Humans

By Michael Marshall

The distribution of slavery in southern US states in 1860
Niday Picture Library / Alamy

A study of the DNA of people in the Americas with African heritage has revealed overlooked details about the transatlantic slave trade.
“This gives some clarity and some sense of individual history,” says historian Linda Heywood of Boston University in Massachusetts, who wasn’t involved in the research. DNA evidence means African Americans can pinpoint where their ancestors were abducted from and reclaim aspects of their heritage that were hidden by the slave trade, she says. “It broadens the way in which identity and personal history can be thought about.”
An estimated 12.5 million people were taken from Africa to the Americas between the 1500s and 1800s, according to historical texts like shipping documents and records of people being sold.

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To fill out the picture, Steven Micheletti of consumer genetics firm 23andMe in Sunnyvale, California, and his colleagues looked at DNA from 50,281 people, including 27,422 people from across the Americas with a minimum of 5 per cent African ancestry, 20,942 Europeans and 1917 Africans. This allowed them to identify stretches of DNA that are unique to people from particular regions of Africa.
The data came from 23andMe customers, along with public genome databases. Studies like this are becoming possible because African people, who were previously under-represented in genome databases, are now being asked to take part in research, says Joanna Mountain, also of 23andMe. Nevertheless, gaps remain. “I’m hoping we get some data from Mozambique sometime soon. It was involved in the slave trade, but we didn’t have enough data to include it in this study,” she says.

In line with historical records of where slaves were taken from, the African DNA in people in the Americas was most similar to that of people living in west African countries like Senegal, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola.
However, most people in the Americas with African ancestry won’t have DNA from a single region of Africa. “Our results suggest the average African American would have connections to multiple regions,” says Micheletti. That is partly because slave traders disregarded ethnic identities, mixing people from different groups, and partly because African Americans moved around within the US. For instance, during the Great Migration of the 20th century African Americans moved from the segregated southern states of the US to northern states.
Because so many people were abducted as slaves, much of the genetic diversity in Africa was carried to the Americas, says Eduardo Tarazona-Santos at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. “But within the Americas, this diversity was more homogenised between populations.”

The analysis points to overlooked details of the slave trade. For instance, the team found less DNA from Senegal, Gambia and regions in other neighbouring countries than would be expected given the huge numbers of people taken from there. This may be because those slaves were often taken to rice plantations in the US, where the death rate was high due to malaria, says the team.

Meanwhile, many people in Central and South America and on many Caribbean islands today carry little African DNA – despite the fact that 70 per cent of slaves who survived the trip to the Americas were sent there.
This may reflect a form of racism once practised in Brazil, says Mountain, in which women of African descent were raped or forced to marry Europeans to promote “racial whitening”. In contrast, in the US, African Americans were often segregated from white people by law, and racial intermarriage was illegal or taboo.
The genetic data also confirms that female slaves have passed on much more of their DNA than male slaves – even though historical records show the majority of people taken from Africa were male. This is probably because female slaves were subjected to rape and sexual exploitation.
Journal reference: American Journal of Human Genetics, DOI: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2020.06.012
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Award-winning writer and campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez, speaks with New Scientist medical reporter Clare Wilson about how systematic gender biases are impacting women and men differently as the world copes with the coronavirus. For example, personal protective equipment is not only in short supply, its design – often based upon male body norms – is putting women at higher risk. Meanwhile, covid-19 affects men and women differently with men dying at a slightly higher rate, but many countries are not collecting sex-disaggregated data, making it difficult to understand the differences and mitigate some of the worst effects, she says. More

By Clare Wilson
A red fox raiding a bin on a residential street in London
Graham Racher / Alamy

We shouldn’t be surprised by how well foxes can survive by scavenging from our food leftovers – it is a behaviour that is tens of thousands of years old.
The ancestors of today’s foxes began living on humans’ food remains about 42,000 years ago, according to an analysis of animal bones found in Germany. “It’s the same as how they behave today in towns,” says Chris Baumann at the University of Tübingen in Germany.
Today, red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) and Arctic foxes (Vulpes lagopus) prey on small rodents in the wild as well as scavenging from the carcasses of animals, often those killed by large predators like bears and wolves. But the closer they live to towns and villages, the more their diet is made up of people’s food leftovers. “They’re very flexible,” says Baumann.

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He and his team analysed animal bones, including those of foxes, bears and wolves, found at sites in south-west Germany. The sites had been dated to three time periods: older than 42,000 years ago, when Neanderthals were the only humans living in the region, and two later periods when modern humans had moved in, lasting until 30,000 years ago.

