Philippa Kaur

By Michael Marshall

The Nesher Ramla excavation in IsraelHershkovitz, I et al.
A previously unknown group of ancient humans lived in what is now Israel for hundreds of thousands of years. They lived alongside modern humans for some of that time, and the two groups may have interacted and learned skills from each other.
The newly discovered people were the ancestors of the Neanderthals, who later roamed Europe and western Asia, argues the team behind the work. If that is true, Neanderthals originated in western Asia, not in Europe as many researchers have previously suspected.
The hominin remains were found at Nesher Ramla in Israel, in a quarry operated by a cement factory. Following its identification, the archaeological site within the quarry was briefly protected to allow excavations to proceed in 2010 and 2011, after which it was quarried. “The site itself is gone,” says Israel Hershkovitz at Tel Aviv University in Israel, a member of the team.Advertisement
Nesher Ramla was once a shallow depression in the landscape that gradually filled with sediment. “It was used by hominins for quite a long time, and it’s very rich in terms of archaeological material and very well preserved,” says Yossi Zaidner at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a member of the research team.

The team found parts of the roof of a hominin skull and a near-complete jawbone. “We believe it’s of the same individual,” says Hila May, also at Tel Aviv University, another author of the work.
It isn’t clear if they were male or female, because the most telltale bones are missing. “But we can say it’s a young adult based on the teeth,” says Rachel Sarig, a member of the team, also at Tel Aviv University.
The sediments in which the bones were found are between 140,000 and 120,000 years old. Our species had emerged in Africa by this time, and made some forays outside: Homo sapiens specimens from 210,000 years ago have been found in Greece, and a seemingly more sustained population existed in the Israel region from at least 177,000 years ago. But H. sapiens wasn’t the only hominin: Europe and western Asia were home to the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis), while eastern Asia was home to a related group called the Denisovans.
To find out if the Nesher Ramla hominin belonged to one of these groups, the team compared the shapes of the bones with those of dozens of other hominin remains. “It was easy to say that it’s not Homo sapiens,” says May. The skull was low and flat, rather than rounded and tall, and the jawbone lacked the chin that is characteristic of our species.
But it didn’t fit any of the other groups either. In some ways, the bones resembled Neanderthal ones, but in others they looked like those of hominins that lived earlier in prehistory.
However, the Nesher Ramla bones do resemble several other hard-to-classify fossils. These include bones from the Qesem, Zuttiyeh and Tabun sites in Israel, and from Atapuerca in northern Spain, some of which are considerably older. Hershkovitz says there are also specimens from China and India that might fit.

The team argues that all these bones should be considered together as a new hominin group, which lived in western Asia between 420,000 and 120,000 years ago. The hominin at Nesher Ramla was “a residue or survivor of this source population”, argues Sarig.
The team hasn’t given the group a species name like Homo neanderthalensis, and simply calls them “Nesher Ramla Homo”. This is because the group says it doesn’t like classing hominins as distinct species if they can interbreed, so also wouldn’t count Neanderthals as a species distinct from us.
“They’re very careful not to call it a species,” says Mirjana Roksandic at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. She says that requires “more discussion”.
The Neanderthal-like features of Nesher Ramla Homo can be explained if they were the ancestors of the Neanderthals, the team argues. On this account, the usual story of the origin of the Neanderthals – that they evolved from earlier European hominins – is wrong. Instead, they originated in western Asia as a subgroup of Nesher Ramla Homo, and entered Europe only when the climate was favourable.

Roksandic is intrigued but not convinced. “These morphological traits of Neanderthals that they see could be easily interpreted as the movement of Neanderthals back,” she says – in which case, Nesher Ramla Homo may have picked them up from Neanderthals, rather than the other way around.
However, May thinks the research team’s scenario makes more sense. Moreover, it would explain a mystery. A Neanderthal who lived in northern Europe 124,000 years ago had some H. sapiens DNA, around 80,000 years before modern humans got there. This could be explained if modern humans interbred with Nesher Ramla Homo in western Asia and some of the resulting hybrids interbred with European Neanderthals.
The Nesher Ramla Homo may also explain other unusual fossils. The bones from the caves of Skhul and Qafzeh in Israel have sometimes been classed as H. sapiens, but don’t look typical of our species. The team suggests they are actually the result of interbreeding between H. sapiens and Nesher Ramla Homo.
There is clear evidence that Nesher Ramla Homo and H. sapiens were interacting, says Zaidner. They made very similar tools, using exactly the same process. This suggests that one group learned the skills from the other. But “we don’t know… who learned from who.”
Journal references: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.abh3169 and DOI: 10.1126/science.abh3020 
Sign up to Our Human Story, a free monthly newsletter on the revolution in archaeology and human evolution

