Humans

Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan star in Netflix’s film The Dig, which reimagines the excavation at Sutton Hoo, where a 27-metre burial ship was uncovered

Humans 3 February 2021
By Francesca Steele
Flawless: Carey Mulligan as Edith Pretty and Ralph Fiennes as Basil Brown
Larry Horricks/Netflix

The Dig
Simon Stone
Available on Netflix

Advertisement

BASIL BROWN, played in The Dig by Ralph Fiennes, was the principal archaeologist behind the 1939 excavation of Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, England. It is now considered one of the most important finds in Britain, the majesty of its 27-metre burial ship and 7th-century Anglo-Saxon treasures reframing historians’ view of the so-called Dark Ages.
However, it was very nearly missed – and Brown wasn’t always acknowledged for his efforts. He was a self-educated archaeologist and astronomer, who spent much of his income as a tenant farmer and insurance agent on that education. Being an independent scholar without an academic post was an irregularity that led to the omission of his name at the British Museum’s display of the Sutton Hoo treasures for decades.
The Dig, based on the novel of the same name by John Preston, rights that wrong. It is directed by Simon Stone with a distinctly British tone of restraint worthy of film producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory, who made the 1990s hits Howards End and The Remains of the Day.
The film approaches English passions cautiously, shining a light on Brown’s incredible contribution, as well as that of Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan), the landowner who hired Brown to dig under the mounds on her estate because she had a “feeling” they would find something of note.
Fiennes and Mulligan are flawless as the excavators that the professionals underestimate, imbuing their characters with an intelligent zeal for the field that isn’t dampened by their places in society: he’s a lowly contractor for the Ipswich Museum, she’s a wealthy widowed landowner who went to finishing school. They share a quiet determination and mutual respect, initially arguing over which of the 18 mounds to tackle first, but finding common ground in the soil and its secrets. “That’s life what’s revealed,” Brown says in a thick Suffolk accent. “And that’s why we dig.”

Brown forms a friendship with Pretty’s young son Robert, a keen amateur archaeologist. It is all the more affecting as we learn that Pretty is dying so Robert will soon be an orphan (Pretty died in 1942).
“The Dig is obsessed with class boundaries. It fizzes with curbed passions amid honey-coloured fields”
This is a film of two halves, the first about archaeology, the second concerned with the personal lives of the people behind the dig. The first half is more successful, illustrating the patience necessary for excavation, especially in England where it is always raining, exposing fragile finds to the elements. It also reveals the dangers. In one of their earliest conversations, Pretty rescues Brown when the earth falls in on him and he claws desperately at the dirt. It is a good illustration of the risks an ordinary man took to exhume historical artefacts, only to be cast aside later.
Like Howards End and The Remains of the Day, The Dig is obsessed with class boundaries. It fizzes with curbed passions amid the honey-coloured English fields, the indomitable march of time making each ordinary moment both horribly transient, as the second world war calls up young men to die in the background, and simultaneously everlasting.
History is made of such things, and forgotten items – like Anglo-Saxon gold and Brown himself – can be retrieved.
In the second half, we learn more about other characters on the dig, including supercilious chauvinist Charles Phillips (Ken Stott) who arrives from the British Museum to oversee things. Then there are archaeologists Stuart Piggott (Ben Chaplin) and his wife Peggy Piggott (Lily James), whose strained marriage disintegrates before our eyes as Peggy forms an attachment with good-looking photographer Rory (Johnny Flynn).
The acting is impeccable, particularly from James, but the romance and domestic crises feel a little heavy-handed in a film that is otherwise so self-possessed. The Dig doesn’t need such frills. Like Sutton Hoo, the treasures aren’t showily arranged but lie quietly, in the silences between people, and in simple shared hopes that stretch across generations.
More on these topics: More

We are relying on specialist knowledge to guide us through the coronavirus pandemic – so it is more important than ever to grasp what expertise is and where it comes from, says Roger Kneebone, author of a new book on the subject

