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    The societies proving that inequality and patriarchy aren’t inevitable

    The people of Easter Island have shown that systems of governance aren’t set in stoneGetty Images/iStockphoto
    Emerging evidence from the study of human societies past and present reveals a “staggering kaleidoscope of social experimentation”, says David Wengrow at University College London. It is tempting to fit societies into neat categories such as hunter-gatherer versus complex, egalitarian versus hierarchical and democratic versus authoritarian. It turns out to be not that simple. What’s more, a society can change drastically if its members choose.
    One such transition took place on Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, in the south-east Pacific. The first settlers established sub-chiefs, each with power over one region of the island and all subordinate to an overall chief. “The chief would have been hereditary,” says Jennifer Kahn at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. “It’s an ascribed position like a monarchy, where you are born into gaining that title.” However, this centralised system proved unstable, so around 1600 the people of Rapa Nui overturned it. In its place they established a birdman cult. Every year, warriors competed by swimming through shark-infested waters to a small islet where they collected a bird’s egg and swam back. “The first one that arrives with their egg unbroken becomes chief for the year,” says Kahn. “It’s an achieved position… that warrior could even be somebody from a low rank.”
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    The civilisation myth: How new discoveries are rewriting human history

    Coke Navarro
    FOR almost all of human existence, our species has been roaming the planet, living in small groups, hunting and gathering, moving to new areas when the climate was favourable, retreating when it turned nasty. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors used fire to cook and warm themselves. They made tools, shelters, clothing and jewellery – although their possessions were limited to what they could carry. They occasionally came across other hominins, like Neanderthals, and sometimes had sex with them. Across vast swathes of time, history played out, unrecorded.
    Then, about 10,000 years ago, everything began to change.
    In a few places, people started growing crops. They spent more time in the same spot. They built villages and towns. Various unsung geniuses invented writing, money, the wheel and gunpowder. Within just a few thousand years – the blink of an eye in evolutionary time – cities, empires and factories mushroomed all over the world. Today, Earth is surrounded by orbiting satellites and criss-crossed by internet cables. Nothing else like this has ever happened.
    Archaeologists and anthropologists have sought to explain why this rapid and extraordinary transformation occurred. Their most prevalent narrative describes a sort of trap: once people started farming, there was no way back from a cascade of increasing social complexity that led inexorably to hierarchy, inequality and environmental destruction. This bleak view of civilisation’s rise has long held sway. However, the more societies we look at, the more it falls to pieces. Confronted with inconvenient evidence, we are being forced to retell our own origin story. In doing so, we are also rethinking what a society can be.
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    Julian Muñoz has a ‘ruler’ that could size up the early universe

    Julian Muñoz has come up with a ruler to measure the early universe.

    A theoretical physicist, Muñoz studies the distant, dim period in the universe’s history known as cosmic dawn. That’s when stars first began flickering on, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, infusing the universe with initial glimmers of starlight and forming the first galaxies.

    Before the first stars, the universe was cold and dark — as Muñoz describes it, “boring.” Then, starlight began to reshape the universe. “It is a very dramatic epoch,” says Muñoz, of the University of Texas at Austin.

    That epoch is also poorly understood. Cosmic dawn is so unexplored that Muñoz compares it to an uncharted area on early maps of Earth. There, Muñoz says, “there could be dragons.” By studying this era, he hopes to reveal the behavior of one dragon of the cosmos, dark matter, the inscrutable substance whose mass binds galaxies.

    But to understand the cosmos, scientists have to be able to measure it. Looking far into space means looking deep into the past. The trouble is our 2-D view of the sky doesn’t readily reveal how far away things are. “When we look at the night sky, we’ve got no depth perception,” says cosmologist Adrian Liu of McGill University in Montreal.

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    Scientists have devised a variety of methods to get a handle on distances, including standard candles and standard rulers — objects of known brightness or length. If you know how bright an object is (compared with how bright it appears) or you know how long a particular feature is on the sky (compared with its apparent length), you can tell how far away it is. A ruler looks smaller from 20 meters away than from 10 meters away, and a 20-watt lightbulb looks dimmer the farther away it is. The same applies over cosmic distances.

