Humans

By Michael Marshall
View from the chamber entrance on Bengorm mountain, Ireland
Thorsten Kahlert

Some Stone Age people in Ireland left the bodies of their dead to decompose in a natural rocky chamber on a mountain. Genetic analysis of two of these bodies shows they had darker skin, like many people in Europe at the time, and suggests they lived in fairly large communities.
The boulder chamber was accidentally discovered in 2016 by a hillwalker exploring Bengorm mountain in north-west Ireland. Finding human bones on the floor, he called the police. The bones turned out to be thousands of years old and the … More

By Donna Lu
Don’t mind the smell of rotten fish? A genetic mutation may be to blame
Shutterstock / casanisa

If you don’t find the smell of fish particularly off-putting, you may have an olfactory gene mutation that makes these odours seem less strong and disagreeable.
Kári Stefánsson at Icelandic genomics firm deCODE Genetics and his colleagues have identified a gene, TAAR5, that affects how people perceive odours containing trimethylamine, a compound found in rotten and fermented fish.
To study how genetics affects our sense of smell, the researchers asked 9122 Icelandic adults to smell six odours that were presented in … More

By Colin Barras
The oldest balls found in Eurasia are leather sacks stuffed with leather strips or wool and hair
Patrick Wertmann

The first ball games in Eurasia may have been played 3000 years ago, according to a new analysis of three leather balls unearthed in an ancient cemetery in northern China. One of the men buried with a leather ball also sported the world’s earliest known pair of trousers, which he may have worn while playing.
The Yanghai cemetery, which contains more than 500 graves, was in use between about 3200 and 1850 years ago. A few years ago, archaeologists … More

Leonard Mlodinow’s book on his friendship with Stephen Hawking shows another side to the late physicist, including tales of punting in Cambridge and annoying a restaurant chef

Humans 7 October 2020
By Gege Li
Hawking said his medical condition helped his focus
NG Images/Alamy

WHEN physicist Stephen Hawking died in 2018 at the age of 76, the world mourned. But after the loss, there remains the enormous legacy of the scientist and the man to consider.
And what a legacy. Renowned for decades of work on cosmology and black holes, with A Brief History of Time selling more than 25 million copies since its release in 1988, Hawking reshaped our understanding of some of the trickiest areas in modern physics.
Among … More

An excellent new podcast with Nina Sosanya sees food scientists in Leningrad struggling against starvation and pseudoscience, and resonates for today’s world

Humans 7 October 2020
By Bethan Ackerley
Seeds is a multilayered show with the problem of feeding people at its heart
Gemma Hattersley

SeedsNo Stone Theatre
LIKE many projects, preparations for Seeds of Hope, the latest stage production from No Stone Theatre, were cut short by the pandemic. Inspired by Nikolai Vavilov, the Soviet agronomist who created the first global seed bank, the play has been revived as a podcast series and renamed Seeds.
You wouldn’t notice that the audio drama has been adapted, mind, because it is a perfect fit for this medium – and is imbued with surprising new resonances.
The main plot follows … More

Choice is a defining feature of video games, but the post-apocalyptic world of Wasteland 3 takes it to extremes. Such flexibility has a price, finds Jacob Aron

Humans 7 October 2020
By Jacob Aron
A post-apocalypticColorado is full ofdangerous challenges
Inxile Entertainment

Wasteland 3 inXile EntertainmentPC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
VIDEO games offer something unique among media: choice. Putting aside choose-your-own adventure books, such as the Fighting Fantasy series, or films like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, the chance to influence and craft a narrative is something only video games can provide. Of course, there are limits imposed by genre and software – play a first-person shooter and you won’t be able to put your gun down and host a tea party – but for some games, choice is their defining feature.
In Wasteland 3, making … More

Modern lifestyles are making our balance worse – and leaving us more vulnerable to devastating trips and falls. The good news is, it’s never too late to regain your poise

Health 7 October 2020
By Caroline Williams

Sarana Haeata

FEW things in life are as embarrassing as falling flat on your face in public. Thankfully, once we have grown out of racing around in parks and playgrounds, it doesn’t happen all that often.
Don’t take your grace and poise for granted, though. According to a growing body of research, our ability to balance – one of humanity’s hardest-won evolutionary skills – is beginning to fade away. Around the world, falls that lead to serious injury or death are on the rise, even in the young. And most of the time, the people falling over are sober and doing nothing more complicated than standing or walking.
Globally, falls are the second biggest cause of accidental death after traffic accidents. Between 1990 and 2017, the total number of deadly falls around the world nearly doubled. Risk of losing your balance increases with age, so you might think this simply reflects the huge number of baby boomers entering their twilight years. But recent estimates suggest the incidence of falls is rising at a rate that outstrips what would be expected from a growing, ageing population.
So what is happening? The decline in our collective stability is prompting scientists to take a closer look at the complex brain-body interactions that underpin our ability to balance, and the ways that it is tied to both cognitive and emotional processing. This system is remarkably complicated, but it turns out that the problems undermining it are relatively simple to pin down. That means there are little things we all can do to improve our balance and reduce the risk of falling.
Anyone who … More

By Michael Le Page
A business man posting a letter in a city
Michael Spring / Alamy

Whether you are in a small town or a big city, the likelihood of people to help you seems to depend on the neighbourhood’s relative wealth. A series of tests in neighbourhoods across the UK showed that helpfulness did not differ based on whether people they live in cities or more rural areas.
“There’s no evidence for this idea that city living makes us unfriendly,” says Nichola Raihani of University College London in the UK.
From 2014 to 2017, Raihani and her colleague Elena Zwirner carried out hundreds of tests in 37 different neighbourhoods in cities, towns and villages across the UK, from Abercynon to Glasgow to Wombourne.

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One experiment involved dropping stamped, addressed envelopes on the ground to see if people picked them up and posted them. In a variant of this, the letters were put on windshields with a note saying “Could you post this for me please? Thank you”.
In another experiment, Zwirner dropped some cards on the pavement when she was around 5 metres from another pedestrian. Sometimes she asked for help, other times she just began picking up the cards. In a third experiment, Zwirner began crossing the road when a car was approaching, to see if it would stop.

The team found that people living in less urban neighbourhoods were no more likely to help than those in cities. However, people were much less likely to help if they were in deprived areas, as defined by income and employment in the 2011 UK Census.
“You are on average about twice as likely to be helped in higher wealth neighbourhoods,” says Raihani.
For instance, in relatively wealthy areas in both cities and towns, around three-quarters of the letters were posted. In poorer neighbourhoods in cities, half were posted. In poorer neighbourhoods in towns or villages, only a third were posted.

“With more and more people moving to cities, it would be worrying if city life was making us less likely to help,” says Raihani.
Some previous studies suggest that wealthier people are less helpful, but these tend to be lab studies involving undergraduates, Raihani says. Large surveys of the public, by contrast, back the idea that people who are relatively wealthier are more likely to help.
Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2020.1359
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