Philippa Kaur

By Sally Adee

Even a post-apocalyptic Earth retains a certain charm for humankindgremlin/Getty Images
Goliath
Tochi Onyebuchi
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SCI-FI dystopias of a ruined Earth are thick on the ground these days, filled with the wreckage of climate change: drowned continents, great extinctions and air that is no longer safe to breathe. In the more hopeful, people leave the planet in search of another world where they can start again, with lessons learned and a determination not to repeat the same mistakes.
In Tochi Onyebuchi’s Goliath, human nature is eternal. So, while the rich predictably leave for pristine space colonies, abandoning those who can’t afford to escape, there is money to be made from tourism to the ruins left behind. Some tourists find themselves captivated by the communities that have emerged, and decide to return to Earth. Gentrification ensues.
The premise is wry and au courant. In a lesser writer’s hands, it could lead to lazy and cynical caricatures, but Onyebuchi uses it only as a jumping off point into a deeper examination of the idea of home, and what we will do to get there.
Onyebuchi started out writing sci-fi for young adults before reaching a wider audience with the multi-award gobbling novella Riot Baby in 2020. He has a master’s degree in screenwriting, which is on vivid display in his hypnotic descriptions of Goliath’s two new human worlds.
We explore these through the eyes of several characters, including colony-dweller Jonathan, who looks out into star-spangled black space from a window in a sterile space station straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. On Earth, we meet Sydney, who watches a dandelion’s seeds get nibbled away by wind under a poisoned red sky.
“By detailing the two worlds, Onyebuchi makes it obvious why people start yearning for Earth”
The style is more than matched by the substance of the story, in which Onyebuchi takes his time to explore the main themes. The gentrification issue, for example, is treated not as an easy punchline but as a way into deeper questions about what we need.
When Jonathan travels from the colonies to Earth, he tours destroyed homes looking for one to fix up. Onyebuchi shows us what he starts with – a shell of a house filled with geological layers of detritus. Then, months later, Jonathan is accepted into the community, which allows him to connect to the lone cable still bringing electricity to the neighbourhood. His wonder and joy at something so ordinary as a working light switch is infectious, especially after the technological marvels he has been taking for granted in the colonies.
By detailing the contrasting textures of the two worlds, Onyebuchi makes it obvious why colony-dwellers start yearning for Earth. Home inspires such longing that people living in the clean, metallic colonies pay handsomely for individual bricks to be salvaged from demolished houses on Earth and sent into space. They fight on auction sites for tiny cacti.
Back on Earth, there are different tensions. Returning residents bring back things that Earth’s citizens were only too happy to see the back of, not least social inequality. Even in space, the richest live in the part of the space station with a view of the galaxies, while everyone else faces the unrecyclable detritus – including dead bodies – that surrounds the colonies in a ring.
What will the prodigal Jonathans bring back to Earth apart from their longing for home? And will the people they left behind be interested in anything they have to offer?
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A concoction of vilca seeds and fermented alcohol may have provided a mild hallucinogenic experience, enabling Wari leaders in South America to bond with their people

Humans

12 January 2022

By Michael Marshall
Anadenanthera colubrina, a tree species common to nearly all regions of South AmericanMatt Lavin/Flickr
Get high, make friends. Members of the Wari society, who lived in the Peruvian Andes more than 1000 years ago, may have mixed hallucinogenic seeds into their beer. Such a mind-bending drink might have offered a way for society leaders to create bonds with ordinary people.
“Being able to provide that experience would create heightened social status among Wari leaders,” says Matthew Biwer at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
The Wari culture flourished in what is now Peru between around AD 550 and 1000. Biwer calls them “the first example of an expansionary state in the Andes”, preceding the later Inca Empire. “There is no written record,” says Biwer, so we don’t know what they called themselves. But they left behind distinctive artefacts and structures including canals.Advertisement
Since 2015, Biwer and his team have been excavating a Wari site called Quilcapampa. He calls it “a waystation along a road” and says it was only occupied for a generation, between about AD 800 and 850.
In the centre of the site, the team found a pit filled with about a million seeds of Schinus molle: a kind of fruit known as molle, or sometimes Peruvian pepper. The molle fruits were used to make a fermented alcoholic drink, a bit like beer, known as chicha.

A few steps away, in a garbage pit, the team found seeds from vilca trees (Anadenanthera colubrina). Vilca seeds contain hallucinogenic substances and have been widely used in Andean cultures. “I haven’t tried vilca myself,” says Biwer, but ethnographic accounts often describe it causing “a sensation of flying”.
If you eat vilca seeds, your stomach enzymes deactivate the active compounds within them – so the seeds are more normally ground up and taken up the nose as snuff, producing a strong effect. However, chicha suppresses those stomach enzymes, so the combination of the two would allow “a very mild and controlled hallucinogenic effect”, says Biwer.
As the Wari state expanded throughout the Andes, its leaders needed ways to impress local people and create bonds with them. They often did so by holding feasts, says Biwer. Providing a hallucinogenic experience would have been an added selling point – especially as vilca doesn’t grow in the Quilcapampa area and must have been imported.
Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2021.177
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The characters used to write the Vai script, which was invented in Liberia in 1833, have become visually simpler over time, reflecting the evolutionary pressures acting on writing

Humans

11 January 2022

By Colin Barras
A character representing the syllable “bi” in Vai scriptKelly et al
The symbols we use to write words evolve to become visually simpler over time, and an analysis of a writing system from West Africa shows that they can do so over just a few generations.
The script used to write the Vai language was invented in Liberia in 1833 and is still in use today. Those who devised it may have had some awareness of the Latin and Arabic alphabets, but the Vai script isn’t modelled on either. Its characters denote … More

