Original subtitles

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.

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.

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.

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.

Look at us.

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.

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.

Does it matter if they are a dream or

existing in reality, for you?

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.

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?

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.

And you are also the "whites."

We also call you the "whites."

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.

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.

The dance lasts all night long.

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.

"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.

In Angola, I see the rubbing in the tree.

Yeah.

Can you see that is that elephant because

of the height?

So, if you scratch the body up on the tree.

Yeah.

Like this.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

You didn't cut off your hand or your finger.

You still have it.

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.

What kind of poison is it?

It's a nerve poison or what is it?

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.

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.

He hears a bird alarmed,

and this tells him a leopard might be nearby.

He sniffs the air for the scent of elephants.

He senses the ground vibrating from

the hooves of fleeing roan antelopes.

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.

Yes you have to move very carefully

before you make that sound.

Kerllen Costa is Angolan.

He dreamt of a career as a professional soccer player,

but then he became an anthropologist.

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.

This material is from the 1966 Italian film

"Africa Addio."

At this time,

big-game hunting was still fashionable.

Today, our respect for nature has changed.

Even a huge fallen tree has its local guardians.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Life here is in many ways ancestral,

although the San Bushmen use cell phones with ease.

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.

- Hi. - How's it going?

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.

Yeah.

We might be testing these darts.

And what this is doing is taking a tiny piece of tissue

from the elephant.

Mm-hmm.

Hopefully, and then we will take that little piece,

and we'll put it into here to preserve.

This device appears promising...

Bull's-eye.

...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.

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?

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?

But this is what the app will look like.

And then we can go through recording all of

the information here.

- 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.

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.

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.

We're with the Angolans.

We will be very safe.

Yeah.

We are going to Angola today, and, um,

so we will be saying goodbye.

The village chief,

here to the left of Kobus, gives permission and his

blessing for Kobus to leave.

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.

The expedition now enters an area that used to be a

battlefield in the Angolan Civil War that raged

for 27 years.

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.

The convoy is headed for the town of Cangamba

to have an audience with the king of the Nkangala.

The king's spirit meets them.

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.

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.

Put it right there in the front.

He'll pick it up and have a look.

Okay.

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.

Mm-hmm.

And he would take that as a symbol

of your respect.

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.

It is about 100 miles now on motorbikes,

with more river crossings to come.

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.

A base camp is set up.

Our Namibian trackers have settled in well with

the Luchaze tribesmen.

Oh, man.

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.

Yeah, yeah.

The tracks in the sand are fresh.

Xui has spotted the track of an individual elephant.

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.

Let's get it from all over here.

Passes out the rectum.

And look at that.

But we are catching up with him.

There is a high chance to get a complete

DNA sequence from the mucus on it.

Mainly wood, just wood.

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.

This is Antonio Luhoke,

the Luchaze hunter who has accompanied Steve on

many prior expeditions.

Next day, traces of a very, very large

elephant were found.

This one here. Here, try that one.

That's the highest point.

Yes.

Wow. There's a big rubbing.

Is that the shoulder height?

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?

- Under? - Mm.

So maybe one more foot.

And, is it a, a male or a female?

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.

Mm.

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.

It's a good 11-foot.

I mean, it's bigger than what we have in Botswana.

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.

Nine to ten?

Yeah, a nine to ten-ton elephant, yeah.

Xui and Xui Dawid discover something else

overlooked by everyone.

This elephant hair will become part of the forensic evidence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

They took a picture?

They took a picture.

May I see the picture?

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.

This one?

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.

Two days' rest.

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.

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.

Xui cautiously shoots his arrow.

They retrieve the tip of the arrow that was meant

to collect the DNA sample.

Ah. Oh.

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.

I think you said it came off the rump. Yeah.

Yeah.

How's the elephant now?

It made the elephant flee,

and so the whole idea with the arrow was given

up for good.

How it looks.

But Steve got his reward.

He got his clean shot.

This is the.

Steve, Steve, Steve, Steve!

Xui, still excited, gives an account of how he

alerted Steve to the elephant.

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.

And another reality set in, the rain.

The expedition would have to return before the peatlands and

rivers would become impassable.

The Source of Life, huh?

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.

Melissa Hawkins was assigned to this task.

I'll stand back, and thank you for doing this.

Okay, great.

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.

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.

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?

So this is an example of that data a little

bit more processed.

So here it's all aligned and mapped.

Okay.

And here, you can see this is one elephant.

This is a second elephant.

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.

Elephant down here versus this elephant up here.

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.

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.

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?

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.

One of the king's own hunters,

who was part of the expedition,

narrates the events day by day.

And now the king speaks.

He reminds us of the elephants by narrating the origin

myth of his people.

Kerllen translates why elephants belong to the tribe.

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.

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.