Humans

How do humans feel living in a world where robots outperform them, asks The Preserve by Ariel S. Winter. Clare Wilson says it’s a great thought experiment

Humans 9 December 2020
By Clare Wilson
How would we react if machines dominated the world?
Donald Iain Smith/Getty Images

The Preserve
Ariel S. Winter
Simon & Schuster
WHEN AI that is truly sentient finally emerges, the big question is how humans will fare. Will machines try to hunt us to extinction, as in the Terminator films, or will their omnipotence mean life for humans can be the kind of extended party of Iain M. Banks’s Culture series?
In Ariel S. Winter’s The Preserve, the robots have reached a stage somewhere in the middle. The book is set in the not-too-distant future, when human populations have dwindled … More

By Colin Barras
Living in darkness, or even hibernating, could have left ancient humans with bone lesions
gorodenkoff/Getty Images

Some of the ancient humans living in Europe half a million years ago had a remarkable strategy for dealing with winter: they hibernated. At least, that is the claim being made by two researchers. Others dispute the evidence – but ongoing research suggests that it might be possible to induce a hibernation-like state in modern humans.
Sima de los Huesos – the “pit of bones” – lies in northern Spain and is one of the world’s most important sites for studying human evolution. Excavations at … More

By Luke Taylor
The rock art may be 12,500 years old
Courtesy of Jose Iriarte

An extensive collection of ancient rock art and archaeological remains found deep in the Colombian Amazon offers a rare glimpse into the lives of the earliest people to inhabit the region.
The images and remains suggest that people lived in the northern Amazon at the same time as now-extinct mega-mammals. They also show that the ancient humans had a varied diet, indicating that they adapted quickly to their new environment.
The as-yet unnamed site in the Serranía La Lindosa, a large, rocky outcrop in southern Colombia, was found by an international team of researchers investigating the Guaviare region. It is the earliest secure evidence of people in the Colombian Amazon, they say.

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A wealth of Indigenous artwork has been documented across Guaviare, particularly in Chiribiquete National Park. The artwork documented at La Lindosa is new to science, and appears to be unknown even to local people, according to the researchers. It is remarkable in both its detail and its scale, the team says. The collage of images includes geometric patterns, handprints, people and animals. It stretches across approximately 5 kilometres of rock face, and could take decades to fully study.

The archaeological team – co-led by Francisco Javier Aceituno at the University of Antioquia, Colombia – was thrilled to find depictions of what appear to be now-extinct megafauna alongside more familiar fish, birds and lizards still alive today.
“We knew that megafauna was in the region and went extinct around 10 to 12,000 years before the present,” says José Iriarte at the University of Exeter, UK, and a member of the research team. If people were depicting them in their art, the humans must have been present in the region at least 12,500 years ago, he argues.
Iriarte says it is “quite clear” that a palaeolama, an extinct stumpy-legged, long-necked camelid, is depicted. Other drawings have been tentatively identified as giant sloths due to their unique proportions, and mastodons – ancient relatives of elephants – due to their trunks.
“The realism for South American standards is really impressive,” says Iriarte.

Others are less sure.
“The horses are clear,” says Hans ter Steege, an expert on Amazonian plant diversity at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands, who wasn’t involved in the research. “But the palaeolama could be a poor representation of a deer to me.”
Further study will be made of the artwork to gain more certainty of the depictions and their age, say the researchers.

However, additional archaeological evidence makes clear that humans were present in the region 12,500 years ago. The researchers have excavated an area at the base of one section of rock face and uncovered evidence of ancient human activity in the form of processed animal bones. Some of the remains occur in layers of dirt containing charred palms that radiocarbon dating shows are about 12,500 years old. The 12,500-year-old layers also contain fragments of ochre similar to that used to draw the rock art.
Establishing the presence of humans during this period — in which megafauna roamed the region and the climate was warming — is significant, says Aceituno.
“The most important thing has been to obtain good radiocarbon dates to specify the early peopling of the area,” he says.
It shows that humans shared the region with immense beasts, but also helps paint a picture of how their world would have looked.
No megafauna remains have been found at the site, perhaps suggesting that humans didn’t hunt the animals or they were processed elsewhere. There were no remains of medium-sized animals like monkeys either, a staple food for Indigenous groups inhabiting the region today. “It could mean they had not developed blowgun technology at this stage to hunt prey in the treetops,” says Iriarte.
Around half the remains were fish — including piranhas — but diets were broad. Reptiles like iguanas and snakes were consumed as well as rodents like paca and capybara.
There is also evidence that various fruits were eaten. The diversity of animals and plants consumed suggests humans adapted quickly to the Amazon, says ter Steege.
Journal reference: Quaternary International, DOI: 10.1016/j.quaint.2020.04.026
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By Donna Lu
Archaeologists have built replica Stone Age rafts to attempt the crossing to the Ryukyu islands
Yosuke Kaifu