By measuring the different isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in the bones, the team could work out what the animals had been eating. In the oldest period studied, foxes had eaten a mixture of animals, and these were likely to have been killed by bears, wolves and lions.
But after around 42,000 years ago, some of the foxes had switched to eating mainly reindeer. None of the other carnivores were mostly eating reindeer, so the foxes couldn’t have been scavenging from the kills of wolves, for instance.
While humans at the time ate a range of animals, including mammoths, “in cave sites, we find a lot of reindeer bones, because they are easy to transport as whole bodies to the caves”, says Baumann. “And if humans butchered them there, it would have produced food waste.”
Looking at the diet of foxes in other areas may become a new source of information about how ancient humans lived, says Baumann.

Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0235692
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A TV adaptation of Brave New World covers many of the same ideas as the book, but is stripped of relevance for the present day

Humans 22 July 2020
By Simon Ings
The Alphas of Brave New World run society while Epsilons toil in factories
Steve Schofield/Peacock

Brave New World
UCP/Amblin
Available on Sky One (UK) date TBC and Peacock (US) from 15 July

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THE 20th century produced two great British dystopias. The more famous one is 1984, George Orwell’s tale of a world unified into a handful of warring blocs run by dictators.
The other, Brave New World, was written in the space between world wars by the young satirist Aldous Huxley. It had started out as a send-up of H. G. Wells’s utopian works – novels such as Men Like Gods (1923), for instance. Then Huxley visited the US, and what he made of society there – brash, colourful, shallow and self-obsessed – set the engines of his imagination speeding.
The book is Huxley’s idea of what would happen if the 1930s were to run on forever. Embracing peace and order after the bloody chaos of the first world war, people have used technology to radically simplify their society. Humans are born in factories, designed to fit one of five predestined roles. Epsilons, plied with chemical treatments and deprived of oxygen before birth, perform menial functions. Alphas, meanwhile, run the world.
In 1984, everyone is expected to obey the system; in Brave New World, everyone has too much at stake in the system to want to break it. Consumption is pleasurable, addictive and a duty. Want is a thing of the past and abstinence isn’t an option. The family – that eternal thorn in the side of totalitarian states – has been discarded, and with it all intimacy and affection. In fact, no distinct human emotion has escaped this world’s smiley-faced onslaught of “soma” (a recreational drug), consumerism and pornography. There is no jealousy here, no rage, no sadness.
The cracks only show if you aspire to better things. Yearn to be more than you already are, and you won’t get very far. In creating a society without want, the Alphas have made a world without hope.

Huxley’s dystopia has now made it to the small screen. Or the broad strokes have, at least. In the series, Alden Ehrenreich – best known for taking up the mantle of Han Solo in Solo: A Star Wars story – plays John. Labelled a “savage” for living outside the walls of the World State, he encounters the Alpha Bernard Marx (Harry Lloyd) and Lenina Crowne (Jessica Brown Findlay), his Beta pal.
Bernard and Lenina are vacationing in Savage Lands, a theme park modelled a little too closely on Westworld in which people act out the supposedly sinful values of the old order for the entertainment of tourists. It is while they settle into their hotel room at the park that Lenina and Bernard suddenly realise they want to be alone together – a shockingly dirty idea in a world that has outlawed monogamy and marriage – and that “it could be our wedding night”.
“In Huxley’s book, characters were given a hard choice between freedom and happiness”
“We’re savages,” gasps Lenina, as it dawns on the two what they actually want. It is a scene so highly charged and sympathetically played that you only wish the rest of the show had lived up to it. The problem with Brave New World is that it is trying to be Huxley’s future in some scenes and trying to be our future in others. The two do not mix well.
Some of Huxley’s ideas about the future loom over us still. The potential eugenic applications of CRISPR gene editing keep many a medical ethicist awake at night. In other respects, however, Huxley’s dystopia has been superseded by new threats. Artificial intelligence is changing our relationship with expertise, so who needs human Alphas? At the other end of the social scale, Epsilons would struggle to find anything to do in today’s automated factories.
Squeezed by our technology into middle-ranking roles (in Huxley’s book, we would be Betas and Gammas), we aren’t nearly as homogenous and pliable as Huxley imagined we would be. Information technology has facilitated, rather than dampened, our innate tribalism. The difference between the haves and have-nots in our society is infocentric rather than genetic.
In Huxley’s book, the lands left for those deemed savages featured an unreconstructed humanity full of violence and sorrow. Characters were given a hard choice between freedom and happiness. None of that toughness makes it to the screen. At least, not yet.
The TV series is a weirdly weightless offering: a dystopia without lessons for the present day. It is as consumable and addictive as a capsule of soma, but no more nutritious.
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Lauren Beukes’s new speculative novel imagines a world stripped overnight of men. Do women do a better job of running things?

