Humans

By Karina Shah

A conch shell found in a cave used by the Magdalenian people of the late Upper Palaeolithic was originally thought to be a cup, but a new analysis suggests they used it as a kind of horn. That would make it the earliest known conch shell horn.
Gilles Tosello at the University of Toulouse in France and his colleagues were investigating objects and cave art found in Marsoulas Cave in the Pyrenees mountains. They revisited a conch shell that was discovered in 1931.
The shell is 31 centimetres long and 18 centimetres wide and once belonged to a large sea snail of the species Charonia lampas that likely lived on the coast of France or Spain.
It has a small narrow hole drilled into the the point of the shell called the apex, and is decorated with fingerprint-shaped ochre red markings.

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“We are pretty sure that this shell was transformed by human action, on the contrary to what was first published in the 1930s,” said Tosello at a press conference on 9 February. Its original discoverers suspected the conch shell was a ceremonial drinking cup.
Tosello and his team came to a different conclusion after examining the inside of the shell with CT scanning and a tiny medical camera.
“The broken part of the apex is very narrow, and the hole inside is perfectly round with a regular edge,” he said. The hole in the apex was most likely drilled to make way for some kind of mouthpiece, such as a small hollow bone to blow into, to protect the lips of the musician.

To test the hypothesis that this was used as an instrument, the team enlisted the help of a horn player to see if they could play the conch shell – the horn player produced three notes close to C, D and C sharp.

Along with the decorative ochre markings – which match paintings found on the walls of the original cave – there are smears of a brown, organic residue around the conch shell. Although there is not enough to determine what the residue is, it was probably used as a sort of glue to fix the mouthpiece into the shell, says Tosello.
The team have now produced a 3D model of the conch shell to investigate how it was used by the Magdalenian people as a musical instrument, without damaging the original artefact.
It’s not surprising that the Magdalenian people played instruments as music is an inherent part of any cultural system, says Francesco d’Errico at the University of Bordeaux in France.
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abe9510
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Paul SayedListen
Octave of Light, featuring soprano Beth Sterling, is an album of exoplanet music by David Ibbett, guest composer at Fermilab in Illinois, and astronomer Roy Gould, who have turned exoplanet spectra into musical chords.

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The Raven’s Hat by Jonas Peters and Nicolai Meinshausen is a series of engaging games that seem unsolvable — until you translate them into mathematical terms. Hours of fun for anyone who took maths seriously at school.
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Tribes of Europa, a near-future German sci-fi series on Netflix, follows siblings Kiano, Liv, and Elja, who are fighting for their lives on a continent split into warring tribal states. Available from 19 February.
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As real spacecraft begin to arrive at the Red Planet, let’s celebrate with Mars-based games like Surviving Mars, where you build colonies, and Tharsis, where you captain a doomed spacecraft

Space 10 February 2021
By Jacob Aron
A Martian base explodes in Red Faction: Guerrilla
Deep Silver Volition
Red Faction: Guerrilla
Deep Silver Volition

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PC, PlayStation 3 and 4, Xbox 360 and One, Nintendo Switch
Kerbal Space Program
Squad
PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
Tharsis Choice Provisions PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch
THIS month sees a trio of real-life spacecraft arrive at Mars, so in honour of their voyages I thought I’d run through my own jaunts to the Red Planet in game mode.

