60 Minutes - 10/21/2018: Genetic Genealogy, Off the Rails, Fly Like an Eagle

Episode Date: October 22, 2018

With the help of DNA and family genealogy -- law enforcement officials are cracking cold cases. Steve Kroft reports. Track work, late arrivals, and more. Bill Whitaker reports on the ever-crumbling infrastructure of the New York City subway system. Scott Pelley shares the story of Lauren McGoughof -- a woman who hunts game -- with eagles. Those stories on tonight's "60 Minutes." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And then for them to end up right in the town where these crimes happened, it can't be a coincidence. Do you remember the day when you figured out who it was? Yes, I remember. I remember the moment when I finally get to all of these people. Why? Well, if I'm right, which I believe I am, I know a secret that only the killer knows or only the rapist knows. It's a plan and a price tag that may have trouble ever getting out of the station. A $40 billion, 10-year upgrade of New York City's antiquated and unreliable subway system. Tonight, we'll go deep down to show you systems and equipment, some that have been operating since the Great Depression.

This thing was built... Before we were born. Long before. Long before. I call it Old Trusty, but it's moving a train. In Mongolia, hunters partner with eagles in a tradition that goes back thousands of years. One of the best at this is Lauren McGow from, of all places, Oklahoma City. This is the most ancient form of falconry in the world. It blows my mind that it's even real.

It's like something out of Lord of the Rings, but you can do it. We built a camera harness to learn what it's like to fly like an eagle. I'm Steve Proft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Bill Proft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. announced a great fanfare that they had solved a notorious 40-year-old cold case and arrested a man they say is the Golden State Killer, a clever, sadistic serial murderer and rapist who terrified the state back in the 1970s and 80s.

But more significant than the arrest was the way it came about, using a powerful new tool called genetic genealogy, which law enforcement says has since been used to crack cold cases all over the country. It's a mixture of high-tech DNA analysis, high-speed computer technology, and old-fashioned family genealogy pioneered by some quirky collaborators who got into it as a hobby. In just six months, it has opened up a new frontier in criminology and also raised questions about privacy and the ethics of using DNA. We found the needle in the haystack, and it was right here in Sacramento.

The search for the Golden State Killer had frustrated law enforcement for decades. Thirteen grisly murders and as many as 50 rapes sometimes followed up with terrifying phone calls to surviving victims. I'm going to kill you. I'm going to kill you. The police never had a good lead until this year. It wasn't a new witness or a snitch, but something that they had had for years, the killer's DNA. They knew everything about his genetic makeup, but not his identity. No matches in law enforcement computers. Then, just before his retirement, cold case investigator Paul Holes pursued a final gambit. Using an alias, he submitted the killer's DNA

to an obscure public database called GEDmatch, popular with genealogy enthusiasts and good at finding family members. If we can't find him, can we find somebody related to him and then work our way back to him? And so ultimately that's what we did. And it worked. After months of research and investigation, the twisted strands of family DNA led them to the doorstep of one of their own, a retired police officer. My detectives arrested James Joseph DeAngelo, 72 years old, living in Citrus Heights. Authorities had surreptitiously obtained a fresh DNA sample from DeAngelo, and according to the arrest warrant, it was an identical match to that of the Golden State Killer. Since that very first case in April, local law enforcement agencies around the country

have used the technique to make arrests in at least 11 other cold cases. All of them would still be cold if it weren't for Curtis Rogers, a retired octogenarian in Lake Worth, Florida, who runs the largest public DNA database in the U.S. out of this three-room bungalow. This is our headquarters for GEDmatch. This is it? This is it. It was built 1925. How many employees do you have?

None. Rogers, a retired Quaker Oats executive in genealogy buff, started GEDmatch eight years ago as a hobby, along with his partner, John Olson, an accomplished computer engineer in Texas. These are all first cousins. They wanted to provide a free open source website where people could upload their DNA file and search for relatives and ancestors. Did you know the police were using this to solve crimes? Not at all.