    Scientists use certain types of exploding stars, for example, to estimate distances, because the blasts put out a predictable light show (SN: 5/8/12). Standard rulers or standard candles can be used to trace out how far away other objects of interest are and reveal how rapidly the universe has expanded over its history.

    But none of the known standard objects reach back to the cosmic dawn era. That’s where Muñoz’s ruler comes in. “This ability to reach that far back,” Liu says, “that’s the really valuable thing.”

    Sizing up cosmic dawn

    No one has ever seen a conclusive signature of cosmic dawn — the very first galaxies are too distant to observe directly. But there’s another way to spot cosmic dawn’s effects, one that’s been a long-sought target for astronomers. As the first stars formed, their light heated the surrounding hydrogen gas, causing it to absorb light with a wavelength of 21 centimeters, a number that results from the separation between energy levels in hydrogen atoms. Observing that 21-centimeter absorption signal is the aim of the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array, or HERA, collaboration, an effort that Muñoz and Liu both work on, using a radio telescope in South Africa.

    If it can be detected, this absorption signal should have subtle, ring-shaped patterns imprinted in it, Muñoz reported in 2019 in Physical Review Letters.

    Secrets of the universe’s cosmic dawn era are revealed in patterns of the absorption of light with a 21-centimeter wavelength, shown in a computer simulation. Regions with more absorption (red) correspond to denser pockets of stars, compared with sparsely populated regions with less absorption (blue). Sparse areas tend to be separated by distances of about half a billion light-years (arrow indicates one example); the same goes for dense areas.J.B. Muñoz

    Those patterns, the basis of his ruler, result from the differing behavior of dark matter and normal matter during an even earlier period, less than 400,000 years after the Big Bang. Sound waves careening through the plasma at that time would have pushed normal matter to high speeds while leaving dark matter at a standstill.

    This mismatch in velocities affected where galaxies formed during the later cosmic dawn era. To create a galaxy, dark matter must gravitationally reel in normal matter. But where the velocities differed, the normal matter zipped right on by. The early universe was left with sparsely populated regions of the sky, arranged in ring-shaped patterns with a predictable distance scale. The rings, which are too subtle to pick out by eye from the data but show up in statistical analyses, have radii of half a billion light-years – that’s one long measuring stick.

    The new standard ruler could reveal how fast the universe was expanding back then. That information can tell scientists what that youthful universe was made of, revealing the amount of dark matter, normal matter and dark energy, another hidden piece of the cosmic puzzle.

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    A new expansion measurement could also add fuel to one of the fiercest debates in cosmology. Currently, different measurements of the universe’s expansion rate clash with one another, leaving scientists pondering whether there are flaws in our understanding of the cosmos.

    Seeking to understand the unknown, including these shadowy cosmic realms, is “an integral component of human nature — like art and poetry,” Muñoz says. “You could live without it, but I really hope you don’t have to.”

    Looking into dark corners

    Muñoz’s interest in dark matter drew him to the cosmic dawn. The first galaxies grew off a scaffold of dark matter. So information about how and when those galaxies formed can reveal dark matter’s properties. In a report published in 2018 in Nature, for example, Muñoz and colleagues suggested that, if some of the universe’s dark matter had a tiny electric charge, a millionth of an electron’s, that could alter the expected cosmic dawn signal.

    He has also developed important computational tools, like a new technique that allows for lightning-fast simulations of the cosmic dawn, reported in May in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The time it takes to perform these simulations has previously limited what scientists can study.

    “He’s got an eye for interesting ideas,” says theoretical physicist Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins University, Muñoz’s Ph.D. adviser. But the cosmic ruler, “that’s probably the most singular idea that he’s had.”

    Becoming a physicist, in itself, was uncharted territory for Muñoz. As a child, he liked science. He recalls being amazed by fossilized shark teeth that were millions of years old — perhaps his first experience grappling with such grand timescales.

