghosts that don't exist right now.
Um, I've spent my life...
...living in a dream that I never had.
It is like the experience of the Cuanavale source lake
for the first time.
You stand there, you feel like you've been there before,
but you have never been there.
You feel like you've dreamed it,
but you've never dreamed it.
You feel like you're in a dream.
And these dreams often come true.
I believe we'll find an elephant,
maybe not as tall as a building,
as big as Henry in the Smithsonian,
but we'll find a bull elephant.
[Werner] Does it matter if they are a dream or
existing in reality, for you?
[Steve] It doesn't matter for me if they are just a dream
because that's almost better.
Then they will always exist,
'cause they always could be there.
And I can go back for the rest of my life
looking for them.
And maybe one day, you find them.
But that's... that's it.
Maybe that's the future of all animals, all wildlife,
is to be in a dream, to be a memory.
[♪ gentle music playing]
[Werner] This is Xui, one of our San Bushman master trackers.
His Ju/’hoansi language consists of many clicking and
smacking sounds far from our phonetic system,
but his language is complex and rich in expression.
Ju/’hoansi translated means "real people."
I kept wondering, who are we, then?
I still have a lot of hair on my chest, on my body.
Am I half an animal?
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[translator] As we used to say when we saw you coming,
we call you
There are the "hairs" coming,
we call you the "hairs"
But you are also people.
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[translator] And you are also the "whites."
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[translator] We also call you the "whites."
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[Werner] Mimicking is an important part of San culture.
Xui was proud to demonstrate for us how a kudu antelope
finally went down from his poisoned arrow.
[♪ dramatic music playing]
[vocalizing in Ju/'hoansi]
[Werner] These San Bushmen here in the Kalahari Desert
of Northern Namibia are the oldest,
the most primordial culture since the dawn of man.
They enter a state of trance.
Thus, the spirit of elephants can enter them.
[vocalizing Ju/'hoansi]
[Werner] The dance lasts all night long.
[vocalizing Ju/'hoansi]
[Werner] This is Kobus,
who will come to Angola as a tracker.
We saw him fainting at the elephant dance last night.
I asked him if the spirit of an elephant had entered him.
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[Werner] "Yes," he says, "I went into a trance.
I felt that something entered my body.
It could have been the spirit of an elephant,
but I cannot describe it exactly.
I'm still learning to become a healer."
Xui Dawid is the third master tracker to join the expedition
to Angola to find the ghost elephants.
He's the only one who speaks English.
[Steve] In Angola, I see the rubbing in the tree.
[Xui] Yeah.
[Steve] Can you see that is that elephant because
of the height?
[Xui] So, if you scratch the body up on the tree.
[Steve] Yeah.
- Like this.
[Steve] Which is the itchiest part?
The itchy, is it the shoulder or the back?
- The shoulder. The shoulder. - The shoulder blades are.
- Yeah. - Okay.
- Yeah, and the head here and the face.
You make it, he makes it like this.
[Steve] On a tree?
- In the tree. Yeah.
- I'd quickly like to introduce Kerllen Costa.
He's from Angola,
and he's been working with the Luchaze in the
Angolan highlands for over a decade.
This is Gary Trower.
He's been working with these communities,
these San communities in this area also for a decade.
And it's a long journey to the Angolan highlands from here.
It's a week driving.
It's over 1,000 miles.
And, of course,
the master trackers are nervous about that.
Gary will be joining them on their journey up,
and Kerllen will be up there to receive them.
So it's important that we spend time with the master trackers
and their families.
[Werner] We were curious about the poison Xui uses
for his hunting.
He took us into the bush together with Ricardo,
our translator, and Gary.
Xui is in search of a bush that is depleted of its foliage.
This is a sign for him that a small beetle about the size of
our ladybug has laid its eggs.
The hatched grubs voraciously eat all the leaves,
then let themselves drop to the ground,
where they dig themselves deep into the sand.
Here, they form cocoons.
It is these cocoons Xui is after.
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[Werner] The grubs inside are so phenomenally poisonous
that a few of them would even kill an elephant.
Under no circumstance must Xui have a cut or
a scratch on his hand, or,
slowly, within a day, he would be stone dead.
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[Gary] So we have a little pestle and mortar here,
which is used for grinding them up.
Once you've mixed your poison in here and it's ready,
you make a little spatula-type tool out of wood,
and then you start smearing it.
You can see this brown color.
All the way from here to there is where the poison is applied.
You never actually apply the poison on the tip,
because if you accidentally scratch yourself
or cut yourself,
so that's why you can see it's clearly only
on this section.
