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    Read an extract from Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake

    A reconstruction of male and female Neanderthals based on the La Chapelle-aux-Saints fossilsS. ENTRESSANGLE/E. DAYNES/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
    Extract taken from Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, published by Jonathan Cape, the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up to read along with us here.
    NEANDERTHALS WERE PRONE TO DEPRESSION, he said.
    He said they were prone to addiction, too, and especially smoking.Advertisement
    Although it was likely, he said, that these noble and mysterious Thals (as he sometimes referred to the Neanderthals) extracted nicotine from the tobacco plant by a cruder method, such as by chewing its leaves, before that critical point of inflection in the history of the world: when the first man touched the first tobacco leaf to the first fire.
    Reading this part of Bruno’s email, scanning from “man” to “touch” to “leaf ” to “fire,” I pictured a 1950s greaser in a white T-shirt and a black leather jacket as he touches a lit match to the tip of his Camel cigarette, and inhales. The greaser leans against a wall—because that is what greasers do, they lean and loiter—and then he exhales.
    Bruno Lacombe told Pascal, in these emails I was secretly reading, that the Neanderthals had very large brains. Or at least their skulls were very large, and we can safely infer that their skulls were likely filled, Bruno said, with brains.

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    He talked about the impressive size of a Thal’s braincase using modern metaphors, comparing them to motorcycle engines, which were also measured, he noted, for their displacement. Of all the humanlike species who stood up on two feet, who roamed the earth for the last one million years, Bruno said that the Neanderthal’s braincase was way out in front, at a whopping 1,800 cubic centimeters.
    I pictured a king of the road, way out in front.
    I saw his leather vest, his big gut, legs extended, engineers’ boots resting on roomy and chromed forward-mounted foot pegs. His chopper is fitted with ape hangers that he can barely reach, and which he pretends are not making his arms tired, are not causing terrible shooting pains to his lumbar region.
    We know from their skulls, Bruno said, that Neanderthals had enormous faces.
    I pictured Joan Crawford, that scale of face: dramatic, brutal, compelling.
    And thereafter, in the natural history museum in my mind, the one I was creating as I read Bruno’s emails, its dioramas populated by figures in loincloths, with yellow teeth and matted hair, all these ancient people Bruno described—the men too—they all had Joan Crawford’s face.
    They had her fair skin and her flaming red hair. A propensity for red hair, Bruno said, had been identified as a genetic trait of the Thal, as scientific advancements in gene mapping were made. And beyond such work, such proof, Bruno said, we might employ our natural intuition to suppose that like typical redheads, the Neanderthals’ emotions were strong and acute, spanning the heights and depths.
    A few more things, Bruno wrote to Pascal, that we now know about Neanderthals: They were good at math. They did not enjoy crowds. They had strong stomachs and were not especially prone to ulcers, but their diet of constant barbecue did its damage as it would to anyone’s gut. They were extra vulnerable to tooth decay and gum disease. And they had overdeveloped jaws, wonderfully capable of chewing gristle and cartilage but inefficient for softer fare, a jaw that was overkill. Bruno described the jaw of the Neanderthal as a feature of pathos for its overdevelopment, the burden of a square jaw. He talked about sunk costs, as if the body were a capital investment, a fixed investment, the parts of the body like machines bolted to a factory floor, equipment that had been purchased and could not be resold. The Neanderthal jaw was a sunk cost.
    Still, the Thal’s heavy bones and sturdy, heat-conserving build were to be admired, Bruno said. Especially compared to the breadstick limbs of modern man, Homo sapiens sapiens. (Bruno did not say “breadstick,” but since I was translating, as he was writing these emails in French, I drew from the full breadth of English, a wildly superior language and my native tongue.)
    The Thals survived cold very well, he said, if not the eons, or so the story about them goes—a story that we must complicate, he said, if we are to know the truth about the ancient past, if we are to glimpse the truth about this world, now, and how to live in it, how to occupy the present, and where to go tomorrow.
    ——
    My own tomorrow was thoroughly planned out. I would be meeting Pascal Balmy, leader of Le Moulin, to whom these emails from Bruno Lacombe were written. And I didn’t need the Neanderthals’ help on where to go: Pascal Balmy said to go to the Café de la Route on the main square in the little village of Vantôme at one p.m., and that was where I would be.

