![]() “Before the rangers, this was a lawless area,” says AWF Primatologist Jef Dupain who leads the current efforts. The NBC News team treks in the Bili-Uele forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The rangers, part of the national Congolese force, are expected to protect the wildlife while helping to secure the area from rebels. Last year the service, which is part of the Department of the Interior, teamed up with the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF), a nongovernmental conservation organization, to sponsor park ranger patrols through the forest. Fish and Wildlife Service has decided to spend $341,464 to support conservation programs there since 2010. The LRA rebels presence in the Bili forest is part of the reason that the International Division of the U.S. military’s general expansion across Africa. In 2011, President Barack Obama sent 100 Special Operations troops to advise and assist the region’s armies fighting the LRA. The video, which focused on Kony’s enslavement of child soldiers, has been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube. The Lord’s Resistance Army gained considerable international attention in 2012 when a group of American activists posted an online video about the war crimes of the group’s leader, Joseph Kony. “There was even speculation that maybe these apes were a hybrid between chimpanzees and gorillas, a new species of great ape, or something else.” “It was fascinating,” Hicks says of the mystery. American primatologist Cleve Hicks arrived in 2004. ![]() He raised money and recruited scientists and volunteers who travelled to the Bili forest to join the effort. It didn’t help that the forest is also home to armies of aggressive ants and swarms of bees that are attracted, in the dry season, to the moisture from humans’ sweat and eyes.Īmmann’s obsession with the mystery apes attracted attention in conservation circles. It’s virtually impossible for a human to keep up with an ape as it moves through the vines, thorns and underbrush. He found traces of the so called “mystery apes,” but the apes themselves remained elusive. “We even built an airstrip.” The NBC team walked with scientists and local expert trackers for more than two weeks under the dense canopy and the savannas of the 12,000-square-mile Bili-Uele tropical forest complex. “We had to ferry equipment through rivers on boats,” Ammann recalls. Were there gorillas there? Could this be new species of apes altogether? They were classified as gorilla skulls, but were said to have been collected from an area that had no known gorilla populations. ![]() "Mystery Apes" airs on "Dateline: On Assignment" at 7 p.m. NBC News joined rangers, trainers and primatologists as they ventured deep into the wild and lawless Bili forest in search of the elusive chimpanzees. The skulls had been discovered by Belgian colonizers who gained international infamy a century ago for brutalizing the native population as they extracted ivory and rubber. This was in the mid-'90s and Ammann, a Swiss-born photographer and conservationist, learned that the skulls at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, had come from a remote part of northern Congo. After covering more than 100 miles in the deep forest of the Democratic Republic of Congo, NBC News cameras were able to capture one of the elusive mystery apes of Bili. The journey to solve the mystery of the Bili apes started when Karl Ammann read a scientific article about some old skulls that were gathering dust at a museum. BILI, Democratic Republic of Congo - Great discoveries often spring from the tiniest of clues: a footnote in a dusty manuscript, a gap between stars or an odd-shaped mound in the desert. ![]()
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