More on these topics: More

By Gege Li

Magic Tree by Yevhen Samuchenko
Photographers: Antonio Pérez, Yevhen Samuchenko, Ju Shen Lee, Roberto Buenov
THESE captivating photos each tell a powerful story about human influence on the planet. The images are among shortlisted entries for Earth Photo 2021, a global photography and video competition developed by the UK’s Royal Geographical Society and Forestry England.
001 The Sea Moves Us, the Sea Moves (Fuvemeh Ghana)Advertisement
Above is an image called 001 The Sea Moves Us, The Sea Moves (Fuvemeh Ghana) from a series by Antonio Pérez, showing Bebli Adzotor in what is left of her home in the fishing village of Fuvemeh, Ghana. Such communities have disappeared or are at risk because of coastal erosion and rising sea levels driven by climate change.
Ukraine’s Sofiyivsky Park is the focus of Magic Tree by Yevhen Samuchenko, showing part of this idyllic park photographed aerially to look like a tree. The park contains more than 2000 types of tree.
Balancing Act All Day Long by Ju Shen Lee
Above is Balancing Act All Day Long by Ju Shen Lee, which features a man fishing on Inle Lake, Myanmar. People here  have a unique fishing technique, rowing their boats with one leg while standing on the other. This requires a lot of strength and balance, as this image shows.
Finally, Forest Like Gardens by Roberto Bueno captures the effects of deforestation, shown through the stepped vineyards in the province of Tarragona, Spain, that have been carved out of land once dominated by forest.
Forest Like Gardens by Robert Bueno
The images will be exhibited at the Royal Geographical Society in London. Competition winners will be announced on 19 August.

More on these topics: More

New developments in a 10,000-year-old cold case have upended our ideas about how and when tuberculosis began infecting humans – and offered hope for a better vaccine

Health

23 June 2021

By Rebecca Batley

Israel G. Vargas
THIS was the coldest of cold cases. The remains of 83 people had lain under the earthen floor of a house in Dja’de el’Mughara, northern Syria, for thousands of years. Who put them there was no mystery: people living in the region during the Stone Age often buried their dead beneath their homes. But the cause of death – for some at least – was totally unexpected. When archaeologists carefully examined the bones, they discovered signs that five of these individuals had tuberculosis. They are the oldest confirmed cases that we know of.
The discovery is significant. Finding evidence of TB in people who died some 10,000 years ago challenges a long-held idea about the origins of this, the most deadly infectious disease to afflict humanity. It is a key piece in the puzzle that researchers are trying to put together to reveal where and how TB started to sicken humans and how it spread around the world. That isn’t just academic. We need this information to find new ways to fight TB, which currently kills at least 1.7 million people every year. By looking closely at the Dja’de el’Mughara remains, and other very cold cases, we might finally be able to stop this indiscriminate killer.
Tuberculosis is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which generally infects the respiratory system and spreads from person to person via airborne droplets. From the 17th century until the 19th century, it caused 20 per cent of all deaths in the Western world. German microbiologist Robert Koch won a Nobel prize for his discovery of the pathogen in 1882. A vaccine – BCG … More

By Anna Demming

Katherine Johnson was honoured by US president Barack Obama in 2015Kris Connor/WireImage/Getty Images
My Remarkable Journey: A memoir
Katherine Johnson, with Joylette Hylick and Katherine Moore
HarperCollinsAdvertisement

