An uprising in South Africa and an exodus in the Caucasus

29:10And their aim today was to cross the ceasefire line, then perhaps return to their homes. Nikki Katsoni was in her 30s when she said goodbye to her family to help plan the Women Return March. Because our aim was to reach a hill, Aronas, that has a guard of Turkish troops. So we wanted to go to the other side. This was the whole idea of breaking the military line with white flags, with peace. Nobody knew where we would break the line because we were going to do it in a clandestine way. I see. But the story leaked out in a big newspaper, so it was no good hiding. I have the photograph of our first press conference, and we say we are going to march home, but we are not going to say when or where.

30:09The government, women's organizations, most of them were against. They said, don't do that. And before our first walk, there were some very bitter comments in newspapers saying, these mad women are going to start a war between Cyprus and Turkey. I mean, how could a peace march of women create a war? We had all the right to go home. We hadn't done anything. We didn't have any animosity towards anybody. So we decided to show to the world what was happening in Cyprus. The press said the women, many of them housewives who had never engaged in politics before, were provoking geopolitical tensions capable of reigniting the conflict.

31:11On the day, Greek Cypriot police tried to stop the march, concerned the women were putting their lives at risk by trying to cross into dangerous territory. So the march organisers tricked their own police force by telling women from all over Cyprus to meet in the capital, Nicosia. We said to people, our buses will be there to take us to where we are going to break the line. So some buses went to one direction and you had all the police in Nicosia running after them. And some buses went on to another direction. So the police didn't know where we were going. When we arrived at Aronas, there was no police there chasing us.

31:56Once the buses made it to the secret starting point, the women began to walk. To protect themselves, they all wore skirts, as they thought the Turkish army might interpret them as Greek soldiers and open fire if they wore trousers. The women also held white flags and banners. I love those banners because they express everything we wear. We just come in peace. We want to go home. I mean, which was obvious. And it was in English, in Greek and in Turkish. And in that march, there were women from all walks of life. You could see that from what they were wearing. It was a very colorful crowd, very young and very old, very foreign-looking and very familiar.

32:50People we knew and people we didn't know. But there was this kind of aura going through us all that makes us go in the same rhythm. But that rhythm would be forced to stop in its tracks. Beineke's side was her friend Cleopatra. We didn't know. We had to go through a minefield. The whole field was spread with these small notices saying mines. And we had to get another side. We were scared, all of us, because we had to walk on a very narrow, elevated passage of the soil. It fell to four in the mines. So Cleopatra and I got on to the very narrow passage. We look at each other and I think we thought of the same thing.

33:47If something happens to us, this is Guttal. And she told me afterwards that she felt that concern. I remember that look in her face as I talked to you today. Maybe we will come out with the light. But the group do make it through the minefield, hoping to pass UN troops in the buffer zone and enter the occupied area. And then the Peace Force of the United Nations try to hold us back. Not to go up to the hill where the Turkish troops were. We could see them from afar. So there was a kind of running and grabbing. There have been scuffles between Greek Cypriot women and United Nations troops in the security zone, which separates the Greek part of Cyprus from the Turkish-controlled north of the island.

34:42The clashes took place as the women who were demonstrating against the partition of Cyprus tried to cross the mile-wide zone to confront Turkish soldiers near Nicosia. The women sat on the ground, forming a line between the UN and the Turkish army. At sundown, they turned back. They were thwarted by a combination of United Nations peacekeeping forces, the extreme heat and an old minefield. It was a very cold day. Yeah. We were sweating and they had put in my bra some cigarettes. And when I came home, they were all melted. Not the ending she had hoped for, but the Greek Cypriot women who marched that day had made their point.

