Philippa Kaur

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    in Humans

    Why the ancestors of dogs were our colleagues not friends

    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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    in Humans

    Why psychologists can't decide if moral disgust is even a thing

    By Ana Aznar

    Michelle D’urbano
    WE SHOULD really care about disgust. Not only does it protect us from coming into contact with possibly dangerous substances, such as rotting meat, but it is also central to understanding our moral compasses.
    Yet, up until around 20 years ago, it was essentially absent from psychological research. Today, it is still shrouded in confusion. All other basic emotions, such as sadness and happiness, have a clear definition, but when it comes to disgust, psychologists are divided over whether it should actually be split into physical disgust and moral disgust, or whether it is only physical disgust that exists.
    Physical disgust is that feeling caused by things such as vomit or faeces. This varies between people, but it helps protect us from touching or ingesting potentially dangerous substances that could put our survival at risk.Advertisement
    Moral disgust, on the other hand, is normally described as the feeling you get when hearing someone has broken social norms or moral codes. Seeing a person steal or hearing about someone having an affair, for example, might be enough to set off this emotion in you.
    Some psychologists argue that physical and moral disgust are two sides of the same coin. Others insist that, although the word “disgust” is used in both situations, when moral norms are broken, what people are actually experiencing is anger.
    Disgust and anger are both negative emotions that have been linked with morality, but whereas disgust motivates us to avoid things, anger pushes us to confront whatever it is that is making us angry.
    In my latest research, I have been examining the schism in psychology on disgust further using parent-child conversations. These are a valuable tool for developmental psychology as parents use them to teach their children about emotions, values and moral issues. They may also be particularly relevant to our understanding of disgust because children only begin to understand it when they are 3 to 4 years old, around a year later than the other basic emotions. This suggests there is a social component to disgust and that children’s understanding of it may be partly learned from their parents.
    In the research, my colleagues and I asked 68 English-speaking mothers and their 4, 6 or 8-year-old children to discuss a series of short stories. In each of them, the main character performed either a physical transgression, such as wearing dirty clothes or sitting on a dirty chair, or a moral one, such as copying someone’s homework or jumping a queue. We then asked the mothers and children to talk about the emotion that they would feel after each transgression.
    We found that both were more likely to say that they were disgusted by physical transgressions than they were angry. In contrast, when discussing moral transgressions, they were more likely to say that they made them angry rather than disgusted. Mothers and children also often said that these actions were wrong.
    What this seems to suggest is that mothers and children are more likely to link disgust with physical transgressions and anger with moral ones.
    Does this mean there is no such thing as moral disgust? We think it certainly points that way.
    Our research won’t settle the controversy around the existence of moral disgust on its own. However, the more we learn about it, the closer we get to understanding how we develop a sense of morality.

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  • 150 Shares179 Views

    in Humans

    Ancient faeces show Iron Age miners ate blue cheese and drank beer

    By Carissa Wong

    Ancient faeces found in salt mines in Hallstatt, AustriaAnwora/NHMW
    Fungi found in faeces from Iron Age people who worked in salt mines in what is now Austria suggest that people were eating blue cheese and beer at least 2700 years ago.
    There is earlier evidence for ancient cheese, found in Early Bronze Age tombs in Western China from nearly 4000 years ago, but these fossilised faeces provide the earliest evidence that “people produced cheese with even a flavour that is found in blue cheese”, says Frank Maixner at Eurac Research in … More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    A Jupiter-like planet orbiting a white dwarf hints at our solar system’s future

    A glimpse of our solar system’s future has appeared thousands of light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. There a giant planet like Jupiter orbits a white dwarf, a dim, dense star that once resembled the sun.

    In 2010, that star passed in front of a much more distant star. Like a magnifying glass, the white dwarf’s gravity bent the more distant star’s light rays so that they converged on Earth and made the distant star look hundreds of times brighter. A giant planet orbiting the white dwarf star also “microlensed” the distant star’s light, revealing the planet’s presence.

