Philippa Kaur

A concoction of vilca seeds and fermented alcohol may have provided a mild hallucinogenic experience, enabling Wari leaders in South America to bond with their people

Humans

12 January 2022

By Michael Marshall
Anadenanthera colubrina, a tree species common to nearly all regions of South AmericanMatt Lavin/Flickr
Get high, make friends. Members of the Wari society, who lived in the Peruvian Andes more than 1000 years ago, may have mixed hallucinogenic seeds into their beer. Such a mind-bending drink might have offered a way for society leaders to create bonds with ordinary people.
“Being able to provide that experience would create heightened social status among Wari leaders,” says Matthew Biwer at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
The Wari culture flourished in what is now Peru between around AD 550 and 1000. Biwer calls them “the first example of an expansionary state in the Andes”, preceding the later Inca Empire. “There is no written record,” says Biwer, so we don’t know what they called themselves. But they left behind distinctive artefacts and structures including canals.Advertisement
Since 2015, Biwer and his team have been excavating a Wari site called Quilcapampa. He calls it “a waystation along a road” and says it was only occupied for a generation, between about AD 800 and 850.
In the centre of the site, the team found a pit filled with about a million seeds of Schinus molle: a kind of fruit known as molle, or sometimes Peruvian pepper. The molle fruits were used to make a fermented alcoholic drink, a bit like beer, known as chicha.

A few steps away, in a garbage pit, the team found seeds from vilca trees (Anadenanthera colubrina). Vilca seeds contain hallucinogenic substances and have been widely used in Andean cultures. “I haven’t tried vilca myself,” says Biwer, but ethnographic accounts often describe it causing “a sensation of flying”.
If you eat vilca seeds, your stomach enzymes deactivate the active compounds within them – so the seeds are more normally ground up and taken up the nose as snuff, producing a strong effect. However, chicha suppresses those stomach enzymes, so the combination of the two would allow “a very mild and controlled hallucinogenic effect”, says Biwer.
As the Wari state expanded throughout the Andes, its leaders needed ways to impress local people and create bonds with them. They often did so by holding feasts, says Biwer. Providing a hallucinogenic experience would have been an added selling point – especially as vilca doesn’t grow in the Quilcapampa area and must have been imported.
Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2021.177
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The characters used to write the Vai script, which was invented in Liberia in 1833, have become visually simpler over time, reflecting the evolutionary pressures acting on writing

Humans

11 January 2022

By Colin Barras
A character representing the syllable “bi” in Vai scriptKelly et al
The symbols we use to write words evolve to become visually simpler over time, and an analysis of a writing system from West Africa shows that they can do so over just a few generations.
The script used to write the Vai language was invented in Liberia in 1833 and is still in use today. Those who devised it may have had some awareness of the Latin and Arabic alphabets, but the Vai script isn’t modelled on either. Its characters denote … More

Cut marks on animal bones suggest ancient hominins butchered them for their meat, and that they were first on the scene instead of having to scavenge from carnivores like big cats

Humans

11 January 2022

By Michael Marshall
Notches on a bone left by human butchering activityJennifer A. Parkinson, Thomas W. Plummer, James S. Oliver, Laura C. Bishop
Ancient humans were regularly butchering animals for meat 2 million years ago. This has long been suspected, but the idea has been bolstered by a systematic study of cut marks on animal bones.
The find cements the view that ancient humans had become active hunters by this time, contrasting with earlier hominins that ate mostly plants.
The new evidence comes from Kanjera South, an archaeological site near Lake Victoria in Kenya. Kanjera South has been excavated on and off since 1995. It … More

By Colin Barras
Ancient Egyptians had a wide range of medical knowledgeAndrAfter virtually unwrapping the mummified body of a young girl who died 2000 years ago, archaeologists have found something unique: an ancient Egyptian bandaged wound.
The ancient Egyptians were no strangers to linen bandages, which they first used to wrap their dead more than 6000 years ago, about a thousand years before the first pharaohs rose to power. But until now, Egyptologists haven’t found bandages that were used to dress the wounds of living ancient Egyptians.
As part of a study … More

By Margaret Cuonzo

A WOMAN once approached me with a curious problem concerning her husband. Like most people who choose to get married, she had promised to love her spouse to the exclusion of all others. But there was a problem: according to her, the man she married simply wasn’t the same person any more. He had the same name and career, the same memories and skills. But over many years, an accumulation of small changes had, she felt, made her husband a completely different person.
This woman had approached me not because I’m an expert in matters of the heart, but because I had just given a talk about paradoxes. These puzzles have entertained and perplexed us for millennia. They force us to grapple with some of the deepest matters of logic and meaning. What does it mean for something to be “the same”, for instance?
I couldn’t offer the woman any simple answers. I reminded her that she had probably changed quite a bit since her youth too. And I pointed out that sometimes our intuitions about concepts like identity can be unhelpful.
In fact, the point goes well beyond relationships. Chewing over paradoxes can show us places where our intuitions need tweaking, and this applies everywhere from the foundations of mathematics to social media and our efforts to live more sustainable lives. Paradoxes have helped thinkers resculpt our understanding of key concepts and attain fresh scientific insights time and again. Now, a new way of thinking through paradoxes is emerging, one that holds promise because it puts our mushy human intuition front and centre.
One reasonable way … More

