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The Himalayas appear like a frozen fortress,
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giving nothing,
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not even enough air.
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Yet there are animals here...
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..miraculous and extraordinary,
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nurtured by the mountains.
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For people, too, the mountains shape their world.
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The animals of the Himalayas teach us about the beauty and fragility of life,
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and the power of the most inhospitable mountains on Earth.
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The highest mountain range in the world forms
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a two thousand-mile scar across Asia,
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separating India from the Tibetan Plateau.
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Our journey is from west to east, through the seasons.
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We start in Pakistan in winter.
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The Karakoram Range, at the western end of the Himalayas, is a world of
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golden eagles, snow leopards, markhors, bears, jackals, and wolves.
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The snow leopard stalks markhors, the wild mountain goats, using the falling snow as cover.
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At this altitude, and in winter, nothing is easy.
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Yet despite the cold and the thin air, there is more life within the Himalayas
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than any other mountain range on Earth.
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The snow leopard has a fully grown cub.
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Families will stay together longer than any other cat.
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It's tough up here to make it alone.
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The difficulties of mountain life encourage companionship.
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The wolves work together, searching for frozen bodies under the snow.
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Himalayan wolves are from an old bloodline, relics of an early ancestor.
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Maybe this was the wolf's first home.
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The bonds within the pack, and the mountain toughness, perhaps, helped them to spread over half the world.
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Domestic dogs came from Asian wolves, so perhaps they, too, are a gift from the Himalayas.
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Is our companion on the hearthrug with us a consequence of an ancient lesson learnt in these mountains?
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It's winter, and the higher villages and farms are deserted.
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Life follows the seasons up and down the mountains.
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Until recently, our presence hardly registered at all on the biggest scar on the planet's surface.
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These mountains arose some 40 million years ago, when India,
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pushing from the south, hit the rest of Asia.
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The land had nowhere to go but up, and folds reached over five miles high.
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The Himalayas are a massive crumple zone, reaching out of the air, towards space.
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In winter, most life retreats to below the snowline.
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They're relics of an ancient ancestor.
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A snow leopard's nearest relatives could be lions, or even jaguars.
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The family follow the antics of the markhors.
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The markhors breed in winter. Males try to throw their rivals off cliffs.
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As well as fighting, the dominant buck follows the girls around, with his tongue hanging out.
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It's a distracting time for the does.
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Perfect for the snow leopard.
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The markhor disappears around the corner.
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The snow leopard seems more puzzled than anything else.
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If there were one place on Earth where we can see the power of raw nature,
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and the fragility of life, it must be here.
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Later, at night, the snow leopard revisits the place where the markhor leaped for freedom.
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It's as if the mountains have taken back her prize,
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perhaps saved the markhor's life,
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and she needs to understand what happened.
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In the bleak landscape we find curiosity, caring families, companionship, and hope.
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The snow leopards and markhors will disappear higher into the mountains.
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We, too, must look beyond the valleys to understand the extraordinary forces that rule the Himalayas.
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This is the largest deposit of accumulated ice and compacted snow outside the poles.
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Thousands of cubic miles of ice slide very slowly down the mountains, as glaciers.
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The glaciers feed many of the greatest rivers in Asia.
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Tiny changes up here can affect parts of India and China, thousands of miles away.
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We are moving east, along Karakoram Range, over the border between Pakistan and India.
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These peaks were carved during ice ages.
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It's about time for another ice age, but instead,
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the Himalayas are melting faster than seems possible naturally.
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Nature appears disturbed, shifting angrily,
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as though a delicate balance was being lost.
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As the glaciers descend and melt, water pours into crevasses, and carves tunnels inside the ice.
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We are now in India, at Gaumukh,
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"the cow's mouth",
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one of the several holy sources of the Ganges.
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Pilgrims take a ritual bath in its freezing milky waters.
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The river, "Mother Ganges", is revered as a goddess, influencing millions of lives.
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During March and April, temples shed their winter isolation, and villagers and farmers return.
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Images of animals are everywhere, emerging from an isolated frozen winter, into spring.
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The mountains themselves are sacred.
