Philippa Kaur

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    in Humans

    The biggest coincidence in human evolution

    The move from hunting and gathering to farming happened around the same time everywhereLUIS & MARTA MONTANYA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
    This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month.
    Let’s talk about the biggest coincidence in human evolution. To fully appreciate this coincidence, you need to see it in context. The oldest known hominins lived 7 million years ago, so we have been evolving separately from apes for at least that long. Our own species, Homo sapiens, seems to be about 300,000 years… More

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    in Humans

    The epic scientific quest to reveal what makes folktales so compelling

    Charles Fréger
    Once upon a time, a strong, attractive hero lost one or both of his parents. He then overcame a series of obstacles and faced off against a monster that had terrorised his community. The hero vanquished the monster and was celebrated.
    If this story sounds familiar, that’s because it is the road travelled by Superman, Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker and countless other fictional heroes stretching back centuries. Its enduring appeal has puzzled researchers for nearly as long. However, in recent years, the study of storytelling has been revitalised, as linguists, psychologists and experts in cultural evolution have begun probing the subject using large databases of myths and folktales, powerful algorithms and an evolutionary mindset. We are finally starting to get answers to key questions, including what makes a good story, why some are more enduring than others and exactly how far back we can trace the roots of the most popular ones – as well as how stories have traversed time and space.

    It is an epic quest, but there has never been a better time to undertake it. Unlike the Brothers Grimm and other early folktale collectors, modern surveyors of storytelling needn’t do painstaking fieldwork – they don’t even have to stray from their computer screens to chart the emergence and evolution of stories. “Social media is almost a natural experiment in storytelling that, through its very platform, does the collection,” says folklorist and ethnographer Timothy Tangherlini at the University of California, Berkeley. What’s more, this new scientific approach can illuminate some phenomena that appear to be modern,… More

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    in Humans

    Ancient humans used bone tools a million years earlier than we thought

    Bones that appear to have been fashioned into tools date back 1.5 million yearsCSIC
    Ancient humans were regularly making tools out of animal bones 1.5 million years ago – more than a million years earlier than previously thought. This indicates that they could adapt the techniques they used to make stone tools to repurpose bone, a very different material.
    It also raises the question of why there is no record of people consistently making bone tools for another million years. Have examples in that gap not been preserved or discovered, or did people abandon them in favour of something better?… More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    The Milky Way’s black hole is constantly bubbling

    The black hole at the Milky Way’s heart neither slumbers nor sleeps. Instead, the ring of plasma surrounding it flickers constantly, punctuated by superbright flares, observations show.

    Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe Sgr A* and its disk for hours at a time over the course of a year, from April 2023 through April 2024. These were the longest continuous observations yet of our galaxy’s central supermassive black hole.

    The telescope revealed a “constant bubbling” in the disk’s light that changed every few seconds or minutes, says astrophysicist Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. A few times a day, and seemingly at random, the disk would emit a blindingly bright flare, Yusef-Zadeh and colleagues report in the Feb. 20 Astrophysical Journal Letters. More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    Citizen scientists make cosmic discoveries with a global telescope network

    In January in Monterrey, Mexico, Iván Venzor was one of only a dozen people in the world to glimpse a potential Jupiter-sized planet crossing in front of a distant star.

    It happened too fast to see by eye — just a seconds-long flicker of light — but Venzor’s backyard telescope recorded the data, allowing him to verify the event with researchers. “I’m having dinner with my family, and I’m trying to discover a new kind of planet from a few meters outside,” says Venzor, a hobby astronomer. “It’s effortless.” More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    The universe’s first supernovas probably produced water

    The first generation of stars in the universe could have produced significant amounts of water upon their deaths, just 100 million to 200 million years after the Big Bang.

    Signatures of water have previously been observed some 780 million years after the Big Bang. But now, computer simulations suggest that this essential condition for life existed far earlier than astronomers thought, researchers report March 3 in Nature Astronomy.

    “The surprise was that the ingredients for life were all in place in dense cloud cores [leftover after stellar deaths] so early after the Big Bang,” says astrophysicist Daniel Whalen of the University of Portsmouth in England. More

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    in Humans

    Ancient ancestor of the plague discovered in Bronze Age sheep

    Yersinia pestis bacteria viewed with an electron microscopeConnect Images/Alamy
    An ancient ancestor of the pathogen that would later cause the Black Death and other major pandemics has been identified in a Bronze Age domestic sheep in Russia – making it one of the oldest pathogens ever found in an animal.
    Its DNA closely matches that of plague bacteria found in European human skeletons from the same period, providing the first evidence that the disease could have spread between humans and their own livestock well before the pathogen evolved to jump from rodents to people via fleas. More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    Some of Earth’s meteors are probably coming all the way from a neighboring star system

    Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to the sun, is probably shedding comets and asteroids into our solar system — and even producing a few meteors in our sky.

    Located just 4.3 light-years from Earth, Alpha Centauri consists of three stars that revolve around one another. If Alpha Centauri has an Oort cloud of distant comets as the sun does, about a million of these objects larger than a football field are now in our solar system, astronomers Cole Gregg and Paul Wiegert of the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, estimate in work submitted February 5 to arXiv.org. More