Humans

By Michael Marshall

Woven wrist cuffs found at a Viking burial siteAntiquity Publications Ltd/Rimstad et al/R. Fortuna, National Museum of Denmark
The remains of a Viking have been rediscovered after being missing for more than a century. They were safely stored in a museum the whole time, but had been mislabelled.
The person was buried with expensive grave goods, suggesting they were an elite person or even royalty. They also seem to have been wearing long trousers with elaborate decorations.

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The story begins in 1868, near the village of Mammen in Denmark. A local landowner named Laust Pedersen Skomager enlisted local farmers to help him remove the topsoil from a mound on his estate. They found it concealed a wooden Viking burial chamber, now called Bjerringhøj. The farmers dug up the contents and shared them out – so when academics arrived on the scene soon after, they had first to recover the remains from their new owners.
A re-excavation in 1986 determined that the burial took place in 970 or 971 AD, during the Viking Age, but recovered few new artefacts. When the researchers looked for the original remains in the National Museum of Denmark, they could not find them – and a search in 2009 of archives at the University of Copenhagen did not turn them up either.
However, since 2018 Ulla Mannering at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen and her colleagues have been studying Viking-era textiles. As part of this, they examined the remains from another burial called Slotsbjergby. One box held human bones along with textiles – yet the descriptions of the burial site made no mention of bones being found with associated textiles. “I was puzzled about it,” says Mannering.

It slowly dawned on the team that the bones might be the missing ones from Bjerringhøj. “We were all wow with this idea,” says Mannering. She says the team knew this could be controversial, so they had to do several analyses to verify the finding.
They found that the number and types of bone match the Bjerringhøj set exactly, as do the textiles. “We don’t doubt that these must be the things that actually belonged to Bjerringhøj,” says Mannering.
The team says the Bjerringhøj Viking was an adult and probably male. He was buried with various textiles including wrist cuffs, a fragment of embroidered wool, and several woven pieces that were seemingly used in ankle cuffs. This implies that the man was wearing long trousers, although the trousers themselves are not preserved.
Furthermore, the wrist cuffs and pieces from ankle cuffs are strikingly similar, says Mannering. “Of course it was not the same object, but there seems to be an overall design idea.”
Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2020.189
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By Ibrahim Sawal

There are 1000 ancient monuments across one region of Saudi ArabiaAAKSA and Royal Commission for AlUla
A vast site in north-west Saudi Arabia is home to 1000 structures that date back more than 7000 years, making them older than the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge in the UK.
Named after the Arabic word for rectangle, mustatil structures were first discovered in the 1970s, but received little attention from researchers at the time. Hugh Thomas at the University of Western Australia in Perth and his team wanted to learn more about them, and embarked on the largest investigation of the structures to date.

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Using helicopters to fly over north-west Saudi Arabia and then following up with ground explorations, the researchers found more than 1000 mustatils across 200,000 square kilometres – twice as many as were previously thought to exist in this area. “You don’t get a full understanding of the scale of the structures until you’re there,” says Thomas.
Made from piled-up blocks of sandstone, some of which weighed more than 500 kilograms, mustatils ranged from 20 metres to more than 600 metres in length, but their walls stood only 1.2 metres high. “It’s not designed to keep anything in, but to demarcate the space that is clearly an area that needs to be isolated,” says Thomas.
In a typical mustatil, long walls surround a central courtyard, with a distinctive rubble platform, or “head”, at one end and entryways at the opposite end. Some entrances were blocked by stones, suggesting they could have been decommissioned after use.
Excavations at one mustatil showed that the centre of the head contained a chamber within which there were fragments of cattle horns and skulls. The cattle fragments may have been presented as offerings, suggesting mustatils may have been used for rituals.

Radiocarbon dating of the skulls shows that they date to between 5300 and 5000 BC, indicating that this was when this particular mustatil was built – and maybe the others too. If so, the monuments would together form the earliest large-scale, ritual landscape anywhere in the world, predating Stonehenge by more than 2500 years.
“This could completely rewrite our understanding of cults in this area at this time,” says team member Melissa Kennedy, also at the University of Western Australia. She says that further south, religious groups became focused in homes, with families displaying small shrines, but the opposite was happening in ancient Saudi Arabia with the mustatils.
There may also have been a relation between the construction of mustatils and the environment. They were built during the Holocene Humid Phase – a period between 8000 and 4000 BC during which Arabia and parts of Africa were wetter, and what are now deserts were grasslands. But droughts were still common, and Kennedy says it is possible that cattle were herded and used as offerings to the gods to protect the land from the changing climate.
Mustatils were typically clustered in groups of two to 19, suggesting that gatherings may have been broken up into smaller social groups.
“The mustatils themselves are probably associated with an annual or generational coming-together of people who would normally be out with their herds and cattle,” says Gary Rollefson at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, suggesting that these rituals were important for bringing communities together. “But there’s no indication that these guys spent a lot of time around the mustatil.”