[Werner] Xui once almost died from this poison when he tried
to break up a fight between his older brother and
another young man.
He threw himself into the middle and was stabbed with a
poisoned arrow.
There's a widespread idealization that these Bushmen,
as pure children of nature, live in harmony.
But like everywhere else, there is jealousy, violence,
and even murder.
[Gary] So what did he do?
As soon as he got that poison in him,
what was his first reaction,
and what did he do to save his life?
[Werner] They made deep cuts in his shoulder and many more cuts
all the way down his arm to bleed out the poison.
His whole arm withered away,
and it took years to grow back to the strength
of his other arm.
- It's extremely poisonous.
If you have any cuts in your hand,
I can vouch for that,
that when I was in the lab, in the process of trying to put
the protective cap back on the needle after
I've done the extract,
it went straight through the glove and actually
pricked me twice.
And I had been told by the hunters that it
starts burning immediately,
and I immediately felt it burning like crazy.
It was burning badly.
[Werner] You didn't cut off your hand or your finger.
You still have it.
[Gary] Yeah, so, luckily, in the lab,
there was a tap right there.
I took the latex glove off.
I had my finger under the tap,
and I was making sure that no blood could come out.
And I just kept doing this repeatedly and letting it bleed
into the basin, flushing it, flushing it, flushing it,
so, 'cause once it gets into your bloodstream,
it will go up your arm.
And, generally, the only way to save yourself is to cut
yourself all the way up so that it can bleed out
as much as possible before it reaches your heart.
[Werner] What kind of poison is it?
It's a nerve poison or what is it?
[Gary] It actually works in several different ways.
So the grubs actually are a hemolytic poison,
which means they break down red blood cells.
So what happens is, the animal, you can actually see in its
urine, the urine actually turns black because that's
all the broken red blood cells that are now being
flushed out of the body.
And another part,
what it does is, it actually, it contains saponins, which,
once the poison travels to your lungs,
it starts foaming and making bubbles.
And that prevents the animal from breathing because the
whole air tube and the nose and nostrils,
I mean, mouth, fill up with bubbles.
[Werner] Because his arrows are poisoned,
Xui's bow is small.
He's one of the greatest trackers alive.
He can read tracks in the sand as we would read a newspaper.
But he reads with all his senses.
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[Werner] He hears a bird alarmed,
and this tells him a leopard might be nearby.
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[Werner] He sniffs the air for the scent of elephants.
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[Werner] He senses the ground vibrating from
the hooves of fleeing roan antelopes.
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[making antelope call]
[Werner] Xui is very good at imitating a small antelope
in distress in order to attract the mother.
The danger is, he could attract a leopard as well.
[Xui] Yes you have to move very carefully
before you make that sound.
[Werner] Kerllen Costa is Angolan.
He dreamt of a career as a professional soccer player,
but then he became an anthropologist.
[Kerllen] I was born and raised in Angola.
Most of my childhood was spent during the height of the
Angolan Civil War.
Because my father was an helicopter pilot for the army,
I spent a lot of hours beside him in the cockpit
of his helicopter, not only fighting in the war,
but trying to run away and make sure his family was safe.
And on these journeys,
I witnessed and listened to a lot of stories,
a lot of atrocities that no human should ever see
nor hear, for that matter.
And it really represented the Angolan Civil War at its highest
where helicopters are machine-gunning elephants
from afar, where boats with soldiers are rifling
hippos on the river,
where soldiers running in the middle of the forest are
shooting down every single animal that they can see.
This really represents the divide that resulted between
biodiversity and humans, because it's not only humans
that were affected, for example,
from what is one of the countries most affected
by land mines.
It's also animals,
because these animals were being killed by land mines.
They were meant for tanks and trucks and other things,
but they were being really destroyed by these land mines.
And that's why you see these Angolan refugees,
humans and animals,
scattering throughout the continent.
And this seems to be a worldwide trend,
it's not just Angola,
where you see humans fighting against creation.
And this was witnessed also in America, for example,
in the late 1800s,
where the trains would go through the heart of America
very slowly, and with people inside it just shooting
at buffaloes and everything that they could see.
Not to eat, but just for the sake of shooting.
As if man is on a mission to destroy what he is part of,
what he is part of, his essence, which is life,
which is biodiversity.
This is also represented by the Fenykovi elephant,
which was shot by Fenykovi, which is, up until now,
the biggest recorded elephant in the world.
This is an Angolan citizen, an Angolan elephant.
He was shot because of his majestic-ness,
because of his greatness.
