Humans

The relationship between a robot and a monk is at the heart of a new bookZoonar GmbH/Alamy
A Psalm for the Wild-Built
Becky Chambers
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I READ a lot of sci-fi and, my, the future can be grim at times. Whether it is characters dealing with alien invasions, technology gone wrong or the ravages of climate change, most modern books in the genre are dour affairs, in stark contrast to the “golden age” sci-fi of the 1940s and 50s, when unrealistic techno-utopianism ruled.
But it isn’t all bad. Increasingly, authors are writing “hopepunk” stories (a slightly cringeworthy term inspired by cyberpunk) that weaponise optimism, according to one Vox journalist.
At the forefront of this subgenre is Becky Chambers, award-winning author of the Wayfarers series. But unlike the golden age stories, Chambers’s characters live complex lives and know that not all problems can be tackled with the wave of a plot-solving gizmo. Instead, they rely on relationships to succeed, picking each other up and dusting themselves down in the face of adversity.
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, the first book in the series, details the adventures of the crew of the ship Wayfarer. As the title suggests, it is much more about the journey than the destination. In a way, not a lot happens, but all the characters are changed by their interactions with one another.
My favourite character in the book is the charming and tragic Dr Chef (yes, he is the ship’s doctor and chef), one of the last of an alien species called Grum, which resemble a kind of six-limbed otter and gradually change biological sex over their lifetime.
This is just one example of the incredibly diverse cast of aliens that populate the Wayfarers books, which share a universe but mostly stand alone. There are Aeluons, who communicate by flashing colours on their faces, and the reptilian Aandrisk, whose society is influenced by the fact they lay eggs – children are normally the result of casual sex, and aren’t reared by their biological parents.
There are also artificial intelligences that run ships and other hardware, but it is illegal to upload an AI to a humanoid robot. This is key in the second book, A Closed and Common Orbit, which is a fantastic examination of identity and autonomy.
Chambers’s latest, the novella A Psalm for the Wild-Built, takes place in a new continuity outside the Wayfarers universe, but shares much of its DNA. It is set on a moon called Panga where humans realised that their sprawling, oil-burning factories were unsustainable and set up a vast rewilding project. “It was a crazy split, if you thought about it: half the land for a single species, half for the hundreds of thousands of others,” writes Chambers. “Finding a limit they’d stick to was victory enough.” Around the same time, robots became sentient and withdrew to the new wilderness, with humans promising to leave them alone.
The book is set some time after this Transition, and follows a tea monk, Sibling Dex, who goes from settlement to settlement as a travelling salesperson-slash-roaming therapist. Despite bringing joy and comfort to those visited, Dex is unsatisfied and heads out into the wilds, looking for a new purpose – eventually making contact with a robot, Mosscap, the first time humans and robots had met in centuries.
The heart of the book is the relationship between the two and the way they support each other. It is a joyful experience and, as with all of Chambers’s books, I was left with a warm, fuzzy feeling inside.

Jacob also recommends…
TV
Legends of Tomorrow
This show about time-travelling superheroes embraces the joy of being silly, and it is now one of my favourites. A recent episode has them meet David Bowie in 1970s London and find Spartacus on a spaceship.
Book
Revenger
Alistair Reynolds
The first novel in a trilogy sees sisters Adrana and Fura Ness join the crew of the Revenger, led by the space pirate Captain Rackamore, for swashbuckling sci-fi.

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Chuang Zhao
LAST week saw the announcement of not one but two groups of ancient humans, both new to science, and there is no reason to think the discoveries will stop any time soon.
In Israel, a team of researchers discovered bones from a member of a population that apparently lived in the area between 420,000 and 120,000 years ago. These hominins, which the team calls Nesher Ramla Homo, looked a bit like the Neanderthals, and the team claims that members of the new-found group were the Neanderthals’ ancestors. Not everyone agrees, however, and other interpretations have already been … More

You might think we peak in our 20s or 30s before enduring a slow decline, but each era of our lives brings new strengths – even old age. Here’s how to make the most of them

