Humans

A set of ancient footprints seems to show children splashing around in water that had pooled in tracks left by a now-extinct ground sloth

Humans

6 April 2022

By Colin Barras
A 3D model of footprints discovered at White Sands National Park, New Mexico, created from multiple photographs. It shows the prints of several prehistoric children jostling around the larger marks left by a giant ground slothDavid Bustos/Matthew Bennett
The delight that children find when they jump in muddy puddles has a surprisingly long history. Fossil footprints discovered at an archaeological site in New Mexico show that a group of youngsters living at least 11,500 years ago spent a few carefree minutes engaged in some joyful splashing. But the world was very different back then: the puddles in question had formed in the deep footprints left by a now-extinct giant ground sloth.
The footprints were discovered at White Sands National Park, a site that is rapidly gaining a reputation for its astonishing archaeology. Within the park, there is a playa – a dried up lake-bed – some 100 square kilometres in size. The playa contains thousands of footprints left by humans, mammoths, sabre-toothed cats and other inhabitants of prehistoric North America. Some of the tracks suggest that humans had reached the Americas 23,000 years ago – about 8000 years earlier than we had thought.
But what really sets the ancient human footprints at White Sands apart is their power to vividly show us what life was like for early Americans. Matthew Bennett at Bournemouth University, UK, has been studying tracks at the site for several years. He and his team can measure the prints to work out things like the age of the person who made them and how fast they were walking or running. Then, they can follow them and see how events such as animal hunts unfolded. “It’s written in the tracks what happened,” says Bennett.Advertisement
In unpublished work, Bennett and his team have found one collection of prints that tell a particularly evocative tale. It begins with a set of roughly 40-centimetre-long footprints that show a giant ground sloth – measuring perhaps 3 metres from nose to tail – once lumbered across the landscape.
Later, a group of three to five small children showed up. The jumbled mess of footprints they left are focused around one sloth print. The way the children’s tracks deform the sloth print tells us that the ground was wet, says Bennett. It is impossible to be certain about what was going on, but Bennett says the best interpretation is that water had pooled in the sloth print to create a puddle that was perfect for splashing in – an irresistible target for children, even in prehistory.

Kevin Hatala at Chatham University in Pennsylvania says he is excited to learn more about the tracks once they appear in a formal scientific report. “Records like this demonstrate the unique potential for footprints to record information that is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to observe or infer from other materials such as bones and stone tools,” he says.
Kim Charlie and her sister, Bonnie Leno, have made trips to see Bennett and his colleagues at work, studying the prints. They are both members of the Pueblo of Acoma near Albuquerque in New Mexico, one of several groups of Pueblo people who feel a spiritual connection to White Sands.
Charlie is fascinated by the idea that giant ground sloths were so common in the world inhabited by the first humans at White Sands, who may be among the ancestors of the present-day Pueblo people. “It’s fascinating,” says Charlie. “And you think: jeez, were these animals friendly?”
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A new wave of archaeological investigations is reconstructing intimate details of our ancestors’ lives from fossilised footprints. They give us glimpses of everything from parent-child relationships to the thrill of a giant sloth hunt

Humans

6 April 2022

By Colin Barras
Rupert Gruber
A YOUNG woman is struggling across a muddy plain with a 3-year-old child on her left hip. She puts the youngster down to catch her breath. But she is too afraid to pause for long. The pair are alone, an easy target for the sabre-toothed cats that may lurk nearby. She picks up the child again and hurries on, vanishing into the distance. For a time, all is quiet. Then a giant ground sloth plods across the path she took. The animal catches the woman’s scent and is instantly on guard, rearing up and turning to scan the landscape for human hunters.
What was it like to live in the Stone Age? There must have been moments of joy, fear, love, pain and perhaps even wonder for the people who inhabited Earth tens of thousands of years ago. But emotions don’t fossilise, so we are shut out of those moments, separated by a vast chasm of time. We can find all the bones and tools we like, but they won’t tell us about the experience of life for our ancient ancestors.
Then again, a new window on their everyday existence may be cracking open. As people went about their lives, they left untold numbers of footprints behind. These recorded their behaviour in a unique way, capturing everything from nervous shuffles to determined sprints. What’s more, the tracks have an order to them, meaning events can be read like a narrative. That story of the woman, the child and the giant sloth is a vivid example we have found written in ancient tracks – but it certainly isn’t the only … More