And it seems like this greatness is what causes not
just this elephant but all other living beings to be
destroyed by humans.
[Werner] This material is from the 1966 Italian film
"Africa Addio."
At this time,
big-game hunting was still fashionable.
[roaring]
[singing in foreign language]
[gunshot]
[singing in foreign language]
[trumpet and roar]
[gunshot]
[singing in foreign language]
[♪ somber music playing]
[singing in foreign language]
[Werner] Today, our respect for nature has changed.
Even a huge fallen tree has its local guardians.
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[Steve] We have the permission of the guardians
to visit this incredible baobab,
1,000 years old.
The ground trodden by the elephants that move around here
looking for parts of the baobab to feed on,
like this over here.
You can see their tracks from days ago.
You can see here, that's the bull.
It's about 50 centimeters.
And if you take the longest diameter and
multiply it by seven, you'll get his shoulder height.
So he is nine foot tall,
very big bull on the edge of the breeding herd
as they feed here.
Not part of them, here to visit with them.
But now the Fenykovi elephant in the Smithsonian,
the largest living land animal ever recorded,
its footprint was, that big.
You can see now, compared to this.
This is his front foot carrying the bulk of his head
and his tusks.
Now, the first footprint that Fenykovi found,
Josef Fenykoevi, was another, 50 centimeters.
So that foot was this big.
Now, he thought this was something new,
a mammoth, a mastodon.
An elephant like Africa's, never seen,
the world has never seen.
This he found on his first expedition in 1955.
They found two bulls together under a tree.
They put 17 high-caliber rounds into the biggest one,
the Fenykoevi, as he turned out to be called, Henry.
They pursued him for 15 kilometers in a Jeep with the
trackers until he collapsed.
And then, upon skinning him,
they found that he had a flintlock round
in his thigh, in his front thigh.
Now, these were typically given in the
18th and 19th centuries to tribal leaders,
to kings for their support of the ivory and the slave trade
in that part of Africa, Portuguese.
So this elephant at this size,
must have been over 100 years old.
An elephant that no one had ever imagined could exist,
an elephant, that we don't understand today as it stands
there in the museum,
an elephant that may be a new subspecies.
When we talk to the Luchaze today,
they've told us of these elephants,
the ones that they've seen,
encountering forest elephants with red eyes.
So we really don't know.
And I'm here to seek help,
the same help that Fenykovi had,
Khoisan Bushmen master trackers to help us,
Kerllen and the Luchaze, find the Fenykoevi,
find Henry, find the descendants of Henry.
Get tissue samples that we can compare to what we
have in the Smithsonian, because in the Smithsonian,
the skin alone was two tons when it arrived there.
They used five tons of material to build the elephant up,
but the skull was one - and-a-half times bigger
than any skull on record in any museum.
And the tusks were too heavy, their bulk,
to mount onto the exhibit, so those are in storage.
We can extract ancient DNA from those for comparison to
what we find today.
[Werner] What is interesting is how the media reported about
this hunt at the time.
Here to the left, Fenykovi poses in front of his trophy.
It was Sports Illustrated that celebrated the sportsman
who had set a new world record.
Fenykovi took meticulous measurements.
Here, his sketch with all the detailed dimensions.
On the top right,
he includes a sworn statement to the correctness of his data.
The emphasis is on the proof of the new record that
has never been surpassed to this day.
- Ghost elephants are these last great giants,
living in these high-altitude forests.
We don't find elephants over 1,200 meters.
They're up there in the sky.
I mean, the terra do fim do mundo,
the Lisima lya Mwono,
Source of Life, it's this, it's this place.
It's the Kalahari but raised into the sky like a temple.
I-it's, it's, under it is a, I don't, what do they call it,
a kimberlite supercluster.
It's diamonds and rare earth minerals,
and gold coming up and pushing it into the sky.
There is a free-air gravity anomaly.
This means gravity is too much there.
What's coming up is coming up too fast.
It's raised this desert into the sky where it's
formed mist belts.
So every morning it's misty over these lakes that are not
meant to be there.
It's a place for lost things, like us.
It's filled with real magic, whatever that is.
I've been to the place where an entire river disappears into
the ground, or I don't know where it went,
a raging river into a dark channel.
[♪ reflective music playing]
[Werner] I've heard people saying that finding the
elephants means finding ourselves.
But do we really learn anything from them?
- I'm not gonna learn anything from a ghost elephant.
Um...
...maybe it's better staying as a dream.
Um, but it's something we chase, dreams, as humans.
We share dreams with each other.