    But Muñoz didn’t have a scientific role model; his parents didn’t finish high school. He focused his attention on video games and coding until a high school physics teacher encouraged his scientific streak. He turned to physics, he says, where “it was possible to channel all this nerdy energy for knowledge.” That’s what drives Muñoz to explore the questions that swirl around dark corners of the cosmos. “I do it because I think the answers enrich the human experience.”

    Julian Muñoz is one of this year’s SN 10: Scientists to Watch, our list of 10 early and mid-career scientists who are making extraordinary contributions to their field. We’ll be rolling out the full list throughout 2023.

    Want to nominate someone for the SN 10? Send their name, affiliation and a few sentences about them and their work to sn10@sciencenews.org. More

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    A star cluster in the Milky Way appears to be as old as the universe

    One of the oldest known objects in the universe is wandering around the Milky Way.

    Star cluster M92, a densely packed ball of stars roughly 27,000 light-years from Earth, is about 13.8 billion years old, researchers report in a paper submitted June 3 to arXiv.org. The newly refined age estimate makes this clump of stars nearly the same age as the universe.

    Refining the ages of clusters like M92 can help put limits on the age of the universe itself. It can also help solve cosmic conundrums about how the universe evolved.

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    The age is “on the edge of the age of the universe, as estimated by other groups,” says astronomer Martin Ying of Dartmouth College. “It helps us set the lower bound of the age of the universe. We don’t expect M92 to be born before the universe, right?”

    Globular clusters like M92 are tight knots of stars that are thought to have all formed at the same time. That makes it easier for astronomers to measure the stars’ ages (SN: 7/23/21). Stars that are born at different masses have different fates: The big ones use up their fuel quickly and die young, and the small ones linger. Figuring out how many of the cluster’s stars have aged out of the main parts of their fuel-burning years gives a sense of when the whole cluster was born.

    But those estimates rely on assumptions about how stellar evolution works. Ying and colleagues wanted to find an age measurement that would sidestep those assumptions.

    Using a computer, the team created 20,000 synthetic stellar populations for M92, each for a different possible cluster age. They then compared the colors and brightnesses for each of these populations with Hubble Space Telescope observations of M92 and calculated the age that fit the collection best.

    This isn’t the first time astronomers have measured M92’s age, but previous estimates relied on just one synthetic collection of stars. Comparing thousands of them reduced the uncertainty introduced by the assumptions baked into each one. The new technique reduced the uncertainty of the cluster age by about 50 percent, Ying says. The team found the cluster is 13.8 billion years old, give or take 750 million years. That’s strikingly close to the best estimate of the age of the universe: a smidge over 13.8 billion years, plus or minus 24 million years, according to the Planck satellite’s measurement of the first light emitted after the Big Bang (SN: 12/20/13).

    The age of clusters like M92 is important partly because of a rising tension over how fast the universe is growing. Astronomers have known since the 1990s that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, thanks to a mysterious substance dubbed dark energy (SN: 8/25/22). But recent measurements of the rate of that expansion, a figure called the Hubble constant, disagree with each other (SN: 7/30/19).

    One way around that tension is to accept a different age for the universe, says cosmologist and study coauthor Mike Boylan-Kolchin of the University of Texas at Austin.

    “We often think about it as, Moses came down from Mount Sinai with ‘13.8 billion years’ written on some tablets or something, but it’s not quite like that,” he says. “If one takes the Hubble tension seriously, then one also has to say we don’t know the age of the universe that well.”

    That’s where M92 comes in. Before spacecraft measured the cosmos’ earliest light, globular cluster ages were the best way to place limits on the age of the universe. That practice had fallen out of fashion for a while, says cosmologist Wendy Freedman of the University of Chicago, who was not involved in the new work.

    But improvements in computing, theory, and measurements of the distances to clusters like M92 make it worth trying again.