35:23The world took notice. Nikki Katsuni was speaking to Elena Angelidis. Now these days, it's relatively common to hear about cases of people infected with Lyme disease, an illness passed on by ticks. But that wasn't the case, only a few decades ago. When children in the US town of Lyme began falling ill, no one knew what was happening. That is, until Professor Alan Steer helped to identify the condition. He told Rena Stanton-Sharma how the story unfolded. Our family have lived in Lyme in this area for 25 years, and when we first moved here, I started having some odd symptoms, as some of the others in the family did, but mostly it was my symptoms in the beginning, with rashes and joint pain and severe headaches and stiff necks.

36:12and fevers. That's Polly Murray, a mother from Lyme, Connecticut, a scenic rural town nestled along the eastern banks of the Connecticut River on America's east coast. Speaking to a BBC TV programme in 1987, she explained what she'd noticed. Our symptoms became so acute and the patterns so definite that I realised that we must do something about trying to find someone that would do some research into what was going on. And so in October of 1975, I called the Connecticut State Health Department. That call would eventually lead to the first identification of Lyme disease in the US, a bacterial infection passed to humans by blood-sucking parasites called ticks.

37:02Professor Alan Steer had started a fellowship at Yale University just months earlier, when he was contacted by the health department. This led to a meeting with Polly. She'd kept a notebook about children that she knew of in this small community who had developed arthritis. I asked my chief of rheumatology about this and said that I would like to join in working on this cluster of arthritis cases. and he said, fine, take about six months and see what you can do. And of course, I've been working on this now for nearly 50 years. Dr. Steer, who was in his early 30s, had been carrying out research into rheumatology, inflammatory conditions including rheumatoid arthritis, which causes painful and stiff joints.

37:55We invited the children to come to Yale for investigation. We were able to identify 39 children in this small community who had recently had or currently had arthritis. And that would be 100 times what one would expect for juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, which is how the children had originally been diagnosed often. A quarter of them lived on one of two roads where one in 10 children had arthritis. That's completely unheard of. Polly and her children had seen over 30 doctors who'd suggested 50 possible diagnoses, but she was convinced there was more to it. She'd noted down that she felt worse during the summer.

38:47Dr. Steer found that the young people who ranged from around five years old to teenagers had had unusual skin markings or lesions which started appearing before their joint problems. One person described it this way. That it started in the front of their body and the two sides met on the back. So this large spreading unusual skin lesion. It was a quarter of the patients, but because the clustering suggested to us an arthropod-transmitted illness, we were quite interested in this skin lesion. An insect is a type of arthropod. An arthropod is a more general term, but a tick is an arthropod because in the adult stages, it has eight legs rather than six.

39:36And a tick is a small spider-like creature which feeds on the blood of birds, mammals and humans. You may not even feel a bite, which can cause flu-like symptoms. Here's that BBC documentary. The tick usually feeds on white-tailed deer. And in 1975, there'd been a big increase in the deer population, with a consequent rise in the number of ticks. Perhaps there was a link with the severe arthritis that Polly Murray's family had suffered that summer. The ticks were feeding on blood from the deer, then dropping back to the ground to lay their eggs and to bite unsuspecting humans. Treating these bites was to reveal an important new clue about the cause of the arthritis.

40:20After this crucial discovery, Dr Steer spoke with a Danish colleague and realised that they could treat people with penicillin, antibiotic medication. In Europe, the skin lesion was thought to be tick transmitted, and that skin lesion was thought to respond to antibiotic therapy. And there were a few cases in which the skin lesion had preceded a neurologic illness. Neurologists thought that the skin lesion was a viral infection, most likely. And because of the experience in Europe, thinking that the skin lesion responded to antibiotic therapy, we began to treat patients with penicillin, which had been used generally to treat the skin lesion.

41:10And in comparison with the patients we'd seen earlier who were not treated with antibiotics, the skin lesion did resolve somewhat faster. And it often prevented subsequent arthritis. From this, we learned that this was likely a tick-transmitted, penicillin-sensitive agent that was causing this illness. This was a huge breakthrough. Not only had he discovered a new disease, they'd found a potential treatment too. But Dr. Steer, who is now one of the most renowned rheumatologists globally, remains humble about that vital step in medicine. That's gratifying, but understanding human disease is often very complicated.

