Philippa Kaur

By Michael Marshall
Gray WolfAB Photographie/Shutterstock
Hello, and welcome to Our Human Story, New Scientist’s monthly newsletter all about human evolution and the origin of our species. To receive this free monthly newsletter in your inbox, sign up here.
This month, prompted by the arrival of our family’s new kitten Peggy, I’m gently pawing at humanity’s relationship with animals. In recent years, we’ve learned a lot about when and where different species were domesticated – but to me this just raises even more questions.
Animal friends
It’s a truism that humans have exerted an outsized influence on the natural world. We have domesticated dozens of animals and plants. There are the familiar examples like cats, chickens and maize, but also many that aren’t so familiar in the Western world, like the dozens of crops domesticated by farmers (if that is exactly the right word) in the Amazon rainforest over millennia.Advertisement
As with many aspects of prehistory, the more we learn, the older domestication looks. Until relatively recently, it was thought that every domestication took place within the past 11,000 years. This period is known as the Holocene, when the climate has been relatively stable and when some humans took up habits like sedentary farming, urban living and writing. But one domestication preceded it: dogs.
We still haven’t pinned down when and where this happened, but dogs were being buried alongside people as if they were pets at least around 14,000 years ago, and they may have split from wolves up to 40,000 years ago. There was possibly more than one domestication event, with only some leaving living descendants. But what’s clear is that it was pre-Holocene and before the advent of permanent settled farming. It may have begun with a form of cooperative hunting.
Set against this are the many clear examples of domestication during the Holocene. For example, I recently wrote about a massive genetic study of horses, which showed that modern domestic horses are descended from a population that lived in what is now Russia, around the Volga and Don rivers, about 4200 years ago. The domestication may have begun a little earlier, but only by a few centuries.
How can we explain why domestication happened so late?
Fascinated by beasts
People were obsessed with animals long before we domesticated any. We can see this in prehistoric art, of which we have clear evidence dating back to 45,000 years ago. Think of the cave paintings in Chauvet cave in France, which Werner Herzog brought to the screen in Cave of Forgotten Dreams. They’re startling in their realism and sense of movement. And they’re almost entirely paintings of animals.

This holds true across Europe – where most studies of cave art have been done – and elsewhere in the world, including Indonesia. Ancient painters spent enormous effort portraying animals in a realistic way. But they couldn’t be bothered with illustrating people: when people are depicted in cave art, they’re rarely better than stick figures.
In a sense, the absence of people in the art is the more mysterious bit. Why weren’t people interested in depicting each other?
Most cultures place enormous symbolic importance on animals. Think of English lions (even though there haven’t been wild lions in Britain for millennia), American eagles and the many versions of “familiars” and “were-animals” that have arisen in cultures all over the world. Think of the rabbits of Watership Down, Anansi the West African spider god, and the ancient Egyptian worship of cats.
It’s almost too easy to think of reasons why prehistoric people were interested in animals. First, humans and our ancestors have been eating meat for a very long time. Exactly when we started is contentious, but we’ve certainly been at it for hundreds of thousands of years. This must have required an enormous amount of knowledge: of the animals’ movements, their behaviours, how they defended themselves. To make a success of their lifestyle, prehistoric people had to take a keen interest in animals.
Similarly, plenty of animals posed a danger. Predators like cave bears and sabre-toothed cats are just the most obvious. There are also inherent dangers from massive herbivores like mammoths and giant ground sloths: even if they don’t want to eat you, they can still trample you.
I’ve been reading John Bradshaw’s The Animals Among Us, and he argues that understanding animals is as profoundly human as language or self-reflection. I think he might be right. The capacity and urge to understand animals, to predict what they will do and even manage their behaviour, is an ancient one.

