Mermaids: The Body Found bản tốc ký tiếng Anh – English transcript
Monday, December 1, 2014 12:07
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this is the fourth incident of its kind in recent months
in the same part of southern australia,
and scientists really don’t know why it’s happening.
this was happening all over the world.
so now we’re following beachings elsewhere.
we alerted marine agencies
to what we discovered with the sonar blasts.
and we begin hearing about other things –
reports of bodies washing up with the whales,
rumors of something else washing up with them.
and in every case,
there was always authorities on hand to control the scene.
but at the time, we just wanted
to stop the beachings from ever happening again.
narrator: in some of these events,
not only were there reports of bodies being found,
but something else.
these had been reported before.
not bodies…but spears.
for years, deep-sea fishermen all over the world
have found them –
found them in fish… caught in the open ocean.
german news archives contain an interview with a fisherman
who had his own experience with this strange phenomenon.
[ speaking german ]
we petitioned the department of defense for information,
and we sought injunctions against the navy,
but it didn’t get us anywhere.
the navy claimed that they were merely studying the anomalies,
that they weren’t the cause of them.
we continued to build profiles of these events,
and we went over the one thing we did have,
which was the recording.
we listened to and analyzed this recording
i don’t know how many times.
and we made comparisons with whales and dolphins.
[ dolphins clicking ]
but this thing, to our ears,
sounded much more intricate, much more advanced.
and we thought we had a reasonable chance
to crack the code.
but it was still beyond us. we needed help.
dr. webster: my name is dr. rodney webster.
i’m currently at the university of south florida.
i specialize in animal communications.
i focus mainly on the field
of cetacean vocalizations — dolphins and whales.
a lot of what i do in my work is i search for signifiers,
which are, you know, particular sounds
to which you can attach meaning or a mood.
you and i would refer to them as words.
so they’re words for dolphins.
[ dolphins clicking ]
what’s so interesting about the 2004 recording
is that i could identify literally hundreds of signifiers
and arrange these into recognizable patterns.
we had not gathered this kind of information
in the previous 30 years of studying dolphins and whales.
narrator: but that wasn’t all
that dr. webster found in their recording.
i noticed that there were some pitch changes in the bloop
at certain parts of the recording,
so i ran a spectrogram analysis of the data
and in the frequencies
that were above the range of human hearing.
and this is what i found.
this is it at original speed
with the whale sounds removed.
[ howling ]
i then slowed the recording down
into the range of human hearing.
here it is at 1/3 of its original speed.
[ howling, chattering ]
multiple individuals,
literally thousands of different signifiers.
at least a half-dozen individual voice prints.
so…what you see here is language.
they’re talking to one another.
[ chattering continues ]
dr. robertson: what animal
could possibly have a language so complex, so sophisticated?
our theory was this was a new species of dolphin.
but there’s another theory we should have considered sooner –
the aquatic ape theory.
it’s a theory about us, really, about where we come from.
and i know it’s always been controversial,
but now i think there’s really something to it.
why are we so different from other terrestrial animals?
according to the theory, it’s because there was a time
when early humans spent much of their lives in the sea.
and the traits that make us so different
from other land animals are a legacy from this period.
we can control our breathing, like marine mammals,
and hold our breath longer than any other land animal.
the human record for breath holding is nearly 20 minutes.
that’s almost as long as a dolphin can dive.
compared to our closest relatives, the apes,
we have a much more flexible spine.
and we have partial webbing between our fingers and toes
that they don’t have.
these are features for an aquatic environment.
why have them unless to help us swim?
and human babies
hold their breath underwater automatically.
they instinctively know how to swim,
whereas a baby chimp or gorilla would drown.
and unlike other apes, we shed our hair.
hair creates drag in water.
and we have a thick layer of insulating fat
that keeps us warm in water.
the only other animals born with as thick a fat layer
are exclusively marine mammals.
some humans are so well-adapted for life underwater
that they still hunt at the bottom of the sea,
walking across the ocean floor.
the moken people of southeast asia
can contract their pupils at will
to control for water distortion.
they actually see underwater
as clearly as if they were wearing a mask.
and in some places in the world,
humans are still so proficient in the water
that they can catch fish without hooks or nets.
all these adaptations for life in the water,
but we lack adaptations
that are commonplace in other land animals.
we shed salty tears and sweat.
salt and water are valuable resources.
other land animals
have efficient ways of conserving them.
we don’t. why?
because part of our evolution took place in the sea.
now, this is all theoretical,
but the land-to-sea transition has happened before.
it’s documented science.
orcas have evolved from a wolf-like ancestor
millions of years ago,
and there are more recent examples.
