Philippa Kaur

By Donna Lu

A large grave in Rennes probably contains soldiers from the French Royal armyColleter et al.
Remains buried in two mass graves in the same cemetery in France have been identified as medieval soldiers belonging to opposing armies.
Rozenn Colleter at the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research and her colleagues have identified the skeletons as belonging to soldiers who fought in the Siege of Rennes in 1491. The skeletons were found buried in a cemetery outside the Jacobin Convent in Rennes.
The researchers identified the skeletons by combining historical information with archaeological techniques, including genetic analysis. They found that … More

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre
There are nerve endings in fingerprint ridges that help us feel things
Leonardo Carneiro de Almeida / Getty
Our fingertips have an extraordinarily high sensitivity to touch – and now it looks like that sensitivity might be largely confined to the ridges of our fingerprints.
“They really help us get very detailed information about what we touch,” says Ewa Jarocka at Umeå University in Sweden.

Advertisement

Scientists have suspected that our circular, winding fingerprints might have evolved to improve our ability to grip objects by creating better friction, says Jarocka. But she says others have suggested they might contribute to our “very refined sense of touch”.
Because current models can’t explain the high levels of sensitivity people have shown in past scientific studies, Jarocka and her colleagues decided to investigate.
They asked six men and six women between the ages of 20 and 30 to lie comfortably in a dentist chair while their fingers were held in place. The researchers then ran a card covered in tiny, flat-tipped cones, each less than half a millimetre high, over their fingertips at different speeds and in different directions. Meanwhile, they recorded electrical activity of a single nerve cell using tungsten electrodes inserted into a main nerve in each participant’s upper arm.

The results allowed the researchers to map out exactly where on the fingertips the information that was sent to the nerve was collected. These sensitivity hotspots turned out to be very small, each only about 0.4 millimetres wide.
What’s more, these hotspots followed specific patterns on the fingertips – the same ones as the fingerprint ridges. Regardless of how the researchers moved the dotted card over a finger, its hotspot map stayed the same, suggesting the sensitivity zones were “anchored in the very stable structure” of the ridges themselves, says Jarocka.
“We have all those multiple hotspots, and each one responds to the details of 0.4 millimetres, which is the approximate width of the [fingerprint] ridge,” she says. “Then our brain receives all that information. This really offers an explanation to how it’s possible that we’re so dexterous and have such a high sensitivity in our fingertips.”

This doesn’t mean fingerprints might not have other functions as well, however – perhaps including improving grip, says Jarocka. But it does reveal the important role that the ridges play in touch.
“Now that we know that the single neuron can be so sensitive on such a [precise] scale, we can finally explain how people can be so detail-sensitive,” she says.
Journal reference: JNeurosci, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1716-20.2021 More

By Michael Marshall
The way ancient humans hunted may have influenced their evolution
Shutterstock / Gorodenkoff
Our ancestors’ diets changed dramatically over the course of the past 2.5 million years, and one research team thinks that profoundly affected our evolution.
According to a team including Miki Ben-Dor and Ran Barkai at Tel Aviv University in Israel, hominin diets were once so dominated by meat from massive animals that the hunters caused some of those species to go extinct. This, in turn, forced our ancestors to develop more sophisticated hunting techniques to bring down smaller, more elusive prey, leading to greater intelligence and the … More

By Jo Marchant
Fragments of the Antikythera mechanism
Hewlett-Packard/X-Tek Systems
The 2000-year-old Antikythera mechanism, often described as the world’s first computer, was a sophisticated bronze device that modelled the cosmos. Researchers have assumed that pointers were used to represent celestial bodies, moving around a dial like the hands on a clock, but a new study suggests that these were instead shown using a series of bejewelled, rotating rings.
The machine dates to the first century BC and was discovered in a shipwreck near the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901. Scientists have spent more than a century decoding its battered remains, which include inscriptions, measuring scales and more than 30 bronze gearwheels.

Advertisement

Modern reconstructions based on detailed X-ray images of the surviving pieces show it was a box around 30 centimetres high, operated by turning a handle on the side. On the back were two spiral dials, showing a calendar – including the timing of the Olympics – and dates of predicted lunar and solar eclipses.
Much of the front part of the mechanism is missing, but researchers agree that a large circular dial once displayed the motions of celestial bodies through the sky. Complex trains of gearwheels calculated the back-and-forth motion of the planets as seen from Earth, as well as the variable speed of the sun and moon.
Inscriptions deciphered in 2016 revealed that Venus and Saturn were represented by mathematical cycles not previously known from ancient Greek astronomy. For example, the Greeks are known to have described the back-and-forth motions of Venus using an 8-year cycle, or a more accurate 1151-year cycle, but the inscriptions on the Antikythera mechanism describe a 462-year cycle.