    In 2015, 2016 and again in 2018 astrophysicist Joshua Blackman of the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia and colleagues pointed the Keck II telescope in Hawaii at the far-off system, which lies some 5,000 to 8,000 light-years from Earth. The team was in search of the giant planet’s star, but saw, well, nothing.

    “We expected that we’d see a star similar to the sun,” Blackman says. “And so we spent quite a few years trying to figure out why on Earth we didn’t see the star which we expected to see.”

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    After failing to detect any light from the spot where the planet’s star should be, Blackman’s team concluded that the object can’t be a typical star like the sun — also known as a main sequence star, which generates energy by converting hydrogen into helium at its center. Instead, the star must be something much fainter. The microlensing data indicate that the star is roughly half as massive as the sun, so the object isn’t massive enough to be a neutron star or black hole. But a white dwarf star fits the bill perfectly, the researchers report online October 13 in Nature.

    “They’ve carefully ruled out the other possible lens stars — neutron stars and black holes and main sequence stars and whatnot,” says Ben Zuckerman, an astronomer at UCLA, who was not involved with the work. He notes that only a handful of planets have ever been found orbiting white dwarfs.

    The new planet is the first ever discovered that is orbiting a white dwarf and resembles Jupiter in both its mass and its distance from its star. Blackman’s team estimates that the planet is one to two times as massive as Jupiter and probably lies 2.5 to six times farther from the white dwarf star than Earth does from the sun. For comparison, Jupiter is 5.2 times farther out from the sun than Earth is. The white dwarf is somewhat larger than Earth, which means the planet is much bigger than its host star.

    The white dwarf formed after a sunlike star expanded and became a red giant star. Then the red giant ejected its outer layers, exposing its hot core. That former core is the white dwarf star.

    Our sun will turn into a white dwarf about 7.8 billion years from now, so the new discovery is “a snapshot into the future of our solar system,” Blackman says. As the sun becomes a red giant, it will engulf and destroy its innermost planet, Mercury, and perhaps Venus too. But Mars, Jupiter and more distant planets should survive.

    And Earth? No one yet knows what will happen to it. More

  • 138 Shares119 Views

    in Space & Astronomy

    The fastest-spinning white dwarf ever seen rotates once every 25 seconds

    The sun turns once a month and the Earth once a day, but a white dwarf star 2,000 light-years away spins every 25 seconds, beating the old champ by five seconds. That makes it the fastest-spinning star of any sort ever seen — unless you consider such exotic objects as neutron stars and black holes, some of which spin even faster, to be stars (SN: 3/13/07).  

    About as small as Earth but roughly as massive as the sun, a white dwarf is extremely dense. The star’s surface gravity is so great that if you dropped a pebble from a height of a few feet, it would smash into the surface at thousands of miles per hour. The typical white dwarf takes hours or days to spin.

    The fast-spinning white dwarf, named LAMOST J0240+1952 and located in the constellation Aries, got in a whirl because of its ongoing affair with a red dwarf star that revolves around it. Just as falling water makes a waterwheel turn, so gas falling from the red companion star made the white dwarf twirl.

    The discovery occurred the night of August 7, when astronomer Ingrid Pelisoli of the University of Warwick in Coventry, England, and her colleagues detected a periodic blip of light from the dim duo. The blip repeated every 24.93 seconds, revealing the white dwarf star’s record-breaking rotation period, the researchers report August 26 at arXiv.org.

    The star’s only known rival is an even faster-spinning object in orbit with the blue star HD 49798. But that rapid rotator’s nature is unclear, with some recent studies saying it is likely a neutron star, not a white dwarf. More

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    in Humans

    Ancient seeds reveal we began using tobacco at least 12,300 years ago

    By Carissa Wong

    Modern cultivated tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) seed vesselsblickwinkel / Alamy
    Seeds discovered at an ancient campsite in Nevada indicate people have been using tobacco for at least 12,300 years, which is far longer than previously thought.
    Tobacco plants are native to North America, and humans are thought to have reached the continent around 20,000 to 16,000 years ago. “This suggests that people learned the intoxicant properties of tobacco relatively early in their time here rather than only with domestication and agriculture thousands of years later,” says Daron Duke at the … More

