Philippa Kaur

By Layal Liverpool

Woodland in the UK has been influenced by human activity for millenniaSteve Speller/Alamy
As early as 12,000 years ago, nearly three-quarters of land on Earth was inhabited and shaped by human societies, suggesting global biodiversity loss in recent years may have been driven primarily by an intensification of land use rather than by the destruction of previously untouched nature.
“It’s not the process of using land itself [that causes biodiversity loss], it’s the way that land is used,” says Erle Ellis at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “You can have traditional land use and still have biodiversity.”

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Ellis and his colleagues analysed the most recent reconstruction of global land use by humans over the past 12,000 years and compared this with contemporary global patterns of biodiversity and conservation. They found that most – 72.5 per cent – of Earth’s land has been shaped by human societies since as far back as 10,000 BC, including more than 95 per cent of temperate and 90 per cent of tropical woodlands.
“Our work confirms that untouched nature was almost as rare 12,000 years ago as it is today,” says Ellis. He and his team found that lands now considered natural, intact or wild generally exhibit long histories of use, as do protected areas and lands inhabited only by relatively small numbers of Indigenous peoples.

The extent of historical human land use may previously have been underestimated because prior analyses didn’t fully account for the influence that hunter-gatherer populations had on landscapes, says Ellis. “Even hunter-gatherer populations that are moving around are still interacting with the land, but maybe in what we would see as a more sustainable way,” he says.
The researchers also found that in regions now characterised as natural, current global patterns of vertebrate species richness and overall biodiversity are more strongly linked to past patterns of land use than they are with present ones. Ellis says this indicates the current biodiversity crisis can’t be explained by the loss of uninhabited wild lands alone. Instead, this points to a more significant role for recent appropriation, colonisation and intensification of land use, he says.
“The concept of wilderness as a place without people is a myth,” says Yadvinder Malhi at the University of Oxford. “Where we do find large biomes without people living in them and using them – as in North American national parks, Amazonian forests or African game parks – it is because of a history of people being removed from these lands through disease or by force.”
“[This study] shows that high biodiversity is compatible with, and in some cases a result of, people living in these landscapes,” says Malhi. “Working with local and traditional communities, and learning from them, is essential if we are to try to protect biodiversity.”
“With ambitious calls to expand global terrestrial protected areas to cover 30 per cent or even half of the Earth, this [study] brings into focus that protection necessarily cannot mean the exclusion of people and anthropogenic land uses,” says Jason Riggio at the University of California, Davis. The “30 by 30” pledge, being championed by a coalition of more than 50 countries, aims to expand protected areas to cover at least 30 per cent of land and sea by 2030.
Joice Ferreira at Embrapa Amazônia Oriental in Brazil says that there are important roles for both protected areas and sustainable land use in preserving biodiversity. “The combination of deforestation, degradation […] and climate change make protected areas paramount,” she says, adding: “if Indigenous custodianship was important in the past, it is much more so nowadays, in the face of new and more intense threats.”
Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2023483118

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By Colin Barras

Could these markings be the beginnings of modern alphabets?Glenn Schwartz
The early history of the alphabet may require rewriting. Four clay artefacts found at an ancient site in Syria are incised with what is potentially the earliest alphabetic writing ever found. The discovery suggests that the alphabet emerged 500 years earlier than we thought, and undermines leading ideas about how it was invented.
A popular idea is that the alphabet first appeared in Egypt about 3800 years ago, when 20 or so Egyptian hieroglyphs were repurposed as the first alphabet’s letters. The script was then used to write … More

By Alexander McNamara
and Matt Hambly

Tom Brakefield/Alamy
Orcas (orcinus orca) are aquatic mammals that can grow up to 8 metres in length, with a dorsal fin that stands up to 1.8 metres tall. But despite being commonly known as killer whales, these intelligent apex predators are actually the largest member of the dolphin family. 
Highly intelligent, orcas can live in a variety of marine environments all over the world, adapting their diet and hunting habits to better suit their surroundings. It’s not just their appetite that changes, either, they communicate in distinct ‘dialects’, and animals from different populations don’t often interbreed. This makes them the only known non-human species whose culture shapes evolution.
Animals suffer from motion sickness, too

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Motion sickness, the feeling of nausea associated with certain movements, affects about one third of people. Although we don’t know the exact cause behind it, we do know that it has something to do with the vestibular system – the delicate structure deep inside the ear responsible for balance. This means that any creature with such a system is susceptible to motion sickness, and that includes cats and dogs.
Saturated fat may not be as bad as we thought
edwardolive/Getty Images/
Mainly found in animal products such as meat, milk and eggs, saturated fat is one of two broad groups of fats in our food, the other being “unsaturated”. Although it is just as calorific as unsaturated fat, saturated fat is thought to be worse for our health because studies have linked higher consumption with a greater risk of heart disease.
However, some recent research has questioned whether saturated fat is as harmful as claimed. It appears people who follow low-carbohydrate, high-fat diets for weight loss and therefore tend to eat more saturated fat, do not see their cholesterol levels soaring and nor do they have more heart attacks.
Still, health advice from the NHS suggests we should eat less red meat, drink skimmed milk and use vegetable margarines instead of butter.