41:58And even though you can come up with a treatment that helps most people, you're often left with a part of the population that just has a harder time with it. You've probably joined the dots. The disease was named after the town Polly was from, Lyme, Connecticut, where it was first found. And then, in 1981, a self-described tick surgeon discovered something new. It was Willie Bergdorfer who had been studying this Ixodes scapularis type of tick. And his particular ability was to dissect even these very small ticks under the microscope and be able to look at their organs, trying to see if he could identify an infectious agent.

42:48And he was the one who actually first saw this bacteria, which is now called, its Latin name is Borrelia burgdorferi. Most of the children who took part in that 1975 study fully recovered. It's generally not as serious an infection at all if one has vaccination. Dev from Lyme disease is quite unusual, but it can happen. The infection can affect all layers of the heart. And if that happens and it's not recognized, it's been a cause of death and generally in younger people. So it can be quite a serious infection, even though most recover from it. Understanding these complexities remains Dr. Steer's lifelong passion.

43:39One is still left with parts of this that are difficult to understand and which we do not have treatments that work really well. An important goal for me is really to work with the next generation.

44:00Alan Steer speaking to Reena Stanton-Sharma. and I have reason to be grateful to Dr Stier and his colleagues because last year I myself was successfully treated for Lyme disease after being bitten by a tick in the forest where I live. Next we're going to Australia where in 1974 a geologist by the name of Dr Jim Bowler uncovered a 42 ,000 year old skeleton. The remains became known as Mungo Man so called after the ancient lake bed where he was found. The discovery transformed our understanding of Australia's past as Dr Bowler has been telling Rachel Naylor.

44:39It's the 1970s and we're in the barren, remote Wollandra Lakes region in New South Wales. But unlike the name suggests, there are no longer any lakes. They dried up 15 ,000 years ago. Geologist Dr Jim Bowler from the Australian National University in Canberra is here to study ancient climate change. I was puzzled by the extent of dunes all up and down across the country, but no desert. And the existence of dry basins that we called lakes, but no water. So I decided that my geology was going to try to unwrap the story of those ancient landscapes. But that's not his only aim. Six years earlier, in 1968, Jim had accidentally found some ancient human bones.

45:30They became known as Mungo Lady as she was found next to Lake Mungo, and she was estimated to be around 40 ,000 years old, far older than any other human remains found in Australia. Jim is sure there must be more out there. On the 26th of February 1974, due to a rare storm, he takes shelter in a solitary sheep station more than 100 kilometres from the nearest town. I was locked up in what was the shearers' quarters where the sheep, I was sitting there, but I had my notebooks. You couldn't work in the wet. So I waited, and then the sky cleared, the sun came out, and I thought, I'm going to get out here.

46:12The rains, they sweep the surface, so they bring a new series of discoveries.

46:20For that reason, Jim is feeling confident about the day ahead. So confident, he writes in his notebook. I'm going out today to sign I might find something really interesting. Wearing a safari hat, sunglasses and a leather jacket, Jim heads out on his motorbike to explore the dunes in the sun. Probably about by the middle of the day, I noticed a white bone appearing on the windblown sandy surface. I thought, first case, it was a wombat, so I swept away just with my hands the tip of these bones, and below this round patch on the surface, there was clearly a human jawbone, and that immediately implied the probable presence of a body on the ground on which I was then standing.

47:07I got back quickly as possible to the nearest telephone, rang my colleagues in Canberra. And at this stage, they already knew that, well, Bolar had found a few things of interest before, so they came immediately this time with a team of people. Here was the further proof of ancient human life that Jim had been hoping for. At 4.18pm, he writes in his trusty notebook, Eureka! The Next Mungo Edition. Within 48 hours, his colleagues from the university, including archaeologist Dr Alan Thorne, arrived to excavate the bones. Unlike Mungo Lady, here was a complete skeleton and there was more. Thorne said to me, watch this.

