Philippa Kaur

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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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

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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

By Gege Li
[embedded content]
Photos Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)
MAGNIFICENT adventures are captured in this selection of images from the ongoing Lights and Shadows exhibition, organised by the Royal Geographical Society in London.
The scenes from travels and expeditions on display are taken from the society’s historic image collection, and reveal the marked progress of photography between 1851 and 1962.
Herbert Ponting/Royal Geographical Society-IBGAdvertisement
Antarctica’s striking vastness is captured in the above image by Herbert Ponting, photographer and film-maker for the British Antarctic Expedition from 1910 to 1913, led by Robert Falcon Scott.
The next image was taken in 1935 on Kellas Peak, which is on the border between India and the Tibet region and is named after Scottish mountaineer and chemist Alexander Kellas.
Herbert Ponting/Royal Geographical Society-IBG
The four smaller images show, clockwise from top left: Mount Fuji in Japan, taken by Ponting in 1907; Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary – the first people to summit Mount Everest, in 1953 – drinking tea in the Western Cwm valley that forms part of the route up the mountain, taken by fellow expedition member George Band; waves from the Southern Ocean crashing aboard the cargo vessel Moshulu in 1939, taken by apprentice seaman Eric Newby; and, finally, the crew of the lifeboat James Caird, which included Ernest Shackleton and expedition photographer Frank Hurley, pulling the boat across Antarctic ice after their ship, Endurance, sank in 1915.
Herbert Ponting/Royal Geographical Society-IBG
Lights and Shadows is at the Royal Geographical Society in London until 10 December, and also online.

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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

We once shared the planet with at least seven other types of human. Ironically, our success may have been due to our deepest vulnerability: being dependent on others

Humans

24 November 2021

By Kate Ravilious
Simon Pemberton
HUMANS today are uniquely alone. For the majority of the existence of Homo sapiens, we shared the planet with many other types of human. At the time when our lineage first evolved in Africa some 300,000 years ago, there were at least five others. And if you were going to place a bet on which of those would outlast all the rest, you might not have put your money on us.
The odds would have seemed more favourable for the Neanderthals, who had already adapted to live in colder conditions and expanded to inhabit much of Eurasia. Or Homo erectus, who had made a success of living in south-east Asia. By contrast, our direct Homo sapiens ancestors were the new kids on the block, and wouldn’t successfully settle outside of Africa until more than 200,000 years later. Yet, by 40,000 years ago, or possibly a bit more recently, we were the only humans left standing. Why?
Many explanations have been put forward: brainpower, language or just luck. Now, a new idea is building momentum to explain our dominance. Ironically, it may be some of our seemingly deepest vulnerabilities – being dependent on others, feeling compassion and experiencing empathy – that could have given us the edge.
Today, surrounded by computers, phones and all the other clever things we have invented, it is easy to pin our success on our cognitive abilities. But the more we learn about other types of human, the more they seem similar to us in this regard. In the case of Neanderthals, and possibly the mysterious Denisovans, this includes the ability to make sophisticated … More

Exclusive: A fast-track visa route for Nobel prize laureates and other award-winners in science, engineering, the humanities and medicine has failed to attract any applicants

Humans

22 November 2021

By Jason Arunn Murugesu
Kevin Foy/Alamy
Not a single scientist has applied to a UK government visa scheme for Nobel prize laureates and other award winners since its launch six months ago, New Scientist can reveal. The scheme has come under criticism from scientists and has been described as “a joke”.
In May, the government launched a fast-track visa route for award-winners in the fields of science, engineering, the humanities and medicine who want to work in the UK. This prestigious prize route makes it easier for some academics to apply for a Global Talent visa – it requires only one application, with no need to meet conditions such as a grant from the UK Research and Innovation funding body or a job offer at a UK organisation.
The number of prizes that qualify academics for this route currently stands at over 70, and includes the Turing Award, the L’Oréal-UNESCO for Women in Science International Awards, and various gongs awarded by professional or membership bodies both in the UK and elsewhere.Advertisement
“Winners of these awards have reached the pinnacle of their career and they have so much to offer the UK,” said home secretary Priti Patel when the prestigious prize scheme launched in May. “This is exactly what our new point-based immigration system was designed for – attracting the best and brightest based on the skills and talent they have, not where they’ve come from.”
But a freedom of information request by New Scientist has revealed that in the six months since the scheme was launched, no one working in science, engineering, the humanities or medicine has actually applied for a visa through this route.
“Chances that a single Nobel or Turing laureate would move to the UK to work are zero for the next decade or so,” says Andre Geim at the University of Manchester, UK. Geim won a Nobel prize in 2010 for his work on graphene. “The scheme itself is a joke – it cannot be discussed seriously,” he says. “The government thinks if you pump up UK science with a verbal diarrhea of optimism – it can somehow become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“Frankly, having precisely zero people apply for this elitist scheme doesn’t surprise me at all,” says Jessica Wade, a material scientist at Imperial College London and a diversity in science campaigner. “UK scientists’ access to European funding is uncertain, we’re not very attractive to European students as they have to pay international fees, our pensions are being cut and scientific positions in the UK are both rare and precarious.”
“It’s clear this is just another gimmick from a government that over-spins and under delivers,” says shadow science minister Chi Onwurah. “It is not surprising that the government has failed so comprehensively to attract scientists from abroad, given their lack of consistent support for scientists here.”
A Home Office spokesperson told New Scientist that the prestigious prizes route makes it easier for those at the “pinnacle of their career” to come to the UK. “It is just one option under our Global Talent route, through which we have received thousands of applications since its launch in February 2020 and this continues to rise,” they said.
Neuropsychologist Dorothy Bishop at the University of Oxford says other visa routes are already quick-moving for top scientists and says it is odd that this scheme was launched in the first place.
Andrew Clark at the Royal Academy of Engineering says his organisation is happy with the number of applications they have seen recently across all immigration routes for foreign scientists. “In many cases applicants would be eligible for multiple routes,” he says. “We wouldn’t want to focus on the use of any particular route over a six-month period, but rather the overall success.”
The idea of prioritising entry to the UK for science award winners is flawed, according to geoscientist Christopher Jackson at the University of Manchester, who in 2020 became the first black scientist to host the Royal Institution’s Christmas lectures. Jackson says these awards are inherently biased and an immigration system based on them will only replicate science’s lack of diversity.
“How we measure excellence is very nebulous,” says Jackson. “These awards favour certain people – those who are white, male, heterosexual, cis-gendered – and reward them based on their privilege.”
Of the over 600 Nobel science laureates from 1901, just 23 are women. No award has ever been given to a black laureate in a science subject. “Studies show that most scientific award winners are white men of European descent and often working at American universities,” Jackson says.
Similar patterns are seen in those who win some of the other awards eligible for the prestigious prize visa route. Of the five who have won the Institute of Physics’ Isaac Newton Medal and Prize since 2015, none have been women. Only one woman has won the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Prince Philip Medal since 2014.

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