There was an email from one of our users that said Jed Match was involved in finding the Golden State Killer. That was the first I knew of it. My world turned upside down at that point. In what way? By the time I got to work, there were satellite trucks up and down this little narrow street that we're on. You see that yellow house over there with the blue shutters? There were reporters knocking on the door. It was, you know, what do I do?

You were upset. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. About what? About whether we were invading our users' privacy in some way that they had no expectation of it being invaded. GEDmatch's policy statement, which had already cautioned that the public site might be used for purposes other than genealogy, notified its community that people could withdraw their file if they didn't want their DNA used by police

to solve crimes. So the blue indicates that there's a match there. While its office in Florida is Spartan, its computer servers in an Oregon data center are not. They can compare 600,000 separate locations in one person's DNA to those of its one million users and determine family matches in just four to five hours, listing as many as 2,000 distant relatives with the closest ones at the top of the page, along with their contact information. And then you have the e-mail address of the people that it belongs to. Correct. So if you want to call them or if you want to e-mail them, you can just...

You can e-mail them. Genealogy is a contact sport. You want to contact people. Roger says GEDmatch is not in the business of finding criminals or solving crimes. He says it can be used by law enforcement to develop initial leads, but it's just the first step in a long process that requires special skills to turn hundreds of possibilities into a handful of suspects. Law enforcement can't do this. It takes an expert genealogist. That's Cece. She is the best

of the best. He's talking about Cece Moore. Genealogy is a small world. She has spent most of the past decade working alone out of her home near San Diego, helping people identify their birth parents and putting names on the unknown dead, a precursor to her latest calling. When I would be asked, what do I do? I'd say, well, I'm a professional genetic genealogist, and people just look at me blankly like, what is that? People are just beginning to find out. CeCe Moore is now the lead genealogist for Parabon NanoLabs, a small DNA technology company in Reston, Virginia, that is leading the way in genetic genealogy. The sheriff's office arrested Michael F.A. Henslick without incident.

The day we visited her, police halfway across the country announced that they had made an arrest on a nine-year-old murder case that she'd been working on. This was just this morning, a couple hours ago. Whereabouts? In Champaign, Illinois. This is the Holly Cassano murder. She had been stabbed repeatedly, I think about 60 times, in her mobile home. And she was a young, single mother.

Moore has played a pivotal role in identifying suspects in 13 of the 14 cases that have arisen since the Golden State killer opened the floodgates six months ago. I'm looking at the people that share the most DNA with this unknown subject. She does it by taking the partial family matches that are generated by GEDmatch and builds out family trees that she hopes will point to the unknown suspect. So our unknown subject is here. Okay, so he's sharing DNA with this person and this person. But two different family trees.

Yeah. This is how she identified the alleged killer in a high-profile 31-year-old double homicide. And I'm trying to find an intersection where these two family trees come together so we're getting that right mix of DNA. So I'm building these down. I'm saying who are their children, who are their children, their children, their children, who are their children, theirs, theirs, and theirs. She uses things like marriage licenses,

birth announcements, obituaries, even Facebook to trace the ancestors. I found an obituary, and that obituary had a descendant from this tree carrying a surname that I recognized from this tree, and I was able to find their marriage record. So a descendant from this couple and a descendant from this couple married and had only one son. That's fascinating. That one son was William Earl Talbot II,

the only male carrier of the DNA mix from the two families that could match the DNA found at the gruesome homicide scenes of Jay Cook and Tanya Van Kylenborg. The young Canadian couple was brutally murdered in 1987 in Washington State. C.C.'s report went to Detective Jim Scharf, who had worked the cold case for 13 years. This was the tip of a lifetime to solve this case. He said Talbot was never even on their radar. But at the time of the murders, he was 24 years old and living not far from where the bodies were discovered. Police tailed Talbot, collected his DNA from a discarded cup, and turned it over to a crime lab technician for analysis. And she told me that we had a match to the suspect that killed Tanya and Jay.