And maybe if this stayed as a dream for the rest of my life,
go up there once a year in September to the springs they
say that they come to,
sitting there quietly, like Vundumtiki,
maybe that's better.
[♪ mystical music playing]
[singing in foreign language]
[Werner] Tell us how ancient the San people are.
- Okay, as a scientist, there is the principle of
greatest genetic diversity.
And that gives the Kalahari San, the Bushmen,
uh, the greatest time depth, so, they are the first people.
We, all of us, are the descendants of a small founding
population of Kalahari San Bushmen,
that survived the Ice Age,
hiding ostrich eggs in the desert,
hunting with poison, and where to walk out.
Some went north, some south to the coast.
And you follow the genetics,
they walked the coastline all the way to Australia,
because the next genetic markers are the Aborigine
peoples of Australia.
So how quickly they walked straightaway,
and then the rest of the world.
[Werner] In other words,
we are the direct descendants of them.
They are our direct ancestors.
- Yes.
Um, to think of them as being different is, uh, bizarre,
if people do.
They are the awakening of us,
the awakening of the human soul.
The dancing, the ritual, the culture, the knowledge,
fire and stone, bow and arrow,
medicine and poison.
Technology starts developing here.
This is us.
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[singing in Ju/'hoansi]
[Werner] The society of the Ju/'hoansi Bushmen is
completely egalitarian.
Xui has hunted a kudu, but he, the provider,
does not brag about it.
He rather puts himself down and belittles his haul.
The women make a show of ignoring him.
The boy here, Xui's son, will distribute the meat.
[wood scraping wood]
Life here is in many ways ancestral,
although the San Bushmen use cell phones with ease.
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[Werner] But I recognize myself.
Having a good talk with your son at the end of a day,
getting up in the morning without fixed plans or duties.
Time does not seem to occur.
This elder of Nhoma village spends much of his day fixing
his musical instrument.
I know I should not romanticize this, but I feel,
surrounded by chickens,
it cannot get any better than this.
[humming quietly]
- Hi. - How's it going?
[Werner] Our three Namibian trackers are spread out
in different villages.
For scientific support,
a visitor arrives in Xui's village.
This is Jordana Meyer, a specialist in DNA biodiversity.
She's come here to give training to the
team of trackers.
- So we want to get those outer cells,
the outer DNA that's left behind from the elephant.
And we swab,
you might know from COVID, the little swab.
- Mm-hmm. - I'll show you in the field
now when we find some elephant dung.
- Mm-hmm. - But we'll swab the outside.
And then we put that into this small vial like this.
And, again, same fluid, liquid that preserves the DNA.
And then that will tell us if this elephant is
maybe from Angola.
[laughter]
[overlapping chatter]
- Yeah.
- We might be testing these darts.
And what this is doing is taking a tiny piece of tissue
from the elephant.
[Xui] Mm-hmm.
- Hopefully, and then we will take that little piece,
and we'll put it into here to preserve.
[Werner] This device appears promising...
- Bull's-eye.
[Werner] ...but later in the Angolan highlands,
it will prove useless.
The team now ventures out to find a dung sample of
the local elephant population.
[Jordana] We're collecting two things.
One is going to be from the inside.
And we want it from the inside because it's not contaminated.
Like we did yesterday,
I'm going to have one person hold this for me.
- Ah. - Take the lid off.
Hold it.
I'm going to break it in and then put it back on.
This is called DNA Shield.
It's a preservative for the DNA,
so that once it's in there, it's actually very stable.
Okay?
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
- Until it looks something like this, okay?
So everybody can see?
- Mm-hmm. - Quite dirty.
Get it quite poopy.
All right, then we open.
And then we very carefully, there's a breakpoint on here.
And it just breaks off by itself, okay?
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[Jordana] But this is what the app will look like.
And then we can go through recording all of
the information here.
[speaking in Portuguese]
- Yes, please. - See how that goes.
Oh, you did it already.
- Yeah. - All right.
- Why are we doing this?
We looked for the ghost elephants and failed.
Helicopters, camera traps, hundreds of them.
Acoustic sensors listening for them.
Still never seen one.
We've got 62 photographs now.
Took us seven years to get the first photograph.
We're here seeking the help of the Ju/’hoansi master trackers,
Xui, Xui Dawid, Kobus,
three of the last master trackers alive,
the last people that can identify an elephant
individually by its footprints, that can read this landscape
and the sands up in Angola.
The sands in the highlands, those are Kalahari sands,
same as these.
They can read them like a newspaper.