Stone Age humans crossed the sea from Taiwan to the Ryukyu islands of south-west Japan tens of thousands of years ago – and it looks like they did so deliberately, even though the islands are too far away to be reliably visible from Taiwan.
Archaeological sites on several of the Ryukyu islands suggest humans had reached the islands by about 30,000 to 35,000 years ago. Yosuke Kaifu at the University of Tokyo and his colleagues suspect the ancient people did so by travelling north-east from Taiwan – a journey that involved ocean crossings of tens to hundreds of kilometres to hop from island to island. The researchers have even repeated some of these ocean crossings themselves using bamboo rafts of the kind that Stone Age humans might have built.
But it hadn’t been clear whether the crossing occurred deliberately or by accident. The Kuroshio current, which flows from Luzon in the Philippines past Taiwan and Japan, is one of the strongest ocean currents in the world, and in some parts is 100 kilometres wide.

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“The speed of the Kuroshio in the east of Taiwan is normally 1 to 2 metres per second,” says Kaifu.

To find out if people could have arrived at the islands by drifting on this current, the researchers looked at existing data from 138 satellite-tracked buoys, released into the world’s oceans as part of the Global Drifter Program. The 138 buoys all drifted past Taiwan or Luzon between 1989 and 2017.
Kaifu and his colleagues found that only four buoys travelled to within 20 kilometres of any of the Ryukyu islands. In all four cases this occurred as a result of adverse weather conditions, including a typhoon.
The finding suggests that the Kuroshio current directs drifters away from, rather than towards, the Ryukyu islands. Because the flow of the current is thought to have stayed the same for the past 100,000 years, it seems likely that Stone Age people reached the Ryukyu islands through deliberate voyaging rather than accidental drifting.
“Now we can tell with confidence that Palaeolithic people set sail deliberately even to a remote invisible island,” says Kaifu.

“Most people probably think that Palaeolithic people were just primitive and conservative, but I now see something different from that general image,” he says.
Journal reference: Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-76831-7
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From The End of Everything by Katie Mack and How to Argue with a Racist by Adam Rutherford to Martha Wells’s Murderbot sc-ifi series, New Scientist’s 2020 gift guide has a book for everyone

Humans 2 December 2020
By New Scientist

Getty Images/Westend61

The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking)
by Katie Mack
For a bit of seasonal giving, why not look to the end of the universe? Thankfully, The End of Everything (Scribner) by Katie Mack is no apocalyptic vision but an engrossing and often funny tour of all the ways our cosmos might come to a close. Mack’s enjoyment of physics stands out – and is contagious. She describes primordial black holes as “awfully cute in a terrifying theoretical kind of way”, antimatter as “matter’s annihilation-happy evil twin” and the universe as “frickin’ weird”. All true, and Mack’s explanations … More

In Watch Dogs: Legion you can play as or team up with any of the characters of the game, and strolling around its digital version of London is a real treat, says Jacob Aron

Humans 2 December 2020
By Jacob Aron
Key London landmarks like The Shard appear in Watch Dogs: Legion
Ubisoft

Watch Dogs: LegionUbisoftPC, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One, Series X and S
NEW SCIENTIST closed its offices on 13 March, a week or so before the UK went into national lockdown. Since then, I have spent most of this year in a small radius around my north London flat and have been into the city centre only a handful of times.
As a native Londoner, it is strange to be so cut off from the city, which is why the opening moments of Watch … More

Lockdown restrictions in winter might seem something to dread, but we can combat this by embracing the mindset of people used to long, dark winters, says health psychologist Kari Leibowitz