150,000 years ago, a fractional amount of evolutionary time,
a group of brown bears split from the rest of their line.
they evolved into a new species.
they became polar bears.
polar bears are capable of holding their breath
for minutes at a time underwater.
they’ve even developed webbing in their front paws
to help them swim.
they are currently, before our eyes,
evolving into marine mammals.
and if this is happening to polar bears now,
why couldn’t this have happened to the human line
at some point in our evolution?
narrator: could we be descended from a group of apes
that were once becoming marine mammals?
[ grunts ]
some scientists believe our ancestors
left the forest for the sea.
but what pulled them here?
what drew them to the water’s edge?
it was food.
it is even thought our ability to walk fully upright
first evolved here,
wading in the shallows where food was easily found.
the trees had been our cradle,
but now we would be shaped by the sea.
over time, more human ancestors collected along the shoreline.
it is even thought
that this is where our advanced intelligence began to develop.
brain-building nutrients like iodine and fatty acids
were abundant in the crustaceans and shellfish
that could be gathered here.
we were beginning to change, and so was the environment.
[ rumbling ]
[ grunts ]
narrator: earthquakes, volcanic activity along the coast.
the east african coast would soon be flooded over
by a rising sea.
some of our ancestors pulled inland,
retaining some of the features they’d adapted
during this aquatic period of their evolution.
others went in a different direction.
if our distant ancestors spent time living in the sea,
is it possible that one group split off from the rest?
and rather than retreating from the water,
did they go deeper in?
the aquatic ape theory seems convincing,
but is it the full story?
immediately following this broadcast,
join me for a live interview with dr. paul robertson,
and witness new evidence being revealed here tonight
for the very first time.
see you after the program.
we detailed every stranding
that followed the washington state event,
trying to establish a pattern of naval involvement.
if we could prove that this was a new species being affected,
we figured that this might give us leverage,
that we could compel the navy
to divulge what they’re doing and possibly stop it.
we had strong circumstantial evidence,
but we would need more.
and that’s what the south african beaching gave us.
what made this beaching stand out
was that our south african colleagues
had made a recording of their own.
dr. dittmar: well, we, of course, had heard
of the work of dr. mccormick.
we’d heard the reports
linking large-scale beachings to sonic events.
and we’d also heard the rumors that such an event
may have affected a species as yet unidentified to science.
and, of course, we heard of the bloop recording.
my name is dr. gavin dittmar.
i am the head of acoustic research
at the marine biology research center
at the university of cape town.
we had an underwater array
just about a kilometer off the tip of cape town.
and this was part of a research program
to monitor whale populations at certain times of the year.
[ clicking ]
that’s why we contacted dr. mccormick.
we now believed that we had found the same thing.
[ birds cawing ]
dr. robertson: when we heard that recording,
we immediately accepted an invitation
to make a research visit.
we arrived about 40 hours after the event.
and, again, we weren’t the first.
other…official investigators had already come and gone.
dr. davis: the south african beaching
was the biggest since the washington state event.
and here again,
we were seeing the exact same patterns of sonic trauma.
what was different in south africa was the recording itself.
here we had another bloop signature,
the same mystery creature that we recorded.
we had the same low-frequency sonic blast.
but here, it was what happened before the blast
that was revealing.
[ howling, clicking ]
here was a bloop call similar to the one we recorded.
it was obviously the same kind of creature.
and this time, there was dolphin chatter on the recording.
not surprising — dolphins are in these waters,
and they get stranded in these events as well.
[ clicking ]
but here, there was communication,