Old Fires/New Frontiers Trivia Quiz

Answer: South Africa

Berger graduated from Southern Georgia University in 1989 and then moved to South Africa to study palaeoanthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand ('Wits') in South Africa on the doctoral level. He remained in South Africa after gaining his doctorate and remained attached to Wits.

At Malapa, he discovered an Australopithecus sediba type site. This is his most noteworthy discovery. He led the Rising Star Expedition which involved the excavation of Homo naledi in the cave system. He has also led excavations at Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, and Gladysvale.

Berger is a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence and has been a very public persona in palaeoanthropology. In 2016, he was named one of the "100 most influential people" by "Time" magazine.

This question was dug up by Phoenix Rising member tazman6619.

Answer: Marina Elliott

Marina Elliott is a Canadian biological anthropologist. In 2013, towards the end of her graduate studies, she answered a Facebook advertisement by paleoanthropologist Lee Berger seeking small-sized people for cave exploration. She was signed on and soon embarked on an excavation expedition to the Rising Star cave that Berger was interested in. Squeezing through an eight-inch-wide chute in the interior of the Rising Star cave, she dropped into a chamber littered with fossil bones. Further analysis revealed that the bones belonged to a new species of human ancestor, which the Berger team named Homo naledi.

Technically, the discovery was made by two recreational cavers who informed Berger of their findings. As the cavers were inexperienced in excavating delicate fossils while Berger wasn't small enough to crawl through the narrow passageway of the cave (8-10 inches wide along some stretches), Marina Elliott was recruited for the job.

Marina Elliott is a 2016 National Geographic Emerging Explorer.

This question was unearthed by Phoenix Rising team player purelyqing.

Answer: Sarah Parcak

Meet the modern version of Indiana Jones, more Silicon Valley than Valley of the Kings. Sarah, who holds a professorship at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has used a host of modern technological and futuristic tools to uncover ancient sites in places such as Egypt, Romania, Tunisia and Italy. Perched in front of banks of computer screens she doesn't have to worry about being sun-smart or the threat of inhaling some ancient fungal disease out in the field. The surface detection methods that were evident in the 1981 film "Raiders of the Lost Ark" are not for this lady... speaking of which, did I tell you that, using her methods, she'd uncovered the city grid of Tanis, famously sought after in that film. In 2016 she uncovered a possible second Viking landing site in North America near Newfoundland and, in 2017, launched a crowd-sourcing appeal to raise money to set on a satellite mapping mission of Peru. Sarah is setting new standards in the field of archaeology; where diggers of the past dug out lots of two metres square, Sarah is looking for her field from the heavens. Where diggers sifted through sand Sarah now sifts through pixels.

This research was dug up and collated by Phoenix Rising team member pollucci19.

Answer: M Jackson

M Jackson (yes, her name is "M") studies glaciers and climate change and the diverse interactions between people and ice. Her 2015 book, "While Glaciers Slept: Being Human in a Time of Climate Change", expresses the idea that people transform as climate and landscapes transform. M believes that we need to try to understand the complexities of that transformational relationship, rather than reducing climate change to processes devoid of human context.

M earned her Master of Science at the University of Montana and a doctorate in geography and glaciology at the University of Oregon. She moved to southeast Alaska in her early twenties and spent more than a decade leading expeditions into the 'back country' of Alaska and the Yukon. It is there that she became aware of the human geography associated with glacial change.

This question was carved out by Phoenix Rising team member JCSon.

Answer: David Gruber

David Gruber's interest in fluorescent life was sparked when he was photographing a coral reef for a museum exhibit. One of the photographs captured the image of an intensely fluorescent eel. This intrigued Gruber, and he and his team set off to find this creature in its natural habitat. Besides the fluorescent eel, they also found several other species of fluorescent life. To aid his deep-sea exploration, Gruber develops equipment that is capable of collecting specimens underwater and capturing fluorescent images. He hopes that his work can help advance medical science by discovering more fluorescent proteins that could potentially allow researchers to see inside a cell.

David Gruber is a 2014 National Geographic Emerging Explorer.

This question was brought to light by Phoenix Rising team member purelyqing.

Answer: Brian Skerry

Brian Skerry's specialty is the ocean and he is world renowned for providing us with extraordinary images of its underwater environments and the creatures that reside within its depths. Not only does he use his photography skills to introduce us to the diversity, the beauty, the magic and the surrealism of an environment that, for many of us, remains a mystery but he also captures and brings to our attention the harm that we humans cause to the sea and its inhabitants. In his thirty plus years as a photographer Skerry has spent more than 10,000 hours underwater, in environments that range from pristine coral reefs to our polar ice fields. One of his images has been honoured by the National Geographic, in 2010, as one of the "50 Greatest Photographs of All Time" and in 2012 Skerry received the Peter Benchley Award for excellence in media.

