Philippa Kaur

By Michael Marshall

Artist’s rendition of Homo bodoensis, a new species of human ancestor that lived in AfricaEttore Mazza
A new species of extinct human has been named: Homo bodoensis. The species hasn’t been identified based on new fossils, but on re-examination of old ones. Why do researchers think there is another species of human? Here’s what you need to know.
Who was Homo bodoensis?
Homo bodoensis is the proposed name for fossils of a group of hominins that lived in Africa during a period commonly known as the Middle Pleistocene, but now technically called the Chibanian, between 770,000 and 126,000 years ago. The species has been described by Mirjana Roksandic at the University of Winnipeg in Canada and her colleagues. It is named for the Bodo cranium, which was found in 1976 at Bodo D’ar in the Awash river valley of Ethiopia. The cranium is about 600,000 years old.Advertisement
The researchers argue that H. bodoensis lived widely throughout Africa for hundreds of thousands of years. They suggest that other specimens of this species include Kabwe 1 from Zambia, the Ndutu and Ngaloba skulls from Tanzania and the Saldanha cranium from Elandsfontein in South Africa. H. bodoensis may also have wandered into the eastern Mediterranean, they say.
What were all these fossils classified as before?
They were given various species designations, which were often used in contradictory ways. For example, depending on which studies you read, the Bodo cranium is variously called Homo heidelbergensis or Homo rhodesiensis. Both species are hard to pin down.
H. heidelbergensis is named for a 609,000-year-old jawbone found in Mauer, Germany. A number of similar bones are known from Europe and Africa during the Middle Pleistocene. But researchers differ on whether they are all H. heidelbergensis.
Meanwhile, H. rhodesiensis was first named to describe the Kabwe 1 skull. This bone was found in 1921 in what is now Zambia, but was then called Northern Rhodesia. At the time the area was controlled by the British Empire. The name Rhodesia originates with Cecil Rhodes, a British mining magnate and politician. Partly because of this association, Roksandic says, the name is rarely used.
What other hominins lived during the Middle Pleistocene?
In a word, lots. In Europe, the Neanderthals emerged during this period, while further east in Asia their sister group the Denisovans also evolved. In southern Africa there was Homo naledi. Finally, modern humans (Homo sapiens) emerged in Africa around 300,000 years ago – about halfway through the Middle Pleistocene.
This tangle of species has been dubbed “the muddle in the Middle Pleistocene”. The problem is sorting out which fossils belong to which species and thus how widespread and long-lived each species was. There is also the issue of figuring out which species gave rise to which.
For example, it used to be thought that H. heidelbergensis was the ancestor of Neanderthals. However, this cannot be true because genetics tells us that Neanderthals emerged early in the Middle Pleistocene, possibly even before the time of the oldest H. heidelbergensis fossils. There were Neanderthals living in northern Spain 430,000 years ago. In the past five years, many European specimens previously described as H. heidelbergensis have been reclassified as early Neanderthals.

Where does H. bodoensis fit into all of this?
Roksandic and her colleagues want to make sense of the muddle. They argue that all the African fossils previously called H. heidelbergensis or H. rhodesiensis should be thought of as one species, H. bodoensis. This species, they argue, eventually gave rise to ours.
Meanwhile, they say H. heidelbergensis fossils found in Europe can all be reclassified as early Neanderthals, and that fossils from the eastern Mediterranean that don’t quite fit any of the species could represent interbreeding.
The team chose H. bodoensis so that these African hominins would “finally” have an African name, says Roksandic.
Does everyone agree we need a new species name?
It’s not necessary, says Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London.
Stringer does agree that H. heidelbergensis has been used too loosely. “I’m partly to blame for this wide usage of heidelbergensis,” he says apologetically. He thinks it should now be confined to the original Mauer jawbone and some other European fossils, such as the BH-1 jawbone from Mala Balanica cave in Serbia.
As for the African remains, Stringer is happy to use H. rhodesiensis. He argues it was named for the country in which it was found, not for Cecil Rhodes himself, and therefore doesn’t honour him. Furthermore, the rules set out by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature state that established names have priority – so because H. rhodesiensis has already been formally named, it should be used unless the original description was wrong.
Alternatively, if H. rhodesiensis is deemed unsuitable because of its imperial connotations, Stringer says there are pre-existing alternatives. For example, the Saldanha cranium – one of the specimens Roksandic’s team placed in H. bodoensis – was dubbed Homo saldanensis by Matthew Drennan in the 1950s. “Even if you got rid of rhodesiensis, there are other names that would apply rather than creating a new one,” says Stringer.
Stringer is also sceptical of the claim that the Bodo cranium is our direct ancestor. In 2019, his team published a study of the evolution of the human face, which found that the species the Bodo cranium belonged to had gone down a different evolutionary path to our species.
Journal reference: Evolutionary Anthropology, DOI: 10.1002/EVAN.21929
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Tatanka Iyotake, popularly known as Sitting Bull, is famed as a 19th century leader of the Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux people – and DNA strengthens the claim that he has living descendants

