NatGeo Flashback Photos: Baboon Teaching a Kitty How to Sit Properly (Like a Baboon) and Mowin’ the Lawn at Stonehenge

Our pal Marilyn Terrell of National Geographic Traveler’s Intelligent Travel blog told us about Flashback, a gem of a monthly photograph archive from NatGeo (some published before in the magazine, some never before seen).

I particularly like these two, of a baboon trying to teach a kitty how to sit properly (like a baboon, that is) and a man mowing the lawn at Stonehenge:

Photography by Kurt Severin, National Geographic Image Collection

SITTING KITTY
A patient little cat endures lessons in baboonery. According to notes accompanying the photograph—which arrived at the Geographic in 1956 but was never published by the magazine—"Baboon mother tries to make Fluffy sit up like a good monkey baby. But the kitten always falls back on her four legs. It seems like such a hopeless case." The baboon, named Helen, was an attraction at Ross Allen’s Reptile Institute, a roadside zoo funded in 1929 in Silver Springs, Florida. She may have been a holdover from the days when Tarzan movies were filmed in the region and Allen provided animal actors for visiting Hollywood productions. —Margaret G. Zackowitz

 

Photograph by Barbara Maddrell, National Geographic Image Collection

CUTTING IT CLOSE
Mowing among the megaliths at Stonehenge must have been a mighty task. England’s Salisbury Plain—home to the famous standing stones as well as hundreds of other prehistoric sites—is one of the largest expanses of rare chalk grassland left in Europe. The man in this 1950s photograph (never previously published in the Geographic) was unavailable for comment on his labors. His name did not accompany the image, and his origins, much like Stonehenge’s, remain a mystery. – Margaret G. Zackowitz

Check out the 2008 archives here: Link – Thanks Marilyn!