IT IS rare to suddenly find yourself a household name at the age of 98. Yet until a few years ago, not many people had heard of Katherine Johnson and her pioneering work as a mathematician at NASA during the space race. All that changed in 2016 following the success of Margot Lee Shetterly’s bestselling book Hidden Figures and the subsequent film adaptation.
“How could I have imagined,” writes Johnson, in the introduction to her autobiography My Remarkable Journey, “that from ages 97 to 101 I would be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom (with a kiss from my favorite president); appear onstage at the Oscars; receive thirteen honorary doctorate degrees, including one from the University of Johannesburg in South Africa; have four major buildings named in my honor, including a second NASA facility…”
The list goes on. Her autobiography, written with input from two of her three daughters, Joylette Hylick and Katherine Moore, charts how she got there. Few, if any, of the other mathematicians who worked with Johnson at NASA during the space race share that kind of mainstream fame, but neither were they forced to overcome the kind of barriers Johnson faced.
Her memoir dwells on the things she loved – mathematics, family and the supportive communities around her – but doesn’t shy away from details of the relentless cruelty, violence and injustice of racial segregation and prejudice that steeped the lives of her family and friends, and those of African American people in general. Add to that her gender, at a time when women weren’t credited with much competence for anything beyond home building and raising children, and you get the picture that she was no ordinary NASA mathematician.
“Johnson needed to be better than her white male colleagues to succeed, and fortunately she was”
Johnson needed to be better than her white male colleagues to succeed, and fortunately she was. “The team soon discovered that I could do the equations quicker than all of them,” she writes unabashedly, though she puts that down to the foresight of her tutor, William Schieffelin Claytor, in adding analytic geometry of space to the curriculum he taught her, and the fact that she was the most recent college graduate.
Yet it was Johnson’s innate flair for her subject that had attracted special interest from Claytor in the first place, and she would continue to shine in her field for decades to come. As the person who first suggested she pursue a career as a research mathematician, Claytor appears more than once in a book rich in tributes to all the people who helped Johnson along the way, as well as to those who helped them. As a result, the memoir is replete with inspiring cameos from talented and tenacious role models who not only achieve great things against all odds, but are often equally dedicated to creating opportunities for those who may follow them.
These positive anecdotes are particularly welcome given the prejudice and racial tension that form a persistent backdrop to the book, from the denigrating impact of segregation on children’s self-esteem to violent lynchings. About halfway through, we get to Johnson’s time at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (and its later iteration NASA), which coincides with some of the more tumultuous moments of the civil rights movement.
She describes the times not just as a high-achieving black woman deeply invested in justice and equality, but as the anxious mother of three young women then just entering adulthood, and as hungry as the rest of their peers to play a role in the often terrifying events shaping social change.
People familiar with Hidden Figures will recognise the odd scene in her memoir, and where a little licence was taken on screen, Johnson is generous in pointing it out while providing excuses for the needs and challenges of the movie format.
Overall, her book is a personal account that tells the tale of a woman with a brilliance for mathematics, love and life. She was undeterred by circumstance, and that set her on the path for a remarkable journey.

More on these topics: More

Josie Ford
Post quantum?
One minor consequence of the global pandemic has been the many hours spent indoors waiting for the doorbell to ring – often, once we have made it from the office stationery cupboard, to be left with a card saying they are sorry we were out, and that the parcel we were waiting for is now being redirected to a sorting office in one of the less fashionable outer London suburbs.
This game of cat and mouse has been given an additional edge recently by the sort of text message sent by the UK’s Royal Mail to reader Martin Andrews, which states that his delivery is due to arrive “between 11:11am and 3:11pm”. “This made me wonder what function it serves to be so precise in their vagueness,” Martin writes.
The Royal Mail’s spread in ETA of exactly 4 hours suggests to us an origin in fundamental physics. Quantum uncertainty would dictate that if your parcel is at a well-defined location in relation to you, you can’t know how fast it’s travelling towards you, and vice versa, so time of arrival will always be, to a certain extent, moot.Advertisement
Putting in the numbers, assuming a spread of velocities between zero and the UK’s national speed limit, only leads us to a truly huge value for a parcel’s wavelength of some 500 metres. Fundamental physics having failed us, yet again, we have put in an enquiry with the Royal Mail press office. We’ll keep you, ummm, posted.
Heard it here last
Stephen Jorgenson-Murray enjoys our Twitter account’s own mazy travels in the fourth dimension as it tweets “Partial solar eclipse will be visible in the UK and Ireland on 10 June” on 13 June.
Drowning out our social media guru’s dark mutterings about the algorithm going wrong – presumably, going by last week’s cover story, one of the ones that runs our life – we’re happy to accept Stephen’s charitable suggestion that a cutting-edge magazine like our own would naturally take the lead in catering to the time traveller market.
Love shine a light
As we write, the summer solstice is just passing in our northern hemispheric climes. Top of our list of concerns, as you might expect, is how to harness the energy of the sun at its zenith and what effect this might have on our relationships.
Only half of that question is ever going to be answered by a working nuclear fusion reactor, and we’re increasingly doubtful whether that will be in our lifetime. So we are grateful that both parts are tackled in what appears to be a PR email for a boiler installation website in consultation with “renowned psychic Inbaal”.
“During this time, those in relationships will enjoy increased attraction to their partners and will be keen to meet up frequently and passionately,” it burbles. “With this natural phenomenon bringing a new or stronger urge to be outdoors, it is the season of al-fresco amore.”
Fortunately, this being the UK, it was raining with fair commitment the other side of Feedback’s curtains this midsummer morn. We hope this will assist our fellow citizens in keeping their passions sensibly zipped up.
Head in the clouds
A delightful prospect is afforded by the bed spotted by Tony Cuthbert on eBay, promising “Height 820 mm” and “Height from under bed to floor 200 m”. Just beware of the sensation of falling you sometimes get as you are about to drift off.
Brighter than 160 GKet
Inappropriate measurement comparison of the week comes via various readers from various US news media. These quote oceanographer Gregory Johnson as saying that an increase in Earth’s heat imbalance (between what we gain from the sun and lose to space) from 2005 to 2019 was the energy equivalent of “four detonations per second of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, or every person on Earth using 20 electric tea kettles at once”. Apropos Johnson’s additional comment: “It’s such a hard number to get your mind around.” Latching on to the second of those numbers, that’s quite some tea party.
How many kangaroos?
Our contingent in Australia, meanwhile, pops by with the culturally attuned unit of the week, courtesy of an article on The Conversation from the discoverers of the country’s largest dinosaur, Australotitan cooperensis.
The description in the title that Australotitan spanned the length of two buses being deemed, we presume, too generic, the body copy goes on to describe it as having weighed “the equivalent of 1,400 red kangaroos”. “How many red kangaroos = one blue whale?” asks Carol Symington, while Libby Kerr bemoans the lack of a conversion into quokkas. Given the uncertainty we uncovered last week, we are wondering about Australotitan‘s volume in Australian pints.
Drink to that
It’s that time of day already – give or take 4 hours, anyway. And so, a toast. A. P. Dawid is a distinguished statistician, emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of the Royal Society, but that isn’t the reason we raise our glass.
No, that is because he is the first, although by no means the only, person to write noting the newly appointed deputy chair of the Wine Society, Eleanor de Kanter. Cheers!
Got a story for Feedback?Send it to feedback@newscientist.com or New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street, London WC2E 9ESConsideration of items sent in the post will be delayed
You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website. More