This question was snapped and posted by Rising Phoenix team member pollucci19.

Answer: Far western Brazilian rainforest

Celine Cousteau's pedigree is the daughter of filmmaker Jean-Michel Cousteau and the granddaughter of the great undersea explorer, Jacques Cousteau. In her own right Celine is an adventurer and filmmaker who specialises in documentaries. Her most ambitious project was to bring to light the plight of the Vale do Javari peoples who live in the Brazilian Amazon close to the Peruvian border. The indigenous people wanted the world to know about their increasing rates of Hepatitis B, imported from external human contact, and the threat posed by oil exploitation to their land rights and their way of life.

Her documentary has discovered that there are approximately 5,000 indigenous people through this area spread through five ethnic tribes but the majority of these are uncontactable. The existence of a number of these villages, which represent one of the largest concentrations of isolated villages in the world, have only been uncovered by flyovers.

Cousteau's documentary "Tribes on the Edge" was released in late 2017.

This question was searched for and documented by Phoenix Rising member 1nn1.

Answer: Mars

Bethany Ehlmann obtained her PhD and Master's in geological sciences from Brown University, and has Master's degrees in Environmental Change & Management and Geography from the University of Oxford. She holds joint positions as a professor in the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) and as a research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory owned by NASA. Her work explores the environmental history of Mars and she is particularly interested in how water shaped the Martian environment. Ehlmann is a part of the Mars Exploration Rover mission that began in 2003. She is involved in mission operations and data analysis. Ehlmann's findings shed light on past Martian environments and whether there could possibly be or have been life on Mars.

Bethany Ehlmann is a 2013 National Geographic Emerging Explorer.

This question was explored with Phoenix Rising team member purelyqing.

Answer: Genghis Khan

Legend has it that Genghis Khan requested that after his death he be buried in an unmarked grave along with his six cats. Many believe his tomb to be in an area of Mongolia known as the Forbidden Zone, which covers a region of 90 square miles. Their logic extends from the tale of a group of 50 battle hardened warriors who settled here with their families and the instructions to kill any trespassers, except for the Great Khan's funeral procession. To date (2018) the tomb of Genghis Khan has not been found.

Dr. Albert Lin plans to change all that and has launched a multi-institutional, technologically enabled search for the legendary tomb. Using monies raised from a crowd-funding platform and working with the Mongolian Institute for Science, the University of California and the National Geographic Society he first got permission to work within this "sacred area". This was granted on the proviso that his group worked the site without the destructive elements of site digging. Lin and his team spent three weeks living on goat stew, goat bread and fermented horse milk and utilized GPS, unmanned vehicle flyovers and satellite imaging to survey and map the site. This new world data was then taken to California where it was converted into three dimensional images, which were then projected into Lin's five-walled StarCAVE (Cave Automated Virtual Environment) that enabled him to investigate the landscape for anomalies at his own pace. He and his team have identified over a dozen potential sites that they will revisit and investigate using non-invasive sub-surface imaging.

There is another legend that indicates that disturbing the Khan's tomb will bring forth the apocalypse. On the day that Albert and his team left Mongolia, the area they'd worked in was hit by its biggest rainstorm in forty years. Is Dr. Albert getting too close?

This question was excavated by Phoenix Rising team member pollucci19.

Answer: Gene Savoy

Dubbed Real Indiana Jones in 1985 by People magazine, Douglas Eugene Savoy was an adventurer and explorer whose determination to locate Eldorado let to the discovery of many important treasures, including Espíritu Pampa and the extensive site of Gran Vilaya. He also undertook a number of sea voyages to prove that ancient cultures could have been in communication.

However, Savoy was severely criticized as irresponsible by more serious and methodical explorers of Peru, who deplored Savoy's actions in publicizing the locations of many of his finds without securing them. One in particular is the pre-Incan metropolis Gran Saposoa, ruins founds in Andean cloud forests and whose location had already been recorded by other explorers. The location of the ruins was released in 1999 by Savoy and was subsequently looted by black marketeers.

He was, by a number of accounts, something of an oddball. He founded his own religion, did things his own way and was known to use his discoveries to validate his own eccentric theories.

This question was secured before being publicized by Phoenix Rising member VegemiteKid.