One of the first excavations to find extinct human remains took place on Java in the 1890s, and the original documentation reveals details about the mudflow that encased the fossils there

Humans

30 March 2022

By Michael Marshall
Archaeological dig in Indonesia where the Java Man fossils were foundpublic domain sourced / access rights from Paul Fearn / Alamy Stock Photo
The first large excavation of ancient human remains in Indonesia, in the 1890s, were done with great care – according to an analysis of unpublished documents from the dig.
The original excavations revealed that Homo erectus on Java lived in a lush valley alongside a range of large animals, including antelope and elephants. Researchers including Paul C. H. Albers at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands have analysed the records, and they say the animals in the fossil bed … More

From hydras to humans, this short book by two marine biologists explores the peculiar process of regeneration, showing that it is a far bigger subject than it might at first seem

Humans

30 March 2022

By Simon Ings

Is the regeneration of a forest after fire fundamentally the same as an animal regrowing a body part?KarenHBlack/Getty Images
What Is Regeneration?
Jane Maienschein and Kate MacCord
University of Chicago Press (out 6 April)Advertisement

SOME animals are able to grow an entire new body from tiny parts. Crabs and lobsters can regenerate lost tentacles and claws. Hydras and some worms can regrow their heads. We humans can replace our skin, hair, fingernails and even our liver.
Regeneration is such a peculiar ability that, even in science, it is surprisingly under-researched. As a result, there is much we still don’t know. What Is Regeneration? is a collaborative effort between Jane Maienschein and Kate MacCord, both at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to fill some of the gaps. Together, they explore why regeneration occurs when it does, why it doesn’t always happen and what the process can tell us about the grander mysteries of birth, death and development.
It turns out to be a seemingly simple phenomena that, on closer inspection, becomes far more complicated. For instance, are we thinking only about regeneration of structure, about regeneration of function or both? Is the regeneration of the gut flora in your intestines after a course of antibiotics or the regeneration of woodland after a forest fire at all similar to regrowing a body part?
To try to pin it down, the authors begin with a history of the study of the subject, starting with Aristotle and ending with Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz’s ongoing research on cellular signalling. Their account pivots on the work of Thomas Hunt Morgan (better known as a pioneer of chromosomal genetics) and, in particular, his 1901 book Regeneration. Morgan, more than anyone before or since, attempted to establish clear boundaries around the phenomenon, and the terminology he came up with remains useful.
He identified three kinds of regeneration. The first two are restorative regeneration, which occurs in response to injury, and physiological regeneration, which describes replacement, as when an elk moults its antlers and new ones grow in their place. The third, morphallaxis, refers to more extreme cases, such as when a hydra, cut into pieces, reorganises itself into a new hydra without going through the normal processes of cell division.
The key to this categorisation is that the mechanisms of regeneration aren’t, as the authors put it, “a special response to changing environmental conditions but, rather, an internal normal process of growth and development”.
So here is the problem: if the mechanisms of regeneration can’t be distinguished from those of growth and development, what is to stop everything ceaselessly regenerating? What dictates the process of regrowth and why does it happen only in some tissues, in some species and only some of the time?
Maienschein and MacCord argue that, to fully understand this, we need to see regeneration as a window into the world of biology in general, and the complex feedback loops that decide what grows, divides and dies, where and when.
Far from being an interesting curio, then, studying regeneration can tell us much about life in general, from a cellular level right up to the level of ecosystems, and inform everything from regenerative therapies using stem cells to ecosystem protection and recovery.
Seen through this lens, regeneration is a far bigger subject than it might at first seem, and Maienschein and MacCord take fewer than 200 pages to anatomise the complexities and ambiguities that their simple question throws up. It is to their credit that they mostly focus on the big picture and don’t make the biology any more complex than it needs to be.