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    Runaway stars could influence the cosmos far past their home galaxies

    Dozens of fugitive stars were caught fleeing a dense star cluster in a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The swarm of speeding stars could mean that such runaways had a bigger influence on cosmic evolution than previously thought, astronomers report October 9 in Nature.

    Massive stars are born in young clusters, packed so close together that they can jostle each other out of place. Sometimes, encounters between pairs of massive stars or neighboring supernova explosions can send a star zipping out of the cluster altogether, to seek its fortune in the wider galaxy and beyond. More

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    A cave in France is revealing how the Neanderthals died out

    Simon Prades
    Around 41,000 years ago, the very last Neanderthal took their final breath. At that moment, we became the only remaining hominins, the sole survivors of the once diverse family of bipedal apes.
    We will never know exactly when or where this momentous event took place, but we do know the Neanderthals died out suspiciously close to the time when modern humans arrived in their territory. Exactly why they vanished has long been hotly debated, but astonishing revelations from the genomes of the last Neanderthals and hidden in a remarkable cave in France are now painting a detailed picture of these first encounters – and what might have happened next.

    “This is a major turning point in our understanding of Neanderthals and their extinction process,” says Ludovic Slimak at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse, France.
    Our species, Homo sapiens, and Neanderthals share a common ancestor, but Neanderthals split from our lineage at least 400,000 years ago, evolving in Eurasia, from the Mediterranean to Siberia. Our species is younger, first appearing in Africa some 300,000 years ago and evolving into hominins that were anatomically much like us by at least 195,000 years ago. Modern humans left the continent in waves from around 170,000 years ago, and were thought to have reached western Europe roughly 43,000 years ago, when – according to the… More

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    Barnard’s star has at least one planet orbiting it after all

    A red dwarf star known as Barnard’s star, which lies a mere six light-years from our solar system, has at least one — and possibly a handful — of small rocky planets orbiting it, a new study suggests.

    Barnard’s star, which is about one-sixth the mass of our sun, is the closest individual star to our solar system. Only the three stars in the Alpha Centauri system are closer. Due to its proximity to Earth, Barnard’s star has long been a target of astronomers looking for exoplanets (SN: 12/1/73, SN: 12/7/23). More

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    Ancient DNA tells story of toddler who lived in Italy 17,000 years ago

    The skeleton of an infant uncovered at Grotta delle Mura in Apulia, ItalyMauro Calattin
    Ancient DNA analysis has revealed a detailed picture of the life of a toddler who died in southern Italy 17,000 years ago, possibly due to a congenital heart condition.
    In 1998, researchers discovered the skeletal remains of a child carefully laid under rock slabs in the floor of the Grotta delle Mura cavern in Apulia, southern Italy. It was the only burial in the cave, which also included signs of daily life and human occupation, says Alessandra Modi at the University of Florence… More

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    Betelgeuse has a tiny companion star hidden in plain sight

    Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse! The red supergiant that marks Orion’s left shoulder may have a tiny, unseen companion.

    Two independent studies found evidence of a star about the same mass as the sun, orbiting Betelgeuse about once every 2,100 days.

    “It was very surprising,” says astrophysicist Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. If the star is real, “it’s kind of hidden right there in plain sight.”

    MacLeod and colleagues linked a six-year cycle of Betelgeuse brightening and dimming to a companion star tweaking its orbit, in a paper submitted to arXiv.org September 17. MacLeod examined global, historical measurements dating back to 1896. More

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    Starlink satellites’ leaky radio waves obscure the cosmos

    While SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are enabling internet access and cell phone communications around the globe, they’re also posing a threat to radio astronomy, a new study suggests.