By Katie Smith-Wong

Michelle Fournet and researcher Natalie Mastick Jensen listen in to whalesApple
Apple TV+: premiere 15 June
Fathom
Drew XanthopoulosAdvertisement

MOST of us introduce ourselves for the first time by saying hello and giving our name. But what if you were trying to greet another species and understand its background? This is the premise of Fathom, a new documentary by director Drew Xanthopoulos, known for directing The Sensitives, which explored the lives of people who are debilitatingly sensitive to our world.
Fathom follows biologist Ellen Garland at the University of St Andrews, UK, and marine acoustician Michelle Fournet at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, on their respective studies into humpback whale songs and social communication.
While Fournet analyses different whale calls as she tries to create a conversation between humpbacks to understand their communication better, Garland studies the cultural transmission, vocal learning and function of whale songs. We watch as the two prepare for field studies in Alaska and French Polynesia.
Fathom‘s languid pace prevents viewers from completely immersing themselves. Although this leaves you waiting for something to happen, it allows Xanthopoulos to hone in on detail and show marine bioacoustics at its slow work. The scientists use hydrophones to acoustically track whales, capturing different calls, most notably the “whup” call, which Fournet studies.
Basing herself in Hobart Bay, Alaska, she is forthcoming about the challenges of surveying 30 whales in a month using focal follows, which involves tracking a specific animal, and playbacks, in which she rebroadcasts natural or synthetic signals to animals and notes their response.
Her candour about the likelihood of failure because of logistical complications brings a level-headedness amid the lofty ambitions, and her willingness to adapt her approach to fine-tune the “conversation” shows flexibility.
As she analyses audio tracks of a series of “whups” and begins to understand their significance, we share her sense of achievement from a groundbreaking insight: that humpbacks use sound to perceive not only each other but their surroundings.
In 1996, marine biologist Philip Clapham described whale song as “probably the most complex in the animal kingdom”, justifying the task of deciphering it as a single research topic. Indeed, Garland has her work cut out: whale songs are mostly used by males for mating purposes. But she identifies that the same series of calls (also known as songs) are “culturally transmitted”, and evolve across vast distances.
Throughout, the haunting sound of whale songs beautifully accompanies Xanthopoulos’s serene cinematography, underlining the simplicity of nature while evoking a sense of isolation. As a result, Fathom captures the calmness of the scientists’ surroundings, while the precise yet soft black-and-white visualisations of the whale call are reminiscent of another film with language at its heart: the 2016 sci-fi film Arrival.
As Garland eloquently points out: “Some things we do are not innate – they are learned. They tell us who we are connected to and where we belong. We call these things culture. We call our communication ‘language’.” For some reason, she adds, we think that what whales do is different.
Fathom celebrates not only the steps towards understanding another species, but the women helping us get to the finishing line.

More on these topics: More

Frank Masi/Paramount Pictures
Watch
The Tomorrow War propels schoolteacher-turned-conscript Dan Forester (Chris Pratt) 30 years into the future, to fight an alien threat on the brink of eradicating humanity. Amazon Prime Video, 2 July.

Read
Gathering Moss by botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer explains the overlooked plant’s key place in the natural world, as well as revealing historical and sacred truths, and its scientific delights.Advertisement
Garry Jones
Visit
UnNatural History, an international exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry, UK, explores the role of naturalists and artists as an intrinsic part of the increasingly complex science of natural history. Runs until 22 August. More