Humans

30 June 2021

By David Robson

Matt Murphy

WHETHER on page, stage or screen, the story of human health and happiness is often presented as an inevitable arc between birth and death. William Shakespeare captured this best with his “seven ages of man” speech. We enter the world “mewling and puking” as an infant, pass through the awkwardness of childhood and adolescence into our physical and mental prime, before a slow decline.
Until recently, science appeared to confirm this view. For many abilities, we seemed to reach our peak well before midlife. But it is now becoming clear that this picture is far too simplistic. Childhood and adolescence may offer the most rapid periods of development, but our brains can change in positive ways throughout life, with some important cognitive skills continuing to improve into our 50s, 60s and 70s. “The whole idea that the brain is fully mature at age 25 is a joke,” says Daniel Romer, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania.
Nor does our fitness simply rise, peak and fall in a curve. While 20-somethings may win a sprint, performance in many other sports can reach a high later in life. That’s not to mention factors like emotional well-being and mental discipline, which rise and fall in unexpected patterns. And despite nostalgia for the joys of youth, for most of us, our happiest days are actually yet to come.
By learning to recognise these patterns, we can find better ways to nurture our growth and embrace the opportunities available at each stage of life. So what, based on science, are the seven ages of you? And how can you make the most of … More

By Adam Vaughan

The skull of a young man thought to have died from plague 5000 years agoDominik Göldner, BGAEU, Berlin
The bacterium behind the Black Death, which wrought devastation in medieval times, has been found in the skull of a man who lived 5000 years ago in what is now Latvia, making it the earliest known plague strain.
Analysis of ancient DNA in the hunter-gatherer’s skull suggests that the strain of Yersinia pestis, which causes the bubonic plague, was less transmissible and harmful than later versions, say Ben Krause-Kyora at Kiel University, Germany, and his colleagues. The lack of the bacteria in three other people buried next to the man, dubbed RV 2039, is one hint of a less deadly disease, says Krause-Kyora.
The apparent lower virulence leads the team to suggest that the plague wasn’t to blame for the decline of European people between 5000 and 6000 years ago, as claimed by a 2018 paper looking at Swedish farmers’ genomes.Advertisement
“There’s an ongoing discussion as whether Y. pestis played a big role in the Neolithic decline,” says Krause-Kyora. “Our hypothesis is really contradicting the one before. It was maybe a more chronic, more omnipresent infection. It caused, for sure, some deaths, but it’s maybe not as severe as it became in the Middle Ages.”

Nonetheless, the high abundance of the bacteria found in the skull of the man, who was probably aged between 20 and 30 when he died, implies he succumbed to the plague, says Krause-Kyora. The man may have been bitten by a rodent such as a beaver, which are known to carry Y. pestis.  Remains of the animals have been found at the same site by the river Salaca in Latvia.
The evidence points to the plague spreading from animal to human at the time, rather than human to human, says Krause-Kyora. The bacteria hadn’t yet gained the genetic mutation that enables fleas to carry it, and which allowed it to infect and kill so many people centuries later.
“To have a close look at the early evolution of this deadly pathogen is really interesting,” says Krause-Kyora. “We see it was more chronic and harmless in the beginning before it became a more deadly disease.”
However, Simon Rasmussen at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, says the evidence is weak for the claim the plague was milder 5000 years ago. “There are no new results to substantiate these claims and therefore it remains a hypothesis,” he says. Rasmussen also believes the new study doesn’t invalidate the case he and his colleagues put forward in 2018, of the plague driving the Neolithic decline.
“The individual does in fact overlap with the Neolithic decline and very likely died from the plague infection. We know that large settlements, trade and movement happened in this period and human interaction is therefore still a very plausible cause of the spread of plague in Europe at this time,” he says.
Mark Achtman at the University of Warwick, UK, says the team’s interpretations of the plague’s epidemiology appear speculative. “The reasons for epidemic and pandemic outbreaks are unlikely to be found in the bacterial genomes, so ancient DNA of single genomes is not going to help,” he says.
Journal reference: Cell Reports, DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2021.109278
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By Alison George