Wild domestication

The more I think about domestication, the more I’m baffled at how late it happened. Our species has existed for something like 300,000 years, and other hominins like Neanderthals were similarly skilled at dealing with animals. Why weren’t dogs domesticated 100,000 years ago, or even earlier?
I don’t think it is a matter of intelligence. The fact is that domestication doesn’t require unusual foresight or brainpower. If it did, it wouldn’t happen in the natural world. Think of the many ants that have domesticated other species. There are ants that plant seeds, cultivate fungus, “milk” aphids for sugary liquid or even farm other animals for meat. I very much doubt that the ancestral ants had any kind of plan for this. Instead, I think that the species involved found advantages in living together and gradually adapted over many generations. If ants can domesticate other species in this unconscious, gradual way, so could prehistoric people. Why didn’t they?
I don’t have a firm answer for this, but I do have a tentative thought. It’s a curious fact that not many animals were domesticated in the Americas, compared with Eurasia and Africa. Llamas and alpacas are almost the only ones. A lot of ink has been spilled, for instance in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, trying to work out why American animals were so resistant to domestication. I wonder if it’s because people hadn’t been living there as long. There have been hominins in Eurasia and Africa for millions of years, but people only made it to the Americas in the past few tens of thousands of years. Maybe the animals in Eurasia and Africa had simply had longer to adapt to the two-legged apes in their midst, priming them to be domesticated. The American animals had a shorter history with people.
In other words, I think the reason most domestications happened in the past 10,000 years isn’t because people only then thought of it, but because species need to co-exist for a long time before they can form such close relationships. My colleague Krista Charles recently reported that wolf puppies raised by humans become just as close to their carers as dog puppies. Wolves are still wild animals, yet they can form relationships with us that most animals can’t.
I’m pretty sure this doesn’t make sense of everything. It does seem like a gigantic coincidence that so many domestications happened in the past 10,000 years, but I’m very uncertain as to why. A particular problem is that domestications happened for different reasons: dogs seem to have been helping us hunt, while horses may have first been domesticated for their milk. So, it may be a mistake to look for a single overarching explanation.
To see what I mean, take the baffling example of tobacco (baffling to me anyway as I’ve always absolutely hated the smell). We recently learned that people were using tobacco at least 12,300 years ago. That’s millennia before the plant became domesticated. It has no nutritional value and doesn’t even give you interesting hallucinations – but people smoked it anyway.

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Ettore MazzaEttore Mazza
A new hominin species has been named – but it may not stick. Researchers led by Mirjana Roksandic have proposed Homo bodoensis as a new name for a bunch of African fossils that lived hundreds of thousands of years ago in the Middle Pleistocene. This is a particularly confusing period of human evolution: there were several species co-existing, and many of the fossils are hard to classify, so we don’t know how widespread each species was, how long it lasted, or which species gave rise to which others. It’s all a bit of a muddle. H. bodoensis is meant to be an umbrella term for all the African hominins with big brains that were alive at the time. It has the advantage of simplicity – and the reference to the Bodo cranium discovered in Ethiopia makes it an African name, which I think is a good thing. However, the rules of nomenclature say that the earliest species names have priority, and several of the fossils in question have already been given names.
From the archive
The ancient Maya culture is one of the most fascinating in archaeology. It’s surprising to me that there are so few depictions of the Maya in books and film, at least in the English language. The Maya were one of the most technologically advanced cultures in the Americas for hundreds of years. They had writing and drew accurate astronomical tables, planted orchards of nut trees, created vivid blue dyes, and built vast cities. Archaeologically, the most conspicuous things are the enormous monuments they built – more of which are found every year. Around AD 800, the Maya stopped building monuments and this has been interpreted as a collapse of the civilisation, probably fuelled by an intense drought. I think it’s more correct to say that the Mayan social structure collapsed – that is, the elites were deposed. It wasn’t that everybody died so much as there was a revolution.
Also in New Scientist
1. Tatanka Iyotake, popularly known as Sitting Bull, was one of the most famous Native American leaders – and a new DNA study adds to evidence that he has living descendants.
2. We now know that Vikings were in North America in the year AD 1021, exactly 1000 years ago – although they might have arrived even earlier.
3. Iron Age miners ate blue cheese and drank beer, according to a study of their faeces.
See you next month!