Mars is a common locale for many first-person shooters, with games in the Doom, Destiny and Call of Duty series all featuring levels on its dry, dusty surface, but they rarely do very much interesting with the setting.
One exception is Doom Eternal, which I reviewed last year. As you fight your way through endless demon hordes, it becomes clear you must journey to hell through a portal at the centre of Mars. How? Why, by commandeering a massive laser on Mars’s moon Phobos and blasting a gigantic crater into the planet’s surface.
Speaking of blowing things up on Mars, the Red Faction series makes a selling point of having “destructible terrain”, essentially letting you knock down walls and buildings to progress through the game. This is still a rarity in video games, partly because of the technical difficulties in rendering destruction on the fly, but also because letting players destroy everything makes it hard to impose any narrative structure.
My favourite of the series, Red Faction: Guerrilla, solves this by throwing narrative structure out of the window, then throwing the window out of the window. You play Alec Mason, a freedom-fighter attempting to overthrow the tyrannical rulers of Mars, but forget all that – what matters here is that you are given mining charges, trucks and a really big hammer and then encouraged to destroy everything in sight. It is incredibly satisfying, even if you are setting the course of Martian settlement back decades.
“Kerbal Space Program lets you build pretty much any spacecraft you can imagine; mine tend to blow up”
If you fancy something a bit more constructive, Surviving Mars, which I reviewed in 2019, puts you in charge of building a colony from the ground up. I enjoyed the challenges of managing water, oxygen and electricity supplies as I plotted out various domed habitats on the Martian soil. The game is just tricky enough that you feel like you are struggling to survive without it being too disheartening when a bunch of your colonists die in a dust storm.
Offworld Trading Company is similar but puts you slightly further into the future, with Mars settled and corporations vying to exploit its natural resources. The game is ruthlessly capitalist and sees you exploiting markets to get one over on your rivals or make a hostile takeover.
If your dreams of being Elon Musk revolve around building rockets rather than becoming a billionaire, Kerbal Space Program is for you. With a bewildering array of capsules, engines and more, you can pretty much construct any spacecraft you can imagine. Whether you can get it off the ground is another matter – mine tend to blow up. Once in orbit, there is a whole solar system analogue to explore, with dusty Duna as Kerbal’s version of Mars.
Finally, for a darker look at what astronauts heading to Mars might face, there is Tharsis. It is set aboard the first crewed ship to the Red Planet, which has been damaged by a micrometeoroid storm, meaning you have to repair the ship and shepherd the crew to safety. Unusually, the game takes inspiration from board games, so you roll virtual dice to achieve objectives such as putting out a fire. This leaves things slightly more up to chance than I would like, making it hard to strategise, but no one ever said getting to Mars would be easy.
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By Sam Wong
Tetiana Vitsenko/Alamy
What you need
1 egg yolk
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp Dijon mustard 250 ml vegetable oil
OIL and water famously don’t play well together. Water is a polar molecule, with a negative charge concentrated around the oxygen atom and a positive charge at the two hydrogen atoms. This means that water molecules attract each other, the hydrogen atoms forming bonds with the oxygen atoms of nearby molecules. Oil, on the other hand, is made from non-polar molecules, which aren’t attracted by the water molecules, so it is hard for them to mingle.
If you shake … More

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has drawn criticism for suggesting a weird object passing through the solar system could be an alien spacecraft. But he insists we must keep an open mind when nature throws us a curveball

Space 10 February 2021
By Leah Crane

Rocio Montoya

IN 2017, something strange came hurtling through our cosmic neighbourhood. Astronomers only spotted it once it was already on its way out, so they didn’t get a proper look. But from the few observations we did get, it was clear that the object wasn’t from around here – its trajectory indicated that it came from another star system. It was dubbed ‘Oumuamua, which means “scout” in Hawaiian, and categorised as the first interstellar object we have ever seen in our cosmic neighbourhood.
Not long after ‘Oumuamua was spotted, Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, made waves by proposing that it may be a piece of alien technology. “‘Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization,” Loeb wrote in a pre-print paper.
It is certainly weird. Observations suggested it is likely to be either flat or cigar-shaped, tumbling end over end every 7 hours or so and accelerating at a pace seemingly greater than could be accounted for by gravitational forces alone. Loeb’s colleagues have since come up with various natural explanations for what we glimpsed of ‘Oumuamua’s features, including the idea that it is some sort of giant fractal snowflake. But he is adamant we should at least be open to the possibility that it could be evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial civilisations.
Loeb has now written a book about it called Extraterrestrial: The first sign of intelligent life beyond Earth. Here, he tells New Scientist about the possibility of advanced alien life and how humans might respond to it.

