Humans

Members of the Native American Lummi Nation consider a captive orca called Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut to be their kin. Now they are using extraordinary means to gain her release

Life 25 November 2020
By Elle Hunt
The captive orca performs twice daily under the name Lolita
Marice Cohn Band/Tribune News Service Via Getty Images

ABOARD a small boat in Biscayne Bay, Florida, Raynell Morris (Squil-le-he-le) beats a steady rhythm on a handheld drum. When she shouts towards the shore, her voice cracks with emotion. “Your people are here,” she says. “We’ll bring you home.”
Morris’s call is directed at the Miami Seaquarium where an animal she considers her kin is kept in captivity. Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut – also known as Tokitae or Lolita – is a Southern Resident orca. It is the last week in September, and Morris has travelled 5500 kilometres from her home in Washington state to mark the 50th anniversary of the whale’s capture. Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s incarceration remains an open wound for Morris and the rest of the Lummi Nation, the Native American people in whose territory the whale was taken. Various groups have been fighting for her release for decades. Now, the Lummi are leading a new approach.
The latest bid to free Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut centres on her cultural significance, striking at the heart of questions about how to recognise Indigenous rights and make amends for historical harms. Morris and another Lummi tribal elder, Ellie Kinley (Tah-Mahs), intend to sue the Miami Seaquarium to release Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), the federal US law governing the return of objects of cultural importance to Native Americans. If they do, it would be the first time the law has been applied to a living being. Those involved believe it is the best hope yet of getting Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut released.
Southern Resident orcas are a single … More

By Chris Baraniuk
Ancient arrows are emerging from Norway’s ice
Glacier Archaeology Program, Innlandet County Council

An extraordinary number of arrows dating from the Stone Age to the medieval period have melted out of a single ice patch in Norway in recent years because of climate change.
Researchers from the Universities of Cambridge, Oslo and Bergen gathered up a total of 68 arrow shafts, some with arrow heads still attached or nearby, and many other artefacts. Almost all of the items were found on an area of mountainside no bigger than 18 hectares in Jotunheimen, a region of southern Norway.
The oldest arrows date from around 4100 BC while the youngest are from roughly AD 1300, based on radiocarbon analysis. However, the dates aren’t evenly distributed across the millennia, raising questions about whether environmental conditions during some periods were more likely to preserve fallen arrows than at other times. Peaks and troughs in reindeer hunting activity could also have played a role.

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In some cases, arrowheads of various materials have also survived, including bone, slate, iron, quartzite and one made of mussel shell. A few arrowheads even retain the twine and tar used to fix them to their wooden shaft.

Based on the nearly 300 specimens of reindeer antler and bone also secreted by the ice, and the fact that reindeer still frequent the area, the archaeologists are confident that the area served as a key hunting ground for millennia.
Other artefacts from the site include a beautifully preserved 3000-year-old shoe and textiles that the archaeologists say may have been used to package meat.
The finds represent a “treasure trove”, says William Taylor at the University of Colorado Boulder, who wasn’t involved in the work. He notes that it is very unusual to recover so many artefacts from melting ice at one location. “You might expect a handful of items if you were lucky,” he says. “It’s extremely rare and extremely important.”
As the ice that locked the artefacts away has shifted and deformed over time, the arrows have moved from the locations where they originally fell. That makes it hard to infer too much about the activity associated with them, says Lars Holger Pilø at the Department of Cultural Heritage, Innlandet County Council, Norway, who is one of the paper’s co-authors.

“The ice is an artefact-preserver but it is also at the same time a destroyer of history,” he says.
Journal reference: The Holocene, DOI: 10.1177/0959683620972775
More on these topics: More

By Gege Li
The eyes are a window to decision making
Rolando Caponi/EyeEm/Getty Image

Choosing between going out for a run or staying slumped on your sofa can be tricky, but it turns out your eyes can reveal your decision before you have even made it.
When we do something that requires physical effort, our pupils can dilate and activity heightens in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain involved in cognition. Now, it seems that these two reactions may also guide our decisions about activities that we have yet to carry out.
To investigate this idea, Irma Kurniawan and her colleagues … More

By Michael Marshall
The shape of the femur from Sahelanthropus tchadensis is typical of apes like chimps
Franck Guy/Université de Poitie

AFTER more than a decade in limbo, a crucial fossil of an early human relative has finally been scientifically described. The leg bone suggests that Sahelanthropus tchadensis, the earliest species generally regarded as an early human, or hominin, didn’t walk on two legs, and therefore may not have been a hominin at all, but rather was more closely related to other apes like chimps.
A paper from a rival group, not yet peer-reviewed, disputes this. The studies are the latest twist in … More