    “The Hubble tension itself is a really challenging nut to crack,” Freedman says. This measurement alone isn’t precise enough to settle the debate. But “the more kinds of constraints we have, the better,” she says. “It’s showing a way for the future.” More

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    ‘Under Alien Skies’ imagines what the sky looks like on other planets

    Ashley Yeager is the associate news editor at Science News. She has worked at The Scientist, the Simons Foundation, Duke University and the W.M. Keck Observatory, and was the web producer for Science News from 2013 to 2015. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a master’s degree in science writing from MIT. More

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    Alien life may be possible even at the Milky Way’s edges

    The discovery of phosphorus in a cloud at the edge of the Milky Way has extended the region in our galaxy where life might be found.

    Phosphorus is one of six essential elements for life on Earth, along with nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and sulfur (SN: 12/16/22). Until now, it had been the only one of those elements missing from the farthest reaches of our galaxy. Finding phosphorus that far out could extend the galaxy’s habitable zone out from its center by roughly 22,000 light-years, researchers reported June 8 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Albuquerque. That in turn could motivate astronomers to look in the hinterlands of the Milky Way for planets and any life they might harbor.

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    The team pointed two radio telescopes at a cool, dusty gas cloud at the edge of the galaxy. The cloud is a frigid –248° Celsius — a mere 25 degrees above absolute zero. It sits about 74,000 light-years from the galactic center, nearly triple the distance Earth is from the Milky Way’s core. And it has signatures of phosphorus monoxide and phosphorus mononitride, astrochemist Lilia Koelemay said at the meeting.

    Looking for phosphorus in that distant cloud was a long shot, says astrochemist Lucy Ziurys, Koelemay’s collaborator at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The element is produced only in supernovas. But there’s not a lot of material in the outer Milky Way, so it’s hard to build stars big enough to end their lives in massive, element-spewing explosions (SN: 11/2/21). Beyond 49,000 light-years from the galaxy’s center, there is only one supernova remnant known, Ziurys says.

    One way phosphorus could have ended up in the outer galaxy is through a supernova closer to the center that launched a “galactic fountain,” Ziurys says. “A supernova explodes, the material gets thrown out of the galactic plane, then settles back down near the galactic edge.” The material would be very diluted there, but “if there are different supernovae going off, they’re going to keep polluting the outer galaxy,” she says.

    “The detection of the phosphorus-bearing molecules … seems clear and compelling,” says Francesco Fontani, an astrophysicist at the Italian Institute for Astrophysics in Florence, who was not involved in the study. He has observed some of the other essential elements for life in the outer galaxy, but never phosphorus.

    The detection of phosphorus in a cloud at the edge of the Milky Way (position marked with a circle at the bottom of this illustration) means that the galactic habitable zone, which previously was thought to end about 52,000 light-years from the center (blue region), might extend at least 22,000 light-years farther out (red region). The yellow dot marks the position of the sun.JPL-Caltech/NASA, R. Hurt/SSC/Caltech, L. Koelemay, C. Chang

    Because astronomers had not found the six life-essential elements so far from the galactic center, they assumed the region where life could exist in the Milky Way — what’s called the galactic habitable zone — extended at most to the farthest supernova they’d found, about 52,000 light years from the galactic center. There’s an assumed inner edge as well at about 6,500 light-years from the galaxy’s core. The relatively large numbers of supernovas occurring there would expose any planets in the region to intense ultraviolet and X-ray radiation, making it difficult for life to last for long.

    “This detection, together with previous detections of organic molecules at similar large distances from the galactic center, supports the idea that the outer boundaries of the galactic habitable zone could be wider than what we previously thought,” Fontani says.

    For life to emerge so far from the galaxy’s center, planets would need to exist out there. So far, they have been observed only relatively close to the solar system — most within a few thousand light-years. “I don’t think we know right now whether they can form at larger galactic-central distances,” Ziurys says. Finding the six elements for life at the galaxy’s edge, she says, will hopefully spur on the search for the most distant places where it could thrive. More

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    Finger marks on cave walls are among the earliest Neanderthal art