Leah Crane: You say … More

By Michael Marshall
A 2700-year-old face cream
Dr. Bin Han, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

Some Chinese noblemen were using cosmetic face cream 2700 years ago. Archaeologists have found an ornate bronze jar containing the remains of a face cream, which was made from a mixture of animal fat and a rare substance called moonmilk that is found in caves.
The discovery is the earliest evidence of a Chinese man using cosmetics, although there is older evidence of Chinese women doing so.
In 2017 and 2018, Yimin Yang at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and his colleagues … More

State-of-the-art special effects combined with a compelling story makes Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian viewing to be savoured on Disney+

Humans 3 February 2021
By Bethan Ackerley

The Mandalorian
Created by Jon Favreau
Disney+

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WHEN George Lucas set out to create Star Wars, he wanted to use special effects that had never been seen before. Over the course of the franchise’s history, that dream has been pursued relentlessly with mixed results.
The original Star Wars trilogy was brought to life by Lucas’s visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) through a groundbreaking combination of blue screens, miniatures, puppets and camera trickery. The prequel films (released between 1999 and 2005) were ambitious too, pioneering the use of digital film and fully computer-generated characters, but relied heavily on digital effects that didn’t always stand up to scrutiny. Since 2015, the latest Star Wars films have showcased some stunning effects, but it is now in TV show The Mandalorian that the series’ most exciting technological developments are taking place.
Set five years after Return of the Jedi, The Mandalorian follows a bounty hunter tasked with finding The Child (a pointy-eared alien better known to fans as Baby Yoda). Unable to surrender the infant to his nefarious client, the Mandalorian is forced to traverse the galaxy to protect his charge from remnants of the Empire.
So far, so Star Wars. Yet what makes The Mandalorian so special is how it builds on the successes and failures of every story in the franchise, especially when it comes to technology. Though you wouldn’t know it, the many alien worlds it features aren’t filmed in deserts and tundras around the world, but are instead realised by ILM on just one stage in Los Angeles, nicknamed “the Volume”.

“The many alien worlds of The Mandalorian are realised on a single stage in Los Angeles called ‘the Volume’”
This cavernous set is encircled by LED panels on its 6-metre walls and ceiling. Instead of shooting actors against green screens and adding a virtual background later, environments – Tattooine’s desert plains, say – are projected onto the walls during filming, blending seamlessly with practical props.
The advantages of this approach are manifold. While shooting with green screens means lighting and reflections have to be tweaked in post-production – a difficult task and part of why the prequel trilogy was so maligned – the Volume accurately lights a scene while it is being filmed, so every world our hero steps onto (in his gleaming beskar armour, no less) feels like a real location.
Those alien planets can be edited on set, so the crew can quite literally move mountains. ILM also uses Unreal Engine from Epic Games, the firm behind Fortnite, to create 3D environments in real time in the Volume. The screens respond to positional data from a camera, so as it moves, the setting shifts to provide realistic changes in perspective.
Beyond the Volume, the show builds on the techniques of its predecessors, using puppetry and animatronics alongside actors to create believable aliens. You only have to look at fans’ reactions to The Child and to “Frog Lady”, season two’s amphibious breakout star, to see how successfully they have been realised. Even old-school miniatures are used.
The Mandalorian represents the next generation of technology in Star Wars, which is fitting for a brand so obsessed with lineage. That doesn’t mean it should be judged on this alone. It is also a compelling story about fatherhood and duty, albeit one with meandering side quests that sometimes divide viewers. Yet with a universe this beautifully realised, who wouldn’t stop to take in the view from time to time?

Bethan also recommends…
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Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian
Disney+
This fascinating series explores key elements of The Mandalorian. A highlight is the episode looking into how composer Ludwig Göransson built the cool soundtrack around giant recorders.
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Empire of Dreams: The story of the Star Wars trilogy (2004)
Ken Burns
The original Star Wars films were taken from the brink of disaster and made into a global phenomenon. This documentary tells the tale.