Humans 22 July 2020
By Sally Adee
In Afterland, a mother tries to flee the US with her son after almost all males die
Getty Images

Afterland
Lauren Beukes
Michael Joseph (UK) and Mullholland Books (US)

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IF ALL the human cells in your body were to suddenly dematerialise, your outline would briefly persist, in all its exquisite detail, in the form of the billions of bacteria and viruses that colonise your every nook and cranny, still suspended in the shape of the frame your body provided.
Something analogous happens in Lauren Beukes’s novel Afterland, available in July worldwide and in September in the UK. Over about two years, a pandemic kills nearly every man in the world, leaving its patriarchal systems staffed exclusively by women. Cole, the mother of one of the precious few surviving boys, needs to get him out of the US and back to their home in South Africa. Her sister, meanwhile, wants to sell him. This gives the novel its structure and speed: it is a deceptively simple heist caper, with Cole on the run across the US from both her sister and the Department for the Protection of Males.
The organisation is charged with imprisoning the few males that remain, probing them to find whatever biological quirk has spared them from the plague and using that knowledge to find a vaccine for the virus. Its aim of jump-starting society “back to normal” will be uncomfortably familiar as we too languish in a pandemic limbo between the Before and the After, hoping for our own vaccine. The misguided waiting game in the novel results in a few temporary accommodations to reality: straight women negotiate awkward first dates with one another, while fake baby bumps become the hottest fashion accessory.
So who gets to maintain civilisation now, and do women run a better society than men? This is where the book shines as one of the best thought experiments of its kind, in which Beukes has stitched together the surprise matriarchy of The Power, the millenarian despair of Children of Men and the deeply intelligent questions of Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.
The Power – in which women develop the ability to give electric shocks, ending their status as the “weaker sex” once and for all – concludes that women are just as bad as men when in ultimate control.

Beukes’s take is more ambiguous. Like Le Guin, she seems to conclude that it doesn’t much matter if it is women or men in charge of society, as it is the structures themselves that turn us into monsters. “You have to be bigger and meaner as a woman to claim your turf,” Cole’s sister tells herself, negotiating her nephew’s kidnapping on behalf of the widow of the kingpin she used to work for. The widow has slid into his place, just as easily as the thugs around her have shifted from being vicious beauty queens to vicious enforcers. The Sisters of Sorrow, the religious community in which Cole and her son take refuge, somehow figures out how to make Christianity even more violently misogynistic in a world without men.
“There is no guarantee that the once-oppressed will wield power any more judiciously than their oppressors”
Yet it isn’t all nihilism. Beukes seeds the book with hopeful rumours of matriarchal societies that have sprung up in other countries. There are never many details beyond the promise, like mirages just over the horizon. “They say the matriarchal societies have been a lot better about getting rid of the homosexuality laws,” promises an email from a friend trying to help them escape across the Atlantic. It is a promise of a better body politic.
Afterland is that rare creature, a ripping tale that neither shies away from big questions nor interesting answers. What happens when the powerless get power? There is no guarantee that the previously oppressed will wield it any more judiciously than those who oppressed them. It isn’t about the individuals. It is about the society they need to maintain.

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By Michael Marshall
Tools found in the Chiquihuite cave in Zacatecas, Mexico, suggest humans arrived there early
Mads Thomsen

HUMANS seem to have been living in the Americas as early as 33,000 years ago – 15,000 years before the most widely accepted date. The finding implies that people arrived there before the peak of the last glacial period and there is a long American prehistory we are yet to uncover.
The first American settlers were probably Homo sapiens, but we can’t rule out extinct groups like Neanderthals and Denisovans. The settlers probably entered from north-east Asia across a land bridge linking Asia and Alaska. This was submerged by rising seas when the ice sheets melted at the end of the last glacial period.
Most archaeologists accept that humans were in the Americas 18,000 years ago. Now two studies bolster the idea that people got there much earlier.

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Ciprian Ardelean at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas in Mexico and his colleagues have spent the past decade excavating Chiquihuite cave in Zacatecas. They have found almost 2000 stone tools buried in sediments in the cave, including blades, points and scrapers. No human remains or DNA have been found.
The youngest samples of sediment are at least 12,200 years old, and the oldest may be 33,150 years old (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2509-0). This suggests that people lived in the Americas before a crucial event: the last glacial maximum – the peak of the last glaciation. Between 26,500 and 19,000 years ago, ice sheets extended across much of North America. This was thought to make condition too harsh for people to enter the Americas, but the new findings suggest humans were already present.

The second study compiles reliably dated archaeological sites to track the spread of people across North America. Lorena Becerra-Valdivia at the University of New South Wales in Australia and Thomas Higham at the University of Oxford, who are also on Ardelean’s team, assembled dates from 42 sites in North America and north-east Asia. Chiquihuite cave was the oldest reliably dated site (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2491-6).
During and just after the last glacial maximum, North America seems to have been sparsely populated, with numbers exploding about 14,700 years ago as the ice receded, says Becerra-Valdivia.