    Researchers inspect markings made by Neanderthals on the wall of La Roche-Cotard cave in FranceKristina Thomsen, CC-BY 4.0
    Neanderthals used their fingers to carve symbols into the wall of a cave in France at least 57,000 years ago. The engravings are some of the oldest known examples of Neanderthal art and are possibly the very oldest.
    “The engravings could only have been made by Neanderthals,” says Jean-Claude Marquet at the University of Tours in France, because they are the only hominins to have left artefacts in the cave and the entrance was sealed by sediments until modern times.
    La Roche-Cotard cave is situated in the Loire valley and consists of four consecutive chambers. It has been excavated on and off since 1912, with the most recent round beginning in 2008.Advertisement
    Neanderthals lived in the front chamber and entered the second and third, says Marquet. Excavations have unearthed many distinctive “Mousterian” stone tools, which are associated with Neanderthals and not with Homo sapiens.
    The walls of the third chamber, called the pillar chamber, are made of tuff, a soft rock primarily formed from solidified volcanic ash. Here, the team found eight panels covered with markings. These include a great many lines traced by fingers: often straight lines, but sometimes also circles or ovals. Some seem to be arranged in larger patterns. One panel has a cluster of more than 100 dots. A subgroup of the engravings was made with tools like flint, antler and wood rather than with fingertips.
    It isn’t clear whether the engravings “represent symbolic thinking”, Marquet and his colleagues write in their paper. “Interpretation and meaning are very complicated [for us] to imagine,” says Marquet.
    The attribution of the engravings to Neanderthals, not modern humans, rests partly on the Mousterian tools found in the cave and partly on the timing. Marquet’s team dated sediments from the cave entrance to at least 57,000 years ago, and probably around 75,000 years ago. This means the entrance was sealed around that time.
    Neanderthals lived in Europe and parts of Asia for hundreds of thousands of years. They disappeared around 40,000 years ago, not long after some modern humans began arriving in Europe in large numbers around 45,000 years ago, following their emergence from Africa. This is long after La Roche-Cotard was sealed.
    “It’s well dated,” says Paola Villa at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “The fact they’re all Mousterian materials suggests that they are right.”
    Engravings made by Neanderthals in La Roche-Cotard cave in FranceJean-Claude Marquet, CC-BY 4.0
    While many examples of prehistoric art are known from Europe and elsewhere, most are from the past few tens of thousands of years, and have been attributed to H. sapiens. Claims of Neanderthal art have been highly controversial. Strong evidence finally emerged in 2018, when researchers demonstrated that art found in several Spanish caves was more than 45,000 years old, and in some cases over 60,000 years old.
    The story has since become more complicated because evidence has emerged that modern humans did intermittently enter Europe earlier than 45,000 years ago. Some briefly lived at Grotte Mandrin in northern France around 54,000 years ago and others were in Greece 210,000 years ago.
    Nevertheless, on the balance of probabilities, Neanderthals were probably responsible for the engravings, says April Nowell at the University of Victoria in Canada. “I have no trouble in accepting these as hominin-produced digital tracings and no trouble accepting that it dates to a period where only Neanderthals were in the region.”

    The engravings in La Roche-Cotard add to the growing evidence of Neanderthals producing symbols and symbolic artefacts. Back in 2003, Marquet and his colleague Michel Lorblanchet at the  French National Center for Scientific Research described an artefact from La Roche-Cotard: a piece of flint with a bone splinter driven through it, which they interpreted as an attempt to represent a face, presumably that of a Neanderthal. More recently, a symbol like a hashtag was found in Gorham’s cave in Gibraltar, which was probably made by a Neanderthal.
    Clearly, some Neanderthals engaged in these behaviours, says Nowell. “But I do find it interesting that all of these examples seem to be one-offs in a way.” There are no other known Neanderthal sites with engravings like those in La Roche-Cotard or the one in Gorham’s cave – whereas prehistoric art by H. sapiens is more common and contains repeating elements.
    In the same way that a person on the beach may doodle shapes in the sand, the Neanderthals may have created symbols with little or no shared meaning, says Nowell. “I think we don’t yet have that kind of community-level symbolic behaviour.”
    It may be that modern humans picked up some of Neanderthals’ symbolic behaviours and developed them further, says Villa. “There is clear evidence that they interbred,” she says, so they could also have learned from each other.

