We’ll sift through 2021 with Whitney Johnson, National Geographic’s director of visuals and immersive experiences, as she works on the “Year in Pictures” special issue and shares what makes an unforgettable image. And we’ll talk with photographers who documented the COVID-19 pandemic and the spread of California wildfires among other key moments of the year.

For more information on this episode, visit nationalgeographic.com/overheard. 

Want more?

Lynsey Addario followed around a group of women firefighters this summer. Meet them in our article. And check out writer Alejandra Borunda’s piece on how land managers are using new strategies to help control wildfires.

Also explore:

To see Muhammad Fadli’s photos, take a look at our article on COVID-19 in Indonesia.

For subscribers: 

See how we summed up 2021 in the “Year in Pictures.” It hits newsstands December 15.

Take a look at Muhammad Fadli’s work in a 2020 article that showed how the pandemic affected communities all over the world.  

Learn the backstory of eight National Geographic photos that made an impact, including the image of the Peruvian shepherd.

Plus, read about our famous wall of photos at headquarters in an essay I wrote for our photography newsletter.

If you like what you hear and you want to support more content like this, please rate and review us in your podcast app AND consider a National Geographic subscription. That’s the best way to support Overheard. Go to natgeo.com/exploremore to subscribe. 

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How did people create Cahokia, an ancient American Indian metropolis near present-day St. Louis? And why did they abandon it? Archaeologists are piecing together the answers—but Cahokia’s story isn’t finished yet. Hear how an Osage anthropologist is protecting the remaining burial mounds and sacred shrines so the descendants of Cahokia’s founders can keep its legacy alive.

For more information on this episode, visit natgeo.com/overheard.

Want more?

Learn more about Cahokia—and see depictions of America’s first city, as well as artifacts left behind—in National Geographic History.

See more stunning finds that unlock our deepest history in the new book Lost Cities, Ancient Tombs: 100 Discoveries That Changed the World. Subscribers can read more about the two centuries of excavation on six continents that give voice to humanity’s forgotten past.

Also explore:

Why did people abandon Cahokia? New research rules out a theory that environmental degradation led to its demise and shows the limits of using a modern, Western lens to study the ancient city.

Learn more about Picture Cave—the Osage “womb of the universe”—in the book Picture Cave: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Mississippian Cosmos by Carol Diaz-Granados and Jim Duncan.

Osage photographer Ryan RedCorn has a message about American Indian culture: “The state of things is not in decline.”

Grisly discoveries of unmarked graves at U.S. and Canadian boarding schools have forced a reckoning over government-funded programs that were designed to strip Native American children of their language and culture—and even their names.

If you like what you hear and want to support more content like this, please consider a National Geographic subscription. Go to natgeo.com/exploremore to subscribe today.

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In the heart of the Serengeti, hippos bathe and hyenas snatch food from hungry lions. National Geographic Explorer of the Year Paula Kahumbu brings this world to life in her documentary series Wildlife Warriors, a nature show made by Kenyans for Kenyans. Host Peter Gwin meets up with Paula in the Serengeti to learn how she became an unlikely TV star, and why it’s up to local wildlife warriors—not foreign scientists or tourists—to preserve Africa’s wild landscapes.

For more info on this episode, visit natgeo.com/overheard

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See the Serengeti like never before in the December 2021 issue of National Geographic. Along with heart-stopping wildlife photos, subscribers can go inside the planet’s largest animal migration: the perilous 400-mile circuit of the wildebeest.

Subscribers can also meet a Maasai spiritual leader who protects a remote mountain forest, and read Paula Kahumbu’s essay on the future of African conservation.

Don’t miss Welcome to Earth, a Disney+ original series from National Geographic, where Will Smith is led on an epic adventure around the world to explore Earth’s greatest wonders, including the Serengeti. All six episodes stream December 8th, only on Disney+.

Also explore:

Watch episodes of Wildlife Warriors on its YouTube channel, WildlifeWarriorsTV.

Learn more about the wildlife that makes the Serengeti irreplaceable. African elephants are “ecosystem engineers” who shape their own habitat. Hippopotamuses spend up to 16 hours a day submerged in water—that’s why their name comes from the Greek for “river horse.”

If you like what you hear and want to support more content like this, please consider a National Geographic subscription. Go to natgeo.com/exploremore to subscribe today.

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When Jacques Cousteau was young, an accident sent him on a path that led him to invent scuba, opening up the underwater world to humans. Today, explorers David Doubilet and Laurent Ballesta follow in his footsteps, making discoveries on their own amazing and sometimes terrifying adventures.

For more information on this episode, visit nationalgeographic.com/overheard. 

Want more?

Learn more about Jacques Cousteau. From National Geographic Documentary Films, Becoming Cousteau is now streaming on Disney+.

See more of Laurent Ballesta’s photographs, including an image he took of a grouper mating frenzy that recently won him the Wildlife Photographer of the Year award from the London Natural History Museum. 

