Philippa Kaur

We’ve long known there was an ancient language that gave rise to English, Bengali and dozens of other tongues – now we’re on the brink of working out where Proto-Indo-European was spoken

Humans

23 November 2022

By Andrea Valentino
Andy Smith
MOTHER. There can scarcely be a more emotive word in the English language. We can imagine children howling it as they wake from nightmares, and centenarians whispering it on their death beds. A 2004 survey proclaimed it the most beautiful word in English, and artists have evoked it in countless poems and plays. Yet even though it can conjure home and hearth in a scant two syllables, mother is perhaps most remarkable for its deluge of cousins. From Dutch (moeder) to Czech (matka) to Bengali (ma), dozens of languages have words that share a common root with mother, tying English to a cobweb of tongues that straddles almost every continent.
Human societies can’t exist without language, and no language family has shaped our world as much as Indo-European. It boasts well over 3 billion speakers, or an estimated 46 per cent of everyone on Earth. From the moment this language family was recognised, scholars have been searching for the answer to a weighty question. Who spoke the Indo-European mother tongue – dubbed Proto-Indo-European (PIE) – that splintered into the hundreds of daughters we hear today?
The quest has thrilled and frustrated experts for centuries, with the evidence sometimes pointing in opposing directions. Yet the field is far from deadlocked. With the power of DNA at their heels, geneticists are making new claims about PIE, a language that may predate civilisation. Meanwhile, linguistic studies now suggest we can trace the roots of Indo-European languages even further back than PIE, to the world that existed shortly after farming took hold in south-west Asia. Not that any of this is straightforward – or without controversy.
The … More

The chromosome may contain regions that promote their DNA’s spread by killing sperm that carry Y chromosomes. However, Y chromosomes may have evolved counter mechanisms over time

Humans

23 November 2022

By Michael Le Page
Some modern humans that had not long left Africa may have evolved an X chromosome that carried “selfish” DNASCIEPRO/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Around 50,000 years ago, a new X chromosome appears to have been introduced into modern humans that had not long left Africa.
There was probably exceptionally strong selection for parts of this chromosome because, today, most people of less-recent African ancestry have inherited those regions.
Kasper Munch Terkelsen at Aarhus University in Denmark, who led the research, thinks these regions may contain bits of so-called selfish DNA that promote their … More

The Hollywood A-lister endures a series of challenges in a bid to extend his life expectancy in this engaging documentary, from climbing 30 metres up a rope dangling over a canyon to fasting for four days

Humans

16 November 2022

By Gregory Wakeman
National Geographic for Disney+
Limitless With Chris Hemsworth
National Geographic
Airs on Disney+ on 16 November
ON THE face of it, Thor star Chris Hemsworth lives an idyllic life. The Hollywood A-lister is married to another successful actor, Fast & Furious‘s Elsa Pataky, with whom he has three children.
But he makes it clear at the start of his documentary Limitless With Chris Hemsworth that he experiences the same mental and health issues as everyone else. Over six episodes, Hemsworth sets out to show that, rather than being overwhelmed by your problems, scientific studies demonstrate that it is much healthier to confront them.
With … More

Where might James Bond go next, in terms of science and technology?From Goldfinger to No Time to Die, James Bond has long showcased the latest tech advances. Might 007’s next adventure involve protecting a low-cost, lightweight, high-capacity battery from sinister forces, asks Kathryn Harkup More

Writers and film makers are always using the multiverse as fuel for their plots, but Nathan Tavares gives it a new twist in A Fractured Infinity, a sci-fi novel about growing up, finds Sally Adee

Humans

16 November 2022

By Sally Adee
When we are young, we fight off the idea of a final version of ourselvesJonathan Knowles/Getty Images
A Fractured Infinity
Nathan Tavares (Titan Books)
IT SEEMS like the multiverse is everywhere right now, if you’ll pardon the pun. From its origins as a groundbreaking head-exploder of a scientific theory, it seems to have achieved the dubious honour of being the go-to lazy plot twist. But it can also elevate other potentially tired genres. This is the trick Nathan Tavares pulls off in A Fractured Infinity, using it to provide new facets for … More

