Humans

By Michael Marshall

Lidio Valdez

The remains of five llamas that may have been ritually sacrificed by Incas have been found in Peru. It isn’t clear how the animals were killed, but it may have been a slow death.
“I have no way to prove it, but I think they were buried alive,” says Lidio Valdez at the University of Calgary in Canada. He says the llamas don’t have injuries like knife wounds to their throats, which would point to different methods of killing.
The Inca Empire dominated western regions of South America for several hundred years, until Spain invaded in the 1500s. Llamas were central to the success of this advanced society. “They were the single most important animal,” says Valdez, providing transport, skin, fibre, fertiliser and meat. “In addition to that, the Incas believed llamas were sacred animals.”

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Spanish people who came into contact with the Inca reported that they regularly killed hundreds of llamas, either for feasts or for ritual sacrifices to deities. However, while archaeologists have found many examples of llamas that were killed and then eaten, llamas that were ritually sacrificed haven’t been found before.

Valdez and his colleagues found five such llamas in an Inca settlement called Tambo Viejo in the Acari Valley, near the coast of Peru. The site had previously been looted, so Valdez suspects there were originally more.
The llamas had no injuries, but their legs were securely tied together. Valdez suspects this was done to keep them under control while they were buried alive.
He says this method of sacrifice fits with what we know about Inca practices. “Incas used to sacrifice children, and it is said some of the children were buried alive,” says Valdez, referring to written accounts from Spanish conquistadors. “If they did that with children, I’m sure they would have done the same thing with llamas.”
A piece of charcoal found next to one of the llamas was radiocarbon-dated to between 1432 and 1459. Tambo Viejo was annexed by the Inca Empire around this time, and the sacrifices, combined with feasting, may have been a way to cement the new social order, says Valdez.

Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2020.183
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Big data’s power is revealed by two books covering a cold-war version of Cambridge Analytica that helped John F. Kennedy get elected-and how modern social media can rig votes today

Technology 21 October 2020
By Vijaysree Venkatraman
John F. Kennedy campaigning in Mayville, Wisconsin, in March 1960
Stan Wayman/The Life Picture Collection Via Getty Images

IN SEPTEMBER 2016, Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, told an audience in New York about the power of big data in global elections. Know the personality of the people you target, and “you can nuance your messaging to resonate more effectively” with … More

Pepe the Frog ended up as the darling of both anarchists and the alt-right. A documentary tells the surprising true story of the super-meme and its creator

Technology 21 October 2020
By Elle Hunt
Pepe the Frog has had many incarnations, from beatific to fascistic
Feel Good Man

Feels Good ManArthur JonesReady Fictions, streaming; BBC 4 Storyville, 26 October
OVER 25 years of the internet, memes have evolved from a one-note online sight gag – a dancing baby, say, or a cat with an irreverent caption in Impact font – to a muscular means of communication, capable of nuance and complex irony.
Yet no meme has had as strange and storied a journey as Pepe the Frog. The laid-back amphibian from cartoonist Matt Furie’s cult hit Boy’s Club was wrested from that context … More

Black Box is an intelligent and melancholy sci-fi film in which a man who loses his memory in a car crash takes extreme steps to get his life back, writes Simon Ings

Humans 21 October 2020
By Simon Ings
Nolan (Mamoudou Athie) turns to Lillian (Phylicia Rashad) for help
Courtesy of Amazon Studios

Black BoxEmmanuel Osei-Kuffour Amazon Prime
NOLAN is trying to put his life back together after a car accident robbed him of his wife and his memory. His daughter Ava has to steer him about, though she is barely old enough for school. She encourages him to reapply for his old job. She sets the satnav for the supermarket. Three times now, Nolan (Mamoudou Athie) has forgotten to pick Ava (Amanda Christine) up from school. It is more than possible that he sometimes forgets her … More

By Chelsea Whyte
Donald Trump signs an executive order on energy and infrastructure
Evan Vucci/AP/Shutterstock

AS US President Donald Trump prepares to face the ballot box in the hopes of winning a second term, his handling of the coronavirus pandemic will be at the forefront of voters’ minds. But Trump’s impact on health, space and environment policy during his time in office also warrants examining.
In the past four years, Trump has promised to reverse environmental regulations and climate change policy, to repeal and replace his predecessor Barack Obama’s landmark healthcare policy and to revive the fortunes of NASA. Has he succeeded?
A … More

By Donna Lu
Was Homo erectus driven extinct by climate change?
The Natural History Museum/Alamy

Sudden climatic changes may have been a significant driver of the extinction of early human species.
Pasquale Raia at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy and his colleagues have used climate modelling and fossil records to determine the effect climate change had on the survival of the species in our Homo genus.
The researchers used a database of 2754 archaeological records of the remains of several species alive over the past 2.5 million years, including Homo habilis, Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens.