Humans 3 February 2021
By Richard Webb

Rocio Montoya

IF ROGER KNEEBONE is an expert, he has spread his expertise widely. Trained as a medical doctor, he spent many years working as a trauma surgeon in the township of Soweto in Johannesburg, South Africa, at the height of apartheid, before returning to the UK to become a general practitioner in rural Wiltshire.
Now in his third career as a professor of surgical education at Imperial College London, he has been at the forefront of many innovations aimed at widening the scope of influences that students are exposed to. These include setting up a Centre for Performance Science with the neighbouring Royal College of Music and helping to devise the Chemical Kitchen project, which exposes chemistry undergraduates to lab skills through the “non-threatening” parallel of cooking.
Kneebone has also tried his hand at many extracurricular activities, from flying light aeroplanes and learning to juggle to building harpsichords – with varying degrees of success, he freely admits. He recently wrote a book, Expert: Understanding the path to mastery. Drawing on the experiences of people from musicians to magicians and tailors to taxidermists – and some scientific and medical experts for good measure – it examines the ubiquitous, but understudied, process of becoming an expert.
Richard Webb: Experts are very much in the public eye at the moment.
Roger Kneebone: I finished writing the book just before the UK’s March covid-19 lockdown began. But now more than ever we need to think about how we make use of the most valuable aspect of expertise – the wisdom based on experience that allows people to give sensible guidance about what to do … More

As the coronavirus crisis goes on, an increasing number of us are feeling worn out and unable to cope. Here’s how you can tell if this is burnout, and what you can do to protect yourself

Health 3 February 2021
By Caroline Williams

Nathalie Lees

“I AM not just busy, I am being overwhelmed by an onslaught of requests like yours…”
There is a certain irony to the email I have just received: the pioneer of burnout research is feeling utterly swamped by work. Christina Maslach, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, spearheaded the study of burnout back in the 1970s and has been working on ways to tackle the problem ever since. Her expertise was already highly sought after even before the coronavirus pandemic. Now she can barely move under the weight of her inbox.
It is hardly surprising. In the year since the word lockdown became ubiquitous, it seems as if almost everyone has hit the wall at least once. But amid the emotional roller coaster of work stress, homeschooling, social isolation and the not inconsiderable fact that there is still a pandemic raging outside, how can you tell when you have reached the end of your tether? When does feeling understandably stressed in difficult times turn into an irretrievable case of burnout? And what can you do to protect yourself?
Thankfully, five decades of research means we have a fairly good idea of what burnout is and what causes it. According to Maslach’s Burnout Inventory, an assessment tool she co-developed, burnout arises when three factors coincide: an overwhelming feeling of emotional exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and detachment and a feeling of lack of accomplishment. For those experiencing burnout, these criteria might manifest in feelings like being exhausted even after plenty of sleep, being emotionally distant from loved ones or no longer caring about jobs that need doing. … More

By Krista Charles
A diagram showing the difference between human and chimpanzee thumb muscles
Katerina Harvati, Alexandros Karakostis and Daniel Haeufle

Our thumbs allow us to use a variety of tools, from hammers to smartphones, and a new analysis suggests they have a long history. Researchers have found that some hominins started developing more dexterous thumbs about 2 million years ago, which could have allowed them to exploit more resources, eventually leading to the emergence of human culture.
Katerina Harvati at the University of Tübingen in Germany and her colleagues looked at thumb efficiency across different fossil human species. The researchers looked at the shape of thumb bones and soft tissue, which is occasionally preserved. They also created 3D meshes of thumb samples and calculated their torque.
“Levels of dexterity very similar to what we see in modern humans were already present 2 million years ago,” says Harvati.

Advertisement

Previous research has suggested that Australopithecus, an earlier genus of hominin, may have been the earliest toolmakers, but the researchers found these fossils lacked the same dexterity found in Neanderthals and Homo naledi.

