Philippa Kaur

By Simon Ings
Getty Images/iStockphoto
The first rule of popular science is to reveal the wonder and mystery of the world. For that reason, Sentient (Picador), written by photographer and wildlife film-maker Jackie Higgins, is my personal pick of the year. It reveals how the 86 billion nerve cells in the human nervous system afford us not just five, but more than 30 distinct senses, all served by dedicated receptors. Here is a thought suitable for the season: did you know that mammals have a special touch receptor dedicated to cuddling?
Bodies and brains
Science writers found many more unexpected wonders to share with us this year. Delicious (Princeton University Press) raises the idea that our ancestors wiped out all manner of psychoactive treats as they worked their way through mammoths, mastodons, bison, Jefferson’s ground sloths, giant camels and many more now-extinct species. The diet of the Clovis peoples of North America is a menu that husband-and-wife team Rob Dunn and Monica Sanchez describe as “a tally of a lost world”. They go on to explain how we came by such a varied appetite and how our dinners robbed the world of so many large animals.Advertisement
For inspiration on how modern humans can avoid doing the same, Jane Goodall’s collaboration with publisher Douglas Abrams is a good place to start. In The Book of Hope (Viking), Abrams interviews Goodall, whose positive philosophy has been honed over a lifetime of commitment to the natural world. “It’s mostly because people are so overwhelmed by the magnitude of our folly that they feel helpless,” says Goodall. The Book of Hope is both a memoir of a well-lived life and a compendium of stories of “people who succeed because they won’t give up”.
New Scientist writer Graham Lawton spent a year keeping a diary of his “minor health woes”. He ratcheted up more than 100, which he explores in detail in Mustn’t Grumble (Headline). It’s a romp through the science behind common ailments that ponders whether our day-to-day gripes are the best indicators of future health.
From healthy bodies to healthy minds. In Move! (Profile), Caroline Williams, another New Scientist regular, explores how moving our bodies can act as “a hotline to the brain”, affecting the way we think and feel for the better.
Meanwhile, in Ginny Smith’s Overloaded (Bloomsbury Sigma), we learn how the way we feel and even our sense of reality depend partly on how certain chemicals behave in our brains. As Smith explains, we often don’t know how these substances work. But where there is clarity to be had, Smith brings it with aplomb, revealing the chemistry behind how we sleep, what we fear, who we love and even what we remember.
“Our ancestors may have wiped out all manner of psychoactive treats as they killed off species”
Not content with this wonderful chemical world, meddling with our brain chemistry, often by ingesting plants, is a favourite pastime of humans and other animals. Many evolved as a form of plant defence, including the sedative morphine, found in the opium poppy; the stimulant caffeine, found in tea and coffee; and the hallucinogen mescaline, found in certain varieties of cacti. In This is Your Mind on Plants (Allen Lane), Michael Pollan weaves tales of drug experimentation into a historical account of our long relationship with them.
Climate of change
In a tricky year for the climate, hope is something that Michael Mann has a surprising amount of. In 1999, he published a graph showing the rapid post-industrial rise in global temperatures. Two decades of harassment and death threats later, Mann remains convinced that we can prevent runaway climate change. The New Climate War (Scribe) sets out a common-sense approach to carbon pricing and a revision of the well-intentioned, but flawed, Green New Deal.
Of course, there are still many who deny that climate change is even happening. In Saving Us (Simon & Schuster), Katharine Hayhoe argues that this isn’t necessarily a problem. A Canadian climate scientist living in Texas who is also an evangelical Christian, Hayhoe argues that since facts can be so easily manipulated and ignored, we should focus on our shared values, beliefs and enthusiasms instead. We may find we have more in common than we think.
Inspiring memoirs
“I was always proud of my work,” writes celebrated NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson in My Remarkable Journey (Amistad), “but for Pete’s sake, I didn’t do anything alone”. Johnson, who came to public attention at age 91 with the publication of Margot Lee Shetterly’s 2016 book Hidden Figures, focuses on those who encouraged and championed her career and helped her become a Black female pioneer in a field, and indeed a society, dominated by white men.
