July’s would-be coup in Turkey came and went without ousting the president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, though the resulting unrest succeeded in casting a wide and chaotic shadow. Fearing instability in Istanbul, the annual meeting of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s World Heritage committee — the 40th in its history — came to an early conclusion.
But not before the attendees swiftly pushed through 21 new sites to the World Heritage list.
The yardstick by which the committee measures potential sites is simply that the locations offer “outstanding universal value” to humanity, according to the UNESCO treaty adopted in 1972. In practice, this means that World Heritage sites are tremendously diverse in origin and composition.
Among the nearly two-dozen new sites on the list are Canada’s Mistaken Point, rough Newfoundland cliffs studded with the oldest evidence of complex organisms — fossils of spindly living things that date back 565 million years.
Included as a single “site,” too, are 17 works by renowned Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier. The listed buildings dot the globe from the Unit? d’habitation in Marseille — the French housing complex credited with influencing the Brutalist style of architecture — to Tokyo’s National Museum of Western Art, the first site in the center of the Japanese city. UNESCO called the structures “works of creative genius” in an announcement on Sunday, which “attest to the internationalization of architectural practice across the planet.”
The announcements came with celebrations concentrated in pockets around the globe. A group gathered in the fishing village of Portugal Cove South, in Newfoundland, to await the decision regarding Mistaken Point.
When news came through, the crowd went “crackers,” said Richard Thomas, a geologist who led the effort to get the seaside cliffs listed, to the Canadian Press. “I was just sitting there dazed … I thought this day would never come.”
Among those that failed to make the grade in 2016 was the U.S. contribution of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work, including the Fallingwater building in Pennsylvania. Somewhat complicating matters is the fact that the U.S. no longer has a vote in UNESCO; as The Washington Post reported, the U.S. ceased contributing roughly $80 million a year after Palestine joined in 2011. In 2013, per the organization’s rules, the U.S. lost voting status.
A highlight from the additions:
Gibraltar Neanderthal Caves, also known as Gorham’s Cave, sit beneath the European continent’s southernmost tip. In 2014, researchers announced in the journal PNAS they found Neanderthal artwork carved into the rock. The find, study author and Gibraltar Museum’s Clive Finlayson told the BBC, “brings the Neanderthals closer to us, yet again.”
Bones offer evidence Neanderthals lived in the caves.