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    in Humans

    Football teams lost home advantage in lockdowns but it is coming back

    By Luke Taylor

    The roar of the home crowd really does have an impactClive Rose/Getty Images
    It is a long-held belief that football teams playing in their home stadium get a boost from their fans. However, quantifying this effect on match results was difficult until the pandemic created an unprecedented natural experiment when most of the 2020/21 season was played behind closed doors.
    Statistics shared with New Scientist by London-based sports intelligence firm Twenty First Group show that home teams in Europe’s five major men’s football leagues lost a significant home advantage when their games … More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    China’s lunar rock samples show lava flowed on the moon 2 billion years ago

    Lava oozed across the moon’s surface just 2 billion years ago, bits of lunar rocks retrieved by China’s Chang’e-5 mission reveal.

    A chemical analysis of the volcanic rocks confirms that the moon remained volcanically active far longer that its size would suggest possible, researchers report online October 7 in Science.

    Chang’e-5 is the first mission to retrieve lunar rocks and return them to Earth in over 40 years (SN: 12/1/20). An international group of researchers found that the rocks formed 2 billion years ago, around when multicellular life first evolved on Earth. That makes them the youngest moon rocks ever collected, says study coauthor Carolyn Crow, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder.  

    The moon formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago. Lunar rocks from the Apollo and Soviet missions of the late 1960s and 70s revealed that volcanism on the moon was commonplace for the first billion or so years of its existence, with flows lasting for millions, if not hundreds of millions, of years.

    Samples of bits of lunar rocks, such as this, are helping scientists study the volcanic evolution of the moon.Beijing SHRIMP Center/Institute of Geology/CAGS

    Given its size, scientist thought that the moon started cooling off around 3 billion years ago, eventually becoming the quiet, inactive neighbor it is today. Yet a dearth of craters in some regions left scientists scratching their heads. Parts of celestial bodies devoid of volcanism accumulate more and more craters over time, in part because there aren’t lava flows depositing new material that hardens into smooth stretches. The moon’s smoother spots seemed to suggest that volcanism had persisted past the moon’s early history.  

    “Young volcanism on a small body like the moon is challenging to explain, because usually small bodies cool fast,” says Juliane Gross, a planetary scientist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J., not involved in the study.

    Scientist had suggested that radioactive elements might offer an explanation for later volcanism. Radioactive decay generates a lot of heat, which is why nuclear reactors are kept in water. Enough radioactive materials in the moon’s mantle, the layer just below the visible crust, would have provided a heat source that could explain younger lava flows.

    To test this theory, the Chang’e-5 lander gathered chunks of basalt — a type of rock that forms from volcanic activity — from a previously unexplored part of the moon thought to be younger than 3 billion years old. The team determined that the rocks formed from lava flows 2 billion years ago, but chemical analysis did not yield the concentration of radioactive elements one would expect if radioactive decay were to explain the volcanism.

    The Chang’e-5 lunar lander extracts samples of the moon that were returned to Earth. The lunar material is the first brought back to Earth in more than 40 years.Chinese National Space Agency’s Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center

    This finding is compelling scientists to consider what other forces could have maintained volcanic activity on the moon.

    One theory, says study coauthor Alexander Nemchin, a planetary scientist at the Beijing SHRIMP Center and Curtin University in Bentley, Australia, is that gravitational forces from the Earth could have liquefied the lunar interior, keeping lunar magma flowing for another billion or so years past when it should have stopped.

    “The moon was a lot closer 2 billion years ago,” Nemchin explains. As the moon slowly inched away from the Earth — a slow escape still at work today — these forces would have become less and less powerful until volcanism eventually petered out.

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    Impacts from asteroids and comets also could have kept the moon’s volcanic juices flowing, but “at this point, any guess is a good guess,” says Jessica Barnes, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson not involved in the study.

    “This is a good example of why we need to get to know our closest neighbor,” Barnes says. “A lot people think we already know what’s going on with the moon, but it’s actually quite mysterious.” More