The researchers suggest that Australopithecus might have been capable of using tools without being adapted for it, whereas the Homo genus developed dexterous thumbs and became adapted for more efficient tool making.
“Regardless of whether stone tool use started before the genus Homo, it’s only after 2 million years ago that stone tool use might have been more efficient,” says team member Fotios Alexandros Karakostis, also at the University of Tübingen. “Therefore, this increased efficiency is likely the factor that led to the gradual emergence of human culture rather than stone tool use itself.”
“All Homo share a common morphology that allows for more dexterity than what came before. And that is brought into light and well supported by this multidisciplinary approach,” says Sandra Martelli at University College London.
Journal reference: Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.12.041
Sign up to Our Human Story, a free monthly newsletter on the revolution in archaeology and human evolution

More on these topics: More

From the right ratio of green and brown waste to regular aeration, here are some top tips for making compost, writes Clare Wilson

Humans 27 January 2021
By Clare Wilson

Annie Otzen/Getty Images

What you need
A compost bin
Kitchen waste
Plenty of waste low in nitrogen, such as cardboard or sawdust
WE ALL like to get something for nothing, and one way to do that in gardening is to make your own compost from kitchen and garden waste. If all goes well, you end up with an earthy, fine brown crumb within a couple of years, which adds nutrients and structure to your soil. But get things wrong, and it turns into a slimy, stinking mess. So what are the dos and don’ts of composting?
The process is all … More

By Matthew Sparkes
Conspiracy theory groups like QAnon find followerson social media sites
REUTERS/Patrick Fallon

CLAMPING down on conspiracy theories may not help tackle extremist views online, instead it might cause them to proliferate.
Shruti Phadke at the University of Washington in Seattle and her colleagues analysed 6 million posts from 60,000 people on social news aggregation site Reddit, as well as their memberships of user-created communities called subreddits, in an attempt to identify the roots of online radicalisation. All the people’s profiles were roughly similar, but half of them were members of at least one subreddit focused on discussing political and scientific … More

All of us are vulnerable to psychological manipulation, due to quirks in the way our brains create our perception of the world. Understanding how that happens can help strengthen our defences against gaslighting

Humans 27 January 2021
By Caroline Williams

Daniel Stolle

“It’s a really discombobulating thing to think, ‘I know you’re wrong, but you are now more confident in your lie than I am in the truth,’” comedian John Oliver told The Hollywood Reporter last year.
He was talking about a high-profile Twitter spat with Donald Trump, which began when Trump claimed that he had refused to appear on Oliver’s “very boring and low-rated show”. Oliver denied inviting Trump, who then upped the ante, claiming he had been asked several times and had repeatedly turned the show down. Trump was so adamant that Oliver wondered if he had forgotten something.
The argument has all the hallmarks of gaslighting, a form of psychological manipulation in which one person undermines another person’s reality. When carried out over a long period of time, the target can begin to doubt their own thoughts and memories.
We might like to think that this couldn’t happen to us, but the bad news is that it definitely could. This is because of a handful of psychological quirks that come as part of the package of the human mind. Although usually beneficial, these aspects of the way we perceive the world can be exploited by a gaslighter to control our reality. The good news is that by understanding them, it is possible to resist attacks and restore your faith in your own thinking – and reality.
“It could happen to any of us. Aspects of the way we perceive the world can be exploited to control our reality”
Gaslighting became headline news in the UK in 2016 when a prominent storyline in BBC radio drama The … More

There’s a tendency among horticulturists to prefer native plant species, but we shouldn’t assume they are better, writes James Wong

Humans | Comment 27 January 2021
By James Wong

Oliver Dixon/Shutterstock

IT ISN’T an exaggeration to say that in the world of horticulture “native” is frequently used as a byword for “better”. Native plants are often considered easier to grow and better for wildlife, while also being less invasive and more resistant to pests.
This belief is so institutionalised that many local planning rules in the UK specify that a certain percentage of landscaping schemes must include native species. Indeed, this conviction runs so deep that some see sharing evidence to the contrary as being hugely controversial, even deeply irresponsible. But accuracy is what matters, so let’s explore … More