“These structures are enigmatic,” says Huw Groucutt at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany. He says they show that remarkable human cultural developments took place in the Arabian peninsula.
But despite all the new findings, there is still much to learn. “People are going to understand these structures even more in the future,” says Thomas. “It’s nice to be at the forefront, but we’re also excited to see what other people find.”
Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2021.51

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By Karina Shah

Forest regrowth in the Amazon basin before AD 1350 suggests people had left the regionStefan Huwiler/imageBROKER/Alamy
Fossil pollen records from the Amazon hint at a surge of regrowth in forests of the Amazon basin around 300 to 600 years before European colonisation of South America, suggesting that Indigenous peoples may have been leaving the region at that time.
Following European arrival in South America in the mid-16th century AD, millions of Indigenous people lost their lives in the face of unfamiliar disease, slavery and warfare in an event known as The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas.

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Previous studies have shown a dip in carbon dioxide levels in the region in 1610, known as the Orbis spike. This has been associated with the population decline that occurred after Europeans landed in South America, as forests regrew on land previously inhabited by Indigenous people, decreasing carbon dioxide levels.
But the pollen record suggests forest regrowth in this region happened earlier. Mark Bush at the Florida Institute of Technology and his colleagues analysed sediment samples from 39 lakes in the Amazon, in Brazil, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia. They recovered pollen from the lake sediment – the deeper the sediment, the older it is.

They found that forest regrowth in the Amazon basin may have begun around 300 to 600 years before the Orbis spike. They didn’t see a pattern of reforestation in the fossil records between 1550 and 1750, following European colonisation.
“Between 950 and 1350 AD, there are more sites that are gaining forest than losing forest during that time,” says Bush. This suggests that Indigenous people were abandoning land hundreds of years before Europeans arrived, he says.
“These were complex societies, they weren’t just hunter-gatherers,” says Bush. The researchers are unsure about the drivers of this early movement, but suggest climate change could have been at play.
Eduardo Góes Neves at the University of São Paulo in Brazil remains unconvinced, as the significant drop in carbon dioxide after European arrival cannot otherwise be explained. “There is extensive evidence for forest recovery from 1550 to 1750,” says Neves.
Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.abf3870
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Sleep is an essential part of the human condition, and we spend around a third of our lives in the land of nod. But what’s really happening when we close our eyes, and why do we need to sleep? We know that without it our ability to perform even simple tasks becomes impaired, but we still don’t know why exactly. This week, Science with Sam explores the mystery of sleep, from why we, and other animals need it, to what happens if we don’t get enough.
More Science with Sam:
Is there life on Mars? 

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Josie Ford
But is it art?
In a former life, Feedback’s daily doings regularly took us across a windswept plaza on a university campus that, through no fault of its own, had been built in the 1960s. Adding to a general air of faded cold war chic was a huge, rusting iron sculpture on a concrete plinth, on which the words “Vorsicht! Kunst” had been graffitied in yellow paint.
This was in Germany, we perhaps should have said, but the warning to beware of art has stayed with us. We are reminded of it when we read that a Sotheby’s auction of non-fungible tokens by the crypto-artist Pak has brought in $16.8 million, including a single grey pixel that went for $1.36 million worth of Ether.
If, to you, that sounds like just words with a few numbers thrown in, then we can only assume you are not au fait with the worlds of art collection or cryptocurrency, and certainly not the uniquely important new conjunction of the two.

