Humans

Filler words such as uh, mmm and huh may seem inarticulate, but without them human communication would be far less sophisticated

Humans 14 October 2020
By David Robson

Andy Smith

YOU might expect it to take more than a two-letter word to sink a politician’s credibility. But one did just that for Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, in June 2016. With a huge wildfire burning in the province of Alberta, he had been asked about the country’s capacity to cope. “Uh, certainly, I think we’re, uh, all aware that, uh, uh, a prime minister, uh, showing up at Fort McMurray, when firefighters are busy trying to, uh, uh, contain a massive raging wildfire is, uh, not a particularly helpful thing,” he began. Trudeau went on to use a total of 50 uhs in a statement lasting little more than a minute.
A video soon went viral, and online commentators were universally scathing. “Canada’s dumbest, uh, Prime Minister” wrote one viewer. Reading the unedited transcript, you may well have questioned Trudeau’s intelligence yourself. Surely such hesitation is a sign of sloppy thinking and ineloquence. Weren’t we taught as children to eliminate uhs from our conversation?
Yet the latest research shows that this is an unfounded prejudice. Far from being an inarticulate waste of breath, filler words like um, uh, mmm and huh are essential for efficient communication, sending important signals about the words we are about to say so that two speakers can better understand each other. “They streamline our interactions, smooth the flow of the conversation and manage our social relations,” says Mark Dingemanse, who studies language and social interaction at Radboud University in the Netherlands. Indeed, he argues that the complexity of our language today couldn’t have emerged without them. To which the obvious response … More

The Book of Malachi by T. C. Farren centres on a young man whose tongue has been cut out during a brutal civil war. It’s a tough, mind-bending morality tale

Humans 14 October 2020

Victor Moussa/Alamy

The Book of Malachi
T. C. Farren
Titan
THE main problem with this book is you aren’t going to want to read it. But it’s good and you should.
Malachi Dakwaa, the eponymous character in T. C. Farren’s novel, is a young man whose tongue was cut out in a brutal civil war. In the years since, he has eked out a half-life as a quality control manager at a chicken processing plant, ensuring the uniform compliance of shrink-wrapped body parts.
One day, he gets an offer for a job he didn’t apply for, with a payment he … More

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