Vladimir Sorokin’s dystopian fantasy is a wild read, mixing political satire with steampunk microstates and a must-have psychotropic drug based on tellurium

Humans

16 November 2022

By Boyd Tonkin
Medieval hierarchies with futuristic technology rule Earth in TelluriaPreechar Bowonkitwanchai/Shutterstock
Telluria
Vladimir Sorokin, Translated by Max Lawton (NYRB Classics)
WE ARE in Telluria, a tiny state that gives its name to a novel, recently released in translation. A holy war between Europe and Islamic powers has plunged the world into a neofeudal era of micro states. In one of these lives Golden Throat, a singer whose ballads denounce the immorality of the elite; for him, “the benefit of decomposing despotism” is “rich satirical material”. Unsurprisingly, Golden Throat comes to a sticky end. … More

The remains of fish teeth at an archaeological site in Israel appear to have been cooked with controlled heat rather than directly exposed to fire

Humans

14 November 2022

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre
Illustration of hominins cooking fishElla Maru / University of Tel Aviv
Microscopic changes in the enamel of ancient fish teeth indicate that humans may have been cooking fish in an earthen oven at least 780,000 years ago.
The findings provide the earliest evidence of actual cooking, as opposed to just throwing meat and bones into a fire, says Irit Zohar at the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History in Tel Aviv, Israel.
“We’ve developed a methodology that allows us to identify cooking in relatively low temperatures, as opposed to burning,” she says. “You cannot immediately correlate the control of fire with cooking unless you show that the food has been cooked.”Advertisement
Researchers have previously suggested that humans were cooking meat 1.5 million years ago, based on the discovery of charred animal remains. But that doesn’t necessarily mean people were heating food before eating it, says Zohar.
“Evidence of charred material doesn’t mean cooking,” she says. “It just means the food was thrown into the fire.”
Zohar and her colleagues studied a 780,000-year-old settlement in Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in Israel’s northern Jordan river valley. No human remains have been found there, but based on its age and the stone tools at the site, the inhabitants are most likely to have been Homo erectus.
The researchers noticed clumps of fish teeth – but no bones – around areas where hearths once burned. Most of the teeth belonged to two species of fish known for their nutritional value and good taste – the Jordan himri (Carasobarbus canis) and the Jordan barbel (Luciobarbus longiceps). So they wondered if the fish had been cooked at low heat, which would have made the bones softer and prone to disintegration while preserving the teeth.
To test their idea, Zohar and her team adapted a technique from human forensic investigations in which X-ray diffraction reveals the sizes of crystals in tooth enamel, which vary according to temperature.
The researchers carried out cooking and burning experiments on readily available black carp (Mylopharyngodon piceus), heating them at different temperatures up to 900°C (1650°F), and then examined the resulting crystal sizes in the tooth enamel. They also looked at crystal sizes in three fossilised teeth from 3.15-to-4.5 million-year-old Jordan barbel, which had probably never been exposed to high heat.
Zohar and her colleagues then collected 30 fish teeth from among the tens of thousands available at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov and compared their enamel structures with those of the previously tested teeth.

They found that the fish teeth from the human settlement had enamel structure patterns indicating that they had been exposed to temperatures of 200°C to 500°C (390°F to 930°F) and hadn’t been directly exposed to the fire. Combined with there being nearly no fish bones nearby and the teeth being discovered near a controlled fire source, the findings suggest that the fish were probably cooked whole, perhaps in an earthen oven, says Zohar.
Notably, the results reveal that humans weren’t just eating fish raw and throwing the heads into the fire, because the tooth enamel would have shown exposure to much higher temperatures, she says.
“Each parameter in itself doesn’t mean cooking, but each one fits together like a puzzle so that we can say, ‘OK, now we see that it’s correlated to cooking’,” says Zohar.
Fish are more nutritious, easier to digest and safer to eat when cooked, says Zohar. The fact that these populations were cooking their fish provides evidence of their advanced cognitive abilities, which were perhaps greater than many scientists have previously believed. “If they already knew how to control fire, then it’s just logical that they would use it for cooking,” she says.
Journal reference: Nature Ecology & Evolution, DOI: 10.1038/s41559-022-01910-z
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