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By Katie Smith-Wong

Looking for one whale in the vast, deep ocean was never going to be easyCourtesy of Bleecker Street
The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52
Joshua Zeman
Digital download from 4 AprilAdvertisement

IN 1989, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts detected an unknown sonic presence at 52 hertz. It was initially thought to be from a submarine, but marine biologist William Watkins later determined that it was the sonar signature of a whale, which he gave the nickname “52”.
It is an unusually high frequency for whale vocalisations, and Watkins was intrigued enough to search for 52 until his death in 2004. But despite picking up 52’s call every year, Watkins never found the mysterious whale.
In The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52, US film-maker Joshua Zeman picks up the search where Watkins left off, and sets out to find a whale that has since taken on almost mythical proportions.
Why 52 calls at this frequency is also a mystery – the whale’s species hasn’t been confirmed, and it is possible that it is the only one of its kind in the ocean. The one thing we do know is that 52 is almost certainly a he: male whales do the singing.
The reason for 52’s presumed loneliness has nothing to do with the fact that he has always been detected swimming alone. Instead, it is because the unique frequency of his call means that other whales can’t understand to respond. With 52’s unique call as the only lead, Zeman launches a seven-day search mission with bioacoustics specialist John Hildebrand and research biologist John Calambokidis.
They begin in the waters off California, at the Port of Los Angeles – the busiest container port in the western hemisphere. Their initial hopes aren’t high: the Pacific Ocean is deep and wide and the chances of finding 52 seem roughly the same as those of 52 finding a mate.
Zeman’s documentary has a strong sense of exploration and ambition: he believes he can locate 52, who has become the Moby Dick to Zeman’s Ahab. Although there is an underlying sense of excitement as to whether 52 can finally be found, there is a human aspect to the search and a personal story behind Zeman’s fascination.
In our increasingly connected world where contact and interaction is only the click of a button away, the fact that so many people still report feeling lonely makes it easy to identify with 52’s situation. There is something deeply affecting about a creature as intelligent and social as we know whales to be, swimming the vast ocean, year after year, never having any proper contact with another of its kind.
This, combined with a growing awareness of the harm that human activity has caused whales, has made 52 something of a focal point for whale conservation, with articles, poems and even a song by the K-pop band BTS about his plight.
Yet this is a story that goes deeper than just one whale. Whale populations are still under threat from hunting, pollution, climate change and collisions with ships. Even if they avoid these perils, the noise of shipping can drown out a whale’s calls, regardless of the frequency it may use. Arguably, Zeman’s quest says more about our collective guilt about this state of affairs than it does about our desire to solve the scientific mysteries surrounding 52.
Finding him is never a foregone conclusion. In fact, as 52 has never been seen or even definitively proven to exist, some within the scientific community are sceptical there is even a 52 to find.
Zeman’s attempt to create a sense of thrill and adventure as he embarks on his quest is hit-and-miss. Exciting footage of the search is punctuated with evocative images of the oceans, which makes the documentary’s tone feel inconsistent. At times, there isn’t enough to elevate the film above being a group of people spending time in a boat. At least not until the closing moments, when it appears that the team’s efforts may not have been in vain.
Overall, The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52 offers a moving insight into a legendary whale and Zeman’s curiosity is infectious. Frustratingly, though, there isn’t enough discussion and explanation of the science behind whale communication, which leaves viewers, much like Zeman, wondering if they might have missed something important along the way.

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Martin Meissner/AP/Shutterstock
“THE time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining,” US president John F. Kennedy once said. It is an adage that Europe must now wrestle with.
With spring blossoming even as war continues to darken the continent, it is hard to spend too much time thinking about next winter. Yet the geopolitical uncertainty created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine means volatile energy prices are guaranteed this year. UK energy bill projections for October have yo-yoed with oil and gas prices in recent weeks, from a high of £3000 a year on average to a still-very-high low of … More

Netflix
Watch
Apollo 10 ½ sees Richard Linklater use the hallucinatory animation style of his A Scanner Darkly to tell the fantastical tale of a young space fan living in Houston, Texas, in 1969, when anything felt possible. Via Netflix.

John McKenzie/courtesy the artist and Ingleby Gallery, EdinburghAdvertisement
Visit
Requiem features an urn full of dust gathered by artist Katie Paterson from meteorites, rocks, corals and other detritus. From 9 April, it will be the focal point of an exhibition at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh, UK, that explores our planet’s past and future.

Read
Power in the Wild, by behavioural ecologist Lee Alan Dugatkin, reveals the realpolitik behind the lives of sweet-looking creatures from meerkats to field mice, as he examines the eternal struggle for dominance in nature.