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Millet farmers living 9000 years ago in what is now north-east China may have spoken a proto-Transeurasian language that gave rise to Japanese, Turkish and other modern tongues

Humans

10 November 2021

By Carissa Wong
A woman carrying millet, a crop whose cultivation prompted the spread of the proto-Transeurasian languageFrank Bienewald / Alamy
A vast Transeurasian language family that contains the Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Turkish and Tungusic languages has had its origins traced back 9000 years, to early farming communities in what is now north-east China.
Transeurasian languages are spoken across a wide region of Europe and northern Asia. Until now, researchers assumed that they had spread from the mountains of Mongolia 3000 years ago, spoken by horse-riding nomads who kept livestock but didn’t farm crops.
Martine Robbeets at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena and her colleagues used linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence to conclude instead that it was the onset of millet cultivation by farmers in what is now China that led to the spread of the language family.Advertisement
The team did this by studying the linguistic features of the languages and using computational analysis to map their spread through space and time based on their similarities to each other. Doing so allowed Robbeets and her team to trace the proto-Transeurasian language back to the Liao river area of north-east China around 9000 years ago.
This is the exact time and place that millet is known to have been domesticated, according to archaeological evidence, says Robbeets.

By adding genetic information and carbon-dating millet grains, the team revealed that the proto-Transeurasian-speaking population split into separate communities that then started adopting early forms of Japanese, Korean and the Tungusic languages to the east of the original site, as well as early forms of Mongolic languages to the north and of Turkic languages to the west.
“We have languages, archaeology and genetics which all have dates. So we just looked to see if they correlated,” says Robbeets.
Around 6500 years ago, the descendants of some of these farmers moved eastwards into Korea, where they learned to cultivate rice around 3300 years ago, spurring the movement of people from Korea to Japan.
“We all identify ourselves with language. It’s our identity. We often picture ourselves as one culture, one language, one genetic profile. Our study shows that like all populations, those in Asia are mixed,” says Robbeets.
The researchers were also surprised to discover the first evidence that Neolithic Korean populations reproduced with Jōmon people, who were previously thought to have lived solely in Japan.
“This study highlights the richness of the narrative that can be developed when linguistic, archaeological and genetic data are all considered,” says Melinda Yang at the University of Richmond in Virginia.
Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04108-8

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The city, built by the son of Genghis Khan, was once thought to be about one-tenth as big as it actually was

Humans

9 November 2021

By Michael Marshall
Distribution of Mongol-period sites documented during a 2016–2017 survey© Esri, DigitalGlobe, GeoEye, Earthstar Geographics, CNES/Airbus DS, USDA, USGS, AeroGRID, IGN and the GIS User Community; graphic by S. Reichert
The capital of the Mongol Empire has been mapped in unprecedented detail. It turns out that the city of Karakorum was far larger than once thought and was quite unlike medieval European cities in its layout.
In the late 1100s and early 1200s, the Mongol leader Temüjin established a vast empire spanning much of Asia and Europe.
Temüjin became known as Chinggis Khan, and is also remembered as Genghis Khan in many nations today. After his death in 1227 … More

The skull of a small child belonging to a different human species has been found deep in a cave system in South Africa. They have been named “Leti”. Leti’s skull was found in a narrow fissure that is almost impossible to access. For that reason, the discoverers argue that the skull was placed there deliberately, as a form of funerary practice. They say it is evidence that hominins have been performing funerary rights for hundreds of thousands of years – even hominins with brains much smaller than ours.