Tony Freeth at University College London and his colleagues suggest that the Greeks could have deduced this from the known cycles using a step-by-step arithmetic method originally described by the philosopher Parmenides in the 5th century BC. They used the same method to derive similar cycles for the other planets, for which the inscriptions are missing, and constructed a new gearing scheme that they claim fits all the available physical evidence, including a previously unexplained 63-tooth gearwheel and the surviving inscriptions.
The researchers conclude that the celestial bodies weren’t represented using pointers, but instead by concentric rotating rings. The inscriptions hint that coloured, semi-precious stones may have shown the position of each planet on its ring.
Freeth says he is confident that the new scheme “is essentially right” and describes it as “a beautiful system”. He thinks the mechanism could have been used to calculate the outcomes of astronomical theories, instead of working out the maths by hand. “It was a prediction machine,” he says. “You just turn the handle and it shows you.”

Mike Edmunds at Cardiff University in the UK, who has worked on the Antikythera mechanism, says the proposal is “ingenious” but cautions that with so few surviving clues, it is impossible to know for sure whether any theoretical reconstruction mirrors the original.
He also notes that the newly proposed design involves many extra gearwheels, and wonders whether such a complex mechanism could have turned smoothly and operated for long periods without breaking.
Freeth says the team’s next challenge is to make a physical model using 2000-year-old techniques, to prove it really would work.
Journal reference: Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-84310-w
Sign up to Our Human Story, a free monthly newsletter on the revolution in archaeology and human evolution
More on these topics: More

By Garry Shaw
Tattoos have helped reveal details of a 19th-century man who had his skin preserved
Smith, M.J., Starkie, A., Slater, R. et al.
The unique flayed skin of an anonymous man has revealed unexpected details about his life. Analysis of the tattoos on his body reveals he was French, a seafarer, loved a woman named Flourine and may have died in prison.
The gruesome artefact is currently held in a private collection in London. It consists of most of the skin of the man’s torso and limbs, which was nailed to a wooden board. Somebody then added horse hair stuffing between … More

By Michael Marshall
A selection of grave goods from La Almoloya, an ancient site in Spain
J.A. Soldevilla/Arqueoecologia Social Mediterrània Research Group, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
A Bronze Age society in what is now Spain may have been ruled by women, at least some of the time. Archaeologists have found the bones of a woman buried with a silver diadem – or crown – and other riches under the remains of a building that seems to have been used for political meetings.
The woman lived in a society that has been dubbed El Argar – the name of the first archaeological site preserving evidence of the culture, which was excavated in the 1880s by engineer-turned-archaeologist Luis Siret and his brother Henri.

Advertisement

The Argaric culture, which dominated what is now south-east Spain between around 2200 and 1550 BC, became famous following the Sirets’s discovery. But the Spanish civil war (1936 – 1939) and ensuing military dictatorship saw research grind to a halt for many decades, says Roberto Risch at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain.
Risch and his colleagues have been excavating an Argaric site called La Almoloya for several years. The ancient building they found there seems to have had some kind of governmental purpose, perhaps serving as a palace or a form of parliament.
“It’s a building with a hall where 50 to 55 people could be sitting listening to each other, or to someone explaining something,” says Risch. There is no evidence of food and no clear-cut religious artefacts, so it doesn’t look like a home or a temple.

Buried in a very large, ovoid jar under the floor of the hall, the team found the bodies of a woman and a man. Both had a multitude of funerary goods, suggesting they were eminent in Argaric society, says co-author Cristina Rihuete Herrada, also at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. DNA analysis shows they weren’t related, but they may have been married: both were immediate relatives of a baby girl buried under a nearby building, who may have been their daughter.
Most of the funerary items, including the most spectacular ones, were found on the woman. She was wearing a silver diadem on her head, two silver earplug piercings and two silver bracelets. As a result, the team believes she was the ruler.

It has long been suspected that women had leadership roles in Argaric culture, says Rihuete Herrada. Four silver diadems have previously been found buried with Argaric women, although it wasn’t clear whether the women were rulers rather than important religious figures. But this is the first time a woman buried with such riches has been found in a building more clearly used for governing.

