Humans

By Michael Marshall
The A303, a road running past Stonehenge in the UK, is often congested
Paul Chambers/Alamy

A PUBLIC row has broken out among archaeologists over the UK government’s decision to allow the building of a road tunnel close to Stonehenge, a protected prehistoric monument in Wiltshire. The tunnel is intended to replace a congested road that disrupts the landscape around the site, but some argue that the plans will cause irreparable damage to archaeological deposits. While digging near ancient history may seem like an obviously bad idea, the case isn’t clear-cut.
Stonehenge is a ring of standing stones surrounded by … More

By Michael Marshall
A wealth of human remains have been found in Cave UW 105
Lee Berger

A treasure trove of ancient human remains discovered in a cave in South Africa could give us a new picture of human evolution – and evidence of a previously undiscovered species.
Lee Berger at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and his colleagues call the cave simply UW 105 because it is the 105th site they have identified. It is a short walk from the Rising Star cave, where his team discovered a new species called Homo naledi in 2013. The following year, the group … More

By Michael Marshall
A wealth of human remains have been found in Cave UW 105
Lee Berger

A treasure trove of ancient human remains discovered in a cave in South Africa could give us a new picture of human evolution – and evidence of a previously undiscovered species.
Lee Berger at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and his colleagues call the cave simply UW 105 because it is the 105th site they have identified. It is a short walk from the Rising Star cave, where his team discovered a new species called Homo naledi in 2013. The following year, the group … More

From Bill Gates’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster to Chiara Marletto’s revolutionary recasting of physics, The Science of Can and Can’t, 2021 is a blockbuster year for popular science books

Humans 30 December 2020
By Simon Ings and Liz Else

Deepol By Plainpicture/Vasily Pindyurin

Saving the planet
FOR good reason, this year is billed as the year we must come together to save human civilisation.
Fortunately, the technology needed to achieve a zero-carbon economy is surprisingly straightforward. Less easy is getting some 8 billion cantankerous primates to agree on a single course of action.
Help is at hand from a wide array of books. The first up is from Mike Berners-Lee of the Institute for Social Futures at Lancaster University, UK. He finds himself already having to update his 2019 bestseller, There is No Planet B: A handbook for the … More

Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor, The Expert System’s Champion by Adrian Tchaikovsky and The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers are exciting sci-fi books we’re looking forward to in 2021

Humans 30 December 2020
By Simon Ings and Liz Else
Sci-fi: 10 top reads for 2021
Remote Control
Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com)
Sankofa was just a girl until she became Death. Now she and her fox companion search the world for answers about what created her. Out January
The Expert System’s Champion
Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor.com)
In the sequel to The Expert System’s Brother, Handry (a monster-fighting wanderer) acquires a band of fellow travellers just in time to face a new foe. Out January

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within
Becky Chambers (Hodder & Stoughton)
The Hugo award-winning finale of the epic Wayfarers series is a tale of expansion into the galaxy. … More

Films Top Gun: Maverick, Dune and Babylon, as well as TV documentaries about Greta Thunberg and Stephen Hawking are all due to be released in 2021

Humans 30 December 2020
By Simon Ings and Liz Else

Jonny Cournoyer/Paramount Pictures

The best films and TV
There is a lot to look forward to this year, and some may even be available as scheduled.
The release of A Quiet Place Part II (pictured above) has been delayed twice due to the pandemic, but perhaps this will fuel anticipation. The dystopian horror, starring Emily Blunt and written/directed by her husband John Krasinski, is now due for release in April 2021. The Abbott family live in an apocalyptic landscape plagued by monsters that hunt by sound, and they are about to discover there are other dangers out there too.
Bios, also pushed back from 2020 and due out in April, stars Tom Hanks as the ailing creator of a robot intended to care for his beloved dog after he dies, in an American Midwest destroyed by a cataclysmic solar event.

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It isn’t all sci-fi dystopias. Tom Cruise will be defying the laws of physics in Top Gun: Maverick, a long-awaited sequel to the 1986 classic. It is set for release in July.
A few months later, in October, Denis Villeneuve’s much anticipated Dune, the second film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s bestselling novel about feudal interstellar society, is due out.
Come December, Don’t Look Up is set to be one of the biggest ever Netflix films, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as astronomers trying to warn the world about a giant meteorite heading towards Earth as a fumbling president downplays the dangers. It is being filmed in socially distanced conditions in Boston, and the cast includes Timothée Chalamet, Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep and Jonah Hill.
Also out in December is Babylon, a new film from La La Land director Damien Chazelle. It takes a fresh look at how cinematic technologies have changed, examining the transition from the silent movie era to the talkies.
On the small screen, there is a smattering of prestige reruns of David Attenborough’s series, plus other nature/climate change documentaries, including I Am Greta, about climate change activist Greta Thunberg. This had a brief cinema release but will air on the BBC in January.

Hawking, a new documentary from Sky (release date not yet available) aims to shed new light on the life of the late physicist through previously unseen private family archives.
Francesca Steele is a film and TV critic based in London
More on these topics: More

The coronavirus pandemic has had us glued to our screens, but there are easy ways to reach a better balance, says Becca Caddy

Humans | Comment 30 December 2020
By Becca Caddy

Michelle D’Urbano

IN RECENT years, many of us have made concerted efforts to reduce the amount of time we spend using our devices. A 2019 study found that one in four people had made changes to how they use their tech by deleting apps, reducing notifications and consciously cutting down the time they spend on social networks. Then the coronavirus pandemic happened – and for many, such practices went out the window.
In one survey, 46 per cent of people said they had increased their smartphone use throughout 2020. According to another, internet users in the UK spent an average of … More

By Krista Charles
Bananas in a floating market in Thailand
Zoltan Bagosi/Alamy

People living in the Mediterranean may have been sampling South Asian and East Asian cuisines up to thousands of years earlier than previously thought.
Philipp Stockhammer at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany and his colleagues examined microscopic food remains present in the teeth of 16 individuals from the Levant, a region east of the Mediterranean Sea. The people lived in the 17th and 11th centuries BC in the cities of Megiddo and Tel Erani.
The team found that these people – who came from a range of social classes – ate foods from South Asia or East Asia, including sesame, soybean, turmeric and banana. This pushes back the timeline for these foods appearing in this region by centuries or, in soybean’s case, millennia.

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“We had always thought this early globalisation was limited to precious stones and metals. Now we see that this early globalisation went hand in hand with the globalisation of food,” says Stockhammer.
His team determined what foods were eaten by analysing dental calculus, a form of hardened plaque that archeologists usually remove – but don’t examine – from excavated skeletons to clean them.
“I hope this will trigger awareness for dental calculus in the future and show how much potential there is. If you clean it up, you basically destroy this unique treasure box that you can open,” says Stockhammer.
“There’s still a lot that we don’t know about food histories in Africa, Australia and the Americas as well,” says Andrew Clarke at the University of Nottingham, UK. “So, I think there’s quite exciting opportunities to apply these techniques to other regions.”
Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2014956117 More