And it's with them, this year, over the next six weeks,
two months that we are going to see a ghost elephant,
a giant elephant,
and the legendary elephants the Luchaze hunters talk about
in the remotest valleys of the Source of Life,
the Lisima lya Mwono,
with these Ju/’hoansi master trackers.
That's what we're doing here.
[♪ inspirational music playing]
- I'm going to Angola, and everyone say it's good.
And everyone is happy.
My wife she is not say goodbye when you go to Angola.
Just work nice, and I will see you when you come back.
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[♪ inspirational music playing]
[Werner] In Nhoma, the village of Kobus,
Angolan trackers of the Luchaze tribe
join the expedition.
They will play an important role from now on
as guides in their homeland,
in the highlands where the ghost elephants hide.
[Steve] We're with the Angolans.
We will be very safe.
- Yeah.
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[Steve] We are going to Angola today, and, um,
so we will be saying goodbye.
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[Werner] The village chief,
here to the left of Kobus, gives permission and his
blessing for Kobus to leave.
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[singing in foreign language]
[Werner] For Xui and the San trackers,
this is a big unknown now.
The presence of the Angolan hunters eases the uncertainty
for Kobus and Xui Dawid as they enter terra incognita.
The border of Angola marks the outer limit of their world.
[singing in foreign language]
The expedition now enters an area that used to be a
battlefield in the Angolan Civil War that raged
for 27 years.
[singing in foreign language]
In the town of Kuito,
Steve Boyes meets a convoy of the foundation Lisima,
an NGO that he established for long-term conservation
in Angola.
Here, the convoy swells to nine vehicles,
two support trucks with armor plating for land mines,
and 12 motorbikes, all in logistical support of
the search camp they will establish.
[speaking in Luchaze]
[singing in foreign language]
[Werner] The convoy is headed for the town of Cangamba
to have an audience with the king of the Nkangala.
[speaking in Luchaze]
[Werner] The king's spirit meets them.
[Steve] Um, I request permission to approach the king to
give him two gifts.
I'd like to show you two pictures,
one of an elephant that is in Washington, D.C.,
capital of the United States,
and the skull of the elephant on the right
that is held there.
We believe that the last hiding place for the descendants
of this elephant is in this area.
And we saw the trails for bull elephants,
one very big one.
And that is the reason we are here,
to understand this animal.
[speaking in Luchaze]
[Steve] We would request your assistance in making this
onto an arrow much bigger,
a much bigger bow to be far away from the elephants.
And I can bring this to you now so that you can see
that it is not an arrowhead.
It is simply something that will go this far into
the skin and fall out.
[speaking in Luchaze]
[Kerllen] Put it right there in the front.
He'll pick it up and have a look.
[Steve] Okay.
[speaking in Luchaze]
- It's a special knife inherited by the Luchaze with
geometry that they've created.
This is the same as that amulet that he has in his hand.
It's for protection, not physical protection,
but spiritual protection.
And he's asking if you could, in the world that you travel,
see if it's possible, to find something like that,
but maybe double the size.
[Steve] Mm-hmm.
[Kerllen] And he would take that as a symbol
of your respect.
[singing in foreign language]
[Werner] It is seven hard days of driving from Namibia
to the Angolan highlands.
There are no roads, no bridges in a landscape,
we have to remember, the size of England.
The four-wheel drives have to be left behind.
[singing in foreign language]
[overlapping chatter]
[singing in foreign language]
It is about 100 miles now on motorbikes,
with more river crossings to come.
[singing in foreign language]
The locals have encountered crocodiles at this river.
Steve is apprehensive,
but he has been assured crocodiles would only
come after nightfall.
We are following the tracks of Luchaze tribesmen
who spend the dry season here hunting antelopes
for meat and skins.
[singing in foreign language]
A base camp is set up.
Our Namibian trackers have settled in well with
the Luchaze tribesmen.
- Oh, man.
[Werner] The motorcycles have to stay behind now in
order not to disturb the elephants.
The next 30 miles must be on foot.
There are first unmistakable signs of the
presence of elephants.
[speaking in Luchaze]
[Steve] Yeah, yeah.
[Werner] The tracks in the sand are fresh.
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[Werner] Xui has spotted the track of an individual elephant.
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[Werner] He finds a tree with recent markings.
The elephant has poked the bark with his tusk and
then rubbed his flank against it.
Elias Ngunga, the Luchaze tracker,
has found a very fresh dung sample.
[Steve] Let's get it from all over here.
Passes out the rectum.
And look at that.
But we are catching up with him.
[Werner] There is a high chance to get a complete
DNA sequence from the mucus on it.