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There's a legend of a holy peak, a perfect four-sided pyramid.
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From each face, according to the stories, a great river flows.
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Each river carries life to the four corners of the Earth.
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The mythical mountain is the axis mundi, the centre of the world.
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As we journey east along the Himalayas, we find a mountain to match the myth.
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Its meltwater flows to the Indus in Pakistan, and south into the Ganges.
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Streams form the Yarlung and head to Bangladesh.
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Three of Asia's greatest rivers can trace their source to this one mountain.
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It's Mount Kailash, which means "crystal mountain".
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Buddhists, Hindus and Jains make pilgrimages here.
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Priests, monks, musicians and holy men all compete in a riot of religious cultures.
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HORNS BLARE
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Giant prayer poles are raised, also reaching up to heaven.
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Paper prayers called wind horses flutter up towards the peak,
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where the gods of different faiths are believed to reside.
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The summit is so sacred, it has never been climbed.
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Our path continues east, from the Karakorams in Pakistan, into India and towards Nepal.
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Spring is climbing the mountain, and upland forests are returning to life.
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It's a surprise to find monkey mountaineers, but the Himalayas have many.
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In April, flowers and buds feed langur monkeys.
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They winter in the valleys, and follow the snowline up the mountains in spring.
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There is something about mountain life,
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the hardship, perhaps, the fragility, that actually changes the character of the animals that live here.
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Himalayan langurs are distinct from their lowland cousins.
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Up here is a more friendly society.
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Further down the mountain, the males fight for the control of a harem.
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But here, they all live together in one group.
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Warm clouds work their way up alpine valleys.
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The snow leopards go deeper into the mountains, impossible to follow.
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The Himalayas are still largely inaccessible and unexplored.
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By May, bees have come out of hibernation, or joined others coming up from the valleys below.
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Giant cliff bees build three-foot combs that are a rippling wall of bodies.
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Waving their abdomens in unison is a defensive warning to keep clear.
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The bees' efforts are in vain.
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Human honey-hunters scale the cliffs.
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The bees are the biggest in the world and amongst the most dangerous.
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They cut out the honey storage cells with 15-foot poles, into a relay of baskets.
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Even the best protective clothes, and a screen of smoke, is not enough,
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and the honey-hunter retreats to savour perhaps the most delicious and dangerous honey in the world.
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People have searched for magical ingredients here for thousands of years, and discovered
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a powerful human aphrodisiac.
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A little solitary deer produces a musky resin from a small gland on its stomach.
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The musk deer has influenced love and fashion across the world.
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The most famous perfumes are based on his scent.
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From Cleopatra onwards, kings and queens wooed with musk.
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Muslims maintain it is the smell of heaven, and they added it to the mortar of the mosques,
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so that the temples smelt of paradise.
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Affecting religion and history,
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or giving us Chanel and Dior, is not the musk deer's intention.
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All he wants is to be noticed by a female musk deer.
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While we may want to smell like Himalayan animals,
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wanting to look like them is rarer, but it does happen.
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The monal pheasant, high above India and Pakistan, is all flash, all show.
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Males compete in a dance of crests and colours.
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Curiously, in the shadow of the mountains, the guards on the India and Pakistan border
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do an irresistibly similar dance.
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The crest, even the posturing walk, perhaps, echo the bird display,
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but the contest of thumbs seems more like the markhor stag, all horns and tongues.
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India and Pakistan are feuding neighbours.
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How much better if all conflicts could be fought out in this way?
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Below mountain borders, following glacial meltwater in streams and rivers,
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is a watery plain, the Ganges basin.
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Here, cranes have their own dances.
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This is the lowest we go. From here, we will return to the highest peaks.
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Many birds are hemmed in by the Himalayas, like these sarus cranes.
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But to bar-headed geese, the mountains are no obstacle.
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From the base of the Himalayas in India, we head to Nepal and Bhutan,
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mountain kingdoms on the top of the world.
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The Himalayas are made of range upon range of mountains, building height.
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The air becomes dangerously thin.
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Bar-headed geese are the highest flying birds in the world.