Cut marks on animal bones suggest ancient hominins butchered them for their meat, and that they were first on the scene instead of having to scavenge from carnivores like big cats

Humans

11 January 2022

By Michael Marshall
Notches on a bone left by human butchering activityJennifer A. Parkinson, Thomas W. Plummer, James S. Oliver, Laura C. Bishop
Ancient humans were regularly butchering animals for meat 2 million years ago. This has long been suspected, but the idea has been bolstered by a systematic study of cut marks on animal bones.
The find cements the view that ancient humans had become active hunters by this time, contrasting with earlier hominins that ate mostly plants.
The new evidence comes from Kanjera South, an archaeological site near Lake Victoria in Kenya. Kanjera South has been excavated on and off since 1995. It … More

By Colin Barras
Ancient Egyptians had a wide range of medical knowledgeAndrAfter virtually unwrapping the mummified body of a young girl who died 2000 years ago, archaeologists have found something unique: an ancient Egyptian bandaged wound.
The ancient Egyptians were no strangers to linen bandages, which they first used to wrap their dead more than 6000 years ago, about a thousand years before the first pharaohs rose to power. But until now, Egyptologists haven’t found bandages that were used to dress the wounds of living ancient Egyptians.
As part of a study … More

By Clare Wilson
GAP Photos/Tim Gainey
IN THE depths of the UK winter, most of my vegetable beds are bare, except for my star performer: purple sprouting broccoli. It is in the middle of its fabulous January growth spurt.
This giant of a broccoli plant is arguably the queen of the brassica family of vegetables. Also known as winter sprouting broccoli, it is very tolerant of cold, and requires several weeks of cold weather before it puts forth its flower buds and becomes ready to harvest.
Unlike ordinary broccoli plants, which have a single large head and are usually harvested by autumn, purple sprouting broccoli … More

By Clare Wilson
GAP Photos/Tim Gainey
IN THE depths of the UK winter, most of my vegetable beds are bare, except for my star performer: purple sprouting broccoli. It is in the middle of its fabulous January growth spurt.
This giant of a broccoli plant is arguably the queen of the brassica family of vegetables. Also known as winter sprouting broccoli, it is very tolerant of cold, and requires several weeks of cold weather before it puts forth its flower buds and becomes ready to harvest.
Unlike ordinary broccoli plants, which have a single large head and are usually harvested by autumn, purple sprouting broccoli … More

By Jacob Aron

You can run a safe theme park. Or you can unleash chaos. Which is more fun?Frontier Developments
Game
Jurassic World Evolution 2
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THE original Jurassic Park was released in 1993, and as a dinosaur-obsessed 7-year-old, I simply had to see it. I badgered my parents to take me, even though I was probably a bit too young to watch people being eaten by monsters.
Needless to say, I loved it, and have had a soft spot for both the books and films ever since. So I jumped at the chance to make my own dinosaur park in Jurassic World Evolution 2.
The game adds dinosaurs to the template of classic management sims such as Theme Park or RollerCoaster Tycoon. You begin after the events of the fifth film, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, when dinosaurs were released en masse into the wild. Your job, working with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, is to round them up. This teaches you the basics of building enclosures, looking after dinosaurs and so on, but it isn’t particularly exciting.
Jeff Goldblum and Bryce Dallas Howard voice their characters from the films and offer advice, but it seems the developers couldn’t secure Chris Pratt, so settled for a substitute that sounds nothing like him.
While the campaign serves as a useful tutorial, where the game really shines is in Chaos Theory mode. This puts you in charge of parks from the five films to see if you can avoid disaster, and is much more fun. In the era of the first film, dinosaurs don’t exist yet, so you send scientists out to find fossils and extract their DNA.
“I hatched two T. rex. They began fighting. Then one killed the other, bust a hole in the fence and escaped”
I started with velociraptors, or at least the Jurassic Park versions, which are roughly as big as a human – the real thing was turkey-sized and had feathers. Despite this inaccuracy, it was a thrill to release them into their enclosure, ready for paying guests. “Every precaution has been taken, we’re following the science,” said one of the researchers, in what feels like a knowing wink to the UK’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic – Frontier Developments is based in Cambridge, UK.
Keeping your park going involves balancing science, business, entertainment and logistics. You need a steady stream of research to create new dinosaurs and modify their DNA, but that requires a positive cash flow. Guests are your main revenue source, but they don’t only want dinosaurs: you have to build restaurants, hotels and toilets to keep them happy. Then there is the back end of the park – power stations, park rangers and medical teams – which supports everything else.
With all this to keep track of, it is no wonder that John Hammond’s original Jurassic Park was a disaster. I managed to hold things together, just. There is a fun moment when Hammond echoes the “we have a T. rex?” line from the original film, which he asks with a mixture of glee and surprise as you prepare to unleash one.
I actually hatched not one T. rex but two and plopped them down in an enclosure I had built to house them as the pride of the park. Unfortunately, I didn’t give them enough food and they began fighting. Then one killed the other, bust a hole in the fence and escaped. It was a scary moment, until I realised I could simply dispatch a helicopter to tranquilise it and ferry it back to the enclosure.
That moment highlights a tension that the game doesn’t quite manage to solve – you want your park to run smoothly, but to really recreate the atmosphere of Jurassic Park, you want to unleash chaos.
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