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By Michael Marshall

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The skull of a small child belonging to a different human species has been found deep in a cave system in South Africa. The team that made the discovery has named the child Leti and believes the skull shows that the Homo naledi species buried their dead.
Leti’s skull was found in a narrow fissure that is almost impossible to access. For that reason, the team argues that the skull was placed there deliberately, as a form of funerary practice. Presenting their findings at a virtual press conference, the researchers said it is evidence that hominins have been performing funerary rights for hundreds of thousands of years – even hominins with brains much smaller than ours.
“We can see no other reason for this small child’s skull being in the extraordinarily difficult position,” said Lee Berger at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Berger and his colleagues have been exploring the Rising Star cave system in South Africa for several years. In 2015, they described Homo naledi, a new species of hominin, found in the caves. More than a thousand bones were found strewn over the floor of the system’s Dinaledi Chamber, which could only be reached by expert cavers able to fit through small spaces. H. naledi had some features that resembled modern humans, but in other respects it looked like an older species: in particular, its brain was small.Advertisement
Two years later, the researchers found a remarkably complete H. naledi skeleton in another part of the cave, the Lesedi Chamber. They called the individual Neo. Crucially, the team also managed to narrow down how long ago H. naledi lived. The remains are only about 250,000 years old, meaning H. naledi existed at the same time as our species and other big-brained hominins like the Neanderthals – yet they retained features from species that lived millions of years earlier.
Meet Leti
In September 2017, the team was exploring deeper parts of the cave, beyond the Dinaledi and Lesedi Chambers.
Marina Elliott of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, was one of the researchers who went in. The distance isn’t great – “It’s about 12 metres from where the Dinaledi material was originally recovered in 2013-14,” she said – but the journey is claustrophobically challenging.
Elliott had to first go through a room dubbed the Chaos Chamber. “There’s boulders that have fallen from the ceiling,” she said. “Then there’s a little bit of a drop into a crawlspace that just literally leads into a couple of small narrow passages.” These passages are only tens of centimetres across, so the researchers had to turn sideways and even partly upside-down to get inside.
In one such passage, about 20 centimetres across and 80 centimetres tall, the researchers found a small ledge. Sitting on the ledge were 28 fragments of skull and six teeth.
When the researchers brought the remains back to the surface, they realised they probably belonged to one individual. They named the individual Leti, from the Setswana word letimela, meaning “the lost one”.
Named Leti, the Homo naledi child’s skull fragments were found in an extremely hard to access chamber.Brett Eloff Photography/Wits University
The team has now described Leti, and the surrounding caves, in two papers. Two of the teeth were milk teeth and four were adult. The adult teeth weren’t worn, suggesting they had only recently emerged from the gums. Based on this evidence, “Leti was probably somewhere between 4 and 6 years of age,” said team member Juliet Brophy of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.
Leti probably dates back to the same time as the other H. naledi remains, said Tebogo Makhubela at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, who was also involved in the work. “We are assigning the age based on the similarity of the geology in all these chambers,” he said.
Primitive funeral?
Right from the start, Berger has suggested that the H. naledi bones were placed in the Rising Star cave system deliberately, by other H. naledi, after they died. “I think it’s fair to say it was controversial in 2015 to say a small-brained, primitive-looking hominin might have been deliberately disposing of its dead,” he said. But, he argued, “there’s been no credible evidence against that original hypothesis”.
The discovery of Leti, even deeper into the cave system, adds to the evidence, Berger argued. On this reading, Rising Star is a H. naledi grave.
Other potential explanations seem unlikely, said team member Darryl de Ruiter of Texas A&M University in College Station. “There’s no indication of any carnivore activity: no tooth marks, no gnawing, nothing like that,” he said. That means it is unlikely other animals carried the bones into the caves. “There’s no indication that there’s a large-scale water movement depositing these things,” he added.
There is evidence that Neanderthals buried their dead as early as 70,000 years ago. They had larger brains than H. naledi, though. There is also evidence that other animals grieve – from apes and monkeys to orcas and elephants – but no evidence of them carefully placing bodies in caves or other burial sites.
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How might H. naledi have carried the remains of their dead so deep? “Our geologists are fairly certain that these deep areas of the the cave have always been in the complete dark zone,” said team member Steven Churchill of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He said cavers sometimes come across living baboons in the cave, seemingly feeling their way around. “Which is probably a terrifying experience,” he says. Conceivably H. naledi did the same.
Alternatively, they may have used fire to light their way. “There are bits of charcoal in the cave, but nothing we’ve been able to firmly associate with the hominins,” said Churchill. But controlled fire use goes back 400,000 years, at least in Europe. Churchill said “it wouldn’t be surprising” if H. naledi could make flaming torches to light their way.
Journal reference: PaleoAnthropology, DOI: 10.48738/2021.iss1.64; DOI: 10.48738/2021.iss1.68
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By Katie Smith-Wong