[Steve] Mainly wood, just wood.
[Werner] Steve also collects a sample of the contents
of the dung, mostly roots and bark.
This will yield insight into the habitat of
the ghost elephants.
Steve, the scientist, has to be quick.
He has to share his treasure with dung beetles,
who appear almost instantly.
The beetle, in turn, has to compete with flies.
The scarabaeus beetle was sacred to the ancient Egyptians.
It had the task of rolling the sun across the sky.
The camp closest to the ghost elephants is
used by Luchaze hunters,
smoking fires and drying meat of antelopes everywhere.
The arrowhead for collecting a sample of the skin of
a ghost elephant is being made ready.
[speaking in Luchaze]
[Werner] This is Antonio Luhoke,
the Luchaze hunter who has accompanied Steve on
many prior expeditions.
[speaking in Luchaze]
[whistling]
[Werner] Next day, traces of a very, very large
elephant were found.
[Steve] This one here. Here, try that one.
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[Steve] That's the highest point.
[Xui] Yes.
[Steve] Wow. There's a big rubbing.
Is that the shoulder height?
[speaking Portuguese]
[Steve] So that's, nine, ten foot.
That's like a big elephant in the Okavango,
like that one we saw.
But it's the top of the shoulder or here?
[speaking Portuguese]
- Under? - Mm.
- So maybe one more foot.
[speaking Portuguese]
- And, is it a, a male or a female?
[speaking Portuguese]
- It must be a male, a bull.
- They believe it's a herd of 16 elephants.
And there's several big males walking in front.
One in front and three or four on the sides protect them.
And there's one or two that have broken their tusks already.
[Steve] Mm.
[Kerllen] And he believes this is one of the four
that are on the side,
paving the way for the herd to come.
- They were talking about, over here, is that height.
And the shoulder.
- Shoulder. - There.
- Yeah. - And he's like that.
- Oh.
[Steve] It's a good 11-foot.
I mean, it's bigger than what we have in Botswana.
[Kerllen] What's standard big in Botswana?
- Ten-foot standard. You don't get bigger.
And that's an eight-ton, seven-ton elephant.
The Fenykovi was 13 tons.
So, like, you're talking about a, yeah.
[Kerllen] Nine to ten?
- Yeah, a nine to ten-ton elephant, yeah.
[Werner] Xui and Xui Dawid discover something else
overlooked by everyone.
This elephant hair will become part of the forensic evidence.
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[Werner] Xui explains here how the elephant has
moved into the wet peatland.
- He obviously heard us coming.
So it's, since the big rain, after the small rain,
he walked through here,
and he actually ran through here.
See this footprint?
And ran, not along the channel,
straight to where Tony is there.
We've got two cameras, so I think the first one
will go there.
Okay.
Here or.
[Werner] As sophisticated as this contraption is,
it never captured any of the ghost elephants.
In the end, the whole thing will come down
to hand-held cell phones.
[♪ pensive music playing]
Among the companions of the night is this spider.
It is poisonous,
and the young teeming on its back are equally poisonous.
The spider was weird enough, but the next morning,
I believed I was still dreaming of demons.
[♪ mystical music playing]
- No, it's been, we, in the beginning,
six days behind him.
One day behind the breeding herd.
Yesterday, we were right behind the breeding herd,
literally chasing them.
They're smelling us with the wind.
That's what the team's done, go around.
Now we are, they're probably with them.
And we're one hour,
two hours, three hours behind this guy.
So we're catching up.
[Werner] But then, unexpected luck would strike.
Each morning, separate teams would venture out.
Here, Elias and António.
The camera filmed them only leaving the camp and
then joined Steve and Kerllen.
- I think it was in his pocket.
[Werner] Suddenly, Elias and António spot the biggest
of all ghost elephants,
the vague gray shape between the leaves.
António only has time to start his cell phone camera.
And then he scrambles to find a better position.
And now, for seconds only, we catch a glimpse.
Then the elephant bull is going away.
[Steve] They took a picture?
[Kerllen] They took a picture.
[Steve] May I see the picture?
[Werner] Was this it?
Was this worth the ten-year search and
the arduous expedition?
Was this the proof?
Was this the truth?
In a way, yes, but the accountant's truth at best.
Yes, the ghost elephants exist.
We have the forensic proof because one of them was
captured on an otherwise disappointing video.
[speaking Portuguese]
[Steve] This one?
[speaking Portuguese]
[Werner] It was certainly the biggest elephant bull.
Its shoulder height indicates that this is the largest known
elephant in Africa and hence, the largest land mammal
on our planet.