Humans

28 October 2021

By Alakananda Dasgupta

Sitting BullClassic Image/Alamy
A study that blends history with contemporary DNA technology has further strengthened the claim of a familial relationship between a living Native American and a historical figure: Tatanka Iyotake, popularly known as Sitting Bull.
Sitting Bull was a leader of the Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux people. In 1876, he was victorious against General Custer’s 7th Cavalry Regiment of the US Army in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, also known as the Battle of the Greasy Grass.
Today, Ernie LaPointe, a Native American author and president of the Sitting Bull Family Foundation, is widely accepted as the great-grandson of Sitting Bull. Now, LaPointe has had his claim strengthened by genetics.Advertisement
LaPointe and his three sisters have previously used historical records, including birth and death certificates, to make a strong case of a familial relationship with Sitting Bull. In 2007, a lock of Sitting Bull’s hair that had been preserved at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC was repatriated to LaPointe and his sisters – and a small sample was sent to a team of geneticists led by Eske Willerslev at the University of Copenhagen to allow for DNA analysis.
The outcome of the analysis was important for LaPointe, who is named as a co-author on the new study. In order to secure the right to determine the fate of the final resting place of Sitting Bull, he needed to provide irrefutable evidence that Sitting Bull was indeed his forbear. Genetic evidence would serve this purpose.

By comparing DNA from Sitting Bull’s hair with DNA from LaPointe’s saliva, the new study does indeed irrefutably establish that LaPointe is the great-grandson of the legendary leader, says Willerslev.
Willerslev says the methods generally used to establish ancestry, such as analysis of the Y chromosome, weren’t possible in this case because the DNA in the hair sample was so degraded. But it was possible to use haplotype frequency to establish a relationship. A haplotype is a set of alleles inherited from one parent. Even unrelated individuals can share common haplotypes, so Willerslev’s team took saliva samples from non-related members of LaPointe’s community, to detect haplotypes that were specific to Sitting Bull’s bloodline.
“It’s fair to say that the more material you have… the more reliable your results will be,” says Willerslev, but he is still confident that the genetic evidence is incontrovertible.
Willerslev, who has been fascinated by Sitting Bull and his legacy since childhood, attended a traditional Lakota ceremony where Sitting Bull’s spirit was resurrected to obtain permission to use the reclaimed lock of hair for scientific scrutiny.
Oglala Lakota Nation President Kevin Killer, a Lakota Sioux Native American leader, explains that hair has a special significance in Native American culture and is considered sacred and the seat of the spirit.

Killer, who wasn’t involved in the study, welcomes the research, which lends support to the culture of oral history of Indigenous people. “To see [our oral history] backed up by science… is a step in proving how strong our oral history that dates back to 10,000 years [is].”
Kimberly TallBear-Dauphine at the University of Alberta in Canada, a Dakota Native American who wasn’t involved in the study, says that LaPointe’s descent from Sitting Bull was never really contested since Lakota people’s genealogies are very well documented both through paper documentation and oral history.
“I’m sure there are benefits for scientists in the use of this technology… [but] they are simply confirming genetically what we already knew through other kinds of evidence,” she says.
Putting the study in perspective, she says: “It certainly doesn’t give Lakota people anything they didn’t already know in terms of Ernie’s relationship with Sitting Bull.”
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abh2013