A reconstruction of Homo longiChuang Zhao
A large fossil skull discovered in China may belong to one of our mysterious long-lost relatives, the Denisovans, potentially offering us our first glimpse of a Denisovan face. It has, however, been placed in a new human species – Homo longi – a name that derives from a Chinese term meaning “dragon”, and that means the early hominin may become known informally as “dragon man”.
Other researchers say the discovery is important and exciting, but think the decision to add a new species to our family tree is premature.
The Harbin cranium was discovered in mysterious circumstances in Harbin City in the Heilongjiang province of China in the 1930s. The man who unearthed it reportedly hid it in a well, only revealing its location on his deathbed. It was recovered in 2018 and has now been analysed for the first time.Advertisement
“It’s a really amazing discovery. It is one of the most complete crania I have ever seen,” says Xijun Ni at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who was part of the team that studied the fossil. It is also the largest known Homo skull ever found.
“This is the biggest human skull I’ve seen – and I’ve seen a few,” says Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum, London, who was also a member of the team.
The researchers estimate that the skull belonged to a man who was about 50 years old when he died, between 146,000 and 296,000 years ago. Its features are a mix of those seen in archaic and modern humans. It has thick brow ridges, for example, yet “the face looks so much like a bigger version of a modern human face”, says Stringer. Its brain size was similar to ours too.

“It’s got such an interesting combination of features,” says Stringer. “The morphology shows that this is definitely a distinct lineage in eastern Asia. It’s not Neanderthal and it’s not Homo sapiens, it’s something quite distinctive,” says Stringer.
One possibility is that the Harbin fossil is a Denisovan. This mysterious group of extinct humans was first identified a decade ago from DNA in a finger bone found in the Denisova cave in Siberia, Russia. The Denisovans were closely related to the Neanderthals, and lived in Asia for hundreds of thousands of years. They also interbred with H. sapiens.
A few additional Denisovan fossils been identified in recent years, including a jawbone at least 160,000 years old from Tibet, known as the Xiahe mandible. But Denisovan skulls have proved more difficult to track down: the Harbin cranium may be one of the strongest candidates yet found, bringing us closer to our first definitive glimpse of a Denisovan face.
When a team led by Ni constructed a family tree to establish the ancestral lineage of the Harbin fossil, based on physical characteristics of the fossils, they found that it was most closely related to the Xiahe mandible. Interestingly, both of these fossils have massive teeth.

“What’s remarkable about the Denisovans to me is the size of their teeth,” says Shara Bailey at New York University, who wasn’t involved with the study. “It’s an exciting possibility that [the Harbin cranium] could be our first Denisovan skull. It could be the face of a Denisovan.”
John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison agrees. “My opinion is that… this is more than likely Denisovan.”
The clincher would be if DNA could be extracted from the Harbin cranium, something that may be done in future.
“I think it’s possible that Harbin will turn out to be a Denisovan skull, the most complete one,” says Stringer. “That’s something we’ll have to test with DNA, but that’s probably a long shot because it’s at least 146,000 years old.”

Although there is excitement at the possibility that the Harbin skull might be Denisovan, there is less enthusiasm about the decision to officially name it as a new species. Five members of the research team, including Ni – but not Stringer – co-authored an accompanying paper in which they established it as H. longi.
Many researchers prefer not to name new human species for several reasons, including the fact that DNA evidence shows that “species”, including Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, interbred. Most academics prefer to refer to the Denisovans as a “group” or “lineage” rather than a distinct species. “You can be a separate lineage and not have achieved species status,” says Bailey.
“I do think that the one type of analysis they use isn’t conclusive enough to say that there’s a new species,” says Sheela Athreya at Texas A&M University.
Journal references: The Innovation, DOI: 10.1016/j.xinn.2021.100130 and  DOI: 10.1016/j.xinn.2021.100132
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By Michael Marshall

The Nesher Ramla excavation in IsraelHershkovitz, I et al.
A previously unknown group of ancient humans lived in what is now Israel for hundreds of thousands of years. They lived alongside modern humans for some of that time, and the two groups may have interacted and learned skills from each other.
The newly discovered people were the ancestors of the Neanderthals, who later roamed Europe and western Asia, argues the team behind the work. If that is true, Neanderthals originated in western Asia, not in Europe as many researchers have previously suspected.
The hominin remains were found at Nesher Ramla in Israel, in a quarry operated by a cement factory. Following its identification, the archaeological site within the quarry was briefly protected to allow excavations to proceed in 2010 and 2011, after which it was quarried. “The site itself is gone,” says Israel Hershkovitz at Tel Aviv University in Israel, a member of the team.Advertisement
Nesher Ramla was once a shallow depression in the landscape that gradually filled with sediment. “It was used by hominins for quite a long time, and it’s very rich in terms of archaeological material and very well preserved,” says Yossi Zaidner at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a member of the research team.

