Humans

By Krista Charles
A reconstruction of a Neanderthal man and woman
S. ENTRESSANGLE/E. DAYNES/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Virtual reconstructions of Neanderthal ears show that our extinct cousins had the same physical capacity for hearing as modern humans, and by inference could also make the same sounds we can – although whether they actually spoke a language is still unknown.
“We don’t know if they had a language, but at least they had all the anatomical parts needed to have the kind of speech that we have,” says Mercedes Conde-Valverde at the University of Alcalá in Spain. “It’s not that they had the same language, not English, not Spanish, nothing like this. But if we could hear them, we would recognise that they were humans.”

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Conde-Valverde and her colleagues used medical imaging software to create virtual reconstructions of Neanderthal external and middle ear cavities, based on CT scans of their skulls. With these models, they could determine the range of sounds that Neanderthals could hear, and thus probably produce as speech. This technique has previously been used to study speech and hearing in other ancient humans and chimps.

The team also did the same for a group of fossils known as the Sima de los Huesos hominins that are thought to be the immediate ancestors of Neanderthals. The results showed that, unlike these ancestors, Neanderthals had the same capacity for hearing as modern humans.
Neanderthal hearing was optimised towards production of consonants that often appear in modern human languages, such as “s”, “k”, “t” and “th”, in the same way our hearing is, says Conde-Valverde.
While we don’t know if this means they had the mental capacity for language development, Conde-Valverde says that recent archaeological evidence, including stone tool use, jewellery making and art hint towards complex behaviour in Neanderthals that could indicate language ability.

“It becomes more and more hard to dismiss the fact that probably they had some sort of speech,” says Dan Dediu at Lumière University Lyon 2 in France. It was likely very similar to ours, but not identical, he says.
Journal reference: Nature Ecology and Evolution, DOI: 10.1038/s41559-021-01391-6
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By Karina Shah
The skull of Ardipithecus ramidus – a hominin that swung from branches?
PvE/Alamy
Our distant ancestors may have swung from branches and knuckle-walked like a chimpanzee – challenging recent thinking that the earliest hominins did neither. That is the conclusion of an analysis of 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus, thought to be one of the earliest known hominins.
In popular thinking, humans are often imagined to have evolved from a chimpanzee-like ape, but many researchers now challenge this idea – particularly in light of fossil evidence from A. ramidus that was published in 2009. One well-preserved individual – nicknamed Ardi – had bones that suggested it typically walked along branches like a monkey rather than swinging below them like a chimp. This hinted that our last common ancestor with chimps also walked along branches, and that chimps evolved to swing and knuckle-walk after they branched off from hominins.

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Thomas C. Prang at Texas A&M University and his colleagues disagree with this conclusion. They have taken the measurements of Ardi’s hands reported in 2009 and compared them with 416 measurements from hands across 53 species of living primates, including chimpanzees, bonobos and humans.
“The analysis of this hand, one of the earliest hands in the human fossil record, suggests that it is chimpanzee-like, implying that both humans and chimps evolved from an ancestor that was chimp-like,” says Prang.

They found that Ardi’s metacarpals and phalanges – the bones of the fingers and palms – were similar in size to those of living apes, with relatively large joint and knuckle dimensions. These adaptations are present in existing primates that move around forests by swinging below branches and may have helped the hominin to grasp onto branches, and even knuckle-walk.
“Ardi also has elongated, more curved finger bones, and we see this increased elongation and curvature in animals that habitually hang from branches,” says Prang.
Larger-bodied primates tend to hang from branches and climb trees, while smaller-bodied animals, like monkeys, are able to walk along the branches.
“[The study] quite convincingly demonstrates that the Ardipithecus hand has some suspensory adaptations, which I think makes more sense given the body size,” says Tracy Kivell at the University of Kent, UK.

The researchers also confirmed this using evolutionary modelling. This involved comparing traits of different primates, both living and extinct, to understand the evolutionary relationship between physical features and movement. “In short, this approach models the evolution of traits across a tree of life, which in this case includes all the species in our analysis,” says Prang.

Understanding hand morphology of our earliest human relative brings us one step closer to explaining why humans are so different from our close relatives. This may suggest that the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans was relatively chimpanzee-like, before the major evolutionary shift towards bipedalism and hand dexterity.
Tim White at the University of California, Berkeley, who discovered the A. ramidus fossil and helped describe it in 2009, remains unconvinced. “This is another failed resurrection of the antiquated notion that living chimpanzees are good models for our ancestors,” says White. He says that the Ardipithecus hand, aside from having five fingers and the ability to grasp, wasn’t specifically chimpanzee-like, as he and his colleagues originally reported in 2009.
Sergio Almécija at the American Museum of Natural History in New York is also largely unconvinced. “We need more Miocene [epoch] ape fossils pre-dating the human-chimp split to test fundamental aspects of our last ancestor with apes,” he says.
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abf2474
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By Bethan Ackerley
Signature Entertainment
Synchronic
Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead
Now available to rent online

