Humans

The Maquan river, the upper section of the Yarlung Tsangpo river, which flows through the Tibetan plateauTAO Images Limited/Alamy
Ancient humans managed to live on the Tibetan plateau, the highest plateau on Earth, during the coldest period of the past 2.5 million years, demonstrating their resilience and adaptability.
The last glacial maximum spanned 26,500 to 19,000 years ago, marking the harshest chapter of the Late Pleistocene ice age. During this time, polar ice caps and ice sheets covered vast swathes of Earth and global temperatures hovered around 4°C to 5°C below those that occur on average today.… More

The future of Earth looks bleak, but we have the capacity to change courseShutterstock/Liu zishan
The Decline and Fall of the Human EmpireHenry Gee Pan Macmillan (UK: Available now US: 18 March)
We’re doomed, says Henry Gee, doomed! Homo sapiens is reaching a crest, after which our global population size will start to drop. In his new book, The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire: Why our species is on the edge of extinction, Gee’s mission is to trace the path from our genesis to our peak, then on to our quite possible annihilation.
When H. sapiens… More

The move from hunting and gathering to farming happened around the same time everywhereLUIS & MARTA MONTANYA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month.
Let’s talk about the biggest coincidence in human evolution. To fully appreciate this coincidence, you need to see it in context. The oldest known hominins lived 7 million years ago, so we have been evolving separately from apes for at least that long. Our own species, Homo sapiens, seems to be about 300,000 years… More

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