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By Adam Vaughan

The fightback against climate change is an all-hands-on-deck situationOneinchpunch/Alamy
“EVERYTHING is happening way faster than it happens in The Ministry for the Future,” says Kim Stanley Robinson of his latest novel, set in a world where an international agency is tasked with fighting for future generations on climate change. That vision was imagined mostly in 2018, which the US science fiction writer says now feels like “another geological age” because so much has happened, from Donald Trump’s election defeat to the covid-19 pandemic.
“Climate change seems to be the main topic on the table now, with all the storms, droughts, fires, freezings – the climate weirdness that has begun and looks like it will never cease in our lifetimes,” he says. Stanley Robinson – or Stan as he is often known – has repeatedly tackled climate change in his work, which is studded with heroic scientists and nods to scientific papers. His focus has increasingly moved beyond the problem of a rapidly warming world to what we should do about it. New York 2140, his 2017 novel, is a salutary warning of the risk of a drowned world if free market economics keep trumping the environment.
The Ministry for the Future hops from Switzerland to India and Antarctica as it mulls every climate fix imaginable, from the titular agency to legal and financial incentives, all the way to activists who are so desperate that they resort to extremism.Advertisement
Real-world versions of the ministry, such as Wales’s future generations commissioner, have suffered from a lack of clout. Does Stanley Robinson think his fictional one would work in reality?
“It would be a great thing, but it wouldn’t be simple or in any way easy to incorporate, because we’re so present-orientated,” he says. Moreover, it would be no panacea. “People would love to have the idea of a single fix, one thing will make everything right,” he says. “That’s just not going to happen.”
Nor is he comfortable with the answer being violent extremism and illegal “black ops”, which some of the book’s characters resort to. “I’m sure that there’s going to be people around the world who are really angry in coming decades and they will commit violence hoping to make a better situation, calling it resistance,” he says. “I think it would be better if we managed to forestall that with legal reforms that are really fast.”
So where does hope lie? In top-down efforts such as international diplomacy, in grassroots local efforts by citizens and everything in between, says Stanley Robinson. “It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation. The idea of either/or, or one’s better, one’s worse, all that needs to be thrown over the side,” he says. It is for this reason that Stanley Robinson thinks research into geoengineering methods, such as temporarily reducing the amount of the sun’s energy reaching Earth, is worth pursuing. All that matters is what works and is fast, he says.
He is also clear that our economic systems need reform. “It’s one of the reasons we aren’t reacting faster [on climate] than we are, because we’re locked into an ineffective system,” he says.
Stanley Robinson thinks the “capacious” nature of novels makes the form good at tackling the subject of climate change. He says its two strengths are giving readers time travel – “you are suddenly in a different time and space and really living it” – and telepathy. “You are in someone else’s head,” he says. But there are limits. “You can only push a novel so far. I don’t even believe in futurism or futurology – I’m a novelist.”
Yet he follows new science more closely than most novelists. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent report on the state of climate change science was “the ultimate in alarms going off”, he says. “The scientific community has been ringing that alarm since the late 90s. And the response has been slow and the resistance has been high.” But he fears the warning is being drowned by the noise of others, from pandemic disruption to “so-called political divides”, he says.
One of Stanley Robinson’s worries is a real-world equivalent of the deadly heatwave that opens his latest novel. “I fear that something like that is going to happen,” he says. He suspects such an event might topple a government but fail to affect global action. “The rest of the world will say, ‘oh, that’s what happens in the tropics’. We’re very good at ignoring stuff that happens elsewhere and saying ‘it can’t happen to me’.”
Stanley Robinson says he sees opportunity at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, UK, where he will give a speech. “My hopes are high COP26 will come up with something striking. Progress will be made.” He is also a big fan of US president Joe Biden. “He has been surprisingly good on climate. And I say this as a leftist.”
Kim Stanley Robinson uses climate science as inspiration for his novelsSean Curtin
And what next? More climate change-themed novels are in the offing. Stanley Robinson has already written novels set in Antarctica, including The Ministry for the Future, and now he wants to head to the other pole. “I’m looking at the Arctic – can we keep an ice sheet over the Arctic? It’s so important,” he says. If the idea grows into a story, it will explore a melting Arctic’s impact on governance, ecology and culture, not to mention the global climate as the region’s reflectivity changes.
“You can only push a novel so far. I don’t believe in futurism or futurology – I’m a novelist”
Sixteen years ago, Stanley Robinson told New Scientist he liked novels with happy endings. Does he hope for one on climate change? “We could have a good 21st century, we could have a good dealing with climate change, we could have a good Anthropocene,” he says. “This is what I charge the young science fiction writers with: you have to write that story so people can imagine it in advance – and then try for it.”