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Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Humans

30 March 2022

Josie Ford
On Earth …
As a fresh-faced 18-year-old, Michael Owen’s mazy run from the centre circle to score against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup round of 16 raised hopes of a new golden era of English football – “soccer”, we add, looking in no particular direction – just as surely as David Beckham’s subsequent sending-off and the inevitable loss on penalties dashed them. Back then, it was only 32 years of hurt; by now it is getting silly.
Altogether more forward-facing is Owen’s recent reinvention as a crypto guru. “Looks to me like blockchain is here to stay,” he announced last month on Twitter, hence he was working with a blockchain specialist on “a really exciting new football project”.
Rapid reaction on the social media site renowned for rapid unkind reaction was predictably unkind, largely along the lines that Owen possibly didn’t actually know what blockchain is. If so, he is welcome to join our club any time.Advertisement
This seems to follow a trend of ex-elite sportspeople advertising cryptocurrency projects, something we can associate with the ennui and need for new revenue streams associated with being an ex-elite sportsperson. We click further, on our eternal quest for both excitement and enlightenment. “The first Michael Owen official NFT collection comprises of 1233 NFT’s that are available across 5 increasingly exclusive tiers,” we read. We are somewhat the wiser: the blockchain is about football stickers. Welcome to the future.
… as it is in heaven
And much, much good may come of this sort of thing, going by a press release on behalf of a “visionary NFT production house” thrust our way by a colleague with eyes not so much rolling as whirling like pulsars.
collection – although the words quoted are from a press release so don’t appear there. Richard says he didn’t include it as it’s a money-making operation; up to you if you still want to put in, I think it’s fine without “On April 3, they’re launching 30 NFTs from their bestselling ‘Greatest Minds of Our Time’ – pop-art images of inspirational figures, such as Oprah, Elon Musk, and the Dalai Lama – into orbit on SpaceX,” the PR puff breathlessly informs us. “Once in space, passenger Israeli air force pilot Eytan Stibb [sic] will call them up on his tablet and bless them with starlight and cosmic rays. He’ll then ‘drop’ them from space directly into the blockchain collection.”
The selection of great minds of our time is interesting, but the ultimate aim – to auction the widgets off for the benefit of clean-water charities – is laudable. The whole process does strike us as a mite overcomplicated, though, given that starlight and cosmic rays are freely available on Earth. An interesting metaphysical question is, if digital art exists only when constituted as pixels, and is called into life only when in orbit, has it been launched into orbit?
No matter. We detect a whiff of good old performance art in all this, so we will politely just nod and smile.
Small island far away
Ceri Brown writes from Haverfordwest in Wales, querying a Sky News story about the position of Henderson Island, part of the Pitcairn group in the South Pacific that through historical accident finds itself a UK Overseas Territory. Populated largely by native crabs and non-native plastic waste, it is perhaps a measure of the seriousness with which the UK has taken its stewardship up till now that the Royal Navy recently found it situated about 1.5 kilometres to the south of where it thought it was.
“Henderson Island is uninhabited and is about the size of Oxford,” the article states, presumably following the principle of British units for British places. “Could you convert that to fractions of a Berkshire please?” asks Ceri, catching us slightly off guard. No, but in standard Imperial units, it is a smidgen under 2 milliWales. That is if anyone is actually sure how big Henderson Island is.
Atmospheric surge
This admirable effort to make global news local sends us rootling in our piles for a headline from the Essex Live website in the UK sent in by Anthony Jamieson in January. “Essex sees huge atmospheric pressure surge as Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption felt across East Anglia”, it screams, adding in smaller typeface that the pressure in Heybridge, Essex, jumped “from just over 1,023 millibars of pressure to 1,024”. No eardrums burst, we hope.
Out of time
Gerben Wierda writes from the Netherlands currying favour – quite our favourite curryable material – and challenging the orthodoxy that true New Scientist aficionados read the magazine back to front.
“I read NS from front to back,” he says, “but Feedback plays an important role in my NS backlog management. If I come across an issue and I am uncertain if it has been read, I check the first entry in Feedback.” We are thus not only the most memorable bit of the magazine, he says, but “like dessert: that most enjoyable end of a good experience.”
Your cheque is in the post. Of course, we recognise that the true measure of an aficionado of this magazine is a backlog of issues that you always convince yourself you are going to clear. Being stuck on the issue of 9 October 2021 has its advantages, says Gerben. “One can read news articles about the possible rise of the new delta variant of covid-19 and remain in a world that is still blissfully free of war crimes being performed in Ukraine.” We hear you.
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You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website. More