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Paid-for newsletters on Substack were a great innovation, but the way it has changed means I will no longer be writing for it, writes Annalee Newitz

Humans

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14 April 2021

Eternity in an Instant/Getty Images
ONE of the breakout social media stories of the past year has been Substack, a start-up that specialises in helping writers get paid for their newsletters. But in recent months, the company has become infamous for secretly providing financial incentives to a small group of people to write some of the biggest ones on its platform.
It was the kind of tale we are used to in the gig economy age. In 2017, Substack was a baby start-up on shaky ground. Nobody was sure newsletters could compete with Twitter or other platforms.
But Substack’s … More

Award-winner Sally Davies, a former chief medical officer for EnglandPaul Grover/Shutterstock
Suffrage Science
First Create the Media, with MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences

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Podbean, Spotify and more
ON 8 March every year, millions of people celebrate International Women’s Day, a slot in the global calendar that is both a unifying recognition of the achievements of women and an urgent warning that gender inequality is still rife.
Science, of course, is no exception to this. Women still make up just 28 per cent of the STEM workforce, while men dominate the highest-paying sectors, such as engineering. A decade ago, to mark the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day and to help address these crucial gaps, the Suffrage Science awards were born.
The Suffrage Science podcast, hosted weekly by science communicator Kat Arney, explains the prizes’ origins by shining a spotlight on past winners, women who have achieved extraordinary things in their careers despite facing an all-too-familiar bias and a lack of opportunities.
In the first episode, Arney talks to the founders of the project: Amanda Fisher, director of the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences, and Vivienne Parry, a science writer and broadcaster. As Arney explains, the awards work by selecting the next winners based on nominations from previous ones, thereby helping to grow a global network of inspirational female role models. The awards, bespoke pieces of jewellery that pay homage to scientific research and the suffrage movement, are passed on to new winners every two years.
Since 2011, 148 women across many scientific disciplines and countries have won awards. Their impact and reach surprised Parry – as she tells Arney, they have seen some early nominees become fine scientists, heading their own departments and creating a new cohort of great scientists.
The episode also features women’s rights activist Helen Pankhurst, the great-granddaughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, who led the UK suffragette movement.
In episode two, Arney talks to Sally Davies, the first female master of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, and former chief medical officer for England, who won a Suffrage Science award in 2011. Among Davies’s many achievements – and the one she is most proud of, she tells Arney – was putting the global threat of antimicrobial resistance firmly on the UK’s radar.
Her successes were accompanied by the difficulties of simply being a woman, as she explains: “I’ve always felt throughout my career that I had to be better than the men to get the job, not as good as [them].”
Listening to Fisher and other guests, I felt connected to them through our shared struggles as women and the recognition of how deeply gender discrimination is etched into every aspect of our experience. But underlying this solidarity, a tough message remains: we haven’t made the progress in improving prospects for women that we like to think we have, says Fisher. For example, there is much to be done in addressing issues faced by women from ethnic minority backgrounds.
The pandemic has widened the divide and even reversed progress in some cases, with women doing by far the majority of homeschooling and childcare, often putting their own jobs at risk. For Helen Pankhurst, there needs to be a new narrative. “Fundamentally, it’s about saying this isn’t good enough – this isn’t good enough for me, for the next generations, for those that came before us. We can and we must do better.”

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Francesco Berardinelli/Netflix
Watch
Zero is the story of shy teen Omar, a boy from Milan, Italy, who no one notices and who feels invisible. In this sci-fi series, as his inner turmoil morphs into real invisibility, Omar must adapt to his new status. On Netflix from 21 April.

Read
The New Breed of robots are best understood as animals, says Kate Darling, an expert in robot ethics. She forecasts that like real animals, robots will supplement, not replace, our own skills and abilities. Review to come next week.
EMAF
Visit
European Media Art Festival is going online this year, from 21 April, with a programme of films, installations, performances and lectures exploring questions about ownership and forms of possession.

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A continent’s worth of land inhabited by ancient people has been submerged by rising seas over the past 20,000 years. Now we’re discovering its secrets

Humans

14 April 2021

By Colin Barras

Divers explore a submerged coastal cave in MexicoKaren Doody/Stocktrek Images/Getty Images
BEAUTIFUL corals, graceful sea turtles and 4-metre-long tiger sharks. It is easy to see why tourists flock to the Dampier Archipelago in north-west Australia to dive among the thrilling – if occasionally intimidating – marine life. But these seas contain something that isn’t advertised by tour guides. When Chelsea Wiseman and her colleagues went diving here in 2019, they found stone tools on the seabed. The artefacts were last touched by human hands at least 7000 years ago, before the sea rose, the land drowned and the sharks moved in.
“We were ecstatic, just blown away, to find the tools,” says Wiseman, an archaeologist at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. And with good reason. During the early millennia of human evolution, sea levels were mostly much lower than they are today, with huge areas of what is now submerged coastal shelf inhabited by our ancient relatives. What they were up to in these Stone Age coastal areas has long been a mystery because studying these underwater sites is so hard.
With the archaeology of our coastal waters largely unexplored, we are missing a huge piece of human history. Now, however, that is changing. Underwater archaeology like that carried out by Wiseman and her team is already showing us how people lived and thrived along Stone Age coasts. It even suggests that, as the seas rose, people took action to hold them back, in a poignant foreshadowing of today. And as the coasts were a crucial route for Stone Age travellers, studying them is changing our understanding of how … More