Humans

By Vijaysree Venkatraman

‘Drinking together may help make us more creativeAlbum/Alamy
Drunk: How we sipped, danced, and stumbled our way to civilization
Edward Slingerland
Little, Brown SparkAdvertisement

SOME years ago, when author Edward Slingerland gave a talk at a Google campus, his hosts ushered him into an impressive room. This is where coders pop in for liquid inspiration when they run into a creative wall, they told him. It wasn’t a place to get drunk alone.
In his engrossing book, Drunk, Slingerland writes that such spaces, which allow for both face-to-face communication and easy access to alcohol, can act as incubators for collective creativity. The boost that alcohol provides to individual creativity, he emphasises, is enhanced when people get drunk in groups.
For millennia, people have used alcohol and other mind-altering substances to get high. Some archaeologists even suggest that the first farmers were driven by a desire for beer, not bread.
If intoxicants were merely hijacking pleasure centres in the brain by triggering the release of “reward” chemicals, or if they were once adaptive but are vices now, then evolution would have put the kibosh on our taste for these chemicals, says the author. So, what is going on?
Slingerland, a philosopher at the University of British Columbia in Canada, has a novel thesis, arguing that by causing humans “to become, at least temporarily, more creative, cultural, and communal… intoxicants provided the spark that allowed us to form truly large-scale groups”. In short, without them, civilisation might not have been possible.
This may seem an audacious claim, but Slingerland draws on history, anthropology, cognitive science, social psychology, genetics and literature, including alcohol-fuelled classical poetry, for evidence. He is an entertaining writer, synthesising a wide array of studies to make a convincing case.
Without a science-based understanding of intoxicants, we cannot decide what role they can and should play, he stresses. In small doses, alcohol can make us happy and sociable. But still, consuming any amount of intoxicant can seem stupid, he concedes, because the chemical targets the prefrontal cortex. This late-maturing brain region is the seat of abstract reasoning, which also governs our behaviour and ability to remain on task. Research suggests small children are very creative because their prefrontal cortex is barely developed.
“A childlike state of mind in an adult is key to cultural innovation – intoxicants allow us to access that state”
A childlike state of mind in an adult is key to cultural innovation, argues the author. Intoxicants provide an efficient route to that state by temporarily taking the prefrontal cortex offline, he says.
Slingerland cites research using the US prohibition movement to test the idea that the communal consumption of alcohol can drive innovation. Prohibition has a long history, with local bans dating to the early 1800s. Using state-level imposition of alcohol prohibition as a starting point, researchers compared counties that had been “dry” for a long time to counties that had been “wet,” but which were suddenly forced to close their communal drinking venues. State-wide bans saw a 15 per cent drop in the number of new patents annually in previously wet counties compared with counties with existing bans.
The last chapter looks at alternatives to alcohol, which don’t produce hangovers, liver damage or risk of addiction. In some centres of innovation, he finds microdoses of purified psychedelics becoming popular.
After exploring the stress-busting, trust-building, creativity-boosting, pleasure-inducing aspects of alcohol, Slingerland dwells on its darker side. From drink-driving to violence, he finds there are many kinks to be ironed out before we can use alcohol as a force for good. That, I imagine, will take some doing. This heady book is, ultimately, an ode to Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, and is best savoured as a fresh take on a contentious topic.
Vijaysree Venkatraman is a science journalist based in Boston

More on these topics: More

Mindfulness is hailed as a treatment for a vast array of problems and the apps are now hugely popular. But do the claims about its benefits stack up? New Scientist investigates

Health

2 June 2021

By Jo Marchant

Stephan Schmitz
THERE is nothing wrong with thinking. It is what makes us human. Our ability to remember the past and imagine the future has made us the most successful species on the planet. But can we take it too far? Scientists and self-help gurus alike argue that spending too much time ruminating on our worries can make us stressed and miserable, while blinding us to the joys of what is happening right now. The cure, we are told, is to be more mindful. The practice of mindfulness – paying attention to our experience in a non-judgemental, accepting way – promises to help us escape the tyranny of our thoughts, boosting our mood, performance and health along the way.
At this point, there can’t be many people on the planet who haven’t tried mindfulness at least once. Secular versions of the practice were first developed from Buddhist roots in the 1970s, paving the way for scientific studies into its effects on the mind. Since it burst into the mainstream in the 1990s, high-profile research papers and media reports have claimed dramatic changes in brain structure and function, and benefits ranging from sharper attention to boosted mood, memory and a younger-looking brain.
Mindfulness is now prescribed by doctors, taught in schools, provided by employers and is readily available to download on our smartphones. It is no longer a fringe topic, but part of daily life. “Now, everyone’s got the app,” says a neuroscientist at Stanford University in California.
In recent years, though, some researchers have begun to urge caution, warning that the benefits of the practice have been hyped and potential harms ignored. It is … More