Health 2 December 2020
By Kari Leibowitz

Rocio Montoya

WHEN health psychologist Kari Leibowitz moved from the US to the Norwegian town of Tromsø, more than 300 kilometres north of the Arctic circle, her research became personal. Inspired by recent findings on the ways in which people’s attitudes influence their mental and physical health, she wondered whether this might be the secret to coping with the long, dark Nordic winter. Her research revealed that many Norwegians have a winter mindset that allows them to thrive in conditions she was dreading. Now back in the US at Stanford University, Leibowitz believes her findings hold lessons for us all, especially for people living in the northern hemisphere who, as the nights draw in, face the dual challenges of winter and a stressful pandemic.
David Robson: What are “mindsets” and why are they so important?
Kari Leibowitz: I think of mindsets as a framework that helps us simplify information and make sense of the world. And we’re really just at the beginning of unpacking the ways that they can shape our health and well-being.
A lot of my research now is looking at how we can use mindsets in clinical practice. In one of the last studies that I did, we tested the effects of changing people’s mindsets – even without treatment. We brought our participants to the lab and we pricked them with histamine, triggering a minor allergic reaction that looks a bit like a mosquito bite. For some people, a doctor just examined their arm; for the others, the doctor examined their arm and said: “OK, from now on, the itch and irritation will feel better and your … More

By Michael Marshall
By 8200 years ago (8200 calibrated years before the present), Doggerland existed as a small archipelago, which had drowned by 7000 years ago
M. Muru

The Atlantis of northern Europe sank under the seas slowly, rather than being obliterated by a tsunami. A little over 8000 years ago, a devastating tsunami swept across the North Sea, striking a small island that existed there at the time. But new evidence suggests the wave didn’t permanently swamp Dogger Island and its surrounding archipelago. People may have lived on the remaining land for centuries afterwards.
Between 110,000 and 12,000 years ago, Earth was in the grip of a glacial period – sometimes rather misleadingly called the last ice age. Because so much water was locked up in ice at the poles, sea levels were many metres lower. This means land that is now underwater was exposed.
This includes much of what is now the southern North Sea, between Britain and mainland Europe. As a result, Britain was connected to Europe by a fertile plain called Doggerland.

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What happened to it? We know much of the polar ice melted, causing sea levels to rise around the world. By about 8200 years ago, Doggerland had gradually shrunk in size, leaving Dogger Island surrounded by a small archipelago (see image, above left). There is some evidence that this final piece of Doggerland had a dramatic end.

About 8150 years ago, a submarine landslide occurred off the coast of Norway, dubbed the Storegga Slide. This created a tsunami in the North Sea that hit the surrounding coastlines – in many areas, the wave was many metres deep. Many researchers have argued that the Storegga tsunami helped cut Britain off from Europe.
The issue is that so far, we have had no archaeological records of the tsunami’s impact on Doggerland. “We know essentially nothing about the actual impact on the areas which were patently most susceptible to be hit,” says Vince Gaffney at the University of Bradford in the UK.
As part of a long-term project to map Doggerland, Gaffney’s team took sediment cores from the seabed off the coast of East Anglia, in the east of England. The cores contain traces of the Storegga tsunami, such as broken shells. It seems the tsunami slammed up a river valley, ripping trees from the sides – and leaving their DNA in the sediments for the team to find. But the water soon retreated and later sediments suggest the area was above water again.
Gaffney’s team compiled existing data from around the North Sea. The researchers argue this suggests the Dogger archipelago survived for several more centuries. By 7000 years ago, it was underwater and had become what is now Dogger Bank: a submarine sand bank.

Simply obtaining the sediment cores was “a major undertaking”, says Karen Wicks at the University of Reading in the UK.

“It kind of confirms things we’d been thinking anyway,” says Sue Dawson at the University of Dundee in the UK.
Simulations of the tsunami had suggested it couldn’t have swamped Doggerland, and in some places, such as northern Norway, the wave may have been fairly small. The crucial factor is the exact shape of the coastline and nearby seabed, which affects how high the water rises, says Dawson.
Wicks has previously found evidence that the hunter-gatherer population in north-east Britain fell around the time of the tsunami. She argues that the tsunami was part of a “perfect storm” of environmental crises in the region, as it combined with a period of climate cooling 8200 years ago.
However, almost nothing is known about the people living on Doggerland. Last year, Gaffney’s team recovered the first known artefacts: two small pieces of flint. As a result, it is unclear how long people continued living there as the area slipped beneath the sea.
Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2020.49
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