The two studies offer “strong evidence for an earlier presence of humans in North America than has been fully accepted”, says Deborah Bolnick at the University of Connecticut.
Until now, it has been widely assumed that only modern humans reached the Americas, since groups like Neanderthals died out millennia before anyone was thought to have got there. Ardelean says we shouldn’t assume that any more. “I don’t see why other species wouldn’t have entered America,” he says.
But Bolnick and Becerra-Valdivia both say the first Americans were most likely to have been modern humans.
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Short film The Ball Method tells the story of Alice Ball. She helped develop an effective treatment for leprosy, then a senior colleague claimed her work as his own giving her no credit

Humans 15 July 2020
By Gege Li
Kiersey Clemons plays chemist Alice Ball, known for “the Ball method”
Haye Yukio

Film
The Ball Method
Dagmawi Abebe

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Amazon Video Direct from August
IN it declared global elimination on that basis in 2000 I think: 2000, the World Health Organization declared that leprosy had been eliminated as a global public health problem, due to effective multi-drug treatments. It is a disease that has long been stigmatised due to disfiguration it can cause. The story of one unsung hero in the development of a treatment for leprosy is told in the short film The Ball Method.
The story starts with archive footage of the Hawaiian island of Moloka’i, where thousands of people with leprosy were quarantined from 1866 by the Hawaiian government. Back then, little was known about the disease and people feared it was highly contagious, though we now know it doesn’t spread very easily.
Countries such as the UK, the US and India exiled people with leprosy to remote locations, where they were left to die. One of the film’s clips shows a child covered in sores on his face and hands.
By 1915, when the film is set, one remedy was beginning to show promise. We are introduced to Alice Ball (played by Kiersey Clemons), a chemistry professor at the University of Hawaii, as she visits Kalihi Hospital in Honolulu. Ball has been enlisted to help develop a treatment for leprosy by Dr Harry Hollmann (Kyle Secor) using the oil from the seeds of the chaulmoogra tree. Chaulmoogra oil seemed to work in treating some cases of leprosy and had already been used for centuries in China and India for skin ailments.

Taking the oil orally caused nausea, so it was administered by injection. But this method was flawed. In its unpurified form, chaulmoogra oil isn’t water soluble and doesn’t react well with the body; oil oozes painfully out of the forearm of one patient with leprosy as he is given a shot.
“Ball was the first woman and first black American at the University of Hawaii to teach chemistry”
In between teaching students at her university, Ball tries to purify the oil into chemical compounds called ethyl esters so it can be successfully injected. To do this, the oil first needs to be converted into fatty acids. Ball has a eureka moment. She realises the acid needs to be frozen overnight to give enough time for the esters to separate, as well as to stop them degrading at room temperature.
Her discovery, the Ball method, led to the most effective treatment for leprosy at the time, one that was used until the 1940s, when a full cure was found. Why, then, is Alice Ball not more famous?
One reason is that credit wasn’t given to her at the time. Ball’s colleague Arthur Dean (played by Wallace Langham), who was president of the University of Hawaii, took her findings as his own, naming the technique the Dean method. There was no mention of Ball in his papers. She didn’t get credit until 1922 when Hollmann published a paper detailing her work.
Director Dagmawi Abebe says this is why he felt it was so important to make the film. “When I came across Alice’s story and saw all the amazing accomplishments she’s done, and how not a lot of people even knew about her, I really wanted to make that known.”
There are few historical records about Ball. She didn’t keep a diary that we know of and died in 1916 aged 24, possibly after inhaling chlorine gas in a lab accident.
So Abebe had to make a lot of choices in how to portray her. He says he wanted to depict her as strong and ambitious given the barriers she is likely to have faced.
Looking at the facts, that doesn’t seem like much of a stretch. At only 23, Ball was the first woman and first black American to teach chemistry and obtain a master’s degree at the University of Hawaii. But being a black woman in this environment wasn’t easy. In one scene, as Ball takes a class, students (all male and white) snigger as they pass around a picture of a crudely-drawn monkey.
For Abebe, who is originally from Ethiopia, it was important to highlight this aspect of Ball’s experience. “I’m interested in telling a story where I feel like a lot of minority stories went untold or hidden,” he says. This narrative is at last finding a wider audience.
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Japan Sinks: 2020, streaming now on Netflix, brings Sakyo Komatsu’s hit 1973 science-fiction novel up to the present day. An ordinary family is put to the test as Japan is demolished in a series of massive earthquakes.
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X+Y: A mathematician’s manifesto for rethinking gender sees Eugenia Cheng apply maths to gender bias and inequality. Never mind identity politics, she says: thinking using mathematics can gift us a fairer world.

Ben Fisher

Visit
Fons Americanus is artist Kara Walker’s 13-metre-tall classically inspired fountain, whose stay in London’s Tate Modern has now been extended. It didn’t cost the earth: it is made from an innovative carveable, acrylic composite.
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