As more Europeans arrived in America 500 years ago, they were in such great need of the land that they and the Native American Indians battled constantly. By the end of the 19^th century, most Indian tribes (部落) were moved to reservations. A lot of their children were taken away to boarding schools to learn to speak English. By the end of the 20^th century, more than half of the Native Americans in the US were living in the cities. They gave up speaking their old tribal language and only used English. As a result, many Native American languages disappeared and with that their culture.

Today some American Indian languages are usually spoken by the older members of the tribes who still live on the reservations. In North America there are 150-170 languages that have at least one speaker. One ancient language spoken by the Northern Paiute tribe has over 100 speakers.

But the good news is that some of these people are keeping their culture and language alive. They are also receiving help from the National Geographic Society’s Enduring Voices project, whose aim is to help languages around the world which are dying out. The team meets these “last speakers”. The experts interview them and they are recorded with video, pictures and so on. They also tell old stories which are written down in English so people can learn more about the cultures.

Recording the language and culture is only part of the project. The next stage is to pass on the language to the next generation. The Salish tribe is an excellent example of how schools can help. The tribe lives on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. Their language is spoken by about 50 people aged over 75. So now, the local people have set up a school. It has 30 students aged two to twelve during the day and there are also courses for adults in the evening.

As more and more people speak the global language of English, Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic, other languages are rapidly disappearing. In fact, half of the 6,000-7,000 languages spoken around the world today will be likely to die out by the next century, according the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

In an effort to prevent language loss, scholars from a number of organizations — UNESCO and National Geographic among them — have for many years been documenting dying languages and the cultures they reflect.

Mark Turin, a scientist at the Macmillan Center, Yale University, who specializes in the languages and oral traditions of the Himalayas, is following in that tradition. His recently published book, A Grammar of Thangmi and Their Culture, grows out of his experience living, working, and raising a family in a village in Nepal.

Documenting the Thangmi language and culture is just a starting point for Turin, who seeks to include other languages and oral traditions across the Himalayan reaches of India, Nepal, Bhutan, and China. But he is not content to simply record these voices before they disappear without record.

At the University of Cambridge Turin discovered a wealth of important materials —including photographs, films, tape recordings, and field notes — which had remained unstudied and were badly in need of care and protection. Now, through the two organizations that he has founded — the Digital Himalaya Project and the World Oral Literature Project — Turin has started a campaign to make such documents, found in libraries and stores around the world, available not just to schools but to the younger generations of communities from whom the materials were originally collected. Thanks to digital technology and the widely available Internet, Turin notes, the endangered languages can be saved and reconnected with speech communities.

When another old cave is discovered in the south of France, it is not usually news. Rather, it is an ordinary event. Such discoveries are so frequent these days that hardly anybody pays heed to them. However, when the Lascaux cave complex was discovered in 1940, the world was amazed. Painted directly on its walls were hundreds of scenes showing how people lived thousands of years ago. The scenes show people hunting animals, such as bison or wild cats. Other images depict birds and, most noticeably, horses, which appear in more than 300 wall images, by far outnumbering all other animals.

Early artists drawing these animals achieved a monumental and difficult task. They did not limit themselves to the easily accessible walls but carried their painting materials to spaces that required climbing steep walls or going on hands and knees into narrow passages in the Lascaux complex.

Unfortunately, the paintings have been exposed to the destructive action of water and temperature changes, which easily wear the images away. Because the Lascaux caves have many entrances, air movement has also damaged the images inside.

Although they are not out in the open air, where natural light would have destroyed them long ago, many of the images have deteriorated and are hardly recognizable. To prevent further damage, the site was closed to tourists in 1963, 23 years after it was discovered.