    Topics:Neanderthals More

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    In a first, JWST detected starlight from distant galaxies with quasars

    CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — For the first time, astronomers have detected starlight from distant galaxies that host extremely bright supermassive black holes called quasars.

    Data from the James Webb Space Telescope reveal that four of these galaxies are massive, compact and possibly disk-shaped, astronomers report June 12 at the JWST First Light meeting. Studying the galaxies could help solve the mystery of how black holes in the early universe grew so big so fast (SN: 1/18/21).

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    “Ever since the discovery of [distant] quasars, there have been studies trying to detect their host galaxies,” said MIT astrophysicist Minghao Yue. But until JWST’s sharp infrared eyes came along, it wasn’t possible. “This opens up brand new windows towards finally understanding luminous quasars and their host galaxies.”

    Quasars are black holes that are feeding so furiously, the material they gobble heats to white-hot temperatures, shining brighter than the stars in the galaxies around them. They’re so bright and distant that each appears as a single, starlike point of light.

    Two independent groups used that starlike quality to erase the black hole glow from images of their galaxies, like a sculptor coaxing a figure out of marble.

    Yue and colleagues used JWST to observe six quasar-hosting galaxies. Around the same time, astrophysicist Xuheng Ding of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe in Tokyo and colleagues used JWST to look at another pair of quasars. The light from all the quasars was emitted more than 12.8 billion years ago, or less than a billion years after the Big Bang.

    The teams used actual stars in the images to simulate the starlike shapes of the quasars. Then they subtracted the simulated quasar from the image of each whole galaxy, and voilà: Only starlight remained.

    Ding’s team got a direct peek at both of their galaxies, while Yue’s team glimpsed two of their six. All the measured galaxies appear to be less than a tenth as wide as the Milky Way, measuring between 2,600 and 8,000 light-years across. The two galaxies that Yue and colleagues observed contain enough stars to make up between 10 billion and 100 billion times the mass of the sun, the researchers estimate. The pair that Ding and colleagues looked at weigh in at about 25 billion and 63 billion solar masses, the team reported at the meeting and in a study to appear in Nature.

    Those masses are comparable to that of all the stars in the Milky Way, which in total add up to roughly 60 billion times the mass of the sun. That’s surprisingly massive for so early in the universe’s history.

    What’s more, the galaxies seem to break a rule set by observations of galaxies in the nearby universe. Locally, galaxies tend to split their mass between stars and black holes in a predictable way: The more massive its central supermassive black hole, the more stars a galaxy has. These galaxies appear to pack more mass into their black hole than their amount of stars should allow.

    “At least for these luminous quasars, they really are over-massive,” Yue said.

    The mass calculations might prove to be overestimates, says astrophysicist Paul Shapiro of the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in either study. Converting the light that JWST can see into stars rests on assumptions about how many stars of various masses a galaxy has. Modern galaxies have a lot more dim, lightweight stars than bright, hefty ones, so astronomers typically assume that the brightest stars they see are just the tip of the iceberg. But that might not have been the case 800 million years after the Big Bang, Shapiro says.

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    “You’re observing the tail and inferring the dog,” he says. “If there were a mass distribution that favors high-mass stars, you could be significantly overestimating the mass associated with the light.”

    But “the fact that we can see it at all is very exciting,” says astronomer Madeline Marshall of the National Research Council Canada in Victoria. The fact that two groups are reporting starlight from quasar hosts independently is very convincing, she says.

    “Pre-JWST, we could not detect host galaxies of [distant] quasars,” she said at the meeting. “Now, with only the first year of observations … we can actually detect some of these hosts for the first time.”

    These first few quasar hosts are just the beginning, Ding says. JWST is scheduled to observe at least 10 more, some of which are even farther away. A larger sample will help astronomers figure out enduring cosmic riddles about how black holes and galaxies influence each other as they grow.

    “We don’t know how black holes can be so big in the early universe,” Ding says. “You need to understand the environment of this monster, how it can collect so much matter to it. So knowing the conditions — the mass of the host galaxies, for example — at least then you can say how their local environment is.” More