We spoke to five researchers working to demonstrate the various ways that racial discrimination is embedded in the structures and procedures that underpin US society

Humans 18 November 2020
By Layal Liverpool

Marta D’Asaro

THE explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement into mainstream awareness has brought the prevalence of systemic racism and anti-Black bias into sharp focus. This isn’t confined to individual acts and attitudes. It is racism deeply embedded as normal practice in the systems, structures and institutions that underpin society. And although it remains invisible to some, a growing body of research shows that systemic racism has a hugely detrimental impact on people across the world.
In the US, where the most recent wave of anti-racism protests began, Black people are far more likely to be arrested and incarcerated than white people for the same crimes. But the issues faced in the US and other countries go far beyond law enforcement. We know that racism is also baked into housing, education, employment and healthcare systems. In the US, UK and elsewhere, for example, the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus pandemic on people from Black and ethnic minority (BAME) backgrounds has put a powerful spotlight on the way societal inequalities affect health and vulnerability to disease.
And yet researchers are still working to understand how societies hold back and harm BAME communities, running experiments and analysing existing data with fresh eyes to uncover all the manifestations of systemic racism. We spoke to five US-focused scientists who investigate concealed discrimination in various aspects of everyday life, from children’s academic development to health and disease in adulthood and interactions with technology.
EDUCATIONAL INEQUITY

Daphne Henry is a developmental and educational psychologist at Boston College in Massachusetts
In the US, Black children tend to get lower scores in reading and mathematics tests compared … More

Feature-length animation Away was created solely by film-maker Gints Zilbalodis. The writing, animation and soundtrack are all uncomplicated, and the storytelling is all the better for it, says Simon Ings

Humans 18 November 2020

Away tells the story of a boy pursued by a strange, humanoid figure
Subliminal Films

Film
Away
Gints Zilbalodis
At selected cinemas, with a digital release in early 2021
A BARREN landscape at sun up. From the cords of his deflated parachute, dangling from the twisted branch of a dead tree, a boy slowly wakes to his surroundings, just as a figure appears out of the dawn’s dreamy desert glare. Humanoid but not human, faceless yet inexpressibly sad, the giant figure shambles towards the boy, bends and, though mouthless, tries somehow to swallow him.
The boy unclips himself from his … More

Talia Lavin went undercover to join white supremacy groups that were abusing her online. Her book, Culture Warlords, makes for difficult reading

Humans 11 November 2020
By Donna Lu
White nationalists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017
Reuters/Stephanie Keith

Culture Warlords: My journey into the dark web of white supremacy
Talia Lavin
Octopus Books
Book
TALIA LAVIN awoke one day to discover a group of white supremacists using encrypted messaging app Telegram to discuss if she was “too ugly to rape”. A few weeks earlier, unknown to its members, she had joined the group.
The writer and former New Yorker magazine fact checker didn’t feel prominent enough to warrant such vile comments. “I was mostly just a loudmouth on Twitter. Why was I taking up real estate in … More

Hugs, handshakes and air kisses serve the same crucial purposes as animal greetings like sniffing, eye poking and buttock grabbing

Humans 11 November 2020
By David Robson
We crave physical contact with family to reaffirm our bonds
Willie B. Thomas/Getty Images

ON 9 MARCH, Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, called a press conference to discuss his country’s response to the covid-19 pandemic. “From now on, we stop shaking hands,” he declared – before promptly reaching out his hand to greet an expert on infectious diseases.
Many of us can empathise. Social distancing sounds innocuous, but this year we have discovered how hard it can be in practice. Touchy-feely greetings, such as handshakes, hugs, kisses and nose rubbing, are deeply embedded in many cultures. These gestures aren’t merely learned, however. Look to the animal kingdom and you will see that many species – especially highly social ones – perform physical rituals when they approach each other. If our urges to touch one another in greeting seem instinctual, it is because they are.
Greetings adopted by animals can be very different to our own – they include eye poking and other gestures that might make you squirm – but understanding these behaviours can give us an insight into human salutations. Examining the evolution of greetings throws light on the subtle ways they lubricate social interactions and also helps to explain why they are so diverse. As we are a super-social species, it isn’t surprising that many of us are struggling to adjust to the new normal. But the good news is that we are proven masters at adapting our greetings to fit new situations.
Will our greetings change for good as a result of covid-19?
Andreu Dalmau/Epa-Efe/Shutterstock

Animal encounters
Mammals tend to use scents to suss each other out, which explains why … More