Humans

Your genes and environment play a big part in forming you, but there is an unexplored third element at play too: luck. The chance events that shape your brain in the womb may influence who you become as much as your genetics, and perhaps even more than the effect of parenting

Humans

21 September 2022

By Clare Wilson
Chance events in the developing brain may be important for shaping who you becomeJiri Hera/Shutterstock
BATMAN became a vigilante after seeing his parents murdered. Wonder Woman’s crime-fighting abilities are thanks to her supernatural creation and childhood of athletic training. Many of us mortals have origin stories too, albeit less dramatic ones. You may feel, for instance, you have inherited cleverness from your mother or confidence from your father, or a love of cooking from fun times in the kitchen with grandparents.
One of the most fascinating questions about what makes us the way we are is how much of our personalities, abilities and interests is down to our genes and how much to our early environment – nature or nurture. But there is a third influence that has, until recently, gone under the radar: randomness. Specifically, chance events that affect nerve cells as the brain is developing. That is a colossal oversight. The latest research suggests that the role of this randomness in shaping who we are could be far greater than environmental factors, and in some cases as much as genetic ones. If so, we should really see ourselves as the product of nature, nurture and “noise”.
This isn’t just of interest to neuroscientists: it has profound implications for us all. We could stop fretting quite so much about our parenting choices and – sorry, Freud – we may also have to allocate less blame to our own parents for how we have turned out. “We have a tendency to develop narrative explanations for differences we see in people,” says Benjamin de Bivort … More

Ancient dung hints that 12,000 years ago, a population of hunter-gatherers in what is now Syria kept animals like sheep or gazelles around – probably for food

Humans

14 September 2022

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre
Dung spherulites were found in samples of archaeological sediment from Abu Hureyra in SyriaAndrew Moore (CC-BY 4.0)
Some hunter-gatherers probably kept sheep, or possibly gazelles, outside their huts before they even started farming crops, according to traces of ancient animal dung.
Alexia Smith at the University of Connecticut and her colleagues have found spherulites – tiny spheres of calcium found primarily in the faeces of grass-eating ruminants like cattle, sheep and antelopes – outside groups of huts belonging to humans who lived in what is now Syria more than 12,000 years ago.
They also found charred spherulites in fireplaces. This suggests that humans lived with herbivores, like sheep, in this region approximately 2000 years earlier than previously thought and were using their dung as a fuel source, says Smith.Advertisement

“They’re still hunters and gatherers, and they’re still relying on hunted gazelle, but now they’re starting to bring live animals to the site and keep them for however long they need them,” says Smith. “And this result is a bit surprising, because it’s earlier than agriculture, and earlier than what we see in adjacent regions.”
Ruminants release significant quantities of spherulites in their faeces, whereas omnivores, including humans, release very small amounts, and carnivores and horses – which are herbivores but not ruminants – release even fewer, says Smith.

Smith was originally curious about when ancient populations first started burning animal dung as fuel, which is done because it can maintain a very high heat. So, she started looking for spherulites – which are about 5 to 20 micrometres across – in the dust at a human settlement at Abu Hureyra – in modern-day Syria near the Euphrates river – which was inhabited between about 13,300 and 7800 years ago.
In dust from as far back as 12,300 to 12,800 years ago, she found darkened spherulites suggesting that dung had been burned at high temperatures, probably as a heat source, she says. But to her surprise, she also found undarkened spherulites all around the outside of huts, suggesting these people were tending to sheep, goats, cows or gazelles just outside their front doors. The earliest evidence we have for crop farming in the region dates back to about 11,000 years ago.