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The true value of art, of course, lies not in aesthetics, but in someone else not having it. This is problematic in the world of digital art, with pixels being so readily copy-and-pastable. Non-fungible tokens, digital widgets that can be added to an unfalsifiable blockchain to assert sole ownership of a digital asset, are the answer to this problem you didn’t know you had yet.
Following the sale of a gif of a flying cat in February for some $600,000, selling the rights to a single pixel represents some sort of progression, if only towards a logical singularity. “This single pixel is one of the most significant pieces of Art imo,” wrote someone who had drunk the Kool-Aid on Twitter. “The future will be very kind to the value of this piece”.
Others have been significantly less kind. Feedback is wary not only of art, but change and new things generally. We will stick for now with the stuff that looks like it will hurt if it falls on your foot – plus those couple of Rothko gouache-on-papers we have stashed behind the photocopier for a rainy day.
Moral fibre
Colin Nicholson of Stockport, UK, doesn’t say why he is receiving regular emails from a US provider of “alternative” views about health and healthcare. Mind you, seeing the unwanted emissions that fill our litter – apologies, “in-” – box, we aren’t one to cast aspersions.
Colin expresses surprise at an item highlighting the very real problem of discarded protective face masks in the environment, “due to the size of the fibres used in their manufacture – between 1mm and 10mm thickness”.
Polymer extrusion processes aren’t our strong point, but we agree that something needs to happen with a centimetre-thick fibre before it is any use against nanosized viral particles. Then again, clicking through to the site that the email links to, so you don’t have to, it seems aimed at those who would prefer to reduce viral transmission probability via a paper bag secured by a tin-foil hat. On that basis, anything will do.
The real Sean Carroll
In our item last week on our theory that people with the same name are actually all the same person, we missed the example under our nose.
We discovered this when a colleague wrote in agitation querying the publicity shot for a New Scientist pixelated happening on the origins of life with scientist Sean Carroll. “My god he’s aged suddenly – and we’re still using the more familiar clean shaven pic of him on the Big Ideas in Physics page,” they wrote.
Indeed, we see that this younger version of Sean Carroll is speaking next week on “How time works”, so we shall watch with interest for clues. Alternatively, it might be that these aren’t the same Sean Carroll. Then we recall that one, or perhaps both, of the Sean Carrolls is a noted proponent of the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory. Perhaps they can tell us which branch of the multiverse we are in, unless it’s both at the same time.
DIY AI
“Deep Learning-based Online Alternative Product Recommendations at Scale” is a preprint that was just posted on the arXiv server, with its authors based at the US’s largest home improvement retailer. “We’ve reached the stage of AI ubiquity where I’m just like “cool, makes sense” when seeing a deep learning paper published by researchers at Home Depot”, tweets Miles Brundage, head of policy research at OpenAI.
Nothing wrong with a do-it-yourself approach, after all. Pausing only to note the appearance of late writer and literary critic Rebecca West on the author list, Feedback congratulates the researchers on how their algorithm combines textual analysis of product data with historical customer behaviour patterns to improve purchase completion rates by 12 per cent. If you liked that product recommendation algorithm, you’ll love this one.
Solar intruders
A product we do like the look of is the Solar Animal Repeller pointed out to us by reader Chris Webster. With the sun’s activity due to hit a periodic peak shortly, it is as well to be prepared for whatever heat-hardened critters coronal mass ejections may fling our way.
The Home Depot offers quite a few that are also effective against gophers, chipmunks and groundhogs. Just the thing to ward off intruders to Feedback’s stationery cupboard, along with that supersized pack of snake glue traps. Or is that the product recommendation algorithm talking?
Got a story for Feedback?
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

Steve Wilkie/Netflix
Watch
Jupiter’s Legacy, on Netflix from 7 May, follows a generation of superheroes handing the torch of civic duty and personal virtue to their children, who are tasked with living up to their reputations. What could possibly go wrong?

Read
Hard to Break habits are no bad thing, says Stanford University psychologist Russell Poldrack, and instilling the right ones will be crucial for tackling threats to our species’ future. The ability to change our unwanted tendencies will also be vital.

Read
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, author of the 2011 hit The Martian, once again pits a sole survivor against almost impossible odds. This time, however, the fate of Earth hangs in the balance and our protagonist has amnesia. More

We spend one-third of our lives asleep, but why is it so essential? In this episode, we explain the science of sleep and why we can’t stay awake indefinitely.

Health

27 April 2021

For something we spend so much time doing, we still don’t really know what sleep is for. It’s clear that we need it. Our ability to perform tasks and make decisions is greatly impaired by a lack of sleep, as anyone who has had a restless night will attest. But it’s not just humans who are so reliant upon shut-eye. Animals need sleep too, even birds that fly continuously for months. So what’s sleep for?  And why can’t we stay awake indefinitely? In this episode of Science with Sam, the first in the new series, … More

By George Monbiot
, Colin Tudge
, Pragya Agarwal
, Jonathan Drori
, Emily Shuckburgh
, Cassandra Coburn
, Jojo Mehta
, Jim Down
, Camilla Pang
and Richard Walker