Also explore: 

David Doubilet has been taking photos for Nat Geo for decades. If you want a list of his greatest hits, check out our article “32 Astonishing Photos of A Career Spent Underwater.” 

And check out his new book out this month with some spectacular underwater images. It’s called “Two Worlds: Above and Below the Sea.”

For subscribers: 

For Nat Geo subscribers, you can also read about the time Laurent and a small crew of explorers spent 28 days living underwater in the Mediterranean Sea.  

If you like what you hear and want to support more content like this, please rate and review us in your podcast app and consider a National Geographic subscription. That’s the best way to support Overheard. Go to natgeo.com/exploremore to subscribe.

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Sound on! From conch shells to bone flutes, humans have been making musical instruments for tens of thousands of years. What did prehistoric music sound like? Follow us on a journey to find the oldest musical instruments and combine them into one big orchestra of human history.

For more information on this episode, visit natgeo.com/overheard 

Want More?

A conch is more than just a musical instrument. A mollusk lives in that shell, and it’s a staple food in the Bahamas—so much so that overfishing is threatening their existence, but a few simple solutions may solve the problem.

The oldest musical instrument was once thought to be a cave bear bone flute made by Neanderthals, but recent evidence suggests that the holes were made by animals rather than tools.

More information about each instrument

The organization First Sounds found and brought to life the recordings of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. For more information about that project, please visit www.firstsounds.org.

Bettina Joy de Guzman travels the world, composing and performing music on ancient instruments. You can read more about her work on her website: www.bettinajoydeguzman.com

More information about the bells of Bronze Age China can be found at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art. A virtual version of their collection can be viewed here: https://asia.si.edu/exhibition/resound-ancient-bells-of-china/

(Credit: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; gift of Arthur M. Sackler, S1987.4-9)

The conch shell sounds you heard were research recordings of the approximately 3,000-year-old Titanostrombus galeatus conch shell horn—excavated in 2018 by John Rick and team from the UNESCO World Heritage archaeological site Chavín de Huántar, in Perú—from a 2019 acoustics and performance study by Miriam Kolar, Riemann Ramírez Rodríguez, Ricardo Guerrero de Luna Rueda, Obert Silva Espinoza, and Ronald San Miguel Fernández. Recordings were made at the Centro Internacional de Investigación, Conservación y Restauración de Chavín (CIICR) in the Museo Nacional Chavín as research conducted within the Programa de Investigación Arqueológica y Conservación Chavín de Huántar (PIACCdH). Site music archaeology and archaeoacoustics research information can be found on the Chavín de Huántar Archaeological Acoustics project website: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/groups/chavin/pututus.html.

National Geographic Explorer Jahawi Bertolli is collecting the sounds of rock gongs from all over the African continent. More information about his rock project can be found here: www.jahawi.com/first-rock

Flutist Anna Potengowski specializes in recreating the sounds of ancient flutes. You can hear more of her work here: open.spotify.com/artist/4a9uIQ2g8A5BIDN1VExUZq

If you like what you hear and want to support more content like this, please consider a National Geographic subscription. Go to natgeo.com/exploremore to subscribe today.

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National Geographic photographer Diana Markosian tells us about her remarkable childhood and how her career as a photographer led her into the war in Chechnya—and eventually to her long-lost father’s doorstep in Armenia.

For more info on this episode, visit natgeo.com/overheard

Want More?  

Check out Diana’s film Santa Barbara, which is showing at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art until Dec. 12 and the International Center of Photography until Jan. 10.

Read her account of finding her father, grandfather, and a piece of herself in Armenia. 

And to see more of her photos, follow her on Instagram @markosian.

For subscribers: 

See Diana’s photographs showing how a Wisconsin high school graduated its seniors in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

And her portraits of a small town in Oregon that was destroyed by wildfires in September 2020 and a resident who lost her home.  

If you like what you hear and want to support more content like this, please consider a National Geographic subscription. Go to natgeo.com/exploremore to subscribe today.

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There's a lost continent waiting to be explored, and it’s right below our feet. We’ll dig into the deep, human relationship to the underground, and why we understand it from an instinctive point of view — but not so much from a physical one. (Hint: we’re afraid of the dark.) National Geographic photographer, Tamara Merino, will take us subterranean in Utah, Australia, and Spain where modern-day cave dwellers teach us how to escape the heat.  

For more information on this episode, visit natgeo.com/overheard 

Want more?

Go belowground with National Geographic Explorer Tamara Merino to see how these communities have been living—quite comfortably—for a very long time. 

In Vietnam photojournalist and National Geographic Explorer Martin Edström created 360 images of the world’s largest cave, Son Doong. It’s so big that a forest grows inside of it.

Ever zip-line to a remote island? Cartographers did, 30 miles west of San Francisco. What did they see when they mapped the hard-to-reach landform known as the Farallon Islands? Caves.

China is home to some of the most intricate cave systems on the planet. These explorers used a laser scanner to capture never before seen images of undocumented caves.

