Humans

Charles Fréger
Once upon a time, a strong, attractive hero lost one or both of his parents. He then overcame a series of obstacles and faced off against a monster that had terrorised his community. The hero vanquished the monster and was celebrated.
If this story sounds familiar, that’s because it is the road travelled by Superman, Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker and countless other fictional heroes stretching back centuries. Its enduring appeal has puzzled researchers for nearly as long. However, in recent years, the study of storytelling has been revitalised, as linguists, psychologists and experts in cultural evolution have begun probing the subject using large databases of myths and folktales, powerful algorithms and an evolutionary mindset. We are finally starting to get answers to key questions, including what makes a good story, why some are more enduring than others and exactly how far back we can trace the roots of the most popular ones – as well as how stories have traversed time and space.

It is an epic quest, but there has never been a better time to undertake it. Unlike the Brothers Grimm and other early folktale collectors, modern surveyors of storytelling needn’t do painstaking fieldwork – they don’t even have to stray from their computer screens to chart the emergence and evolution of stories. “Social media is almost a natural experiment in storytelling that, through its very platform, does the collection,” says folklorist and ethnographer Timothy Tangherlini at the University of California, Berkeley. What’s more, this new scientific approach can illuminate some phenomena that appear to be modern,… More

Bones that appear to have been fashioned into tools date back 1.5 million yearsCSIC
Ancient humans were regularly making tools out of animal bones 1.5 million years ago – more than a million years earlier than previously thought. This indicates that they could adapt the techniques they used to make stone tools to repurpose bone, a very different material.
It also raises the question of why there is no record of people consistently making bone tools for another million years. Have examples in that gap not been preserved or discovered, or did people abandon them in favour of something better?… More

Yersinia pestis bacteria viewed with an electron microscopeConnect Images/Alamy
An ancient ancestor of the pathogen that would later cause the Black Death and other major pandemics has been identified in a Bronze Age domestic sheep in Russia – making it one of the oldest pathogens ever found in an animal.
Its DNA closely matches that of plague bacteria found in European human skeletons from the same period, providing the first evidence that the disease could have spread between humans and their own livestock well before the pathogen evolved to jump from rodents to people via fleas. More

A sample of organic glass found inside the skull of a man from HerculaneumPier Paolo Petrone
The eruption of Mount Vesuvius around 2000 years ago caused one man’s brain to explode and turned the fragments to glass. The discovery is the only known instance of soft tissue turning to glass and sheds new light on how eruptions kill – and how we might protect people.
The volcanic disaster struck in AD 79, burying the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae in thick layers of ash that eventually solidified. At least 1500 bodies and thousands of ancient papyrus scrolls have… More

We may live in an age of doomscrolling, but we can keep wild, apocalyptic thinking at bayStephen Taylor/Alamy
A Brief History of the End of the F*cking WorldTom Phillips (Wildfire)
In 1950s Chicago, aliens from the planet Clarion made contact with Dorothy Martin. They warned her of a “holocaust of the coming events” that would begin on 21 December, 1954. Lake Michigan would subsume Chicago, and the rest of the world would follow into oblivion. Martin and her followers would be airlifted to safety on Clarion via flying saucers – but only if they first removed all… More

The Bété I archaeological site in Ivory Coast was overgrown when researchers visited in 2020Jimbob Blinkhorn, MPG
Humans were living in a tropical rainforest in West Africa 150,000 years ago. The finding pushes human habitation of tropical forests much further back in time, suggesting our ancestors were able to live in a wide variety of terrains.
It has generally been thought that humans evolved in open grasslands and savannahs, says Eleanor Scerri at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany. Instead, she says, our ancestors were highly adaptable. “Ecological diversity is at the heart… More

Rectangular buildings became common from about 10,000 years ago, as seen in this reconstruction of the ancient city of Çatalhöyük in Turkeyselimaksan/iStockphoto/Getty Images
Buildings with corners have a much deeper history than we thought, adding an unexpected twist to a curious architectural mystery from the dawn of village life.
Archaeologists have long been aware of a global trend in early architecture. From south-west Asia to the Americas, the very earliest settlements typically contained buildings with a round or oval-shaped ground plan. Then, usually a few thousand years later, these apparently went out of fashion, becoming… More

Wooden spears from Schöningen, Germany, dated to 300,000 years agoMinkusimages; Matthias Vogel, NLD.
Prehistoric people may have used throwing spears to hunt large animals 300,000 years ago – and perhaps as far back as 2 million years ago. A new analysis of preserved wooden spears indicates they could be thrown over medium distances, as well as used for thrusting.
“Traditionally, you would say thrusting is more simple than throwing, as a technological concept,” says Dirk Leder at the Lower Saxony State Office for Cultural Heritage in Hanover, Germany. “You have to understand aerodynamics for throwing to… More