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WHEN they aren’t busy being the darlings of indie horror cinema, film-makers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are, by their own admission, armchair enthusiasts of astrophysics, philosophy and futurism. That heady cocktail of interests has influenced all their films to date, but perhaps none more so than their latest and most ambitious creation: Synchronic.
The film stars Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan as paramedics and friends Steve and Dennis, who are called out to a series of unusual drug overdoses across New Orleans. Although the victims are found in very different circumstances – one has been stabbed by a centuries-old sword, while others have been burned or frozen to death – they have all taken Synchronic, a designer drug based on the hallucinogen DMT.
Aside from those grisly incidents, the first third of Synchronic is a slow-burning drama about the quiet miseries that Steve and Dennis are mired in. Steve is a disaffected womaniser who has recently been diagnosed with a brain tumour, while Dennis’s marriage is strained by a new baby and his daughter Brianna’s teenage angst. Thankfully, these personal troubles are just a vehicle for a much more intriguing concept.
When Brianna (played by Ally Ioannides) vanishes after taking Synchronic at a frat party, Steve starts to buy up the remaining supplies. He eventually meets the drug’s creator, Dr Kermani (Ramiz Monsef), who matter-of-factly reveals that Synchronic manipulates your pineal gland, the same region of the brain as Steve’s brain tumour. It is reminiscent of the resonating device in H. P. Lovecraft’s short story From Beyond, which lets the user see alternative planes of existence. However, instead of seeing monsters from another dimension, Synchronic changes how you experience the flow of time.

Kermani explains that time isn’t linear, instead working like a vinyl record: you play one track, but the other grooves are always there. “Synchronic is the needle,” he says, letting people travel to the past while physically remaining in the present. The catch is that you have no control over where you end up, and if you manifest in the middle of a forest fire or in the path of a rampaging bull, you will still die in the present.
“Time works like a vinyl record: you play one track, but the other grooves are always there”
As soon as Steve starts experimenting with Synchronic in an attempt to find Brianna, the film’s real potential emerges. He approaches the task methodically, rationing out his limited supply to establish the rules of the drug. I won’t reveal much about which time periods Steve travels to, but his encounters are surreal and upsetting in equal measure. The past is a particularly dangerous place for a Black man, and the film is at its best when it explores how time travel is disproportionately terrifying for Steve.
While there are a few holes in the plot – why does the drug never take people to the future, for instance – the potential of Synchronic‘s central conceit is obvious. Unfortunately, while the film-makers are no strangers to small budgets, their ambitions were clearly hamstrung by a lack of funds.
The environments in the past are severely limited, with a few brief glimpses of deserts and snowstorms being about as adventurous as the film-makers can afford. Although they make up for that with some clever tableaux and eerie, roving camerawork, you still sense that Synchronic would have benefited immeasurably from having twice as much cash, and twice as much time spent mining the horrors of history.
All that said, Benson and Moorhead have still created a grim, uneasy thriller with truly hair-raising moments. For all that I mourn the unfulfilled potential of the concept, Synchronic is yet more evidence that these film-makers should be given the tools with which they can fully realise their mind-bending ideas.
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Proto-cities built from 6200 years ago in eastern Europe upend our ideas about when civilisation began and why people made the move from rural to urban living

Humans 24 February 2021
By Laura Spinney
Stuart Mcreath
AROUND 6200 years ago, farmers living on the eastern fringes of Europe, in what is now Ukraine, did something inexplicable. They left their neolithic villages and moved into a sparsely inhabited area of forest and steppe. There, in an area roughly the size of Belgium between the modern cities of Kiev and Odessa, they congregated at new settlements up to 20 times the size of their old ones.
This enigmatic culture, known as the Cucuteni-Trypillia, predates the earliest known cities in Mesopotamia, a civilisation that spanned part of the Middle East, and in China. It persisted for 800 years, but then, as mysteriously as it had begun, this experiment in civilisation failed. The inhabitants left the lightest of footprints in the landscape, and no human remains have been found. “Not a pinkie, not a tooth,” says palaeogeneticist Alexey Nikitin at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.
This puzzling lack of evidence has fuelled a lively debate about what Nikitin calls the “Dark Ages” of European prehistory. “You talk to five Trypillian archaeologists, you get five different opinions,” he says.
But the data gap hasn’t stifled interest – quite the opposite. Several projects in recent years have tried to make sense of the Trypillian proto-cities. Despite big disagreements, what is emerging is a picture of an early and unique attempt at urbanisation. It may be the key to understanding how modern Europe emerged from the Stone Age – and even throw new light on the emergence of human civilisation in general.