The team found parts of the roof of a hominin skull and a near-complete jawbone. “We believe it’s of the same individual,” says Hila May, also at Tel Aviv University, another author of the work.
It isn’t clear if they were male or female, because the most telltale bones are missing. “But we can say it’s a young adult based on the teeth,” says Rachel Sarig, a member of the team, also at Tel Aviv University.
The sediments in which the bones were found are between 140,000 and 120,000 years old. Our species had emerged in Africa by this time, and made some forays outside: Homo sapiens specimens from 210,000 years ago have been found in Greece, and a seemingly more sustained population existed in the Israel region from at least 177,000 years ago. But H. sapiens wasn’t the only hominin: Europe and western Asia were home to the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis), while eastern Asia was home to a related group called the Denisovans.
To find out if the Nesher Ramla hominin belonged to one of these groups, the team compared the shapes of the bones with those of dozens of other hominin remains. “It was easy to say that it’s not Homo sapiens,” says May. The skull was low and flat, rather than rounded and tall, and the jawbone lacked the chin that is characteristic of our species.
But it didn’t fit any of the other groups either. In some ways, the bones resembled Neanderthal ones, but in others they looked like those of hominins that lived earlier in prehistory.
However, the Nesher Ramla bones do resemble several other hard-to-classify fossils. These include bones from the Qesem, Zuttiyeh and Tabun sites in Israel, and from Atapuerca in northern Spain, some of which are considerably older. Hershkovitz says there are also specimens from China and India that might fit.

The team argues that all these bones should be considered together as a new hominin group, which lived in western Asia between 420,000 and 120,000 years ago. The hominin at Nesher Ramla was “a residue or survivor of this source population”, argues Sarig.
The team hasn’t given the group a species name like Homo neanderthalensis, and simply calls them “Nesher Ramla Homo”. This is because the group says it doesn’t like classing hominins as distinct species if they can interbreed, so also wouldn’t count Neanderthals as a species distinct from us.
“They’re very careful not to call it a species,” says Mirjana Roksandic at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. She says that requires “more discussion”.
The Neanderthal-like features of Nesher Ramla Homo can be explained if they were the ancestors of the Neanderthals, the team argues. On this account, the usual story of the origin of the Neanderthals – that they evolved from earlier European hominins – is wrong. Instead, they originated in western Asia as a subgroup of Nesher Ramla Homo, and entered Europe only when the climate was favourable.

Roksandic is intrigued but not convinced. “These morphological traits of Neanderthals that they see could be easily interpreted as the movement of Neanderthals back,” she says – in which case, Nesher Ramla Homo may have picked them up from Neanderthals, rather than the other way around.
However, May thinks the research team’s scenario makes more sense. Moreover, it would explain a mystery. A Neanderthal who lived in northern Europe 124,000 years ago had some H. sapiens DNA, around 80,000 years before modern humans got there. This could be explained if modern humans interbred with Nesher Ramla Homo in western Asia and some of the resulting hybrids interbred with European Neanderthals.
The Nesher Ramla Homo may also explain other unusual fossils. The bones from the caves of Skhul and Qafzeh in Israel have sometimes been classed as H. sapiens, but don’t look typical of our species. The team suggests they are actually the result of interbreeding between H. sapiens and Nesher Ramla Homo.
There is clear evidence that Nesher Ramla Homo and H. sapiens were interacting, says Zaidner. They made very similar tools, using exactly the same process. This suggests that one group learned the skills from the other. But “we don’t know… who learned from who.”
Journal references: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.abh3169 and DOI: 10.1126/science.abh3020 
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By Gege Li