HOME to more than 39 million people, California is the most populous US state. It is also among the driest. Together, these factors make demand for water a long-standing challenge. River’s End, a new documentary by Jacob Morrison, dives deep into the water crisis and asks difficult questions about who gets the water and why.
At the centre of the film is the Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta, an estuary in the north of the state. Connecting the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, the delta is a key source of fresh water and the battleground for the latest California water war.
In 2015, then-governor Jerry Brown and the California Department of Water Resources proposed a $15 billion plan now known as California WaterFix & EcoRestore that would see two large tunnels built from the Sacramento river under the delta to provide water for California. Inevitably, not everyone agrees with the plan: the tunnels would redirect water towards southern California, reducing freshwater supplies to farmers around the delta.
Narrated by DeLanna Studi, River’s End combines stock footage of landscapes around the delta and other parts of California, which highlights the fluctuating water supply levels, with simple animation to bring an educational slant and explain the extent and significance of the issue. With interviewees including politicians, corporate officials and local farmers, Morrison delivers a bleak yet brutally honest insight into the battle for water.
The documentary touches briefly on supply disputes in the early 20th century in the Owens valley and its role in the California water wars, which comprised a number of political conflicts between local farmers and the City of Los Angeles over water rights. But its main thrust examines how current supply issues are causing conflict between regional corporations and local farmers.
Both sides say they need water to run their businesses, but it soon becomes clear that the local communities don’t have nearly as much government support as the corporations. There is testimony from frustrated local farmers who rely on water from the delta to grow their produce and say their livelihoods have been affected, not only by a lack of supply, but also by pumping facilities, which take water away from the area.
The situation in the Westlands Water District in central California proves particularly enlightening. Its connections with ex-President Donald Trump (via former Westlands lobbyist David Bernhardt), a focus on lucrative yet thirsty almond farming and the substantial difference in living conditions between farm owners and workers in the field paint a stark picture of the power and influence of large corporations.
Although the corporation-versus-the-little-person narrative is all too recognisable, the documentary also zooms out further to highlight the consequences on the wider environment and the wildlife that also relies on it for survival. Among the locally endangered species mentioned is the delta smelt, a fish species that is close to extinction due to the ongoing damage to the delta’s ecosystem.
River’s End provides a thorough overview of California’s water issues and the need to achieve a sustainable water supply. It ends with a solemn message. As the state’s population continues to grow, it remains unclear whether there will be enough water to meet the requirements of all those who need it. In the end, it may come down to who needs, or perhaps who wants, it more.

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By James Wong

Fotokostic/Shutterstock
THE interconnectivity of our world never fails to amaze me. Even as a plant scientist fascinated by food production, I am often astonished by the extent to which changes in a seemingly unrelated industry on a distant part of the planet can affect our dinner plates – and the reaction of pundits to these impacts.
Recently, news broke that soaring global fertiliser costs, created by factors such as rising energy prices in China, would be likely to have a devastating knock-on effect on the food security of some of the poorest people on Earth.
Surprisingly, some activists and thought leaders saw … More