Philippa Kaur

Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity…”
We are just a couple of weeks into 2021 and yet that famous opening from Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities has never rung truer. On the one hand, we are seeing the roll-out of effective vaccines against a disease that little more than a year ago was unknown to science – a stunning tribute to human wisdom, and … More

A narrow focus on IQ to determine success is depriving us of key decision-making smarts, as our faltering response to problems such as covid-19 and climate change shows

Humans 13 January 2021
By Robert J. Sternberg

Timo Kuilder

IMAGINE a world in which admission to the top universities – to Oxford or Cambridge, or to Harvard or Yale – were limited to people who were very tall. Very soon, tall people would conclude that it is the natural order of things for the taller to succeed and the shorter to fail.
This is the world we live in. Not with taller and smaller people (although taller people often are at an advantage). But there is one measure by which, in many places, we tend to decide who has access to the best opportunities and a seat at the top decision-making tables: what we call intelligence. After all, someone blessed with intelligence has, by definition, what it takes – don’t they?
We have things exactly the wrong way round. The lesson of research by myself and many others over decades is that, through historical accident, we have developed a conception of intelligence that is narrow, questionably scientific, self-serving and ultimately self-defeating. We see the consequences in the faltering response of many nations to the covid-19 pandemic, and a host of other problems such as climate change, increasing income disparities and air and water pollution. In many spheres, our ways of thinking about and nurturing intelligence haven’t brokered intelligent solutions to real-world problems.
We need a better way. Fortunately, at least the starting point for this is clear. By returning to a more scientifically grounded idea of intelligence, who can have it and how we set about cultivating it in ourselves and others, we can begin to reboot our decision-making smarts and reshape our world for the better.
Our … More

By Michael Marshall
Today’s dog breeds are descended from wolves
Christian Müller/Alamy

Dogs may have become domesticated because our ancestors had more meat than they could eat. During the ice age, hunter-gatherers may have shared any surplus with wolves, which became their pets.
The timing and causes of the domestication of dogs are both uncertain. Genetic evidence suggests that dogs split from their wolf ancestors between 27,000 and 40,000 years ago. The oldest known dog burial is from 14,200 years ago, suggesting dogs were firmly installed as pets by then.
But it isn’t clear whether domestication happened in Europe or Asia – or in multiple locations – or why it happened. Dogs are the only animals domesticated by hunter-gatherers: all the others were domesticated after farming became widespread. One suggestion is that people domesticated dogs to help them with hunting, while another scenario has wolves scavenging human waste dumps and becoming accustomed to people.

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Maria Lahtinen of the Finnish Food Authority in Helsinki and her colleagues suggest that the key may have been a surfeit of meat.

Dogs were domesticated when ice sheets covered much of northern Eurasia and the climate was colder than today. During this time, humans and wolves would have competed for food, as both are top predators.
However, wolves can survive on nothing but lean meat – which contains protein and little else – for months. In contrast, humans cannot. There are limits to how much protein our bodies can handle, so we have to eat other food groups such as fat as well. “We are not fully adapted to eat meat,” says Lahtinen.
Her team calculated how much food was available during the Arctic winters, based on the prey species living there. They found there was an excess of lean meat, suggesting human hunters would have ended up with more of this than they could consume. Wolves could have eaten this surplus, implying the two species weren’t in competition during the harsh winters. Instead, humans could have shared lean meat with wolves without losing out themselves.
Lahtinen suggests that hunter-gatherers may have taken in orphaned wolf pups – perhaps viewing them a bit like pets – and fed them on spare lean meat. They probably didn’t have any long-term goal in mind, but the tamed wolves would have later proved to be useful hunting partners – reinforcing the domestication. “They must have been very attractive for hunter-gatherers to keep,” says Lahtinen.

Journal reference: Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-78214-4
More on these topics: More

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Bear Head is a sequel to Dogs of War by prolific science fiction author Adrian Tchaikovsky. It follows the adventures of Honey, a genetically engineered bear that appears to have infiltrated Jimmy the Martian’s head.

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Where are the Women in STEM? is the question put to an audience of 10 to 14-year-olds on 13 January in an interactive lecture from Newcastle University in the UK. The YouTube event explores the forgotten roles of women in STEM fields.

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We Alone is conservationist David Western’s account of humankind’s management of the planet, from Masai herders … More

Documentary iHuman is thoroughly committed to an apocalyptic view of society in which we are in thrall to artificially intelligent machines. That is its strength – and its weakness, says Simon Ings

Humans 6 January 2021
By Simon Ings
iHuman explores our relationship with technology
Cosmic Cat

iHuman
Tonje Hessen Schei
Screening for eight weeks at modernfilms.com/ihuman
When a ship’s artificial brain fails, its crew must rebuild it from scraps in this techno-theological thriller by the author of Dune.
IN 2010, she made Play Again, a film about digital media addiction among children. In 2014, she won awards for Drone, which explored the CIA’s secret role in drone warfare. Now, with iHuman, Norwegian documentary-maker Tonje Hessen Schei tackles – well, what, exactly?
iHuman is a weird, portmanteau diatribe against computation – specifically, the branch of it that allows machines … More

Emerging technology comes with both upsides and downsides that we need to understand. Podcast Brave New Planet is a great place to start

Technology 6 January 2021
By Vijaysree Venkatraman
Deepfakes are doctored videos created by artificial intelligence
AFP via Getty Images

Brave New Planet
Eric Lander
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“IN THE face of overwhelming odds, I’m left with only one option. I’m going to have to science the shit out of this,” says Matt Damon’s character in The Martian, when he realises he is stranded on Mars and no one is rushing to his rescue.
Eric Lander, a key scientist on the Human Genome Project and director of the Broad Institute, a biomedical and genomic research centre in Massachusetts, quotes the lines in the prologue to his podcast, Brave … More

By Michael Marshall
The A303, a road running past Stonehenge in the UK, is often congested
Paul Chambers/Alamy

A PUBLIC row has broken out among archaeologists over the UK government’s decision to allow the building of a road tunnel close to Stonehenge, a protected prehistoric monument in Wiltshire. The tunnel is intended to replace a congested road that disrupts the landscape around the site, but some argue that the plans will cause irreparable damage to archaeological deposits. While digging near ancient history may seem like an obviously bad idea, the case isn’t clear-cut.
Stonehenge is a ring of standing stones surrounded by … More

By Michael Marshall
A wealth of human remains have been found in Cave UW 105
Lee Berger

A treasure trove of ancient human remains discovered in a cave in South Africa could give us a new picture of human evolution – and evidence of a previously undiscovered species.
Lee Berger at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and his colleagues call the cave simply UW 105 because it is the 105th site they have identified. It is a short walk from the Rising Star cave, where his team discovered a new species called Homo naledi in 2013. The following year, the group … More