Humans

Who were the Anglo-Saxons? Biological anthropologist Alice Roberts’s informed, sophisticated new take digs deep to re-examine their true origins

Humans

25 May 2022

By Michael Marshall

FEW groups of people exert more power on English imagination than the Anglo-Saxons. They first appear in the historical record in the 1st millennium AD, in the wake of the Roman Empire’s retreat from Britain, and historians have seen them as playing a central role in the emergence of medieval English society. But were they a group who invaded Britain … More

Ornette Made In America, USA, 1985. Courtesy of Barbican Centre.
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Journeys across Afro-futurism traces Black futures through the medium of film, featuring Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Nyokabi Gethaiga and others. At the Barbican Centre, London, from 2 to 30 June.

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Beyond Measure documents humanity’s attempts to claw dependable truths from a chaotic universe. James Vincent’s gripping story of how and why we measure just about everything, from radiation to happiness, is published on 2 June.
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The Orville begins its third season. Starring Adrianne Palicki as Commander Kelly Grayson and Seth MacFarlane as Captain Ed Mercer, they’re out to find strange … More

Finding out how acidic or alkaline your soil is means you can select the right plants for it, and maximise their chance of thriving, says Clare Wilson

Humans

25 May 2022

By Clare Wilson
mblickwinkel / Alamy Stock Photo
HAVE you ever wondered why some plants in your garden thrive, while others barely grow no matter how tenderly they are nurtured? It may not come down to your green fingers, but to whether you have chosen the right plant for that spot.
Most people know they need to consider their local climate and how much sunshine any particular site gets. But you should also choose the right plant for your soil type, which depends on your area’s geology and history. You can find maps of soil type online, but gardens can differ at a local level.
A first step … More

This documentary tracks the quest for the oldest human footprints in North America, and what they can tell us about when people first arrived on the continent

Humans

23 May 2022

By Carissa Wong
Ancient footprints in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park.GBH/NOVA/WGBH
Ice Age Footprints
Directed by Bella Falk and David Dugan
On PBS on 25 May at 9PM EST, then streaming at pbs.org/nova
IN January 2020, in a secret location within White Sands Park, New Mexico, geologists Kathleen Springer and Jeffrey Pigati began to dig out a trench in search of ancient human footprints. They hoped to shed light on two long-standing questions about the history of humans in North America: how long ago did people first arrive, and did humans … More

By Corryn Wetzel
Fossilised human faeces from Durrington Walls, EnglandLisa-Marie Shillito
The people who built Stonehenge probably ate cattle organs and shared leftovers with dogs, according to an analysis of parasites trapped in ancient faeces.
Fossilised excrement roughly 4500 years old was discovered several years ago at Durrington Walls, a Neolithic settlement in England thought to have housed the people who built Stonehenge. Previous research suggests the village held a few thousand residents who travelled to the location seasonally to erect the stone pillars.
Piers Mitchell at the University of Cambridge and his team analysed 19 faecal fossils, determining that some were from humans and some from dogs. When they examined the faeces under a microscope, they saw the eggs of a type of parasite called a capillariid worm, which they could identify from its lemon-like shape. This led them to conclude that the sample came from someone who had eaten raw organs of an infected bovine.Advertisement
“We know they must have been eating internal organs such as the liver, where this parasite would normally live, and they were also feeding it to their dogs, because the dogs had the same kind of parasite,” says Mitchell.
The villagers probably ate raw, parasite-laden organs when a cow wasn’t cooked thoroughly. “We can see these beautiful parasite eggs from thousands of years ago, which haven’t been damaged by the cooking process,” says Mitchell.
One sample of dog excrement contained eggs from a freshwater fish tapeworm, which Mitchell says is an especially intriguing find because fish were not a common food at the settlement. He suspects the raw fish was transported from a faraway village for a feast at Stonehenge then consumed by the dog.
“[The results] show a really interesting way that humans were living with their companion animals thousands of years ago – they were still treating their dogs as one of the family even back then,” says Mitchell. “It’s given us this wonderful window of evidence that we didn’t have before.”
Journal reference: Parasitology, DOI: 10.1017/S0031182022000476

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Nathan Keay © MCA Chicago. Image courtesy of Carolina Caycedo
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Caroline Caycedo fills the Baltic Centre in Gateshead, UK, with art exploring environmental justice, biodiversity and cultural diversity. There’s also a new commission to look at, inspired by the neighbouring river Tyne. Open from 28 May.

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The Elephant in the Universe is dark matter. In this new book, popular science writer Govert Schilling describes the century-long attempt by theoreticians to make sense of an elusive, unobservable world. Available from 31 May.
a taste of whale/Greenwich Entertainment
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A Taste of Whale starts a gripping conversation between activists and whalers from the Faroe Islands, as they prepare for the “grind”, a hunt of whales and dolphins. Watch on Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+ from 27 May.