And it brought tears to my eyes. And then I screamed, yeah, you know, we got him. When I give these names to law enforcement, I am really sure. Because all those pieces have to come together a really specific way. And then for them to end up right in the town where these crimes happened, it can't be a coincidence. Do you remember the day when you figured out who it was? Yes, I remember. I remember the moment when I finally get to all of these people. It's because it's a pretty profound moment to zero in on that. It's certainly a heavy discovery. Why?

Well, if I'm right, which I believe I am, I know a secret that only the killer knows or only the rapist knows. It's, you know, it's a profound thing. This has changed lives. And, you know, I see what I believe is the answer. One of the hardest answers to come up with was who killed eight-year-old April Tinsley, who was abducted while playing outside her home in 1988. Her body was discovered three days later in a ditch outside Fort Wayne, Indiana. She'd been raped and murdered. The police had the DNA of her killer, but could never find a match. For 30 years, he taunted investigators, scrawling threats on a barn door and tying notes to girls' bicycle seats.

The amount of interviews, man hours that went into this case is unbelievable. Brian Martin has been a Fort Wayne homicide detective for six years. He was the one who got the call in July from CeCe Moore saying there had been a breakthrough. We began looking at the individuals that she had given us, and within four to five hours, we began surveillance. Fourteen days later, that individual was taken into custody and is currently in the Allen County jail.

The suspect is John Miller, a 59-year-old loner who worked at Walmart and lived in this trailer six miles away from where April's body was found. He's pled not guilty, but according to this affidavit, when police went to arrest him, they asked Miller if he had any idea why they wanted to talk to him. Miller looked at them and said, April Tinsley. He knew exactly what it was for. Is that the most satisfying part of the job? There's two things that are satisfying. Finally, having the pieces come together is very satisfying. And then giving these families some justice to have an arrest. That is the most meaningful thing to me. The support for genetic

genealogy in the law enforcement community is virtually unanimous. Parabon NanoLabs, the company C.C. Moore works for, had been anticipating it for years. It's already marketing technology to police agencies that creates computer-generated composites of suspects, predicting eye color, skin tone, and perhaps even facial structure based on their DNA. Steve Armantrout is Parabon's CEO. So you were ready when the Golden State case happened? Yeah, the wheels were already in motion. We sat back and watched the public response.

It was overwhelmingly positive. This was like a starting gun to go ahead and move out. We sat back and watched the public response. It was overwhelmingly positive. This was like a starting gun to go ahead and move out. Armentrout says Parabon already has more than 100 cases in the pipeline, but there is no shortage of cautionary questions being raised by civil rights groups and bioethicists about the reliability of crime scene DNA, the lack of standards and protocol in this revolutionary new field, and whether website users have become genetic informants on their relatives. The field is so new it's almost impossible to predict consequences. None of the cases have gone to trial, and no one has pled guilty.

Do you anticipate that there will be legal objections? Sure. I would think any good defense attorney is going to challenge this just because there has never been a precedent-setting decision on specifically using genetic genealogy and GEDmatch. So I look forward to the day that we get that decision. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill.

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I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. New York City is a place where attitude and strong opinions are in the DNA.

New Yorkers might not agree on much, but there's one thing on which millions of them do agree. The subway is a mess. Trains are packed, breakdowns and delays are routine. Some say it's gone off the rails. After an actual derailment last year injured more than 40 people, the governor declared a state of emergency. When it first opened more than a century ago, the New York City subway was considered a feat of American engineering. Now it's another example of the country's ailing infrastructure. Luckily, there's a man with a plan, an Englishman in New York, who proposes the city's largest infrastructure expenditure since the 1950s.