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They cross-referenced these records with a climate emulator, which modelled temperature, rainfall and other weather data over the past 5 million years. The aim was to determine the climatic niche for each species – a range of conditions including temperature and precipitation that are optimal for survival – and how widely distributed the niche area was through time.
The team found that H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis and H. neanderthalensis all lost a significant portion of their climatic niche area just before they became extinct.

“Species are good at surviving when they have a large area at their disposal to live in,” says Raia. But when liveable areas decrease and the result is small patches that are geographically isolated from each other, species enter what is known as an extinction vortex.
The reductions in liveable area resulted from sudden climatic changes, the team found. H. erectus, for example, went extinct during the last glacial period, which began about 115,000 years ago. The researchers suggest this was the coldest period the species had ever experienced.
The team found that for the Neanderthals, competition with H. sapiens was also a factor, but that even without the presence of our species the effect of climate change alone may have been enough to lead to extinction. Even species with the ability to control their local environment – such as by wearing clothes or creating fires – were susceptible to the effects of climate change, says Raia.

But gaps in data may compromise the certainty of the conclusion that climate change was the primary extinction driver, say researchers who weren’t involved in the study.

Aside from Neanderthals, there is scarcely any fossil evidence for the other species studied, says Bernard Wood at George Washington University in Washington DC. “Individuals belonging to these taxa lived at times, and in places, not sampled by the existing fossil record,” he says.
“Plus, the first appearance date of a taxon almost certainly underestimates when a taxon appeared, and its last appearance date almost certainly underestimates when a taxon became extinct,” he says.
As species approach extinction, regardless of the cause – whether it be competition, being hunted or breeding problems – their range necessarily declines, says Corey Bradshaw at Flinders University in Australia. If a species’ range was already in decline, that could give the false impression that the climate niche area was also declining, he says.
“No species that we know of has ever gone extinct from a single mechanism. It’s always a combination,” says Bradshaw. “For example, in the case of many megafauna species in the late Pleistocene, it’s coming to light that there were a lot of interaction effects between human hunting and climate change.”
Journal reference: One Earth, DOI: 10.1016/j.oneear.2020.09.007
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Filler words such as uh, mmm and huh may seem inarticulate, but without them human communication would be far less sophisticated

Humans 14 October 2020
By David Robson

Andy Smith

YOU might expect it to take more than a two-letter word to sink a politician’s credibility. But one did just that for Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, in June 2016. With a huge wildfire burning in the province of Alberta, he had been asked about the country’s capacity to cope. “Uh, certainly, I think we’re, uh, all aware that, uh, uh, a prime minister, uh, showing up at Fort McMurray, when firefighters are busy trying to, uh, uh, contain a massive raging wildfire is, uh, not a particularly helpful thing,” he began. Trudeau went on to use a total of 50 uhs in a statement lasting little more than a minute.
A video soon went viral, and online commentators were universally scathing. “Canada’s dumbest, uh, Prime Minister” wrote one viewer. Reading the unedited transcript, you may well have questioned Trudeau’s intelligence yourself. Surely such hesitation is a sign of sloppy thinking and ineloquence. Weren’t we taught as children to eliminate uhs from our conversation?
Yet the latest research shows that this is an unfounded prejudice. Far from being an inarticulate waste of breath, filler words like um, uh, mmm and huh are essential for efficient communication, sending important signals about the words we are about to say so that two speakers can better understand each other. “They streamline our interactions, smooth the flow of the conversation and manage our social relations,” says Mark Dingemanse, who studies language and social interaction at Radboud University in the Netherlands. Indeed, he argues that the complexity of our language today couldn’t have emerged without them. To which the obvious response … More

The Book of Malachi by T. C. Farren centres on a young man whose tongue has been cut out during a brutal civil war. It’s a tough, mind-bending morality tale

Humans 14 October 2020

Victor Moussa/Alamy

The Book of Malachi
T. C. Farren
Titan
THE main problem with this book is you aren’t going to want to read it. But it’s good and you should.
Malachi Dakwaa, the eponymous character in T. C. Farren’s novel, is a young man whose tongue was cut out in a brutal civil war. In the years since, he has eked out a half-life as a quality control manager at a chicken processing plant, ensuring the uniform compliance of shrink-wrapped body parts.
One day, he gets an offer for a job he didn’t apply for, with a payment he … More