[singing in Luchaze]
[Werner] Two days' rest.
[singing in Luchaze]
[singing in Ju/'hoansi]
[Werner] And then Steve will get lucky.
- Just saying to Gary and Xui that we heard
an elephant up over this ridge here.
Just gonna go look if we can see the tracks,
which one it was.
[♪ mysterious music playing]
[Werner] After less than two hours' march,
the San trackers catch a glimpse of an elephant.
Our professional camera stayed slightly behind,
and, thus, what we see was shot by Steve on
his cell phone.
[♪ mysterious music playing]
Xui cautiously shoots his arrow.
[♪ mysterious music playing]
They retrieve the tip of the arrow that was meant
to collect the DNA sample.
[Steve] Ah. Oh.
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
- I couldn't see it properly.
I think it, I think it bounced off the elephant or missed it.
But we got, when it hit the ground, certainly,
it took some sand in.
But the elephant is right here.
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
- I think you said it came off the rump. Yeah.
- Yeah.
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[Steve] How's the elephant now?
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[Werner] It made the elephant flee,
and so the whole idea with the arrow was given
up for good.
[Steve] How it looks.
[Werner] But Steve got his reward.
He got his clean shot.
[Steve] This is the.
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
- Steve, Steve, Steve, Steve!
[Werner] Xui, still excited, gives an account of how he
alerted Steve to the elephant.
[speaking in Ju/'hoansi]
[Werner] After the first excitement had subsided,
Steve was again confronted with a question whether
it might have been better never to have
encountered the ghost elephants.
Were they not possibly better as a rainbow,
as a mirage in the sky?
And yet, he did encounter one of them for real.
This reality was undeniable.
Steve would have to live with his success.
- This is the one by himself.
In the water tower, in this place.
[Werner] And another reality set in, the rain.
The expedition would have to return before the peatlands and
rivers would become impassable.
[Steve] The Source of Life, huh?
[singing in foreign language]
[thunder]
[Werner] Now the time had come to return and secure the loot,
the biological samples of the ghost elephants.
The Smithsonian had given permission to extract a DNA
sample from Henry in order to compare it with Steve's samples.
- Now, where will we be taking the sample from?
- I think we'll aim for somewhere around here or in, uh,
where the tusks are from.
And I'll collect the samples,
but I'll have to get my team in to help.
[Werner] Melissa Hawkins was assigned to this task.
- I'll stand back, and thank you for doing this.
- Okay, great.
[Werner] Mary Faith Flores will assist her through
the next steps.
At the base of one of the molars,
she was able to find tissue that,
even after 70 years,
was still fresh enough to be promising.
The next procedures have to be performed in a
completely sterile environment.
These here are Henry's tissue samples.
Melissa and Mary will extract the DNA here.
And now Steve delivers mucus and dung samples from the ghost
elephants to Katherine Solari of Stanford University.
In the background, Dmitri Petrov,
the mastermind behind Stanford's genomic programs.
- These samples are literally out of the elephant,
just a few weeks ago.
Um, four of them, five of them are from the actual
ghost elephant bull.
So I'm going to hand them over.
But you see, um,
this is one of the ones from the bull itself.
- Perfect.
We're just gonna bead-bash it in order to open up all
of the cells and release all of the DNA so that we
can see everything that's in there,
what they're eating,
as well as samples from the DNA of the elephant.
[machine whirring]
This is the sequencing machine.
And it's very state-of-the-art,
worth well over a million dollars.
- This is where our ghost elephant samples will go?
- Yes, exactly.
This is where they'll end up.
They'll go through a number of steps from what we saw earlier
to end up on here, but this is where they end up and
where the data is generated.
And this machine creates six billion sequencing reads.
[Steve] Six billion.
So 6,000 million DNA sequences.
- It's a lot of data. - Yeah?
- So I have it set up here to show you.
So, here, each line is a read.
This is 150.
- That's a lot of letters. - Letters long. And then.
- So you're talking about six billion of these lines?
- Six billion. - Outputted by this machine.
- Exactly. - From the elephant-dung samples.
- Exactly. - This is mitochondrial?
- This is all DNA. - All DNA?
It's just everything that's in there?
And what are you going to do with this data?
[Katherine] So this is an example of that data a little
bit more processed.
So here it's all aligned and mapped.
[Steve] Okay.
[Katherine] And here, you can see this is one elephant.
This is a second elephant.
[Werner] To find the anomalies, here marked in yellow,
would be impossible for humans.
From the billions of lines, a computer program identifies the
differences between two specimens.