The man was buried with a dagger and had injuries consistent with a life of horse riding, as well as a long-healed skull injury. This suggests he may have been a warrior.
Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2021.8 More

Read
Gut Feelings: The microbiome and our health by Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty reveals how understanding this alien inner world will make it possible to target medicines to an individual’s needs at the molecular level.
Instant Film
Watch
An Impossible Project, streaming on digital platforms from 15 March, celebrates the return of analogue formats, from Polaroid to vinyl. The film highlights the work of Viennese biologist Florian “Doc” Kaps to reverse the tide of technological “progress”.

Read
Double Blind by Edward St Aubyn leaps from London to Cap d’Antibes in southern France to a rewilded corner of Sussex, UK, in a thrilling and mischievous tale of ecology, psychoanalysis, genetics and neuroscience.
More on these topics: More

Floating in space watching your ship speed away rivals moments in Gravity or Interstellar – and it’s one of the things that makes Outer Wilds among the best games ever made, says Jacob Aron

Humans 10 March 2021
By Jacob Aron
A view of Timber Hearth, the home planet where Outer Wilds begins
Mobius Digital
Outer Wilds
Mobius Digital

Advertisement

PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
THE first few months of any year are a slow time for video game launches, but whether it is due to the pandemic or the recent release of next-generation consoles, new games are thin on the ground at the moment. That is why I spent this month checking out 2019’s Outer Wilds – and I am glad I did, because it is one of the best games ever made.
A bold claim, but hear me out. Outer Wilds is set in a miniature solar system filled with planets bearing evocative names such as Giant’s Deep and Brittle Hollow. As the newest member of Outer Wilds Ventures, an organisation that is as much a bunch of trail hikers as it is NASA, you set off to explore these worlds – and in 22 minutes, the sun explodes in a supernova, wiping out you and everything else in the solar system.
Moments later, the game resets and you begin another 22-minute session. This time limit, combined with the small solar system, gives you space exploration without the boring bits. After launching your trusty spacecraft, you can be walking on the surface of another planet within minutes. At the same time, everything operates under more-or-less realistic orbital mechanics, making space flight a challenge of matching orbits and velocities – you can’t just point at your destination and go.
I spent my first few runs getting to grips with the controls, which allow you to thrust in either direction along all three spatial axes, and more than once found myself falling into the sun, triggering an early reset. Yet little by little, I mastered my ship and was soon merrily exploring.
“There are no new abilities to unlock as you play – the only thing you gain is knowledge”

I am deliberately avoiding saying much about what I found because Outer Wilds is about the joy of discovering things for yourself: it really is everything you could want from a space-exploration game. To give you a flavour, during my playthrough, I fell into a black hole, docked with a mysterious space station and landed on a comet, before falling off again.
But not all in a single go. Your ship’s computer records your discoveries, linking them together like a corkboard with strings. This doesn’t reset, allowing you to uncover the game’s many mysteries over a number of runs. There are no new abilities to unlock as you play – the only thing you gain is knowledge, so you could theoretically complete Outer Wilds in your first 22 minutes.
The result is that the game is full of “aha!” moments that are both incredibly satisfying and make you feel very clever, but it is also mechanically brilliant. Launching your spacecraft at the start of a run is always a tiny thrill as you rumble into orbit. Your spacesuit has limited oxygen and fuel, making it essential to manage your resources. If you run out of fuel, you can use oxygen as propellant in a last-ditch effort to get to safety.
This comes together to generate moments that easily rival Gravity or Interstellar. At one point, I was floating around a planet, separated from my ship, which was orbiting another planet.
I could see the ship was heading away from me, and doubted I would be able to catch up with my remaining fuel. Instead, I pulled open my map of the solar system so I could estimate when the two planets would have their closest approach. Timing things just right, I jetted off for what I thought would be a daring rendezvous. For a moment, it seemed like I was on course… until I smashed into a moon, cracked my helmet and died. Thankfully, the next run was just a moment away.

Jacob also recommends…
Games
The Witness
Thekla
PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Android, iOS
The Witness is full of mysteries. Set on an island split into regions, each locale puts its own spin on grid-based logic puzzles. It is gorgeous, but extremely mentally taxing.
No Man’s Sky
Hello Games
PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
No Man’s Sky offers billions of procedurally generated worlds. This can make them feel samey, but the latest update lets you collect alien pets.

More on these topics: More