Humans

In Second Spring, an archaeologist who has developed a lesser-known form of dementia that alters her personality, unmasks her new life – to the dismay of friends and family More

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Inscape is Louise Carey’s first solo novel: a science fiction tale of near-future corporate surveillance in which a young soldier is sent to discover the source of an attack on her home, and gets more than she bargained for.

Antonio Saba/CERN

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V&A and CERN Classroom Live invites online visitors to explore ALICE, a detector dedicated to heavy-ion physics at the Large Hadron Collider, ahead of the March opening of Alice: Curiouser and curiouser at the V&A Museum in London.

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The Mind of a Murderer sees forensic psychiatrist Richard Taylor revealing the “whydunnit” behind some of the most tragic, horrific and illuminating cases of murder. Can we find common humanity even in the darkest of deeds?
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Vikings are rarely portrayed as a civilized people, but new game Assassin’s Creed Valhalla has it both ways with people playing nice while still overrunning everything in sight, says Jacob Aron

Humans 13 January 2021
By Jacob Aron
There is action in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, but harming civilians is off-limits
Ubisoft

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
Ubisoft Montreal
PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One, Series X and S, Google Stadia
VIKINGS have undergone a bit of a rebrand of late. Once seen as violent barbarians, rampaging in horned helmets across Europe, we are increasingly finding evidence that they were an advanced, civilised people with everything from frozen food to navigational crystals.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the latest in the historical action series, seems to want it both ways. You play as a Viking called Eivor (male or … More

Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity…”
We are just a couple of weeks into 2021 and yet that famous opening from Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities has never rung truer. On the one hand, we are seeing the roll-out of effective vaccines against a disease that little more than a year ago was unknown to science – a stunning tribute to human wisdom, and … More

A narrow focus on IQ to determine success is depriving us of key decision-making smarts, as our faltering response to problems such as covid-19 and climate change shows

Humans 13 January 2021
By Robert J. Sternberg

Timo Kuilder

IMAGINE a world in which admission to the top universities – to Oxford or Cambridge, or to Harvard or Yale – were limited to people who were very tall. Very soon, tall people would conclude that it is the natural order of things for the taller to succeed and the shorter to fail.
This is the world we live in. Not with taller and smaller people (although taller people often are at an advantage). But there is one measure by which, in many places, we tend to decide who has access to the best opportunities and a seat at the top decision-making tables: what we call intelligence. After all, someone blessed with intelligence has, by definition, what it takes – don’t they?
We have things exactly the wrong way round. The lesson of research by myself and many others over decades is that, through historical accident, we have developed a conception of intelligence that is narrow, questionably scientific, self-serving and ultimately self-defeating. We see the consequences in the faltering response of many nations to the covid-19 pandemic, and a host of other problems such as climate change, increasing income disparities and air and water pollution. In many spheres, our ways of thinking about and nurturing intelligence haven’t brokered intelligent solutions to real-world problems.
We need a better way. Fortunately, at least the starting point for this is clear. By returning to a more scientifically grounded idea of intelligence, who can have it and how we set about cultivating it in ourselves and others, we can begin to reboot our decision-making smarts and reshape our world for the better.
Our … More

By Michael Marshall
Today’s dog breeds are descended from wolves
Christian Müller/Alamy

Dogs may have become domesticated because our ancestors had more meat than they could eat. During the ice age, hunter-gatherers may have shared any surplus with wolves, which became their pets.
The timing and causes of the domestication of dogs are both uncertain. Genetic evidence suggests that dogs split from their wolf ancestors between 27,000 and 40,000 years ago. The oldest known dog burial is from 14,200 years ago, suggesting dogs were firmly installed as pets by then.
But it isn’t clear whether domestication happened in Europe or Asia – or in multiple locations – or why it happened. Dogs are the only animals domesticated by hunter-gatherers: all the others were domesticated after farming became widespread. One suggestion is that people domesticated dogs to help them with hunting, while another scenario has wolves scavenging human waste dumps and becoming accustomed to people.

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Maria Lahtinen of the Finnish Food Authority in Helsinki and her colleagues suggest that the key may have been a surfeit of meat.

Dogs were domesticated when ice sheets covered much of northern Eurasia and the climate was colder than today. During this time, humans and wolves would have competed for food, as both are top predators.
However, wolves can survive on nothing but lean meat – which contains protein and little else – for months. In contrast, humans cannot. There are limits to how much protein our bodies can handle, so we have to eat other food groups such as fat as well. “We are not fully adapted to eat meat,” says Lahtinen.
Her team calculated how much food was available during the Arctic winters, based on the prey species living there. They found there was an excess of lean meat, suggesting human hunters would have ended up with more of this than they could consume. Wolves could have eaten this surplus, implying the two species weren’t in competition during the harsh winters. Instead, humans could have shared lean meat with wolves without losing out themselves.
Lahtinen suggests that hunter-gatherers may have taken in orphaned wolf pups – perhaps viewing them a bit like pets – and fed them on spare lean meat. They probably didn’t have any long-term goal in mind, but the tamed wolves would have later proved to be useful hunting partners – reinforcing the domestication. “They must have been very attractive for hunter-gatherers to keep,” says Lahtinen.

Journal reference: Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-78214-4
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Bear Head is a sequel to Dogs of War by prolific science fiction author Adrian Tchaikovsky. It follows the adventures of Honey, a genetically engineered bear that appears to have infiltrated Jimmy the Martian’s head.

Alamy Stock Photo

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Where are the Women in STEM? is the question put to an audience of 10 to 14-year-olds on 13 January in an interactive lecture from Newcastle University in the UK. The YouTube event explores the forgotten roles of women in STEM fields.

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We Alone is conservationist David Western’s account of humankind’s management of the planet, from Masai herders … More

Documentary iHuman is thoroughly committed to an apocalyptic view of society in which we are in thrall to artificially intelligent machines. That is its strength – and its weakness, says Simon Ings

Humans 6 January 2021
By Simon Ings
iHuman explores our relationship with technology
Cosmic Cat

iHuman
Tonje Hessen Schei
Screening for eight weeks at modernfilms.com/ihuman
When a ship’s artificial brain fails, its crew must rebuild it from scraps in this techno-theological thriller by the author of Dune.
IN 2010, she made Play Again, a film about digital media addiction among children. In 2014, she won awards for Drone, which explored the CIA’s secret role in drone warfare. Now, with iHuman, Norwegian documentary-maker Tonje Hessen Schei tackles – well, what, exactly?
iHuman is a weird, portmanteau diatribe against computation – specifically, the branch of it that allows machines … More