More on that in a moment. First, if you have never ridden the sprawling New York City subway, welcome aboard. When the trains are moving, there's no better way to get around New York City than on the subway. These 400-ton behemoths crisscross the underbelly of the city, zipping through a web of tunnels deep underground and on elevated tracks high in the air. Catch one in the right light, and it can look like a model train running through a toy cityscape. There's more than 600 miles of track, uptown, downtown, out to the boroughs. Like the city itself, the subway never sleeps. It runs 24-7. Nearly six million people ride the trains each day, often accompanied by

a soundtrack for the mad dash to the door. The cost at the gate, $2.75. For that fare, sometimes you get a show, whether you want it or not. Other times, a view. The Empire State Building. There, in the distance, the Statue of Liberty. And here on the subway, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Ridership is near a 70-year peak. But after years of neglect,

deferred maintenance, and financial mismanagement, the system can't handle the strain. Please stand by. Last year, passengers got trapped, desperate, on a broken-down train for almost an hour in sweltering heat. Earlier this year, a ceiling collapsed on a platform in Brooklyn. One passenger suffered a concussion. In September, torrential rains poured inside a Manhattan station. It all adds up to a mosaic of misery, exacerbated by the heat, the rats, and incessant delays. Enter Andy Byford, a world-renowned Mr. Fix-It for troubled subways. He's the new president of transit for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, shorthand the MTA, the state agency that runs the trains.

This has to be the mother of all transit challenges. It is. And the way I look at it, Bill, is someone has to take this on. You know, if every transit professional said, oh, it's too tough, I'm not going to risk my career in going there, nothing would happen. I'm prepared to give it a go. He's certainly got the credentials. Byford grew up a train enthusiast in Britain in the city of Plymouth. He worked his way up in the London Tube, ran mass transit in Sydney, and most recently led a turnaround in Toronto. The MTA brought him on board in January to stop

the hemorrhaging and resurrect the system. I pinch myself sometimes, how did this spotty kid from Plymouth suddenly end up running New York City Transit? But it's a dream. Some people would call that a nightmare. When I left Toronto, there was a mix of people saying congratulations or are you crazy? But I like a challenge.

If we can turn this around, then it will be the most satisfying period of my career. I mean, it will be the pinnacle. Byford seems undaunted. He proudly wears his name tag for all disgruntled commuters to see. He expects to be held accountable. Like everyone else down here, he just wants the trains to run on time. I'm Andy Byford. I'm the president of transit. With his friendly neighbor approach, he's that rare executive who does his own market research, routinely popping up unannounced to query customers, motivate workers, and take stock of the subway.

You know, we've got to up our game and get better at the basics, number one. And if all that glad-handing weren't enough, he also doesn't mind getting those hands dirty. You really do just pick up the trash. Absolutely. I'm not going to walk by that. So things like that. He's fastidious down to the last crumb. Things like trash. Yeah, get rid of it. I don't want to see unclean stations or messy stations. Good luck on that one. Yep. A group of maintainers... Half-eaten bagels are the least of his worries. Byford was hired to shake up the tired old system.

He crafted a grand modernization plan that calls for hundreds of station renovations, thousands of new subway cars, and more state-of-the-art computer signal controls that can run trains faster and more frequently. It sounds like you're going for broke. I've said in the past that's what we have to do, not to tweak this system. It needs way more than that. It needs to be a comprehensive, top-to-bottom modernization of every aspect of our operations. Why shouldn't we be on a par with London, with Hong Kong, with Shanghai, with Singapore?

This is New York, for goodness sake. But the MTA's track record is not world class. Computerizing just one line took about a decade. Byford says with his planned efficiencies, he can upgrade nearly the entire system in that amount of time. And that would be the easy part. The hard part? How to pay for it. He calculates his plan could cost a whopping $40 billion.

How are you going to come up with that kind of money? Well, I mean, I leave that to smarter people than me. I leave that to the politicians. But the politicians are squabbling. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to raise money by taxing millionaires. Governor Andrew Cuomo, by charging vehicles squeezing into congested midtown Manhattan. If money and politics weren't enough, Byford says he's going to need a third thing, the patience of New Yorkers, who will have to put up with subway lines shutting down for repair. Any one of those things would be next to impossible to achieve. How are you going to achieve all three? By British charm. It will not be quick,

it will not be cheap, and it certainly won't be easy. So my message to New Yorkers is there's no gain without a bit of pain. This will be worth it. Tell that to the 400,000 people who take the L train every day, which runs between Brooklyn and Manhattan. The line is facing an imminent 15 month shutdown for repairs. Riders gave Byford an earful. So my question is, how would I get to work? It's hell right now. One drive to West Forth. The most ambitious element of Byford's plan is ripping out and replacing the antiquated signaling system that controls traffic on the tracks. This is what he inherited, equipment that's been operating since the Great Depression. This machine, more than 100 years old.