Physicist Kate Greene is another ground-based space trailblazer. She grew up wanting to be an astronaut and in 2013 she (almost) got her wish. Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars (Icon Books) is her tale of spending four months in a geodesic dome in Hawaii, with five other people, to mimic living in a colony on another planet.
The experiment revealed many of the pitfalls future pioneers will face: “The same people, same seats at the table, same clothes, same smells, same routines, same view outside the one-and-only window looking out onto the same rocks. No sunshine on our skin, no fresh air in our lungs.” Greene turns the longueurs and frustrations of her mission into a moving and compelling story.
Machines and minds
Meanwhile, on actual Mars, there is a spot that will be forever known as Larry’s Lookout. It is named after Larry Crumpler, a geologist and part of the Mars Exploration Rover project, who reversed the Spirit rover up to this spot in 2005 to photograph the Gusev crater. His book Missions to Mars (William Collins), studded with full-colour photographs taken by rovers and NASA satellites, shows how robot technology has helped us see our planetary neighbour as never before.
Back on Earth, the robots are almost as smart. This, says Kate Darling in The New Breed (Allen Lane), means we should give some serious thought to our future relationships with them. Darling celebrates our ability to bond with those outside our own species (soldiers have mourned the loss of bomb disposal robots, and Darling mentions one trooper who sprinted under gunfire to rescue a fallen robot). But she reminds us that robots, unlike animals, are designed by people, and could be used to exploit our better nature.
A final note of caution about our technological future comes from Kate Crawford. In Atlas of AI (Yale University Press), she reveals the hidden costs of artificial intelligence, from the consumption of natural resources to the more subtle costs to our privacy, equality and freedom.
A year of great sci-fi
In a year with so many reasons to seek out escapism, we were spoiled for choice with sci-fi books.
Deep Wheel Orcadia (Picador) by Harry Josephine Giles was one of the best. It’s a tale of a community of space miners faced with the possibility that the mysterious resources they have been extracting are actually sentient. Versed in Orkney dialect with an English translation, it is also perhaps the most unusual sci-fi offering of the year.
In the hyper-connected future of Skyward Inn (Solaris), humanity has spread to the stars, colonising inhabited planets as it goes. This is how a broad-chested, curly-haired extraterrestrial called Isley has ended up running a pub in England’s west country, serving a native liquor that brings good memories to mind.
Isley is happy; so, by all accounts, is his planet. So why is there a mob gathering in neighbouring Simonscombe? What do they know that the rest of the world doesn’t? In this book, Aliya Whiteley cements her reputation as one of our most exciting new novelists.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel since winning the Nobel prize in literature covers more familiar territory, with a recognisable yet slightly off-kilter version of our world. Klara and the Sun (Faber) tells the story of an intelligent, self-aware “artificial friend” who is navigating a dystopian world of human users who seem to have forgotten how to form attachments to each other and have lost sight of what really matters.
In an even more eerily familiar world, Calvin Kasulke’s Several People Are Typing (Hachette) ponders whether corporate instant-messaging apps like Slack will ultimately suck your soul out of your still-living body. The result is a riotous techno-horror-comedy whose protagonist Gerald wakes one day to find his consciousness has been uploaded into his company’s Slack channel. Will he escape? Will he want to? And will his bosses care either way? Since he started “working from home”, there’s been a leap in Gerald’s productivity, after all…
More psychological insights are to be found in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shards of Earth (Tor). In this universe, interstellar travel requires zipping through a dimension called “unspace”, which, while convenient, wreaks a psychic toll that only a few, genetically enhanced humans can survive. On the plus side, it proves useful for those who need to bargain with planet-wrecking aliens.
Finally, Becky Chambers’s A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Tor) is set on a moon called Panga, which is half protected wilderness, half industrial hellscape. Robots live in the wilderness and humans leave them alone. Then, Sibling Dex, a human “tea monk” (a kind of travelling therapist) heads into the wilds and makes contact with a robot, Mosscap.
It’s the first time humans and robots have met in centuries and, amid all the dystopian science fiction on offer, their developing relationship offers a joyful interlude that brings a warm, fuzzy feeling that is perfect for the time of year.