Also explore:

South Dakota is famous among cavers for its web of cave mazes. Take a look at what they’ve found under the Black Hills.

If you like what you hear and want to support more content like this, please consider a National Geographic subscription. Go to natgeo.com/exploremore to subscribe today.

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Blood-sucking villains. Spooky specters of the night. Our views of bats are often based more on fiction than fact. Enter National Geographic Explorer at Large Rodrigo Medellín, aka the Bat Man of Mexico. For decades he’s waged a charm offensive to show the world how much we need bats, from the clothes we wear to a sip of tequila at the end of a long day. Now, as the COVID-19 pandemic causes even more harmful bat myths, the world must once again realize that bats may not be the hero everyone wants—but they’re the hero we need.

For more info on this episode, visit natgeo.com/overheard

Want more?


See how Rodrigo uses a multi-pronged approach—involving field research, conservation, and tequila—to help protect bats.

In a Nat Geo short film, Rodrigo ventures into an ancient Mayan ruin to find two rare species of vampire bat.

Curious about the connection between bats and COVID-19? Explore why it’s so tricky to trace the disease’s origins. 

Also explore:

Learn more about bats: They can be found nearly everywhere on Earth and range in size from lighter than a penny to a six-foot wingspan.  

Why do bats get a bad rap? See how Spanish conquistadors and Dracula convinced us bats are more fright than friend.

Bat myths have real-world consequences. In Mauritius, a government campaign culled tens of thousands of endangered fruit bats.

For more bat info, follow Rodrigo on Instagram @batmanmedellin

And for paid subscribers:

Step inside Borneo’s limestone caves, some of the largest and wildest on Earth—and home to to millions of bats.

If you like what you hear and want to support more content like this, please consider a National Geographic subscription. Go to natgeo.com/exploremore to subscribe today.

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Social media is not just for modern folk. In this episode from the Overheard archives, we’ll look at how in ancient Pompeii, people also shared what they thought, who they met with, what they ate—just with different technology.

For more information on this episode, visit nationalgeographic.com/overheard

Want more?

The new book Lost Cities, Ancient Tombs: A History of the World in 100 Discoveries details the story of Pompeii and other milestones in the human journey.

Pompeii is not just an archaeological site; it's one huge graveyard. But it was very much a living city right up until it was snuffed out by Mt. Vesuvius.

When you think of an avalanche, you probably think of snow. But volcanoes also cause avalanches. Archaeologists believe that it was an avalanche of rocketing, boiling gas and sediment that cooked Pompeiians alive in 79 A.D.

In the late 1800s, archaeologists started pouring plaster into voids left in the hardened volcanic ash covering Pompeii. The result? Full-sized casts of Vesuvius' victims—human and otherwise.

Do you live in the shadow of a volcano? Here are a few safety tips for when that telltale rumbling begins.

Could Chernobyl be our contemporary version of Pompeii? Some archaeologists think so.

Also explore:

Curious about how Pompeii's graffiti compares to the stuff in your own backyard? Check out images of ancient Pompeiian graffiti at the Ancient Graffiti Project.

Vesuvius will erupt again. The question is when, and what will Pompeiians do when it does?

If you like what you hear and want to support more content like this, please consider a National Geographic subscription. Go to natgeo.com/exploremore to subscribe today.

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San Diego is home to the world’s first frozen zoo—a genetic library where scientists are racing to bank the tissues and stem cells of disappearing animals. As scientists begin to clone endangered species, we revisit an episode from our archives that delves into what conservation looks like, as we head into a period that some scientists believe is our next great extinction.

Want more?

More information about Elizabeth Ann, the cloned black-footed ferret can be found here.

National Geographic photographer Ami Vitale has covered conflict and nature. She was with Sudan when he died and she believes that the survival of creatures like the northern white rhino is intertwined with our own.

Move over, Noah. Joel Sartore is building his own ark — out of photographs. He’s on a decades-long mission to take portraits of more than 15,000 endangered species before it’s too late.  

Stuart Pimm has a lot more to say about species revival. In this editorial he makes a case against de-extinction — and explains why bringing back extinct creatures could do more harm than good. 

It’s been a long time since Jurassic Park hit theatres. Today, our revival technology straddles the line between science fact and science fiction — but do we want to go there?  

Also explore:

Read Kate Gammon’s original reporting for InsideScience, which inspired this conversation here at Overheard HQ. 

Want to dive further into the debate? Hear George Church’s talk — and talks by some of the greatest minds in conservation — at the TedxDeExtinction conference. 

The Frozen Zoo is working on a lot of exciting research that didn’t make it into the episode. For example, they’ve already managed to turn rhino skin cells into beating heart cells. To learn more about what they’re up to, check out the San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research for yourself. 

Some of the most promising applications for the Frozen Zoo come from new technology that lets us turn one kind of cell into any other kind of cell. Read more about the first mouse that was created from skin cells.

If you like what you hear and want to support more content like this, please consider a National Geographic subscription. Go to natgeo.com/exploremore to subscribe today.

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