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The higher they go, the faster the jet-stream.
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A 100 mile-an-hour tailwind catapults them over the Himalayas.
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Bar-headed geese fly higher than Everest.
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Their blood is different, with special haemoglobin,
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and they can breathe faster and deeper, many gulps for each wing beat.
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They suffer severe hypoxia, way beyond any human athlete, pushing the boundaries of pain.
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Bar-headed geese are not alone.
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Some cranes, less well adapted, gawky compared to the geese, attempt the journey.
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Demoiselle cranes find ways through high mountain passes, mothers leading their young.
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The cranes use rising currents of air to gain height, to battle over ridges,
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then descend into valleys to recover.
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There, waiting for them, are golden eagles.
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The eagles try to separate young cranes from the flock.
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The predators hunt cooperatively, like so many others here.
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The young crane escapes one, and is caught by another.
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There is nothing the rest of the flock can do.
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The demoiselle cranes battle on, but ahead are the largest obstacles in the world.
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And the biggest of all, Everest.
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One animal has learnt to survive, briefly, at the top.
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We don't need to conquer these mountains,
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there's no breeding site to get to, and no adaptation to help us.
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Yet every year, hundreds of people push their physiology
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for medical research, or more often, for themselves.
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The top is called the "death zone",
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a combination of the best view in the world
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and being in no state to enjoy it.
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Winds average hurricane force, temperatures 50 below zero,
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and a calm day can quickly change.
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Over 200 people have died here, many abandoned on the mountain.
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About 10% of climbers attempting the summit lose their lives, and many more are injured.
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In this harsh world of rock, ice and courage, lives a little spider.
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Its Latin name means "standing above everything",
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and it's been found at 22,000 feet.
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It's supposedly the highest living animal in the world.
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But it can't be the only one up here,
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since spiders need other insects to feed on.
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Sure enough, tiny flies and springtails also manage at amazing altitudes.
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But it's got another trick.
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It's a jumping spider.
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Like all good mountaineers, it will secure a line.
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Springtails are primitive insects that feed on anything
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blown up from lower altitudes.
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This community of plants and animals depend on airborne sustenance.
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Hence the name
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an Aeolian Biome,
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life brought on the wind.
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Very occasionally, snow leopards are seen at high altitudes,
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following goats, or maybe scavenging our rubbish ever higher.
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Wolves, too, are being seen up here,
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in this case filmed close to Everest base camp.
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It's not clear if climate change is opening up new areas for them
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or if there's some other reason.
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Scientists say it's warming and melting here
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faster than anywhere else outside the poles.
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Beyond Nepal and Bhutan, following the cranes and geese over the Himalayas, instead of finding
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lush plains at sea level, we discover a high, cold, dry plateau,
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hardly lower than the peaks themselves.
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It is Tibet.
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Glacial rivers thread through a desiccated landscape the size of France,
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but higher than anything in the Alps or the Rockies.
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The Himalayan peaks are just the jagged edge, the ramparts of a wall
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with the Tibetan Plateau hidden behind.
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The animals cope with extreme altitude, thin air and a tough life.
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The snow leopards look the same, but there are also new characters.
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This is a brown bear, a grizzly in all but name and tufted ears.
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He's rare, timid and hardly ever filmed.
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The Tibetan fox hunts a rodent called a pika.
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Pikas live in dens, like ground squirrels or rabbits, and eat the tough grass.
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Pikas are the staple food of any predator.
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He's the most wonderful-looking fox.
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Square-jawed, eyes of cunning, and a twisted, knowing smile.
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The fox and the bear go around as a team.
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More high altitude cooperation, perhaps, or maybe the wily fox
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just follows the bear around, hoping to nab a pika from under the bear's nose.
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It's mid-summer now, but the ground is usually frozen,
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and only the bear has the strength to dig out the pikas.
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If the bear is digging up one end of a burrow,
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the fox is ready for the pikas to emerge at the other end in a panic.
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PIKAS CALL
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The bear missed out. The fox eats some and buries the rest.
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The deep permafrost will help keep it fresh.