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By Rowan Hooper

BE WARNED: George Monbiot will put you off your dinner. But that is a good thing – indeed, a vital thing. Our diets have to change. More to the point, the way we farm has to change. “Farming,” says Monbiot, a columnist for The Guardian newspaper and an environmental activist, “is the most destructive human activity ever to have blighted the Earth.”Advertisement
It is a deliberately provocative statement, of course, but it shows how the myth of the green and pleasant farm is deeply ingrained. Even after reading this comprehensive, devastating and rousing book, that statement still took me aback. But Monbiot lays out his case with statistics and backs it up with citations – the destruction, the ecocide, the suffering, the exploitation, the economic senselessness. It is undeniable.
Here is a sample. Human habitations, we learn, cover 1 per cent of the world’s land surface. Crops cover 12 per cent. Areas given over to grazing farm animals account for 28 per cent of the world’s land. Only 15 per cent is protected for nature. And that 28 per cent given to grazing animals? It delivers just 1 per cent of the world’s protein.
How about crops? Almost 60 per cent of the calories produced by farmers come from four crops: soya, maize, wheat and rice. Most of the world’s soya – some 86 per cent – is grown in Brazil, Argentina and the US, and three-quarters of soya, much of it grown on former rainforest or the savannah of Brazil’s Cerrado region goes to feed farm animals. Meat is murder? Meat is also destructively profligate.

The first half of Regenesis, in which Monbiot sets out the facts about the planet’s teetering life-support systems, is deeply distressing. The sheer damage caused by farming – the ploughing, the fertilisers, the pesticides and herbicides, the antibiotics, the irrigation and the greenhouse gases, but most of all the extirpation of species and the horrific clearance of land – has pushed those life-support systems to breaking point. Land use, says Monbiot, is “the issue that makes the greatest difference to whether terrestrial ecosystems and Earth systems survive or perish”.
Your reward is the book’s second half, where he offers a treasure trove of hope and solutions, and a vision for a sustainable, healthy, equitable world. Monbiot knows that in transitioning from our destructive practices, we must bring farmers with us. We meet inspiring farmers who pioneer ways to grow food that don’t destroy the soil’s fertility and allow other species to thrive too, as well as some radical solutions. One of the most exciting is using bacteria to make protein. Monbiot eats a pancake made from the stuff, and proclaims it “the beginning of the end of most agriculture”. Well, that would be nice.
Does Monbiot overestimate not only the willingness of the general public to eat bacteria as their main source of protein, but to entirely change food habits – something at the heart of all cultures?
Maybe, but change can happen quickly. Some social scientists argue that a decent-sized minority, around 25 per cent, can trigger society-level tipping points in attitude. Look at the worldwide shift in support for LGBTQ+ rights and same-sex marriage. A few years ago, no one had heard of Greta Thunberg; now she is world famous and the Fridays for Future climate movement may change the world.
So yes, this essential book really should put you off your dinner. It should put you on to something sustainable, equitable, ecologically beneficial and, hopefully, delicious. More

From non-consensual vaginal microbiome transplants to misconceptions about the G-spot, Rachel E. Gross discusses the sexism and biases that have led to our fragmented understanding of the female reproductive system

Humans

18 May 2022

By Catherine de Lange
Nabil Nezzar
JOURNALIST Rachel E. Gross was working as the science editor at Smithsonian.com when she developed an “obnoxious” vaginal infection that set her on a mission to better understand her own body. It may have started with her genitals, but in her new book, Vagina Obscura: An anatomical voyage, Gross not only unravels many misunderstandings about the female body, but also rewrites the history of the science of gynaecology with women and LGBTQ+ researchers front and centre. She spoke to New Scientist about why this matters.
Catherine de Lange: What made you want to write this book?
Rachel E. Gross: I was doing a lot of coverage of women in the history of science. These themes kept coming up of women in scientific fields that had been left out of the conversation or blocked from attaining certain levels. And at the same time, there were all these questions about women’s bodies and bodies [of people] with a uterus and ovaries that weren’t being asked. I made the connection: the deceptively simple reason why these questions weren’t being asked was because women weren’t at the table.
How did you find these incredible stories of women who were written out of the history books?
The darkest section of the book is about James Marion Sims and the development of the speculum. It’s well known that he was a southern slaveholder who made his advancements on the bodies of enslaved Black women. But there is a lot more to that story. I relied a lot on historians who had excavated the stories of some of those women, namely Betsy, Lucy and Anarcha. Deirdre Cooper Owens is the historian … More