A fantastic science book can wow you, entertain you and change the way you think, all over the course of a few hundred pages. It can also act as a source of inspiration. We have asked 10 brilliant science writers and authors to pick their favourites, many of which were influenced earlier in their careers by their choices. Did your favourite make the list?
The best popular science books as picked by science writers

Jonathan Drori chooses Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
This is like being asked to choose the best vegetable or your favourite child! However, if pressed, I would nominate Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962 but still luminous and relevant. With her strong evidence and clear voice, Carson ignited global environmental efforts by detailing the effects of DDT and other pesticides on the environment. In addition to showing that life on Earth is composed of complex webs of interdependency, she revealed the dangers posed to humans and wildlife by artificial pesticides and exposed the cosy acceptance of industry propaganda by government officials.

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The fierce opposition to Silent Spring mounted by chemical companies has a strong resonance today. Following pressure from lobby groups, the UK government recently allowed sugar-beet seed to be treated with thiamethoxam, a neonicotinoid pesticide that is acutely toxic to bees. Politicians of every stripe should read and thoughtfully digest Carson’s groundbreaking, impassioned, yet utterly scientific book.
 Jonathan Drori’s book, Around the World in 80 Plants, is out now.

Pragya Agarwal chooses The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
A book that really stands out for me personally is The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. This was one of the very first books I read that showed how science writing can be magical and fascinating, emotional and political, and intersect with social science, history and philosophy. It is something that I have tried to embody in my own writing, but no one does it better than Mukherjee in this work, where he makes the most complex biological processes and his own love of science so relatable and human.
The way that The Emperor of All Maladies introduces social and cultural context in interpreting the language and communication of a disease that had been shrouded in mystery is sublime. Even though the book is really about death, it is also very optimistic; it normalises talking about dying and grief, and how those are inextricable parts of life. I read it a long time ago and then dipped in and out over the years, and I have been utterly mesmerised and inspired by it ever since.
Pragya Agarwal’s book, (M)otherhood, will be published in June 2021.

Emily Shuckburgh chooses Chaos by James Gleick
I read Chaos by James Gleick as a teenager, and perhaps more than anything else, it inspired me to pursue mathematical studies. It provides such a vivid demonstration of the richness and beauty that can be found within, and as a consequence of, mathematics. I was particularly motivated by the idea that mathematics can be used to better understand – and, indeed, predict the behaviour of – the world around us. It set me on a research career using mathematics to interrogate climate change.
The book opens with a description of mathematician and meteorologist Ed Lorenz watching the early-morning fog creep along the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus – little did I know that years later I would gaze out at the Charles river from the same spot, or that to this day I would still be building on Lorenz’s work. For me, the book was the flap of a butterfly’s wing that spawned an entire career.
Emily Shuckburgh is the director of Cambridge Zero, the University of Cambridge’s major climate change initiative and author of Climate Change (A Ladybird Expert Book).

Cassandra Coburn chooses Junk Food Monkeys by Robert Sapolsky
My all-time favourite popular science book is Junk Food Monkeys by Stanford University neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky. This book occupies a very special place in my heart because it was the first popular science book I ever read. In a series of essays, Sapolsky explores a variety of bizarre and seemingly disconnected topics (chapter titles range from “Beelzebub’s SAT Scores” to “The Night You Ruined Your Pyjamas”), using evolutionary biology to deftly dissect and inform.
I must have been around 11 when I first picked this book up, so I couldn’t possibly have understood all that I was reading. But Sapolsky’s technique of providing careful, fact-based examinations, sprinkled with pithy humour, offered me a method of making sense of the world that I had never encountered before. It was my first introduction to the scientific technique as a tool, not just science as fact. Twenty-odd years later, I am still using science to try to understand and improve the world.
Cassandra Coburn’s book, Enough: How your food choices will save the planet, is out now.

Colin Tudge chooses On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin
Incomparably the greatest – there are no others in sight – is Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1859. It was, indeed, a “popular” book – written in a hurry after the exemplary Alfred Russel Wallace threatened to beat him to the draw, it was an immediate bestseller. Yet it has transformed biology and the mindset of the whole world.

Alas, though, like all great thinkers and prophets, Darwin has been most horribly misrepresented, not least by his would-be disciples. He is cited as a champion of atheism, although his clerical contemporary Frederic Farrar saw in him “a spirit profoundly reverent”. His emphasis on competition is invoked to justify neoliberalism, which he would surely have despised. He has been presented as a cold fish, the stereotypical scientist, though he was a loving family man and a warm friend. Truly the record needs rebalancing.
Colin Tudge’s book, The Great Re-Think, is out now.