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The Tibetan Plateau is so high that despite being the same latitude
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as North Africa, even in late spring, the temperature is icy.
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At 15,000 feet live chiru, Tibetan antelopes.
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The chiru puff like steam engines in the cold, thin air.
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A male guards his harem, breathing clouds of misty condensation.
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There are other males eyeing up his females.
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A neighbour might come charging in to kidnap one for his own.
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In these arctic conditions it's very surprising to find...
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a small snake.
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In places, hot springs are a sign of volcanic activity below.
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The snake survived its home being pushed
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almost three miles straight up, by holding out in this natural sauna.
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The hot spring snake is a lost relic.
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Their nearest cousins are across the world in America.
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The streams flow into lakes,
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now home to the bar-headed geese after their epic journey over the Himalayas.
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One of the prettiest birds chooses the roof of the world to have up to ten beautiful goslings.
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The goslings have to feed themselves right from the start.
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Bar-headed geese always nest by water, for food,
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but also to escape the hardy Tibetan wolf.
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HORNS PLAYING
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Novice monks are practising their Tibetan horns.
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Buddhism was born on the other side of the Himalayas, overlooking India,
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but its mountain philosophy soon spread to Tibet.
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A love of nature and animals is one of its teachings.
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Cranes are symbols of a long life and a faithful partnership.
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CRANES CALL
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Buddhists believe in reincarnation
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and that every animal has a spirit that one day will become a person
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and that every person has lived as an animal.
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So wildlife is looked after carefully,
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and, like this crane with a wounded wing,
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fed and nursed back to health.
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It's another example of how the Himalayas affect people and animals alike
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and increase sensitivity and co-operation.
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For those who live in the shadow of the Himalayas, a little can be given back
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in the most extraordinary and extreme way possible.
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A sky burial is the ultimate homage to the mountain.
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After you die, you are taken up a revered peak and left to feed the vultures.
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Buddhists believe that all life is connected,
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each animal depends on another, even BECOMES another.
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It's an idea born in these mountains
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from an understanding of the power of nature and the complexity of life.
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The Buddhists look to the mountains particularly for reliable water in calm streams.
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But flowing east are massive and changeable rivers -
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the lifeblood of a billion people.
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The Yangtze, the Yellow River,
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the Yarlung and the Mekong are all are born here on the Tibetan Plateau.
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To the north runs the Yellow River, so-called because of the huge amount
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of glacial soil it brings to China.
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They call the Yellow River the mother of Chinese civilization.
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It has another name too - China's Sorrow.
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The floods have killed millions of people down the generations.
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As the climate changes, the river will change and China's Sorrow may take on a new meaning.
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Thousands of dams battle
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to harness and control the gifts of the Himalayas for ourselves.
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Another of Tibet's massive rivers continues our journey east.
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Then it turns south and cuts straight through the Himalayas.
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The Yarlung Brahmaputra, from Mount Kailash, and the Nujiang,
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the Yangtze and the giant Mekong all slice through the mountains, creating the most extraordinary place yet.
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Some of the gorges are double the depth of the Grand Canyon - the rivers, the wildest in the world.
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It makes getting around difficult, and tests the ingenuity of the Yunnan people.
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Cable crossings of rattan rope had been in use for hundreds of years
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before steel was introduced.
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This is the main route to market.
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Getting around may be harder, but these deep fissures draw warm wet air in from the tropics.
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The valleys act like the pipes of a central heating system and create tropical paradises
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high in the mountains, like the mythical Shangri-La.
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To the Chinese particularly, this is heaven, hidden beyond the clouds.
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Tropical monkeys like bear macaques live on rainforest fruit at 8,000 feet.
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Each Garden of Eden has unique animals and plants,
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walled in by mountains, pockets of exceptional biodiversity.
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The mountain chains running into China are a sanctuary from the plains below.
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Elephants and leopards are fleeing from farmers and loggers.
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These high tropical forests are a miraculous paradise.
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Sunbirds drink nectar from epiphytes,
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musk deer provide the fragrance of heaven.
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While in a private corner is another love story.