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An uplifting film tells the story of how George Jarrett Helm Jr became a leading voice in a movement for environmental and Indigenous rights in Hawaii

Humans

1 December 2021

By Simon Ings
The US military used Kaho’olawe as target practice for decadesCourtesy of CCFF 2021/Hawaiian Soul
Film
Hawaiian Soul
‘Āina Paikai
WHAT IS the best way to carry out activism? How should we communicate bad news in ways that stir into action those who, not unreasonably, just want to get on with their lives?
Hawaiian Soul, a 20-minute short film directed by Hawaiian film-maker ‘Āina Paikai, asks those questions through the dramatised experiences of one man: the Hawaiian falsetto singer and musician George Jarrett Helm Jr.
Born in 1950, Helm was a guitarist and singer with … More

A set of 3.7-million-year-old footprints were initially thought to have been left by a bear walking upright, but have now been reinterpreted as the prints of an unidentified hominin that walked a little bit like a modern catwalk fashion model

Humans

1 December 2021

By Michael Marshall
One of the hominin footprints preserved at Laetoli in TanzaniaScience Photo Library
Ancient footprints that were originally thought to have been made by a bear walking on two legs were actually made by an extinct human species. The discovery means there are now three known sets of hominin footprints from the same locale in Tanzania.
It isn’t clear which hominin species made the prints. The authors of the new study say they don’t match the other sets of footprints at Laetoli, a site in Tanzania, so were probably made by a different species. If this is true, it would mean that two hominin species coexisted in the same region at the same time.
“Not only are they not a bear, they are hominin and they are not the same hominin as those that made [the other footprints],” says Ellison McNutt at Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine in Athens.Advertisement
The footprints were discovered in 1976 by Peter Jones and Philip Leakey. Excavating at Laetoli, they found five prints in a place they dubbed site A. The tracks had been left in soft volcanic ash that subsequently hardened into rock.
The pair’s colleague Mary Leakey suggested that the prints had been left by a hominin. However, later studies suggested that they were actually made by a bear walking on its hind legs. As a result, site A fell into obscurity.
Meanwhile, more footprints were found at Laetoli in a location a few kilometres away, labelled site G, and these were definitely made by hominins. The trail stretches 24 metres and includes prints (one of which is pictured above) from three individuals walking together. Both sets of footprints are 3.66 million years old and are thought to have been made by Australopithecus afarensis, the species to which the famous Lucy fossil belonged.

Now, McNutt and her colleagues have re-excavated the site A footprints. “The bear hypothesis was very reasonable at the time,” she says, because the prints do look unusual. But the sediment in them was never properly cleaned out, so their true shape wasn’t known. McNutt’s team cleaned the prints thoroughly and produced 3D scans of them.
The researchers compared the tracks from site A with footprints made by humans, chimpanzees and American black bears. “There are a lot of things that make it distinctly hominin,” says McNutt. For example, the big toes were proportionally much larger than the second toes, which is seen in hominins but not in bears.
The team was “very clever” to re-excavate site A and “it’s quite convincing that it’s not a bear”, says Marco Cherin at the University of Perugia in Italy. “I think it almost definitely is a hominin.”
McNutt and her colleagues also argue that the prints don’t match the more famous tracks at site G, so were therefore made by a different species of hominin. For instance, individual footprints at site A were relatively wide for their length, compared with those at site G. The hominin also seems to have cross-stepped, meaning it brought its feet across its body’s central line – a gait seen in its most exaggerated form when fashion models walk down runways placing one foot directly in front of the other.
“It’s not afarensis,” says McNutt. “It is certainly Australopithecus or something very like it.” Beyond that, she says we can’t be sure. However, she adds that elsewhere in Africa, there is clear evidence of multiple hominin species coexisting in the same regions, so it wouldn’t be surprising if the same was true at Laetoli.
Cherin isn’t convinced about that. “For the moment, I would be most cautious about the possibility of having two hominin track-makers in Laetoli,” he says.
In 2016, Cherin’s team described two additional hominin trackways at Laetoli, at a place called site S. These were interpreted as belonging to A. afarensis, but they are a range of sizes, and Cherin says the site A prints don’t look very different in terms of their size and shape from the site S prints, which might suggest they were all left by members of the same species. He highlights a study published in July that shows it is necessary to have more than 20 prints to get a reliable picture of how an animal walked. There are only five prints at site A.
Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04187-7
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The extra-large, dagger-like canine teeth seen in male great apes have been missing from human ancestors for at least 4.5 million years – possibly because females opted for less aggressive partners