Jojo Mehta chooses A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber
I am, by nature, a curious generalist, so I have enjoyed many popular science books over the years, from Morris Kline’s Mathematics in Western Culture to Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct via Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman and The Tiger That Isn’t, to name a few. It may be a legacy of my postgraduate anthropological studies – or possibly the East-meets-West legacy of my Buddhist guru and Christian priest grandfathers – that means I am as fascinated by the underlying epistemological standpoint of the writer as I am by the subject matter itself.
As such, one of my favourites is in the area of consciousness studies and evolutionary theory. Really, it is a philosophy book: Ken Wilber’s A Brief History of Everything. His elegant reconciliation of scientific, cultural, psychological and sociological perspectives into a coherent and intellectually rigorous framework is remarkable, and (in its left-brain way) it works, which makes it both useful and beautiful. As, in my world, all the best things are.
Jojo Mehta is a co-founder of the Stop Ecocide campaign.

Jim Down chooses Longitude by Dava Sobel
Dava Sobel’s book chronicles the struggle to solve the longitude problem. In 1714, with the world’s explorers literally lost at sea, the British parliament offered £20,000 for a “practicable and useful” solution.  Astronomers looked to the stars for inspiration, while others relied on the howling of injured dogs. John Harrison, a self-taught clock-maker from Yorkshire, set out to build a precision timekeeper that could withstand an 18th-century ocean crossing – a task so fraught with difficulty that it was deemed unachievable by Isaac Newton himself.
Longitude is the gripping story of one man’s 40-year struggle against the establishment. It is a tale of perfectionism, determination, genius, politics, treachery and ultimately redemption. Sobel punctuates her book with gems such as the inadvertent discovery of the speed of light, and leaves the reader marvelling at the beauty of science. Three of the four clocks that Harrison built still keep time today.
Jim Down’s book, Life Support: Diary of an ICU Doctor on the Frontline of the Covid Crisis, is out now.

Camilla Pang chooses Critical Mass by Philip Ball
The one book that changed my life was Critical Mass by Philip Ball. It came out when I was a teenager and – being a chunky monkey at 656 pages long – it was the biggest book I had read in the shortest time! Throughout each page, it gave me confidence in my thoughts (which were previously branded as crazy and noisy) into crystallised sense. Linking sciences together is a thing.
Critical Mass explores how physics can be used in politics, and the sciences of human behaviour and organisation; these were ideas I was having at the time that I read it, and I learned from the book that others had been having them for centuries as well. This was a pivotal moment in my confidence as a scientist and in trusting my judgement.
Learning this historical context and understanding where my own ideas aligned – or otherwise – was exciting, and has informed my own area of study ever since. How do we understand the people around us? Does it matter that the ideas in my head only make sense to me? How can I make them real? There and then, I started to externalise my links by communicating and updating my scientific principles, so I could further examine these everyday interactions.
Camilla’s book, An Outsider’s Guide to Humans: What science taught me about what we do and who we are, is out now.

George Monbiot chooses The Unnatural History of the Sea by Callum Roberts
Callum Roberts’s magnificent The Unnatural History of the Sea tells the story of what the ocean once was, and could be again. It draws on a vast pool of historical and ecological knowledge to show just how much we have lost: cod the length of a person, plaice like tabletops, shoals of herring several miles long being harried within sight of the English shore by packs of bluefin tuna, giant sharks, fin whales and sperm whales. Reading it is like stepping through a portal into a magical kingdom. He explains how we could restore this glory and ensure that our seas boil with life once more.
George Monbiot’s book, This Can’t Be Happening, will be published in August 2021.

Richard Walker chooses The Nature of Nature by Enric Sala
Sala’s landmark book offers an impassioned argument for the preservation of the nature around us, distilling complex ecological challenges into an account that feels both accessible and practical. Each chapter explores a series of questions – some still unanswerable – and explains why the environmental crisis is, indeed, the most significant issue facing humanity. The book also covers the real-life challenges we face in prioritising nature against a backdrop of global capitalism, providing lessons that are more relevant than ever as we look towards economic recovery from the covid-19 pandemic.
Seamlessly blending research and theory with personal anecdotes from Sala’s vast experience, The Nature of Nature is a must read for anyone with an interest in protecting our one home, a compelling and heartfelt call to action on the need to save the natural world.
Richard Walker’s book, The Green Grocer, is out now.
These authors are appearing at the Hay Festival, which takes place online from 26 May to 6 June 2021. hayfestival.org/wales

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