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A pheasant plays peek-a-boo with a prospective mate.
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The Temminck's tragopan hopes his bright wattle
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and dance will show he'll be a worthwhile husband.
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She seems less than convinced, and moves away.
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He follows, displaying on the move, ever hopeful.
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But by midsummer, it's too late, and he tucks his wattle away for another year.
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Above the warmer valleys, another world...
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..steep woods filled with lichen.
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The Yunnan snub-nosed monkeys feed almost entirely on the lichen,
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and so are trapped at the high altitude that it grows.
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At 14,000 feet, they are the highest primates in the world, except for a few of us.
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Large troops are formed of many families, each with a Buddha-like male and several wives.
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Last year's young help with the babies.
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They are curious looking, some like little elves
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and some like plastic surgery gone too far.
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At the height of summer, a strange cooling brings snow to the mountains.
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The snub-nosed monkeys feel the change in the weather.
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Each July, the snow comes in and the monkeys shiver.
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The monsoon has begun.
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The cold mountains draw tropical air from the Indian Ocean, thousands of miles away.
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Clouds pile up, and from July to September deliver most of the annual snow and rain.
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Without the Himalayas driving the monsoon, Southern Asia would be a desert.
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Soil and mud, ground up by glaciers,
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pour off the mountains.
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The monsoon can bring life
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or destruction and sorrow.
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Life depends on the mountains, the character of which is unpredictable.
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It's not just a religious belief, but a scientific fact as well.
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In places, we shape the mountain to our will to provide more food.
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Rice paddies are some of the oldest human structures on Earth.
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The cultures that understand the Himalayas say we must give something back.
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They say all life is connected,
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and each animal depends on another,
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even BECOMES another.
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It is as if the mountains are trying to teach us something else, too,
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a very old lesson about the power of nature
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and the fragility of our lives.
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It's not just the animals that makes the Himalayas so extraordinary.
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It's also the plants.
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In fact, the floral wealth of this region has had an enormous impact on the lives of all of us.
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It all began in the early 19th century,
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when a new wave of adventurers risked their lives to collect exotic plants from across the world.
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The Himalayas was one of the most promising and tempting regions of all.
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This rugged land was still largely unknown to the outside world.
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Here, surely, there were new plant species to be found.
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That quest led to a special connection with the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.
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Well, in the 19th century in particular,
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there was a lot of collecting of plants throughout the world,
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particularly well-to-do people liked to build up collections of specimens
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just as they liked to collect stuffed animals and this type of thing.
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Joseph Dalton Hooker was one such well-to-do explorer
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and lucky for him, his father was Director of Kew.
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As Western high society became gripped by a gardening craze,
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William Hooker sent his son in search of new plants.
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In 1847, Joseph set off on a three-year expedition into the Himalayas.
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Single-minded and determined, he endured great hardships.
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He suffered with altitude sickness,
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his journey was sabotaged by local people,
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he was even imprisoned.
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Nevertheless, he walked for eight hours a day,
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collecting plants and documenting every detail of his travels.
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He was the first European to collect in the region
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and his discoveries made him one of the greatest botanists of the 19th century, a key scientist of his age.
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He returned from the Himalayas with a wealth of new flowers,
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including 28 new species of rhododendron.
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We've got some examples here of specimens that were collected by Hooker.
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One example here is Rhododendron arborium, which in fact is the national flower of Nepal.
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But there are a large number of these specimens collected by Hooker
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of this species from Nepal, and we do have specimens that have got
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Hooker's name on them, so here we've got a specimen that was collected in 1848.
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Simply by bringing these new species back, it would have had a great impact, because lots of these things
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would never have been seen before, so a lot of new things introduced into cultivation.
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So these plants would have had the real sort of wow factor for gardeners at the time.
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Gardeners across the nation competed for the boldest and brightest specimens,
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bringing a little bit of the Himalayas into everyone's garden.
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In fact, a quarter of the plants in our gardens today came originally from the Himalayas...
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from azaleas to euphorbias,
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gentians to irises...
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and peonies to primulas.
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But Joseph Hooker also recognised the value of plants to science and medicine.