Magic Tree by Yevhen Samuchenko
Photographers: Antonio Pérez, Yevhen Samuchenko, Ju Shen Lee, Roberto Buenov
THESE captivating photos each tell a powerful story about human influence on the planet. The images are among shortlisted entries for Earth Photo 2021, a global photography and video competition developed by the UK’s Royal Geographical Society and Forestry England.
001 The Sea Moves Us, the Sea Moves (Fuvemeh Ghana)Advertisement
Above is an image called 001 The Sea Moves Us, The Sea Moves (Fuvemeh Ghana) from a series by Antonio Pérez, showing Bebli Adzotor in what is left of her home in the fishing village of Fuvemeh, Ghana. Such communities have disappeared or are at risk because of coastal erosion and rising sea levels driven by climate change.
Ukraine’s Sofiyivsky Park is the focus of Magic Tree by Yevhen Samuchenko, showing part of this idyllic park photographed aerially to look like a tree. The park contains more than 2000 types of tree.
Balancing Act All Day Long by Ju Shen Lee
Above is Balancing Act All Day Long by Ju Shen Lee, which features a man fishing on Inle Lake, Myanmar. People here  have a unique fishing technique, rowing their boats with one leg while standing on the other. This requires a lot of strength and balance, as this image shows.
Finally, Forest Like Gardens by Roberto Bueno captures the effects of deforestation, shown through the stepped vineyards in the province of Tarragona, Spain, that have been carved out of land once dominated by forest.
Forest Like Gardens by Robert Bueno
The images will be exhibited at the Royal Geographical Society in London. Competition winners will be announced on 19 August.

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By Katie Smith-Wong

Michelle Fournet and researcher Natalie Mastick Jensen listen in to whalesApple
Apple TV+: premiere 15 June
Fathom
Drew XanthopoulosAdvertisement

MOST of us introduce ourselves for the first time by saying hello and giving our name. But what if you were trying to greet another species and understand its background? This is the premise of Fathom, a new documentary by director Drew Xanthopoulos, known for directing The Sensitives, which explored the lives of people who are debilitatingly sensitive to our world.
Fathom follows biologist Ellen Garland at the University of St Andrews, UK, and marine acoustician Michelle Fournet at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, on their respective studies into humpback whale songs and social communication.
While Fournet analyses different whale calls as she tries to create a conversation between humpbacks to understand their communication better, Garland studies the cultural transmission, vocal learning and function of whale songs. We watch as the two prepare for field studies in Alaska and French Polynesia.
Fathom‘s languid pace prevents viewers from completely immersing themselves. Although this leaves you waiting for something to happen, it allows Xanthopoulos to hone in on detail and show marine bioacoustics at its slow work. The scientists use hydrophones to acoustically track whales, capturing different calls, most notably the “whup” call, which Fournet studies.
Basing herself in Hobart Bay, Alaska, she is forthcoming about the challenges of surveying 30 whales in a month using focal follows, which involves tracking a specific animal, and playbacks, in which she rebroadcasts natural or synthetic signals to animals and notes their response.
Her candour about the likelihood of failure because of logistical complications brings a level-headedness amid the lofty ambitions, and her willingness to adapt her approach to fine-tune the “conversation” shows flexibility.
As she analyses audio tracks of a series of “whups” and begins to understand their significance, we share her sense of achievement from a groundbreaking insight: that humpbacks use sound to perceive not only each other but their surroundings.
In 1996, marine biologist Philip Clapham described whale song as “probably the most complex in the animal kingdom”, justifying the task of deciphering it as a single research topic. Indeed, Garland has her work cut out: whale songs are mostly used by males for mating purposes. But she identifies that the same series of calls (also known as songs) are “culturally transmitted”, and evolve across vast distances.
Throughout, the haunting sound of whale songs beautifully accompanies Xanthopoulos’s serene cinematography, underlining the simplicity of nature while evoking a sense of isolation. As a result, Fathom captures the calmness of the scientists’ surroundings, while the precise yet soft black-and-white visualisations of the whale call are reminiscent of another film with language at its heart: the 2016 sci-fi film Arrival.
As Garland eloquently points out: “Some things we do are not innate – they are learned. They tell us who we are connected to and where we belong. We call these things culture. We call our communication ‘language’.” For some reason, she adds, we think that what whales do is different.
Fathom celebrates not only the steps towards understanding another species, but the women helping us get to the finishing line.

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