“Very quickly, I realised, ‘Oh, my goodness, we have an opportunity here to actually consider the antiquity of live animals on the site’,” she says.
By the late Neolithic period, about 8000 years ago, though, spherulites started to disappear from around the huts, says Smith. That may be because the herds had become so large that people were tending to them on pastures further away from the settlement. “It seems like kind of the opposite of what you’d expect,” she says. “But then, it makes sense, because if you have a huge number of animals, it’s not sustainable to keep them on site.”
This doesn’t mean the animals were domesticated, though, adds Smith. Nor does it indicate which ruminants were living outside the huts. What is more likely is that humans tethered wild animals and fed them to keep them alive as a later meat source. “At the end of the day, these animals were dinner,” she says.
Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0272947
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New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

Humans

14 September 2022

Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) in Lucasfilm’s AndorLucasfilm Ltd
Watch
Andor takes Star Wars fans back to before the events of Rogue One, and finds Cassian Andor (Diego Luna, pictured above) doing all he can to avoid getting involved with a seemingly doomed rebellion. On Disney+ from 21 September.
Read
Stars in Your Hand, by Kimberly Arcand and Megan Watzke, shows how to make models of the cosmos using a 3D printer and 3D computer imaging. Luckily, it includes easy instructions for creating stars and more. On sale from 20 September.
… More

In unstable times we need to think clearly about the future. There is a lot to learn from David Christian’s Future Stories: A user’s guide to the future, an ambitious book with a Big History approach

Humans

14 September 2022

By Elle Hunt
Facing the scenarios ahead is vital – while we can still do somethingBrian Jackson/Alamy
Future Stories
David Christian (Penguin Random House)
NOW more than ever, it feels like the future is uncertain: the times, they are unprecedented. Adam Tooze, an economic historian at Columbia University in New York City, recently described the global outlook as a “polycrisis”, remarkable not only for the number of risks currently active, but also their volatility.
As well as the pandemic, we have the invasion of Ukraine, inflation, pressures on food and energy markets and upheavals in … More

Bryn Nelson’s extraordinary book asks why we let a vital natural resource, human faeces, get flushed away when we could be using it to heal guts, improve soil and understand our past

Humans

14 September 2022

By Chelsea Whyte
Clinical-looking modern toilets may help fuel unhelpful notions that faecal matter is disgustingShutterstock/Oasisamuel
Flush
Bryn Nelson (Hachette)
ASK me to name the world’s best invention, and I will always give the same answer: the toilet. Its ability to whisk waste away to a safe place where potential pathogens and odours can do no harm isn’t to be sniffed at. But an unusual book has convinced me that toilets make it too easy to waste our waste.
Bryn Nelson’s Flush: The remarkable science of an unlikely treasure explains the many ways … More

From Jason deCaires Taylor’s underwater statues, walking to oblivion, to Carl Chun’s detailed illustration of an octopus, a new book explores how our oceans have inspired art through the centuries

Humans

14 September 2022

By Alison Flood
Jason deCaires Taylor, RubiconJason deCaires Taylor
A WOMAN is immortalised, gazing at her phone, part of an anonymous crowd of sculptures by British artist Jason deCaires Taylor. But this is no ordinary setting: deCaires Taylor’s pH-neutral marine cement figures (above) are 14 metres underwater off the coast of Lanzarote, Spain, and will eventually be reclaimed by the sea. The work’s name, Rubicon, draws from the idea the crowd, and the world, are heading towards a point of no return as temperatures rise.
The image of Rubicon is taken from a new book, Ocean: Exploring the marine world, which details how our oceans have been a “symbol of infinity, beauty, solitude, isolation, danger, happiness, weightlessness and longing” in art through the centuries. Featuring more than 300 images ranging from Roman mosaics to nautical cartography, Ocean also highlights how climate change has affected the seas.
NNtonio Rod, Trachyphyllia, from Coral ColorsNNtonio RodAdvertisement
NNtonio Rod (Antonio Rodríguez Canto) took 25,000 photos over the course of a year to make the award-winning time-lapse film Coral Colors (2016), from which the striking still Trachyphyllia (see above), featured in the book, is taken. Rod wanted his film to raise awareness of corals as they become more vulnerable to climate change-related bleaching.
Biodiversity Heritage Library/Contributed by MBLWHOILibrary
Ocean also features marine biologist Carl Chun’s stunning illustration of an octopus (Muusoctopus, formerly Polypus levis), drawn from a specimen collected near the Kerguelen Islands in the south of the Indian Ocean during the 19th century. The illustration (above) is included in Die Cephalopoden, Chun’s seminal 1910 work on cephalopod molluscs.
Book publisher Phaidon Editions

More on these topics: More

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