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Today, the Herbarium makes Kew one of the most important botanical institutions in the world.
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It's a vast database housing over seven million specimens
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and representing 98% of the world's plant species.
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Succeeding his father as Director, Joseph also opened the Jodrell Laboratory
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and firmly established Kew as a scientific institution.
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This laboratory does a lot of work
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on the biological activity of plants.
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We have an emphasis on looking for medicinal uses of plants,
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and that could be what we term
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over-the-counter medicines - things like coughs and colds - but also looking for drugs
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that could be used to treat things like Alzheimer's, TB and cancer.
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The Himalayan region is estimated to have about
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between 18,000 and maybe 20,000, 21,000 different species of plants,
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and of those, there's documentary evidence
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on uses of about 2,000 of those for medicinal uses.
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So one of the things that we are doing at Kew is partly capturing the traditional uses,
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but also looking at the traits that plants have in different areas that they have evolved
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to protect themselves, that can help us design drugs for the future.
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00:53:39,120 --> 00:53:41,960
People living in the remote valleys of the Himalayas
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have always relied on plants for their medical remedies, but so do we.
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Around a quarter of all our pharmaceuticals contain substances derived from plants.
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Plants that we may take for granted in our gardens could be miniature medicine chests.
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00:53:58,320 --> 00:54:04,280
Some of the plants that we've been working on, some of them are quite famous to the areas,
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because they're not only medicinal plants, but they're in the culture of the people,
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and that would be rhododendrons.
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Every bit of the rhododendron plant has a traditional use,
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from the flowers to the leaves, to the bark, to the roots is used.
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Now, the other plant is peony.
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Now, we know it for its beautiful flowers, but within the Himalayas
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00:54:33,200 --> 00:54:37,920
it's often the root bark that is used as a medicine, and I've had
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quite a few trips actually looking for samples of this because it is a plant that has been over-exploited.
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But in the Himalayas there is a real issue with the continuing growth and over-exploitation by man.
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And therefore we could be losing things that we haven't yet studied.
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At the start of the 19th century, almost nothing was known about Himalayan plants.
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Now, we are methodically examining them all to see how they might be of use to us.
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As so few people live up here, it was once thought
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that the high altitude plants were safe from exploitation.
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But today, there is a much greater threat.
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As the climate warms, glaciers are receding and the land no longer suits the plants that evolved here.
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But there is nowhere else for them to grow.
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With climatic changes threatening thousands of plant species worldwide,
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Kew has embarked on the most ambitious of all plant conservation projects.
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The Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst Place,
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Kew's base in West Sussex, holds more than a million seeds.
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We know, as seed bank people,
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that you don't have to lose plants, you don't have to lose them.
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We can use seed banks
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to make sure that these plants don't go extinct.
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Here, seeds arrive from plant-hunters working all around the world, to be catalogued and bar-coded.
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Each batch is carefully sifted and cleaned.
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Then they are X-rayed to ensure that there's no contamination by insects that might harm them.
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Only after everything has been checked are they banked for the future.
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In an underground vault, they are kept dormant at minus 20 degrees.
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00:56:40,200 --> 00:56:44,600
Essentially what seeds are, are they're little time capsules.
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Plants can survive for centuries using their seed
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and we accentuate that ability
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00:56:53,360 --> 00:56:57,760
and we've learnt a lot about seeds such that we can actually spin that process out.
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We know that we can keep seeds alive for 1,000 years.
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The Millennium Seed Bank has already ensured that 54,000 species of plants
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are safe from extinction.
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00:57:11,200 --> 00:57:14,400
'The seed bank is just the first step, because we have to make sure
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'that we can turn them back into plants.
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00:57:16,440 --> 00:57:20,560
'There's no good having 1.6 billion seeds sitting in a fridge downstairs,'
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but it's our first stepping stone to them turning those species back into real plants.
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Each seed is valuable.
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As plants continue to provide food, fresh air, habitat stability,
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even medicines,
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we know we need them for our future.
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Their time capsules may even hold the key to problems that we have yet to face.
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Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
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E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk
42443
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