We saw operator Rekia Spady move switches on the tracks around her station by pushing and pulling its antique levers. This is 2018, and this thing was built... Before we were born. Long before. Long before. But it, I mean, I call it old trusty. It's moving the train. In this age of GPS, this low-tech map marked the approximate location of nearby trains.

So you see how that green dot is up there behind the blue dot? It's still in transit. So it's moving into the station, and now he stopped. But you don't know exactly where on the track that train is. No. No. This is New York City. They don't know exactly where the trains are at any given time in the subway system.

Yeah, that's what we need to transform, and it's about accelerating towards a modern signaling system. That would give us precise, absolute identification of where trains are and it would enable you to move trains up safely closer together ergo more trains the old-fashioned system requires intensive care when parts break which at their age happens often this busy repair shop springs into action like doctors mechanics examine the patients. Some sound like they're on their last breaths. Many of the companies that made these components are long gone, so workers here have to manufacture their own replacement parts. I have 50,000 employees

working with me as a big team. We've got old processes, old systems that we use, and yet my miracle work is keep that going every day. 34th Street, Heffield Square, Bronx. Change can't come soon enough for frontline employees like train operators and conductors who face an increasingly aggravated public. It's a lot that we deal with. We brought together a small group of veteran workers for what turned into a group therapy session.

Melvin Wright is a third-generation train operator. Pulling into a station, people tapping their watch at me, you know, like reminding me we're late. That's real life stuff. That's what goes on. Cheryl Nicholson is a conductor of 29 years. She says there's no shortage of bad behavior and bad attitudes. I used to cry. I used to cry.

Because of what people would say to you. Because people were so mean. And they say it's gotten worse. In August, passengers pummeled a conductor in Brooklyn after the train was forced to skip a few stops. No one here excuses the violence, but we were surprised to hear this. They're frustrated and I get it. They have reason to be frustrated? They do have a reason. If your job depends on you to be there and your boss said, you

know, this is the third time, Mr. Whitaker, what are you thinking? Oh, that conductor's going to get it. It was the MTA. Yeah, so we get it. Nothing irritates the traveling public more than delays. On Andy Byford's watch, on-time performance has ticked up slightly, though many riders say they haven't noticed. Byford says he's focused on the basics.

He's using $800 million in emergency funds from the state to shift maintenance into overdrive on the tracks and in the garage, where subway cars are being overhauled at the fastest pace in a decade. Remember Rakia Spady's 100-year-old clunker? Her equipment is getting a long-planned upgrade. That's a copy. It looks good on the board. Of course, we can't do a story about the subway without hearing from passengers. To get a quick read on their unvarnished opinions, we went to the MTA's futuristic-looking Rail Control Center, where workers monitor and manage train traffic system-wide.

There, we met Haley Dragoo, a social media millennial who works in... The Twitter division. The Twitter division. The Twitter division. The Twitter division gets about 2,000 tweets a day, many from irate passengers. What's the purpose of having a schedule if you never abide by it? But most of the tweets are from people who just want to know why they can't get to school, work, or home on time. We just kind of try and put ourselves in these people's shoes and try and answer them as best we can and as accurately as we can. And then we hope that that

made their day a little better or at least more clear. The subway riding public is kind of fed up right now. And I get that. So our job is crystal clear. We need to turn this around for New Yorkers and I absolutely want New Yorkers to start feeling by the end of this year it's definitely getting better. By the end of this year? By the end of this year? By the end of this year.

Wrenching this marvel of the 20th century into the 21st will take a virtuoso performance. New Yorkers are an impatient lot. They want things fixed yesterday. Andy Byford knows he's on the biggest stage before the toughest crowd on earth. You've got a lot on your to-do list. I want to see things, but that's what I love. It keeps me busy, and the upside is also get to live in New York. What's not to like?

