Notes on Alan Rabinowitz’s Beyond the Last Village

Conventional wisdom has long insisted that there’s nothing new left to discover on the surface of the earth. “The time for discoveries is past,” wrote naturalist Louis Agassiz back in 1867. “No student of nature should go out now expecting to find a new world.” The fact is, however, that Agassiz was proven wrong by several explorers who came after him (John Wesley Powell, for example, or Roy Chapman Andrews), and his generalization continues to prove flimsy today — as is evidenced by Alan Rabinowitz’s recent adventure travel book, Beyond the Last Village: A Journey of Discovery in Asia’s Forbidden Wilderness. “Many people are still convinced that our knowledge of the world’s large creatures and cultures is all but complete,” Rabinowitz says in his introduction. “They are wrong.”

To prove this assertion, Rabinowitz led a series of expeditions into the Himalayan region of northern Myanmar in the late 1990’s, to search for an isolated pocket of mountain habitats suspected to harbor unknown Pleistocene-era animal species. Rabinowitz, who works for the U.S.-based Wildlife Conservation Society (and is the prot