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Researchers have uncovered 478 ceremonial sites that were probably built by the Olmec and the Maya thousands of years ago

Humans

25 October 2021

By Krista Charles

A lidar-based image of an ancient ceremonial site in MexicoTakeshi Inomata
Hundreds of ancient Mesoamerican ceremonial sites built over a period of about 600 years have been uncovered. This comes after the discovery of the first such site – Aguada Fénix – was announced in 2020
Takeshi Inomata at the University of Arizona and his colleagues used a form of remote sensing called lidar, which uses airborne lasers to form a 3D picture of the surface of the ground. They used this to discover 478 sites in an area covering 84,516 square kilometres in southern Mexico, some of which was covered by dense jungle.
The sites were made up of rectangular complexes, which the Maya and Olmec probably used for ceremonial gatherings. “People just come and go… sort of like a pilgrimage centre,” says Inomata.Advertisement
They consisted of a central open plaza, where people might have gathered, with a series of low earthen mounds along the edges where there might have been built structures. And they were probably constructed between 1050 and 400 BC by two ancient civilisations – the Olmec, which was the earliest known civilisation in the region, and the Maya, which may have learned from the Olmec and whose culture collapsed around AD 800.
“Nobody knew about those rectangular ceremonial sites until we found Aguada Fénix, so all these new findings are a revelation about this early period,” says Inomata. “That really made us rethink about the origin of Mesoamerican civilisation. Many of those complexes were built by people without too much hierarchical organisation.”
The sites were all relatively flat with a few small pyramids compared with later constructions in the region such as Chichen-Itza that typically contain large pyramids.
“We don’t know exactly what they might have looked like in life, but one could argue that they were small cities,” says Elizabeth Graham at University College London, who wasn’t involved with the study. “When I first started work in the 70s it was still a time where everyone thought cities developed in the Classic period around 200 AD. Now, steadily the period in which I guess you could say urbanism developed has been pushed back and pushed back.”
Journal reference: Nature Human Behaviour, DOI: 10.1038/s41562-021-01218-1

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By Elle Hunt

Jacques-Yves Cousteau was a pioneer of underwater researchThomas J. Abercrombie/National Geographic
Film
Becoming Cousteau
Liz GarbusAdvertisement

BY HIS own account, the film-maker and ocean explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau hated it when his work was labelled as “documentary”. “That means a lecture by a guy who knows more than you,” he wrote. “Our films are true adventure films.”
Becoming Cousteau, a new documentary about Cousteau’s life and legacy, captures that spirit without getting too swept away. The result is a captivating portrait of a complicated man who was as well-known and widely beloved as David Attenborough is today.
Veteran film-maker Liz Garbus was first approached by National Geographic to make a film about Cousteau’s life in 2015. It was only in 2019, after years of negotiation, that Garbus was granted exclusive access to the Cousteau Society Archives, controlled by Cousteau’s widow Francine. Their children, Pierre-Yves and Diane, have co-producer credits on the film, but in Garbus’s hands, the involvement of those closest to Cousteau serves as an asset, not a liability, helping to paint a picture of a true original.
Cousteau was a born explorer, with an insatiable drive to see the world and a talent for sharing what he found. He started making films aged 13 and, at 20, entered the French naval academy with a view to becoming a pilot. When his career in aviation was cut short by a car accident, he began swimming on the French Riviera to help heal his broken bones, before becoming fascinated with freediving.
Soon, he became frustrated with the limits of freediving and, with his naval colleagues, experimented with breathing apparatus that would allow them to spend more time underwater. This led to the invention of the aqualung, which made diving more accessible for both scientists and amateur explorers.
Archival footage captures the fear and thrill of those early dives, which weren’t so far removed from space exploration at the time in terms of the risks involved.
In 1947, diver Maurice Fargues died while attempting to set a new depth record with the aqualung. This only focused Cousteau’s mind further. Fargues’s death must not be in vain, Cousteau said.
“Cousteau abandoned his dream of undersea civilisations to fight for oceans that could support life at all”
His ultimate goal, at that time, was utopian, “paving the way to a time when human beings will live continuously under the sea“. For Cousteau, diving proposed a route to liberation not just for him, but for all humankind, “to eliminate all ties to the surface”.
The spirit of this mission was embodied by his research vessel the Calypso, spoken of by its crew as something between a safe haven and a spiritual calling. “This escape would not exist if people were happy on land,” says one sailor. Footage of life onboard from the mid-1950s through the 60s gave ocean exploration a certain glamour. It is no wonder Cousteau’s work inspired a generation of film-makers and seafarers.
While celebrating Cousteau’s many triumphs, Garbus also engages with his life and work through a contemporary lens, interrogating the cowboyish tactics – such as blast-fishing with dynamite and slaughtering sharks as sailors’ revenge – that were in line with the pioneering spirit of the time, but are antithetical to conservation interests today.
In 1953, the Calypso – only ever one cheque short of financial ruin – even accepted funding to search for oil in the Persian Gulf. “We just didn’t know any better at the time,” says a crew member.
Cousteau himself was quick to change course. By the 1970s he had stopped showing his early films, saying “the mentality has changed”, and threw himself into lobbying for protection of the marine ecosystem.
After documenting two decades of decline, he abandoned his dream of an under-the-sea civilisation to fight to ensure that oceans could support life at all. His series – “no more about dealing with beautiful little fishes, [but] the fate of mankind” – was dropped from US television for being doomsaying.
Cousteau’s warnings for future generations are even harder to hear now, after 50-plus years of inaction. But his story inspires hope about what can be achieved by one person with a vision.