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Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan star in Netflix’s film The Dig, which reimagines the excavation at Sutton Hoo, where a 27-metre burial ship was uncovered

Humans 3 February 2021
By Francesca Steele
Flawless: Carey Mulligan as Edith Pretty and Ralph Fiennes as Basil Brown
Larry Horricks/Netflix

The Dig
Simon Stone
Available on Netflix

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BASIL BROWN, played in The Dig by Ralph Fiennes, was the principal archaeologist behind the 1939 excavation of Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, England. It is now considered one of the most important finds in Britain, the majesty of its 27-metre burial ship and 7th-century Anglo-Saxon treasures reframing historians’ view of the so-called Dark Ages.
However, it was very nearly missed – and Brown wasn’t always acknowledged for his efforts. He was a self-educated archaeologist and astronomer, who spent much of his income as a tenant farmer and insurance agent on that education. Being an independent scholar without an academic post was an irregularity that led to the omission of his name at the British Museum’s display of the Sutton Hoo treasures for decades.
The Dig, based on the novel of the same name by John Preston, rights that wrong. It is directed by Simon Stone with a distinctly British tone of restraint worthy of film producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory, who made the 1990s hits Howards End and The Remains of the Day.
The film approaches English passions cautiously, shining a light on Brown’s incredible contribution, as well as that of Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan), the landowner who hired Brown to dig under the mounds on her estate because she had a “feeling” they would find something of note.
Fiennes and Mulligan are flawless as the excavators that the professionals underestimate, imbuing their characters with an intelligent zeal for the field that isn’t dampened by their places in society: he’s a lowly contractor for the Ipswich Museum, she’s a wealthy widowed landowner who went to finishing school. They share a quiet determination and mutual respect, initially arguing over which of the 18 mounds to tackle first, but finding common ground in the soil and its secrets. “That’s life what’s revealed,” Brown says in a thick Suffolk accent. “And that’s why we dig.”

Brown forms a friendship with Pretty’s young son Robert, a keen amateur archaeologist. It is all the more affecting as we learn that Pretty is dying so Robert will soon be an orphan (Pretty died in 1942).
“The Dig is obsessed with class boundaries. It fizzes with curbed passions amid honey-coloured fields”
This is a film of two halves, the first about archaeology, the second concerned with the personal lives of the people behind the dig. The first half is more successful, illustrating the patience necessary for excavation, especially in England where it is always raining, exposing fragile finds to the elements. It also reveals the dangers. In one of their earliest conversations, Pretty rescues Brown when the earth falls in on him and he claws desperately at the dirt. It is a good illustration of the risks an ordinary man took to exhume historical artefacts, only to be cast aside later.
Like Howards End and The Remains of the Day, The Dig is obsessed with class boundaries. It fizzes with curbed passions amid the honey-coloured English fields, the indomitable march of time making each ordinary moment both horribly transient, as the second world war calls up young men to die in the background, and simultaneously everlasting.
History is made of such things, and forgotten items – like Anglo-Saxon gold and Brown himself – can be retrieved.
In the second half, we learn more about other characters on the dig, including supercilious chauvinist Charles Phillips (Ken Stott) who arrives from the British Museum to oversee things. Then there are archaeologists Stuart Piggott (Ben Chaplin) and his wife Peggy Piggott (Lily James), whose strained marriage disintegrates before our eyes as Peggy forms an attachment with good-looking photographer Rory (Johnny Flynn).
The acting is impeccable, particularly from James, but the romance and domestic crises feel a little heavy-handed in a film that is otherwise so self-possessed. The Dig doesn’t need such frills. Like Sutton Hoo, the treasures aren’t showily arranged but lie quietly, in the silences between people, and in simple shared hopes that stretch across generations.
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