    In some wavelength bands, unintended leakage of electromagnetic radiation from the latest generation of the satellites is more than 30 times brighter than emissions from previous versions, Cees Bassa, a radio astronomer at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy in Dwingeloo and his colleagues report September 18 in Astronomy & Astrophysics. Because the latest generation of Starlink satellites will orbit as many as 100 kilometers lower than earlier satellites, they’ll seem even brighter to ground-based telescopes. Overall, their brightness could easily mask observations of dimmer objects like distant galaxies or stars. More

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    Rachel Kushner’s Booker-shortlisted Creation Lake is top-notch

    Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake has been shortlisted for the Booker prize
    Creation LakeRachel Kushner (Jonathan Cape (UK, 5 September); Scribner (US, 3 September))
    Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner is a thriller, a spy caper, a comedy and also a poetic take on human history all the way back to the time our species, Homo sapiens, shared Earth with the Neanderthals. It is a sensationally enjoyable novel and has deservedly made the Booker prize longlist.
    The story is narrated by our anti-hero, Sadie Smith (not her real name). She is a US undercover operative working for shady employers who is sent to France to infiltrate and ultimately destroy Le Moulin, a group of eco-activists whose members are known as Moulinards.Advertisement
    Sadie sets about her task in an entirely amoral fashion. First, she seduces a man named Lucien who has contacts within the activists. After a few months, she has secured work among the Moulinards and travels to Lucien’s family house, conveniently placed in an area of Guyenne, south-west France, where Le Moulin is based.

    The roof leaks, but the house itself is a great eyrie to spy upon her prey from – a job made easier by her high-powered, military grade binoculars and a caseful of high-tech kit.
    The novel’s structure is brilliant. We follow Sadie as she worms her way into the justifiably paranoid Moulinard community. We are also led backwards through her life, rifling through her backlist of operations and lingering resentments against those who are attempting (rightly) to expose her. We gradually realise our apparently super-professional operative takes unnecessary and dangerous risks. Is she, in fact, a vulnerable young woman hanging by a thread, or a grenade with the pin pulled out? Or both?
    These two strands, moving forwards and backwards, are equally gripping, each informing the other with perfect dramatic timing. But it is the book’s third strand, relating to a much older man’s emails, that becomes the beating heart of the book.

    Sadie has hacked into Le Moulin’s group email account so she can read every message they get from someone named Bruno Lacombe. He is a mentor and inspiration to the group, and it makes sense that she pays his emails particular attention.
    In the messages, Bruno talks about his views on the superiority of Neanderthals, the inferiority of H. sapiens and his life living alone in a Neanderthal cave. He also lectures the Moulinards on the history of the Guyenne area.
    As a plot device, these emails have every right not to work. But we quickly learn to read them intently, just as Sadie does. Soon we realise that it is the relationship between Sadie and Bruno (albeit a relationship only she knows about) that is at the emotional centre of the novel.
    She is more interested in him and what he has to say than any of the Moulinards are. Might she run into him before her operation in France is over?
    I found Bruno’s musings on the Neanderthals, however biased and unscientific, particularly gripping – perhaps because I read them while on a New Scientist tour of the prehistoric art of northern Spain. The oldest artwork there is believed to be by Neanderthals, and however different (or not) they were from us, Bruno’s passion is evocatively captured.
    I can’t say any more without spoiling the high-octane plot. As for Sadie, does she deserve our sympathy, and where do the book’s events leave her as a person? I look forward to reading this again, and perhaps puzzling that out.
    Emily also recommends…
    The Ministry for the FutureKim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)
    Creation Lake is arguably climate fiction. But if you want the ultimate in cli-fi, then read The Ministry for the Future. The book plays out a scenario that is almost upon us as the world heats up. Its structure, made up of fictional eye-witness accounts, is bold and relentlessly brilliant.

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    Topics:Neanderthals More