[Katherine] Elephant down here versus this elephant up here.
[Werner] This is the University of California, Riverside.
The final step in Steve's research will be done here to
compare the DNA of the ghost elephant's with Henry
and other lineages.
- Steve, hi.
[Werner] This leads him to Ellie Armstrong.
- Great to see you. - Good to meet you in person.
- I brought something out for you.
- Thank you very much.
- It's 'cause I knew you were coming.
- Well, you knew that we went to Smithsonian.
- Absolutely.
- And we dug around just below the teeth,
took out some tissue.
And the objective is to compare that to the fresh samples
I brought from Angola.
- What we'll be able to do with these is really be
able to trace the history of these elephants.
So, with the historic specimen,
there are some things that we know about it,
like where it was collected,
but there are some things that we obviously
don't know about it,
especially in relation to the elephants that you've
collected from Angola.
And so what we'll be able to tell is what population this
elephant was from,
whether it was more related to forest elephants
or other species of elephants, or how different it is from the
elephants that we're currently seeing.
- I've interacted with thousands of elephants in my life.
- Mm-hmm.
- I've never seen elephants like this.
They've got long legs. They're very tall.
They've got small feet compared to their size.
They live at altitude.
I mean, if you were to take a savanna elephant nor a bush
elephant from the Okavango Delta and put them up there,
they would not survive.
I mean, is it crazy to think that they are, like a,
not a subspecies or, um.
- Yeah, they're. - Something completely different?
- We'll be able to trace that using the genetic DNA.
So we'll be able to understand whether this is sort of a
lineage that has descended from some of these historic lineages
that you've been able to sample at the Smithsonian or whether
this is something that's totally new and never
has been sampled.
And that's what's so great with genetic sequencing.
You know, sometimes we get species that we can't tell them
apart just by looking at them.
But once we look in the genome,
we know that they're actually distinct.
When we sequence a genome,
we're sequencing about three billion base pairs
of DNA.
And we have to put this into supercomputers and then process
all of the data.
Um, so, usually, this takes on the order of about
six months to a year.
Um, and that's because we have to pull in all of
the genetic data
that's already been sequenced for elephants so that we
contextualize the data that you have brought back and
got for us.
The first time we do it, it takes a long time.
But then the second and the third time we do it,
it starts becoming very quick.
[Werner] Her findings, long down the line,
will be published in scientific journals.
I was puzzled by the array of dead birds
for scientific research.
They appeared like Egyptian mummies in eternal sleep.
But how can we keep the dwindling diversity
of species alive?
[singing in foreign language]
Can the ghost elephants be kept alive long into the future?
Policing their survival through armed rangers has only slowed
down their dramatic decline in numbers.
On his way back from his expedition,
Steve had another fascinating audience with a local king.
His deep-rooted traditions may hold the key to the protection
and survival of the ghost elephants.
Everything is formalized.
First, he grants permission to hear the report
of the expedition.
[clapping rhythmically]
[speaking in Luchaze]
[Werner] One of the king's own hunters,
who was part of the expedition,
narrates the events day by day.
[speaking in Luchaze]
[Werner] And now the king speaks.
He reminds us of the elephants by narrating the origin
myth of his people.
[speaking in Luchaze]
[Werner] Kerllen translates why elephants belong to the tribe.
[Kerllen] When those hunters went to hunt,
there was one small elephant at the back of the herd.
This elephant, a small elephant came to the Kwango River.
And as it got to the river,
it started taking off his skin of elephant.
And as he took off the skin,
the hunter could see that it was a woman.
And he helped her take off all of the elephant skin.
And with the woman,
he came running all the way to here,
the kingdom of the Nkangala.
He kept that woman as a wife.
They reproduced with that woman.
And that's why he's telling you that the elephants are
part of the people.
So that's why you see that when you ask for
permission to the king, before we left,
because we asked permission, he kneeled.
And he did the ritual to connect to the ancestors,
asking permission.
And they allowed you to see the elephant.
That's why you managed to see the elephants.
Those elephants you will not see if you do not ask
permission to the king and the king to his ancestors.
- Okay.
[clapping]
[singing in foreign language]
[Werner] Is there hope in the enduring power of African myth
that humans and elephants belong together?
Will the landscape enshroud the ghost elephants
for a long, long time?
Probably not.
But the power of traditions will not easily fade away.
And what is striking is that both Steve and the tribal
elders firmly believe that if the elephants disappear,
this would be the harbinger of our disappearance as well.
Life would go on but without us.
[singing in Ju/'hoansi]
[♪ somber music playing]