RIO: You might have heard many heartwarming reunion stories, but this one, revolving around a South American Magellanic penguin and a man, will surely make your day. This penguin swims 5,000 miles every year to reunite with the man who saved his life.
Joao Pereira de Souza, 71, who is a part-time fisherman and retired bricklayer, lives in a village located outside Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In 2011, he found a tiny penguin, in very critical condition, covered in oil, lying on a rock, almost close to his death.
Joao took him under his protection. He cleaned the oil from his body and started feeding him fish everyday. Joao named him Dindim, reports Mirror.UK.
When Dindim was healthy, Joao tried to release him back into the sea, but Dindim decided to stay with him.
“He stayed with me for 11 months and then, just after he changed his coat with new feathers, he disappeared,” Joao recalls.
Dindim was back after few months and for 5 years he has been spending 8 months of the year with Joao.
It’s believed that the penguin spends rest of the time breeding off the coast of Chile and Argentina. And it’s amazing to see how he swims 5,000 miles every year to meet the man who once saved his life.
"No one else is allowed to touch him. He pecks them if they do. He lays on my lap, lets me give him showers, allows me to feed him sardines and to pick him up," Joao told Globo TV.
Every year he comes to Joao in June and leaves in February.
Penguin swims miles every year to meet the man who saved it
Penguin swims miles every year to meet the man who saved it
Archeologists discover world’s oldest artwork in Indonesia’s Sulawesi
- Newly dated artworks are believed to have been created by ancestors of indigenous Australians
- Discovery shows Sulawesi as one of world’s oldest centers of artistic culture, researcher says
JAKARTA: Hand stencils found in a cave in Indonesia’s Sulawesi are the world’s oldest known artworks, Indonesian and Australian archeologists have said in a new study that dates the drawings back to at least 67,800 years ago.
Sulawesi hosts some of the world’s earliest cave art, including the oldest known example of visual storytelling — a cave painting depicting human-like figures interacting with a wild pig. Found in 2019, it dates back at least 51,200 years.
On Muna, an island off the province’s southeast, researchers have discovered new artworks which are faint and partially obscured by a more recent motif on the wall. They used a new dating technique to determine their age.
The cave art is of two faded hand stencils, one at least 60,900 years old and another dating back at least 67,800 years. This makes it the oldest art to be found on cave walls, authors of the study, which was published this week, said in the journal Nature.
Adhi Agus Oktaviana, a researcher at the National Research and Innovation Agency, or BRIN, and co-author, said this hand stencil was 16,600 years older than the rock art previously documented in the Maros-Pangkep caves in Sulawesi, and about 1,100 years older than stencils found in Spain believed to have been drawn by Neanderthals.
The discovery “places Indonesia as one of the most important centers in the early history of symbolic art and modern human seafaring. This discovery is the oldest reliably dated rock art and provides direct evidence that humans have been intentionally crossing the ocean since almost 70,000 years ago,” Oktaviana said on Wednesday.
The stencils are located in Liang Metanduno, a limestone cave on Muna that has been a tourist destination known for cave paintings that are about 4,000 years old.
“This discovery demonstrates that Sulawesi is one of the oldest and most continuous centers of artistic culture in the world, with roots dating back to the earliest phases of human habitation in the region,” said Prof. Maxime Aubert of Australia, another of the study’s co-authors.
To figure out the stencils’ ages, researchers used a technique called laser-ablation uranium-series dating, which allows for the accurate dating of ocher-based rock art. The method uses a laser to collect and analyze a tiny amount of mineral crusts that had formed on top of the art.
The study also explored how and when Australia first became settled, with the researchers saying the stencil was most likely created by the ancestors of indigenous Australians.