47:49He gave me a little pellet and it was a pellet of iron oxide. And so immediately the penny dropped that this was not just iron oxide, it was ochre. And we could see a faint trace around the margins of the body that there was a faint reddening. This trace continued down from cranium down to the groin. This body had been anointed. This was huge news. It showed that those who buried Mungoman were more sophisticated than previously thought, as this BBC documentary from 1975 explains. Red ochre in the grave can only signify that the ancient people of this lake believed in an afterlife and had created religious rituals at least as early as modern man in Europe.

48:34They have the earliest cremation in the world, which also indicates religion, and their pellets of ochre may make them the first artists. So that all came together on that single day. Not bad for a day that started with Jim stranded on a sheep farm in the rain. The skeleton, a hunter-gatherer with arthritis who died around the age of 50, was nicknamed Mungoman. He was buried on his back with his hands crossed in his lap. It took time to understand and appreciate the full significance of what we were seeing. The dating at that time, all we could say was certainly well beyond 20 ,000. Jim's colleagues went further and estimated that Mungo Man was older than that, maybe even 63 ,000 years old.

49:19They had received worldwide acknowledgement that this was a new history to Australia. And I was approached by the media in Melbourne, the Melbourne Age, and I was very sceptical about those dates because they did not fit the geology. So I said to the reporter, look, I don't believe those dates. And if you believe them, you believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden. And the media lady said, well, look, we'll quote you on that. No, no, no, you can't. I didn't say it. I'll say I never said it. So next day, the Melbourne Age came out. Bowler says the age of the Mungo Man is ridiculous.

50:01Jim's instincts were right. Carbon dating later showed Mungoman was about 42 ,000 years old, which still made him Australia's oldest known human skeleton. That's nearly 10 times older than the pyramids of Egypt. His remains were taken to the Australian National University to be studied, and in 1979 the area he was found in became a national park and a World Heritage Site in 1981. But Indigenous Australians viewed the excavation as a violation of their sacred traditions. How did you feel about the bones being moved at the time? Oh, that's come back to bite us. The reality was the bones were taken without permission.

50:43That's true. At that time, the Indigenous people from that area had been removed probably 50, 60 years earlier. So I didn't meet any in my work there for many years until after the appearance of the Mungo people, when Aboriginal people came and said, hey, look, hey, wait a minute, this is our history, not yours. Indigenous Australians from the region campaigned for Mungoman to be returned to his ancestral home. In 2015, the Australian National University apologised for their original excavation. Two years later, Mungoman was returned to Mungo National Park and in 2022, in accordance with the wishes of the Indigenous community, he was reburied in a secret location to protect his remains from desecration.

51:32Jim believes the fact it was undisclosed is a missed opportunity. For me, it was a sad and unfortunate moment. A pilgrimage place where people could come and honour not just the bones, but the ancestral people. That never happened. Lake Mungo itself is a pilgrimage place for many people. They go there and they see the land and the amazing record of ancient people, but not the full story, not the spiritual dimension of the Mungo people. That's the story Australia still waits to digest. Mungo Man is no longer regarded as Australia's oldest remains. In 2017, evidence was discovered to suggest that Aboriginal people have been in Australia for even longer, 65 ,000 years.

52:21But Jim's discoveries helped redefine our scientific understanding of early Australians. It clearly was a moment of life-changing significance, both not to me, but also to Australian history. I have spent 50-odd years in the company with Mungo Man. He's here on my wall today behind me. I talk to him and he talks to me. I listen to him and he's asked me questions. Bowler, what have you done to my land? What have you done to my people? They become real questions to which we have to find answers. That is a dialogue that goes on between me and Mungo Man and will continue whether he's buried or not.

