Humans

Cognitive scientist Gillian Forrester is challenging chimps and gorillas to solve puzzles in an attempt to address the long-standing mystery of how humans evolved the ability to speak

Humans

13 September 2022

By Alison George
Nabil Nezzar
IT LIES at the centre of human experience, and yet how our incredible capacity for complex language arose is a mystery. We are still far from understanding why we are the only living ape with such a skill.
Answering these questions is difficult, not least because speech doesn’t leave its trace in the fossil record. However, we can look to our ape relatives for clues, as cognitive scientist Gillian Forrester at Birkbeck, University of London, is doing. She has developed puzzle mazes for chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and children that shed light on one idea of how language evolved. She tells New Scientist how her findings are challenging our understanding of the brain and painting a clearer picture of how language began.
Alison George: What inspired you to study the evolution of language?
Gillian Forrester: I’ve always been intrigued by the efforts to teach chimpanzees to speak, which were going on while I was growing up in the 1980s. They were a massive failure when it came to chimps learning to combine words into more complex phrases.
This got me intrigued about the common factors between human language and other animal communication systems, and how and why a language system emerged in humans but not for other great apes.
How do we start to answer that question?
We don’t have our ancient ancestors to look at to see how things changed over evolutionary time because they are all extinct, and cognition doesn’t fossilise. So all we can do is make suppositions based on their artefacts, such as tools and things they were buried with, to give us an indication of their communication skills. … More

Paul de Gelder’s Shark and David Shiffman’s Why Sharks Matter aim to turn the all-too-common public panic about the predator into interest in their conservation

Humans

7 September 2022

By Elle Hunt
A bull shark (Carcharhinus leucas) swimming in the Pacific Oceanshutterstock/Leonardo Gonzalez
Shark, Paul de Gelder (HarperCollins) and Why Sharks Matter, David Shiffman (Johns Hopkins University Press)
BY FEBRUARY 2009, Paul de Gelder had spent thousands of hours in the water as part of his job as a diver in the Australian Navy.
Early one morning, he was conducting a counterterrorism trial, swimming solo around Sydney Harbour, when he was attacked by a 3-metre-long shark. The fish slammed into him with its jaws, pinning de Gelder’s right hand to his leg. He recalls … More

A dystopian future isn’t inevitable. By prioritising the needs of our children and grandchildren today, we can give them a world without poverty, discrimination and so many other evils, says William MacAskill

Humans

| Comment

7 September 2022

By William MacAskill
Simone Rotella
CURRENTLY, society does little to care for its future. In my new book, What We Owe the Future, I make the case for longtermism: the view that we should be doing much more to protect the interests of generations to come. Longtermism puts the needs of our children and grandchildren front and centre in our moral thinking, and takes seriously the sheer scale of the future that may be ahead of us.
Why should we look so far ahead? The case for longtermism is grounded in three key ideas.
The first is that future people matter. The moral worth … More

From a parched Earth, Song Ji-an joins a lunar mission to find out how her sister died. With nods to the 1972 Solaris and Alien, word-of-mouth hit The Silent Sea is an intriguing show, says Bethan Ackerley

Humans

7 September 2022

By Bethan Ackerley
Song Ji-an (Bae Doona) joins a mission that finds a terrifying truthNetflix
The Silent Sea
Director Choi Hang-yong
Netflix
IF YOU live in Europe, this seems an appropriate time to watch The Silent Sea. With even rainy nations touched by what may be the continent’s worst drought in 500 years, it is easier than ever to imagine an arid future for Earth.
This South Korean sci-fi thriller debuted on Netflix in December last year to little fanfare, but its acolytes have spread the word and it is now a word-of-mouth … More

A 31,000-year-old Stone Age skeleton has been found with the lower part of its leg cleanly removed, and the bones reveal that the child survived for several years after it happened

Humans

7 September 2022

By Clare Wilson
The left tibia and fibula end suddenly (on the left) where they were cutTim Maloney
A Stone Age child living 31,000 years ago in what is now Borneo seems to have had their leg carefully amputated above the foot and survived for several years afterwards.
This suggests that the hunter-gatherer community the person was part of had the medical skills to stop someone bleeding to death or dying from infection – both common hazards of amputation before modern medicine, says Maxime Aubert at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia.
Before the latest finding, … More

The search for the direct ancestor of humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans has been protracted and puzzling. Now, fresh clues are adding a surprising twist to the tale

Humans

31 August 2022

By Colin Barras
Martin O’Neill
THE year is 1933, and China is partly under the control of invading Japanese forces. During construction of a bridge near Harbin in the north-east, a local man working for the Japanese makes a stunning discovery: an ancient human skull. He recognises the skull’s value right away. Determined not to hand the fossil over to the occupiers, he buries it in an abandoned well.
There the skull remained until 2018, when, shortly before his death, the man told his family of its existence. In due course, the Harbin skull came into scientific hands. It was worth the wait, not least for the clues it offers those searching for the enigmatic Ancestor X – the species that gave rise to humanity.
For as long as researchers have been finding ancient human-like fossils, one question has been nagging away in the back of their minds: how are we related to other prehistoric groups and species? In particular, how do we fit in with the Neanderthals and Denisovans who shared Earth with us for most of our existence? It is this question that the discovery of Ancestor X promises to answer. However, the hunt for it has been fiendish, with major twists and turns along the way. In recent years, it has also led to some surprising discoveries, including the revelation that we had misunderstood the way our species, Homo sapiens, evolved. Now, with the re-emergence of the Harbin skull, the search for Ancestor X looks set to get easier in some ways – and a lot more difficult in others.
When it comes to the big picture of human evolution, universal consensus … More

The fruit of Synsepalum dulcificum, a plant native to West Africa, doesn’t taste sugary on its own, but any sour food you eat afterwards will turn miraculously sweet

Humans

31 August 2022

By Sam Wong
Wirestock, Inc./Alamy
MOST people find sugar hard to resist, and with good reason. Our big brains need lots of energy and sugary foods provide plenty of it. But when calories are too readily available, it is easy to overdo it.
There has been no shortage of research on sugar substitutes that trigger a sweet sensation without the calories, such as aspartame and sucralose, but these compounds also taste slightly bitter for many people. What’s more, evidence from animal and human studies has linked some to glucose intolerance and weight gain.
One promising alternative is found in the fruit of Synsepalum dulcificum … More

From working out a dead person’s last meal to the possible poisoning of the Buddha, a new book from David J. Gibson has some great tales about how plants help solve crimes – and are used to commit them

Humans

31 August 2022

By Kate Douglas

Forensic botany can be a key witness in cases of murder or rapemladenbalinovac/Getty Images
Planting Clues: How plants solve crimesDavid J. Gibson (Oxford University Press)

THEY called him the Sherlock Holmes of France – and, in fact, his antics did inspire the novelist Arthur Conan Doyle.

When Edmond Locard established his forensic science lab in 1912, the world had never seen anything like it. The place wasn’t much to look at – cramped quarters on the fourth floor of the Palais de Justice in Lyon – but there Locard set about laying … More