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By Michael Marshall

A panoramic view of L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, CanadaBob Hilscher/Getty Images
Before Christopher Columbus, Vikings were the first Europeans to reach the Americas. We now know to the year when they were there. Norse people were chopping down trees in Newfoundland in the year AD 1021, so they must have crossed the Atlantic Ocean by then.
“Exactly a millennium ago, human beings for the first time in history had got across [the Atlantic],” says Michael Dee at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Evidence for a Norse presence in North … More

By Simon Ings

WHEN Spanish and other European forces entered South America in the 15th century, they used dogs as weapons to massacre the indigenous human population. Sometimes, their mastiffs, enormous brutes trained to chase and kill, even fed on the bodies of their victims.
This didn’t quell the affection in South America for dogs, though. Ferocious as they were, these beasts were also novel, loyal and intelligent and a trade in them spread across the continent.
What is it about dogs that makes them so irresistible?
In Our Oldest Companions, anthropologist Pat Shipman traces the ancient drivers that led to our species’ special relationship with dogs. It is an epic, and occasionally unnerving, tale of love and loyalty, hunting and killing, gleaned from a huge amount of archaeological and palaeogenetic research.
In Shipman’s view, there was nothing inevitable about the development of the grey wolf – a fierce, meat-eating competitor – into the playful friends that we know today. As Shipman puts it: “Who would select such a ferocious and formidable predator as a wolf for an ally and companion?”
To find the answer, says Shipman, forget the old tale in which someone captures a baby animal, tames it, raises it, selects a mate for it and brings up the friendliest babies.
Instead, she argues, it was the particular ecology of Europe about 50,000 years ago that drove grey wolves and human interlopers from Mesopotamia to develop a symbiotic relationship that set the stage for our future friendship.
“Who would select such a ferocious and formidable predator as a wolf for an ally and companion?”
Working together allowed humans to tap into the wolves’ superior speed and senses, and to gain their protection against other large predators including lions. The wolves, in turn, benefited from a human’s ability to kill prey at a distance with spears or arrows.
It was a partnership that allowed them to net enough food to share, and to outcompete the indigenous Neanderthals who didn’t have a team of super-fast predators to help them.
This idea was explored in Shipman’s 2015 book The Invaders In Our Oldest Companions, she develops her argument by exploring parts of the world where dogs and humans didn’t evolve similar behaviours.
Australia provides Shipman with her most striking example. When Homo sapiens arrived in Australia, around 65,000 years ago they came without domesticated dogs, because, at the time, there was no such thing.
When the ancestors of today’s dingoes were brought to Australia about 3000 years ago, their charisma earned them a central place in Indigenous Australian folklore, but there was no incentive for the two species to live and work together. Australia was less densely populated by large animals than Europe and there were only two large mammalian predators, the Tasmanian tiger and the marsupial lion, to deal with. As a result, says Shipman, while dingoes are eminently tameable, they have never been domesticated.
With the story of humans and dogs in Asia, Shipman goes against the grain. While some researchers argue that the bond between wolf and man was first established here, Shipman is having none of it. She points to a crucial piece of non-evidence: if dogs first arose in Asia, then where are the ancient dog burials?
Cute, but there was never a good enough reason to team up with dingoesJulie Fletcher/Getty Images
“Deliberate burial,” writes Shipman, “is just about the gold standard in terms of evidence that an animal was domesticated.” There are no such ancient graves in Asia, she points out. It is on the right bank of the Rhine in what is now Germany, that the earliest remains of a clearly domesticated dog were discovered. Known as the Bonn-Oberkassel dog, and dating from 14,200 years ago, it was found in 1914, tucked between two human skeletons, the grave decorated with works of art made of bones and antlers.
From there, domesticated dogs remained firmly in our hearts and homes There are now more than 300 subspecies, although overbreeding has left hardly any that are capable of carrying out their intended functions of hunting, guarding or herding.
Shipman passes no comment on this, but I can’t help but think it is a sad end to a story that began among mammoths and lions.

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