53:05The Australian geologist Jim Bowler, who discovered Mungo Man in 1974, he was speaking to Rachel Naylor. For this week's sporting witness, now that the FIFA World Cup has kicked off, you might remember the last time it was held in the Americas. It was in 2014, and one of the key games involved the host nation Brazil facing Germany. The stadium certainly roared, but not with joy. The German footballer Thomas Müller has been telling Uma Doriswamy what happened that day. I think before the tournament started with our first game, I had the feeling there was a lot of pressure on the team, but we started with a big win against Portugal into the group stage.

53:49I had maybe our biggest party after that in our base camp, so that was a big relief. Thomas Müller is one of Germany's top goal scorers, and in that match against Portugal, he scored a hat-trick, so he's allowed to have enjoyed that party. Both teams made it through their group games undefeated. We found ways to get good results. We had a tough match against the USA, we won it. We turned almost a loss against Ghana around in the last minutes of the game to tie it. We had a difficult game against Algeria, maybe a solid one against France. So it was okay. The Brazilian team, maybe the expectations were really high.

54:33If you have a home World Cup, if you are Brazil, if you look back, what Brazil did between 1994 and almost 2006, The pressure was on them and the expectations of the whole country was really high and they struggled a little bit with their playing style. They made it happen to reach the semis, but they lost Neymar in the quarters. Neymar was Brazil's 22-year-old talismanic forward. He was the team's top scorer, but a back injury meant he would miss the rest of the tournament. Having already lost their captain, Thiago Silva, who was suspended for picking up two yellow cards in earlier games, the team was under even more pressure.

55:13Going into the stadium, the Brazilian team wore caps with Neymar's name on it and held up his shirt during the national anthem Would all the emotion from the team and the fans be too much? When the national anthem was on, it was an incredible atmosphere but you also could feel that the pressure was there It's easy to describe and easy to talk about it that maybe the pressure didn't help them but to be honest, the start of the game of the semis it was maybe not really good from both sides. I watched it back several times and I have to say that a lot of easy mistakes were made but both teams were kind of waiting for a moment.

55:53And that moment came in the 10th minute when Thomas scored from a corner by escaping his marker, David Luiz, in the penalty box and side-footed the ball into the net. It's a great goal but we as players in this World Cup situation, in World Cup semi-finals, we are not there because we won in the lottery. We are there also because we have skills and that was not something out of my skill box, so I was not surprised. What happened next is arguably one of football's biggest humiliations. Regular listeners of Sporting Witness will know that I'm not allowed to use sports commentary for rights reasons.

56:28So Thomas is going to do it for me, describing the goals as they go in minute by minute. OK, let's give it a try. 23rd minute. Right side attack for the Germans, Philipp Lahm. No, no, no, no. Maybe a ball from the right side to Toni Kroos in the centre of the goal outside the box, maybe 25 yards. He passed the ball to a running Thomas Müller. He ran across, laid off for Miroslav Klose. He missed the first shot, converted the second one to 0 for Germany. 24th minute. 24th minute attack on the right side again, very active right side. I don't remember who played on the right side of this game. Maybe it was Philipp Lahm and Thomas Müller.

57:12OK, here we go. So it was a good combination, a good cross from Philipp Lahm. To myself, it was a great touch to just deflect it. The others will say, I missed the shot. The ball went through to Tony Cruz and he took it with his left foot. One-timer, half-volley, brilliant technique, smashed it into the back of the net. 26 minutes. 26th minute, I think a crucial ball loss for the Brazilians. Semikadira maybe took it, played a 1-2 with Toni Kroos and Toni Kroos scored. 29th minute. 29th minute, Mats Hummels was dribbling the ball through the midfield, almost lost it but made it happen. Played the ball through with a long last step, almost a tackling.

57:58He played the ball to Mesut Ozil. He was slightly offside, maybe three to five centimetres. Had a nice quick combination with Cadira again, passed it back to him and he finished 5-0. Good work, Thomas. 5-0. It took only 29 minutes for the Germans to completely dismantle Brazil's defence and with it, the country's spirit. Fans were crying in the stands. This was not how it was meant to happen. At half-time, both teams tried to take it all in. If you look up to the scoreboards and it's 5-0 in a semifinal in Brazil against Brazil, then you realize or you don't realize what really happens. But you realize that you don't realize it, if this makes sense.