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Humans

5 January 2022

Josie Ford
Nailed it
Gazing into the alternative reality featured on the other pages of this magazine, we have mixed feelings. That’s a generally valid statement, but it applies especially to the metaverse that The Company Formerly Known As Facebook and others are building.
Or it does until we realise it gives our influencer franchise a (glittery) golden opportunity to mention Metaverse Nails™ (patent pending), “the only product in the WORLD that allows you to adorn your digital and physical self with customisable holograms”. “Glam wearable tech” is very much our bag – see our tote? It’s totes virtual – although our community service order still stands after going too far with Gucci’s virtual clothing line in lockdown (3 October 2020). Collectible fashion accessories that interact with a 3D social app to trigger a dazzling range of interactive hologram nail stickers that can be snapped and shared in real time to social networks seem a safer bet.
As was reported last year, TCFKAF might have agreed: shortly after its metamorphosis in October, it briefly suspended the Instagram account, @metaverse, of the driving force behind Metaverse Nails™ (patent pending), Thea-Mai Baumann, for “pretending to be someone else”. Far be it for us to question motivations, but if being someone else isn’t the point of the metaverse, we aren’t sure what is.Advertisement
Flipping the bird
Feedback is relieved to be informed by our man in a hide with a pair of binoculars, Jeff Hecht, that birds are real. For those who hadn’t realised there was any doubt, we urge you to marinate – but not for too long – in the social media conspiracy theory that birds used to be real, but were replaced by US government spy drones. The walls of the metaverse being decidedly porous, this has seen billboards pop up in major US cities and a demonstration outside Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco demanding that the company change its logo.
For a while, we had a similar, special theory of avian unreality concerning the implausible, yet undoubtedly ornamental, pelicans of St James’s Park in the heart of London’s government district. We gave it up on the basis we couldn’t work out who ordered the poop. Now, as The New York Times revealed last month, the general theory of unreality has been revealed as a prank dreamed up to demonstrate the absurdity of conspiracy theories.
This is all pretty, well, meta. We are left pondering the truth value of the statement “this conspiracy theory is false”. While we do so, we offer up the fact that, although birds might exist, fish, reptiles, worms, wasps, jellyfish and a host of other things don’t. That isn’t a conspiracy, it is phylogenetics.
Look on the buttered side
Andy Bebington intervenes from Croydon, London, with a philosophical solution to the long-standing scientific puzzle in our Twisteddoodles cartoon on 4 December 2021: why toast always lands butter-side down. It is because we buttered the wrong side. We await explanation of how attaching buttered toast to the back of a falling cat retrocausually flips right side to wrong side. It is probably something to do with quantum theory; it usually is.
How low can you go?
Did monkeys really sail the oceans on floating rafts of vegetation? we asked in our super soaraway holiday edition (18/25 December 2021, p 50), answering the question with a firm “yeah but no but yeah”. Brian Horton of the floating raft of vegetation that is Tasmania takes exception, not to that, but to our description of a riverine floating island that “covered an area about the size of two Olympic swimming pools”.
“Surely everyone knows that area is measured in football pitches and swimming pools are only for volume,” he fumes. “Please ensure that the appropriate units are used in New Scientist articles to maintain standards.”
We hear you, Brian, while countering with Malcolm Drury of Ottawa’s clipping from a CBC News website article on oil sands tailing ponds in Alberta with a storage capacity “the equivalent volume of more than 560,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, which would stretch from Edmonton to Melbourne, Australia, and back if placed end-to-end”. Measurement standards are clearly slipping – to lower and lower dimensions.
In their element again
Many thanks to those of you who responded to our appeal for elemental names from across the world (11 December 2021). Sergio Frosini from Genoa, Italy, wins the prize of a gram of unobtanium in a virtual tote bag with his list of actors Franca Rame (copper) and Turi Ferro (iron), journalist Tito Stagno (tin) and horror film director Dario Argento (silver).
Sergio further enriches us by informing us that Stagno’s principal claim to fame is as the first person in the world to announce the Apollo 11 mission’s touchdown on the moon – a full 56 seconds before it happened. Miring ourselves briefly in the nether regions of the Italian-speaking web convinces us that those most liable to bring up this striking instance of retrocausality have well-defined views of the moon landing. Having seen the grainy footage ourselves, we are prepared to accept it was cock-up, not conspiracy. Which is a pretty good guiding principle for life, come to think of it.
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You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website. More

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Why We Love is one of the fundamental questions of human nature. Anna Machin trawls the social and life sciences for answers to why we fall in and out of love with partners, celebrities, family members and pets.
The Natural History Museum/Alamy
Watch
Ancient Human Occupations of Britain will be revealed by Chris Stringer in this online talk at 6pm GMT on 10 January. Find out which species of early humans colonised Britain, when they arrived and the tools they made (pictured).Advertisement

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Harrow by Pulitzer finalist Joy Williams explores a post-apocalyptic world where nature has been destroyed, and no one cares but a few older survivors who are plotting their revenge on those responsible.

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By Clare Wilson
GAP Photos/Tim Gainey
IN THE depths of the UK winter, most of my vegetable beds are bare, except for my star performer: purple sprouting broccoli. It is in the middle of its fabulous January growth spurt.
This giant of a broccoli plant is arguably the queen of the brassica family of vegetables. Also known as winter sprouting broccoli, it is very tolerant of cold, and requires several weeks of cold weather before it puts forth its flower buds and becomes ready to harvest.
Unlike ordinary broccoli plants, which have a single large head and are usually harvested by autumn, purple sprouting broccoli … More