Humans

29 November 2021
, updated 20 November 2021

By Clare Wilson
An Ardipithecus ramidus skull found in Awash, EthiopiaPvE / Alamy
Male hominins may have lost the extra-large canine teeth that are seen in most other male primates at least 4.5 million years ago – relatively early in our evolution. This suggests that male human ancestors became less aggressive with each other around the same time, possibly because females preferred less aggressive mates, says a researcher behind the finding.
Modern-day human males have proportionately the smallest canines of all male great apes. For most other primates, such as gorillas and chimpanzees, males have significantly bigger canines than females. Larger canines have been linked with more fighting between males for access to females.
It is unclear when in our evolutionary history male canines shrank, because fossils that are several million years old lack DNA that could be sequenced and assigned to a sex. The ancestors of humans and chimpanzees split about 7 million years ago, so the change in tooth size is thought to have happened at some point since then.Advertisement
Gen Suwa at the University of Tokyo in Japan and his colleagues measured the dimensions of more than 300 fossil teeth spanning 6 million years of hominin evolution. These included 24 from Ardipithecus ramidus, one of the earliest known hominins, which lived about 4.5 million years ago.

The A. ramidus canines didn’t clearly fall into two distinct groups, so the team developed a statistical technique for analysing subtle variations to distinguish male and female teeth. To check its accuracy, the group tested their technique on modern samples from primate teeth for which the sex was known.
Using the technique, the team found that male A. ramidus upper canines were 1.06 times larger than female ones, while the lower canines were 1.13 times larger than those in females – similar to the situation with modern humans. Those of modern chimpanzees, by comparison, are about 1.3 times larger in males for both upper and lower canines.
This suggests that male human ancestors have had relatively small canines for at least 4.5 million years – and that they were less aggressive toward other males than other great apes, says Suwa. “Smaller canines may evolve if females prefer to mate more with males that are prone to less aggression,” he says.
Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2116630118

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A pendant carved with mysterious dots and unearthed in a Polish cave is thought to be over 40,000 years old

Humans

25 November 2021

By Alison George
The pendant is decorated with dots in an asymmetrical loop patternAntonino Vazzana – BONES Lab
A pendant carved from mammoth ivory is the oldest known ornate jewellery made by humans in Eurasia. The discovery is shaking up our understanding of the emergence of so-called symbolic behaviours in the region.
The oval-shaped pendant, 4.5 centimetres long and 1.5 cm wide, was unearthed in Stajnia cave in Poland. It has two holes drilled into it, presumably to be used for thread, and is decorated with a sequence of more than 50 small indents in a looping curve.
“It’s a beautiful piece of past work from Homo sapiens, an amazing piece of jewellery,” says Sahra Talamo at the University of Bologna, Italy, who led the team that analysed the pendant.Advertisement
Using a new radiocarbon dating technique, the researchers discovered that the pendant was created 41,500 years ago, making it the oldest of its kind found in Eurasia. “We were quite shocked,” Talamo says.
This predates other objects and personal ornaments with punctured dot motifs found in France and Germany by 2000 years. It also highlights Poland as an important region for artistic innovation for the first wave of modern humans in Europe who developed new types of decoration for their bodies as a marker of personal or cultural identity.

The pattern of dots on the ivory forms an asymmetrical loop, but exactly what they mean is still an open question, says Talamo. “The most beautiful interpretation is that it is a lunar calendar,” she says.
The motif is similar to the one found on the Blanchard plaque from France, an engraved bone dated to around 30,000 years ago, which has been postulated to be a hunting tally to count the number of animals killed, or a marker of the position of the moon over time.
The excavations at the Stajnia cave also reveal how modern humans were in Poland around 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. “Poland was not supposed to have Homo sapiens there at this time,” says Talamo.
Journal reference: Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-01221-6

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Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Humans