58:42It was not dreamland. It was more like we didn't know what land it was. But we tried to stay calm or we tried to just accept it. And in halftime, when we had the first time, a few seconds more to think about it, we looked around in the locker room and everyone was a little bit like, what happened here? The German manager, Jürgen Löw, told his players to keep their concentration up and not to become arrogant on the pitch. Try to settle down emotions a little bit, try to remind us to stick to our plan, to stick to our style, to play these kind of games, to play especially not disrespectful in some moments.

59:20Sometimes maybe when you are hyped up like this, maybe you have some moments you try some nutmegs or stuff like that and he wanted to avoid these situations to play with respect. But we were pretty sure that we will go through, to be honest, after the first 45 minutes. The second half kicked off and Brazil found their composure for a bit. But in the 69th minute, German forward André Schürrle scored and again, 10 minutes later, making it 7-0. By now, the remaining Brazilian fans in the stadium started applauding the German team and gave them a standing ovation. Brazil's Oscar scored in the 90th minute, but it was no comfort.

1:00:02Thomas spoke to his Bayern Munich teammate, Dante, after the match to try to console him. We had a short chat, but you feel a little bit uncomfortable or sorry for people you know when you know they're in these situations when their expectations were that high. And yeah, in the end, the 7-1, it was a crazy result. And the post-mortem on how Brazil collapsed began. Not in their worst nightmares did anyone in Brazil think this is how it would end. But everywhere, heads dropped, mouths opened wide, and people cried as this proud footballing country was completely humiliated. The stadium emptied and the fan fest fell quiet.

1:00:40No one in Brazil had seen this coming. I think it's really sad in the end to end the competition, to end the championship with this kind of negative result. For Brazil, for the Brazilian people, it's very embarrassing. But for Thomas and his teammates, their job was to keep their focus. I think everyone was amazed and a little bit shocked in a positive way. but the thing is when you win a semi-final like that the job was not done so it was not like that we had the big party after the semi-final craziness was more for the fans, for the spectators for us it was just one more step closer to our goal and I remember it very clearly that we were very focused right after the game because we knew, okay, now the last step is waiting for us

1:01:37The tormentor of many international defences, not just Brazil's, Germany's Thomas Müller was speaking to Uma Doriswamy. There are lots of football stories from the past on our website. Find them by going to bbc.com slash witness history and then looking for Sporting Witness, Kuwait's only World Cup appearance, the Panenka penalty, Van Basten's wonder goal and many more. You'll find them there. That's it, though, for this edition of the History Hour. We'll be back next week. I hope you can join us again then. This is Max Pearson from all of us here. Thanks for listening. Goodbye. From the pioneers.

1:02:12We weren't going to ask mission. We're just going to do it. And the celebrations. You feel you have, you win. I feel it. I was first. I was first. We were so proud of ourselves. And Cameron was proud of us, too. I still cannot believe it. It was such an amazing feeling. It was incredible. To the humiliations. I did cry most of the half. Oh man, I'm failing. I'm failing this sport that I love. Sporting Witness takes you to the events that have shaped the sports world through the eyes of the people who were there. It's not just about the sport. It's about all the other things that people with disabilities learn from each other.

1:02:52For nine minutes, you become a fan in the stands as we take you back in time to examine memorable moments from all over the world. There's a magic during those moments that carries your soul. We were truly blessed to be a part of history. Sporting Witness. Subscribe wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

1:03:13He's widely recognised as one of the greatest footballers in history. He's won the prestigious Ballon d 'Or Award five times. He's the all-time leading goal scorer in professional football. And according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, he's the first active footballer in history to achieve billionaire status. Guess who we're talking about yet? That's right. Good Bad Billionaire is exploring the life and fortune of football icon Cristiano Ronaldo. That's Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.