Falconry, the art of hunting with birds of prey prey was born in the forbidding altai mountains of central asia hunters there still loft golden eagles into the sky in a partnership of man and bird that predates recorded history we say man but in truth one of the best hunters in mongolia today is a woman from oklahoma city lauren mcgow took us to one of the most remote places on earth to meet the hunters who trained her and before the next few minutes are through you will know what it's like to fly like an eagle the mongolian step is the greatest expanse of grassland unaltered by humankind. It endures because human existence has narrow odds between the widest climate extremes on earth, 104 degrees in summer, 50 below in winter. Nomads depend on the animals that yield nearly all of their

food, fiber, clothing, and fuel. And one of the oldest bonds in nature is an alliance of survival among hunters, horses, and golden eagles. This is the most ancient form of falconry in the world. This is where it all began. It's the cradle. So several thousand years ago, we don't know precisely when a man saw an eagle catch a rabbit or a fox and had the ingenious idea to hunt in partnership with it. It blows my mind that it's even real. It's like something out of Lord of the Rings, but you can do it. Lauren McGough was in high school when she dedicated her life to raptors. She traveled with us to the place she calls the Cradle.

6,000 miles led us first to the, the largest contiguous empire of all time. From here, we flew another 800 miles to Bayan-Olgi, where Mongolia, Russia, China, and Kazakhstan meet. This was the end of the road, but not the end of our journey. We crossed the open steppe, past wild Bactrian camels with two humps, a vanishing species with only about 1,000 left in the world. Our destination was a camp of nomads, people who introduced Lauren McGow to the golden eagle. Hello! They hadn't seen her in two years. Deja! Feels like I never left.

Just in a few minutes of seeing everybody. Such a magical place. Now, how did a woman from Oklahoma end up out here in Mongolia? Well, I read a book on falconry, and it's like the fire was lit. I just knew I had to do it. And as I was researching, I went to the library and I found this old book that had black and white photos of eagle hunters from Mongolia. So, you know, this beautiful shaggy horse and this man with a giant eagle and a fox pelt on his horse. And it just

looked like the most incredible thing. And I thought, I have to, I have to see it, I have to do it. At the age of 17, her father, a former Air Force stealth pilot, brought her to Mongolia. Lauren returned five years later with funding from a Fulbright scholarship. Then she earned a Ph.D. based on her work with the eagle hunters. These are the people that can talk to animals because they have relationships with goats, sheep, horses, camels, eagles. They have intimate knowledge of where snow leopards are and foxes are. There's no agriculture here because the land's not arable. So they've ingeniously learned to domesticate animals and then build these unique relationships with wild animals. It's a relationship that she learned from people who endure the life of 19th century ranchers.

They are Kazakhs, who make up just 4% of Mongolians. They have no running water, no electricity. They survive on meat and milk and burn dung as fuel. The nomads live in clusters of a half-dozen families or so. The boys mine the flocks, while the men ride in search of foxes to make furs for sub-zero survival. In all the years you've been doing this,

what have you learned about these animals? A hunter named Chukan gave us an answer we never saw coming. As they said in the old times, if the horse makes your name famous in a race once a year, the eagle makes your name famous a hundred times a year. If I gift to people many foxes, they will say it was Chukan who gifted us the foxes. Eagle hunting is more about your name being spread far and wide among the people. So, if eagle hunting is about the ego of men, we wondered how they saw Loren McGow. Did you have any doubt that a woman could hunt with an eagle? Oh, he said, we've never had a female eagle hunter.