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We too often turn to insulting people’s brain power – and that closes off our ability to understand others, argues Melanie Challenger

Humans | Comment 24 February 2021Michelle D’urbano
BELITTLING the minds of others is commonplace. Stupid! Brainless! Imbecile! Dozy! Just scroll through the comments on pretty much any contentious article and you will find criticism by mental slander. Social media is littered with words like “unthinking” and “idiot”, especially when people are confronted with views with which they disagree.
Indeed, Twitter is a lightning rod of prejudices about minds. Former US president Donald Trump was perhaps the kingpin here, before Twitter banned him. Not only did he routinely boast of his own mental prowess – “sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest” – but he persistently used mental slurs to silence critics: “dummy!”.
Yet we can all be guilty of mental slander. Right-wing supporters frequently call those on the left “libtards”. Meanwhile, according to the Oxford English Dictionary’s New Monitor Corpus, conservative voters in the US are often derided as “nutjobs”. Mental slurs are a fast and simple trick to silence an unwanted voice and to lower trust in evidence we resist. A growing body of research is allowing us to understand where this prejudice comes from.

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Humans are group-living animals. Probing and judging other minds is a part of how we coordinate with each other, cooperate and make and break alliances. By the age of 5, children make assumptions about people’s mental states, such as understanding that someone can be mistaken in their beliefs. Particular parts of the brain are implicated: the medial prefrontal cortex, the temporal poles and the posterior superior temporal sulcus. These work in concert to enable us to detect and make judgements about minds – both our own and those of others.
All this doesn’t stop at the neck. When we bond in a group – whether that is with kin or co-workers, friends or football fans – our bodies produce hormones like oxytocin that play a role in bringing us together. But, as psychologist Carsten De Dreu points out, these hormones don’t just unite us; they encourage exclusivity. This – directly or indirectly – can alter our views on other minds. In effect, we believe those in our group more readily, often exaggerating the mental abilities of those with whom we feel allegiance.
What follows from this is that we can undervalue the intelligence of those whose views differ from our own. Even more troubling, we can find ourselves responding more slowly to signals of emotion or experience from outsiders. Social psychologists Susan Fiske and Lasana Harris have used neurological imaging and behaviour studies to show that we shut down the medial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in social cognition, when confronted with minds we wish to ignore. When we suspend parts of our brain key to recognising another’s mental and emotional states, we not only close our minds to one another, we cease to care.
All this has real-world consequences for whom we listen to and whose voices we trust. In an age of political polarisation and misinformation, the echo chambers created by social media do more than just seal us off from diverse possibilities and points of view; they muffle our ability to care about those whose views we might not like.

What can we do about it? First, we need to recognise the biases that prevent us from keeping one another in mind. We must make it less socially acceptable to use mental slander in the service of an argument. Beyond this, we would benefit from greater opportunities to hear one another out.
This pandemic is a reminder that we have very few mechanisms for listening and deliberating together. That needs to change. But a more radical option lies in a much larger paradigm shift. Is it time for our species to stop using the idea of own superior cognition as validation?
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Burn promises to change the way we think about food, exercise and life, as evolutionary biologist Herman Pontzer brings his 20 years of research experience to bear on the mysteries of human metabolism. (Buy from Amazon)

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The Big Freeze, the Scott Polar Research Institute’s arts festival, launches online on 4 March with the European premiere of Polar Self Portraits 2, a creative project connecting artists and their work from six continents.

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Let’s imagine you have inherited a fortune and want to solve the world’s most pressing problems. Here’s the best way to spend your money to make a difference to climate change, disease and poverty

Life 24 February 2021
By Rowan Hooper
Andrea Ucini
MOST of us have had that conversation: what would you do if you won the lottery? Pay off the mortgage, quit your job, maybe start a small business doing something you have always dreamed of. But what if you acquired a truly vast fortune – not just a few million but a trillion dollars? And what if you had to spend it on making the world a better place?
I know, a trillion dollars – a thousand billion dollars – sounds like a vast amount of money, especially during the twin crises of recession and pandemic. But in the grand scheme of things, it isn’t. A trillion dollars is about 1 per cent of world GDP. It is what Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is on course to be worth by 2026. The world’s richest 1 per cent together own $162 trillion in assets. And it’s just one-twelfth of what governments around the world found in 2020 alone for economic stimulus packages in response to the new coronavirus.
What could you do with such a relatively modest sum, if charged to spend it on the world’s biggest challenges? This is the central question of my book, How to Spend a Trillion Dollars, in which I choose 10 megaprojects (all things scientists are working on now) and explore what could be achieved if we showered them with money. Here we examine three of the most urgent of those challenges: solving world poverty, halting runaway climate change and curing all disease.

Eradicate world poverty

Perhaps the most important thing we could do for human welfare would be to alleviate poverty. According … More

Bill Allsopp/Loop Images Ltd/AlaSOME readers might remember the 1985 movie Brewster’s Millions. Richard Pryor’s character has to spend $30 million in 30 days in order to inherit a $300 million fortune. This week, we update the conceit, inflating the sum to a cool $1 trillion, and set a few ground rules: the money has to be spent on projects to improve human welfare, to restore the environment and to advance science.
It is the premise of How to Spend a Trillion Dollars, a new book by New Scientist‘s podcast editor Rowan Hooper that takes 10 megaprojects and costs them out. It is a … More