By Michael Marshall

The full sequence of the human genome is finally hereKTSDESIGN/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
We have finally sequenced the complete human genome. No, for real this time.
When scientists first announced that they had read all of a person’s DNA 20 years ago, they were still missing some bits. Now, with the benefit of far better methods for reading DNA, it has finally been possible to read the whole thing from end to end.
“Having been part of the original Human Genome Project in 2001, and especially focused on the difficult regions, it’s really … More

By Garry Shaw

Catacombs of Saints Marcellinus and PeterD. Gliksman/INRAP
Ancient human remains found in a catacomb in Rome belonged to a migrant from northern Africa who grew up along the Nile valley before travelling to the heart of the Roman Empire more than 1700 years ago.
The remains, consisting of only a jawbone fragment with three teeth attached, were found in the Catacombs of Saints Marcellinus and Peter, south-east Rome. They were uncovered in a chamber during a rescue excavation, conducted before a support pillar could be installed.
Kevin Salesse at the Free … More

By Michael Marshall

Tell Banat North in Syria was submerged in 1999
An earthen mound in what is now Syria may be the oldest known war memorial in the world, constructed before 2300 BC. The remains of what could be foot soldiers and charioteers were buried in distinct clusters in a monument made of piled-up soil. However, it isn’t clear if they belonged to the winning or losing side, or what the conflict was about.
The finding comes from a re-examination of remains from the White Monument, which was excavated in the 1980s and 1990s. The area was submerged in 1999 by the construction of the Tishrin Dam on the Euphrates river, and hasn’t been investigated since.
Anne Porter at the University of Toronto in Canada was one of the leaders of the excavations. “It was a salvage project,” she says. The flooding was “a really traumatic experience” because the area was “the most fabulous site you could imagine working on”.Advertisement
Immediately to the north of a small mountain called Jebel Bazi, Mesopotamian people built a settlement that archaeologists call the Banat/Bazi complex. It was occupied between about 2700 and 2300 BC. The site included a set of earthen mounds called Tell Banat, and slightly further north a single large mound called Tell Banat North or the White Monument.
The White Monument got its name because it was coated in a chalky mineral called gypsum. Porter says it was built in three stages. The first was a smooth mound, which the team never managed to excavate due to the flooding. Later, people built smaller mounds on top of it, containing human bones. “Imagine upside-down ice cream cones on the outside of a pudding,” says Porter. “That’s what it must have looked like.”

Finally, the people constructed stepped platforms around the edge of the mound. In the soil, the team found lots of fragmentary bones. Some were human. Others belonged to animals similar to donkeys – the exact species is unclear.
Porter has now worked with a class of undergraduates to reconstruct where all the bones were placed in the earth platforms. “It was them that realised there’s a pattern here,” she says.
One cluster held the remains of humans buried with hard pellets of compacted earth, which may have been projectile weapons. The team argues that these were foot soldiers.

The other set tended to have a single donkey-like animal paired with an adult human and a teenager. The team suggests these were charioteers: the adult driving the chariot and the teenager jumping on and off the chariot.
Porter suspects the monument reflects “an internal conflict” rather than an invasion. At the time, hierarchical societies were emerging, creating “a tension between a community-based kinship society and then these narrowing elites who are in control”, she says.
Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2021.58
Sign up to Our Human Story, a free monthly newsletter on the revolution in archaeology and human evolution

More on these topics: More

If a strange tingling feeling comes over you when someone whispers, chews or taps in your ear, you might be lucky enough to experience autonomous sensory meridian response or ASMR. This strange but relaxing sensation has spawned countless videos on YouTube, but what exactly is it? Sit back, relax and let Science with Sam explain.
More Science with Sam:
What is a black hole? And could you survive one?
Is our reality just one part of a multiverse? More

By Krista Charles

An archival photograph showing a double burial at Jebel SahabaWendorf Archives of the British Museum
Individuals buried at the prehistoric cemetery Jebel Sahaba in Sudan seem to have experienced violence and trauma at several points during their lives. The discovery may help us understand the prehistory of violence before the origin of farming.
At about 13,400 years old, Jebel Sahaba is one of the earliest sites displaying signs of mass conflict. Violence between communities seems to have become more common once people settled in one place to farm, which had begun happening by about 12,000 years ago. But evidence of organised violence among more mobile communities, like those represented by Jebel Sahaba, is unusual.
The remains at the cemetery were exhumed in the 1960s, and once it was clear that 20 of the skeletons carried injuries, it was suggested they had belonged to people who had died during a single war. A reanalysis shows that this probably wasn’t the case.Advertisement
Isabelle Crevecoeur at the University of Bordeaux in France and her colleagues examined the remains of 61 individuals, including the 20 already found to have injuries. They identified more than 100 healed and unhealed bone lesions that were previously undocumented and indicate that these pre-agricultural people survived several instances of violence during their lives.