24 November 2021

Josie Ford
The future, now
Are you the sort of person who looks at the word “challenge” and sees “change”? We are, but then we are also the sort of person that sees the words “henge” and “leech”.
This probably means we aren’t the sort who will be duly inspired by “Leading with Purpose – The University of Alberta Brand Story”, a video introducing that institution’s new “One University” brand strategy. Having had it served up to us by a mole underneath its lawns, we find ourselves overcome with increasing waves of emotion.
“Leading with purpose means we never rest on our laurels,” we learn, to the backing … More

Many people experience maths anxiety and some even mention feelings of “rage and despair”. One way to improve the subject’s perception is by playing down the Platonists, suggests Michael Brooks

Humans

| Comment

24 November 2021

By Michael Brooks
Simone Rotella
WE HAVE a problem with maths. Our approach to the subject has led to a situation where 30 per cent of US adults are defined as having “low numeracy”: they can’t make calculations with whole numbers and percentages or interpret simple statistics in text or tables.
Some 49 per cent of UK adults – 17 million people – have no more numeracy than we expect of primary school children. Around 93 per cent of US adults describe themselves as experiencing some level of “math anxiety”, involving negative emotions – and possibly an elevated heart rate, clammy hands and dizziness – when asked to interact with mathematical problems.
I blame this on our obsession with the ancient Greeks. Many of our intellectual traditions hark back to this time and place, from the scientific use of Greek letters to the adoption of the Greek term “academia” as our society’s repository of knowledge. Last week, a new exhibition opened at the Science Museum in London that celebrates the ancient Greeks as thinkers who embraced a fusion of arts, science and religion as they “sought to understand the world in a logical and mathematical way”. But that depends on how you view logic and mathematics.Advertisement
Is it logical to assume that “all is number”, as the Pythagoreans did? This led them to give certain numbers a special status and to dismiss the idea of nothingness, and thus zero as a number. While accepted in Chinese and Indian cultures, negative numbers were also impossible for the ancient Greeks to accept.
And what is actually divine about the “divine proportion”, sometimes known as the golden ratio? Although we often give the idea credence, there is no evidence that humans naturally credit this mathematically derived geometry with special aesthetic powers, as disciples of Euclid contend. The Greeks routinely ascribed mystical powers to shapes and forms: Plato described the 12-sided dodecahedron as the shape that God used “as a model for the twelvefold division of the Zodiac”. But there isn’t anything holy about this geometric form. Sometimes a shape is just a shape.
Putting such ideas on a pedestal is problematic because it has created a cloud of awe and “otherness” around mathematics. This has percolated through to how we teach it and how it is received. Maths is endowed with an almost sacred status for the power of numbers. Those who share this faith become insiders. Those who don’t feel excluded.
Among significant numbers of school students, this results in a sense that maths “just isn’t my thing”, creating anxiety about having to deal with it. In the UK, 36 per cent of 15 to 24-year-olds experience maths anxiety. Some young people even have feelings of “despair and rage” about maths. The evidence shows that this anxiety lasts into adulthood, as does abandonment of the subject. Only one in five UK adults say they would be proud if their child were good with numbers, compared with one in two for reading and writing.
Celebrating a non-Greek, more utilitarian approach to numbers could help here – and would be much more faithful to the true history of mathematics. Sumerian construction workers used what we call Pythagoras’s theorem to create perfectly square corners long before the Greeks arose. The Babylonians used algebra as a tax-calculation tool. At the time of the ancient Greeks, Indian thinkers were using negative numbers in debt management.
Mathematics is a social utility, like law and democracy. It isn’t a religious movement. Perhaps we should solve this problem like the ancient Sumerians did, by grouping maths among the humanities, rather than as an adjunct to the natural sciences. Maybe then maths will finally belong to us all.

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Nazire Avlar/Shutterstock
IT IS sobering to think that if the Neanderthals had continued for 2000 more generations, they would still be sharing the planet with us today. Our other close relatives, the mysterious Denisovans, came even closer to surviving to modern times, and would have needed just 750 more generations of their lineage.
Instead, we Homo sapiens find ourselves alone, the sole survivors out of the seven or more types of human that we once shared a planet with. It is easy to assume that we killed the others off, but the most likely explanation for their demise is that dramatic … More