Why did your brother take her in? She came from a world far away. She had her mind set on learning to hunt with the eagle. Her motivation came from deep in her heart. We just couldn't say no. When Lauren first came to Mongolia, it took her two weeks to catch an eagle she could call her own. How do you catch a golden eagle? Yes, So you have a dead hare that you lay out with a crow or a raven staked nearby, and you encircle it in a net. So the eagle, on migration, looks down and sees this hare that only a crow has possession of,

and it thinks, I can easily bully that crow out of that rabbit and have a free meal to myself. So it comes in, and when it tries to grab the dead rabbit, the net unfolds around the eagle. The eagle is taught to feed at the hand of the hunter. And as long as the meals are regular, the eagles are calm, content, and come back for more. They perch on the hunter's arm with a rawhide leash called a jess tied to their legs. They train the birds with a fox pelt tugged by a rope. This is what happens

when the eagle zeroes in on a fox. After the bird makes the kill, the hunters ride in, strip the pelt, and give the meat to the eagle. It's a technique well over a thousand years old. We may not know exactly when it started, but you don't have to be here in Mongolia very long to figure out why it began. In an area as vast as this, with game so rare, it helps to have a hunting partner that can see seven times better than a human and cover all of this at about 50 miles an hour. What is that like?

The eagles were kind enough to show us. We custom built a soft rubber camera harness and learned how to fly. Golden eagles are abundant all around the northern hemisphere. In terms of survival as a species, conservationists call golden eagles an animal of least concern. This is a 10-pound bird, which don't be fooled if that doesn't sound like a lot. They have hollow bones and they're mostly feathers, so 10 pounds on a bird is an enormous bird. They have a 6-foot wingspan. They usually have lovely amber eyes,

and the name golden eagle derives from the beautiful golden feathers on their nape. Around the neck. Yes, around the neck. They're incredibly effective at killing, which is what they're built for. I mean, they're a modern-day velociraptor, a perfect product of evolution. I will never be tired of a golden eagle flying.

Every time it thrills me. The eagle's talons can close on its prey with a bone-crushing force of 900 pounds per square inch. A fun fact that is no fun to know. Come on, sweetheart. Perfect. Okay. Very good.

And then go ahead and stand up. And then to secure the eagle, place your jesses between your thumb and the rest of your fingers. Right here. Yes. Okay. The noise that the eagle recognizes is ka. Okay. Whenever you're ready just take off her hood. Remove the hood? Yes. Ka. Ka. Ka. Good girl. What a feeling. Notice she said, good girl. The only eagles worthy of partnership are female.

They're larger, stronger, better hunters. Ironic, since the human partner is traditionally male. Of all the eagle hunters you've known, how does Lauren rate? How good is she? She's at the same level as men. She could compete with them. Lauren, now 31, is considered one of the best falconers in the world. She has brought the ancient ways to Oklahoma, where she rehabilitates raptors and trains with her own eagle named Miles.

What is the career of one of these eagles? So an eagle is trapped first year, second year, maybe third year on its migration. And then it has a time with an eagle hunter, which could be as short as a year or as long as six, seven, eight years. Eventually, they return that eagle back to the wild. It is part of the tradition to let them go? Yes. They firmly believe that an older eagle should be in the wild. What do you say to some people who might watch this and think that the eagles are being abused, that they shouldn't be caught? I would encourage anybody that has doubts to go out with a falconer. In this country or in the United States or anywhere, we only encourage their natural instincts.

The only difference is you are right there. You have a front row seat to see this incredibly million-year-old predator-prey relationship. Do you worry that one day there will be no more eagle hunters? A hunter named Uni told us, no, it's an essential art that Kazakhs are born with. Since Kazakhs have come to the earth, they have been practicing this tradition. It will not disappear.

Also, each of us has a young person that we teach, like this boy. It passes from generation to generation. What's at stake if this tradition is lost? This is where man first figured out that he could have a relationship with a raptor. And what a loss would it be for humanity if it was gone? We can take an individual eagle and bring it from the spectrum of wild all the way to tame and then wild again. And we get to see what they're capable of up close and in person. Man, if that understanding of eagles and animals were to leave, that's not a world I want to live in.

The boy named Becca is the hope of his family's traditional world. He's learning horsemanship and falconry. And it was with Becca that we discovered the most endangered species on the steppe, the nomads themselves. There may be only 300 eagle hunters left.