“We knew that we were going to find maybe some additional lesions, but, in this case, this systematic and really thorough analysis of the remains allowed us to add 21 individuals to the 20 that were already recognised with traumatic lesions,” says Crevecoeur.
There were probably deliberate, sporadic and recurrent attacks between different cultural groups among these hunter-fisher-gatherers, says Crevecoeur.
“We do not know of any other cemetery at that time which shows such a high rate of people injured and killed,” says Thomas Terberger at the University of Göttingen in Germany. “This high rate of conflict is something unique and it will be a task for the future to analyse whether this is outstanding evidence, or perhaps the reanalysis of other [similarly ancient] sites will show more evidence of such conflicts.”
The team found that most of the lesions were related to impact marks from projectiles, and in some cases there were still bits of stone embedded in the bones of both men and women. These fragments may have come from the heads of arrows or spears.

“These results enrich our understanding of the contexts in which violence emerges among foragers,” says Luke Glowacki at Harvard University. “They provide additional evidence for an emerging consensus that foragers, just like agricultural peoples, had interpersonal violence in the form of raids and ambushes.”
Journal reference: Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-89386-y
Sign up to Our Human Story, a free monthly newsletter on the revolution in archaeology and human evolution

More on these topics: More

By Alice Roberts

Michelle D’urbano
TWO seemingly disparate scientific disciplines have been drawn into each other’s orbits, set on a collision course. On one side is archaeology with its grimy earthiness, heavy with history and tradition; on the other is genetics, with its clinical brightness, brave and brash in its newness. Fusion can be difficult, but it can also create astonishing energy when it happens.
At the forefront of this merging is a new sequencing project called 1000 Ancient Genomes. Led by Pontus Skoglund at the Francis Crick Institute in London, it is the most ambitious ancient genomics project to date. The DNA it looks at will be completely sequenced, leaving no stone unturned, no stretch unread.
It is two decades since the human genome was first sequenced, and the pace of change in genetic technology in the intervening years has been breathtaking. Sequencing is now faster by several orders of magnitude – a human genome can now be deciphered in a day. And with DNA extracted from ancient bones, we are able to uncover the genetic secrets of our ancestors.Advertisement

An ancient genome can reveal the sex of an individual and provide clues to their appearance. For example, the DNA of Cheddar Man, a 10,000-year-old skeleton found in Somerset, England, revealed that he was likely to have had quite dark skin and blue eyes – a combination that is rare today.
But the archaeogenetic revelations become even more fascinating when we start to compare genomes from different individuals, casting light on patterns of relatedness.
Recent analyses of individuals from Neolithic tombs in the UK and Ireland have revealed a daughter buried in the same tomb as her father, two brothers buried together, and a man whose parents were either siblings or parent and child. These findings help us to understand what society was like in these places 5000 years ago.
Wider studies can also shed light on population movements in the past. One recent revelation has been the changes that came with the appearance of the Beaker culture in Britain and Ireland, with genomic data showing a 90 per cent population turnover in the third millennium BC.
This information was met with consternation by some archaeologists. Did a mass of invaders sweep in and take over? Some headlines stoked that idea, suggesting that “Dutch hordes” had killed off the “Britons who started Stonehenge”.
The language we use is crucial. Archaeologists take “migration” to mean a very deliberate, large-scale movement of people: a forced relocation or a planned invasion. However, to geneticists, it simply means people moving and having children somewhere different. Such a migration could happen over many generations. Differences in concepts and definitions can lead to misunderstanding.
The lesson is that both fields must also heed their differences. “There has to be continuing dialogue,” says Tom Booth, who works on the 1000 Ancient Genomes project. “We may never agree on what terms to use, but we might at least understand each other’s perspective.”
If the potential of the fusion between archaeology and genetics is to be realised, both sides need to work on dismantling the language barrier between them – and to work out how to communicate these new ideas more publicly, without sparking inflammatory (and meaningless) headlines. Perhaps it will take a new generation of archaeogeneticists to successfully fuse the disciplines.
As Pooja Swali, who is also involved with the 1000 Ancient Genomes project, says: “I think you’d be struggling to find an archaeology course now that didn’t cover ancient DNA.”
Archaeogenetics is coming of age, and we can expect many more revelations in the years to come.
Alice Roberts’s new book, Ancestors: The pre‑history of Britain in seven burials, is out now

More on these topics: More