Humans

The campfire was a social hub for ancient humans, and a virtual reality investigation suggests that the flickering light may have made art etched on flat rocks look animated

Humans

20 April 2022

By Colin Barras
The position of replica Stone Age plaquettes in relation to fire during an experimentNeedham et al., 2022, PLOS ONE, CC-BY 4.0
Stone Age Europeans may have huddled around campfires at night to watch simple animations created when firelight danced across artwork etched on flat rocks.
The ancient paintings preserved on the walls of European caves tell us that Stone Age artists could depict animals with astonishing realism. What makes this prehistoric art even more impressive is that a lot of it must have been painted by firelight, because it lies far from cave entrances and beyond the reach of the sun.
Recently, some archaeologists have speculated that ancient humans saw this flickering firelight as an opportunity to enhance their work. By producing multiple overlapping pictures on the cave wall, artists could create rudimentary animations as the light from their flaming torches highlighted first one and then another image.Advertisement
Now, Andrew Needham at the University of York, UK, and his colleagues have found evidence that these simple animations weren’t confined to deep caves. Instead, some appear to have been etched onto flat stones placed near hearths around which Stone Age people would gather in the evening.

The stones, called plaquettes, were excavated in the 19th century from the Montastruc rock shelter in southern France. Most of them are 10 to 20 centimetres in length and width and have images of animals – usually horses or reindeers – etched on one or both sides. They were created by so-called Magdalenian people, probably between about 16,000 and 13,500 years ago.
Little is known about how the plaquettes were originally used. But Needham and his colleagues point out that most of them have one feature in common: evidence of exposure to heat. Because other ancient artefacts from the rock shelter don’t show evidence of heat exposure, the researchers argue that the plaquettes were routinely placed near campfires.
Needham and his colleagues wondered what effect flickering light from the flames might have had on the artwork. To explore this, they produced 3D computer models of the plaquettes and used virtual reality to simulate dim light dancing over their surfaces.

Doing so revealed that the light can draw the viewer’s attention to first one and then another animal engraved on the plaquette, giving an impression of movement.
“This must have been quite a powerful visual effect,” says Needham – particularly in the context of a campfire. “This was likely an important social space. It might have been a place to share stories or chat and bond with each other after long days spent out in the landscape hunting and gathering.”
He says the research is a reminder of the need to think about ancient art in its original context when possible.
“The art is not just the engraved lines on the rock, but those engraved lines experienced under the correct conditions of darkness and roving light,” says Needham. “It changes our appreciation of what art was and how it was used by Magdalenian people.”
Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0266146
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From deep-sea mines to aquaculture, bioprospecting and energy generation, humanity’s accelerating expansion into the high seas has potentially huge consequences for its health

Humans

20 April 2022

By Graham Lawton
Wind power could require 45,000 km2 of European waters by 2050Miguel Navarro/Getty Images
BLUE BUSINESS: Power and comms
The world’s first offshore wind farm opened off the coast of Lolland, Denmark, in 1991. Since then, the global installed capacity has grown to nearly 35 gigawatts – enough to power the entire UK – almost all of it in European (25 GW) and Chinese (9 GW) waters. Other sources of ocean renewable energy are also being eyed up, including waves, tides, currents, salinity gradients, thermal gradients and marine biomass. The EU has a target of installing 1 GW of these alternative sources by 2030, says Benjamin Lehner at the Dutch Marine Energy Centre in The Hague.
All these figures are a drop in the ocean compared with the world’s 1840 GW of gas-fired power capacity. Yet with wind power generation getting cheaper all the time – costs declined 70 per cent between 2012 and 2021 – rapid growth looks like a foregone conclusion. The trade association Wind Europe estimates that, by 2050, Europe will have 450 GW of offshore wind.
That brings its own challenges. It will require about 45,000 square kilometres of ocean, most of it between 11 and 22 kilometres from shore, the goldilocks zone for offshore wind. Europe has 550,000 square kilometres of this real estate in total, but more than 60 per cent is earmarked for marine protected areas, says António Sarmento at consultancy firm WavEC Offshore Renewables in Lisbon, Portugal. Building, operating and maintaining offshore wind farms can damage the seabed, while the power cables that carry electricity to shore … More

As buyers await the launch of a bicycle saddle that promises to be earthquake resistant, Feedback also ponders the sculptures set to be housed in a transparent cube on the moon, and key information on the errant mass of the W boson

Humans

20 April 2022

Josie Ford
Quaking on our bikes
Feedback doesn’t live in great fear of earthquakes. The last significant tremor in our neck of the woods – a 4.3-magnitude shocker that hit Folkestone, UK, in 2007 – was, according to one eyewitness, like someone was at the end of my bed hopping up and down. This is how it felt the last time the earth moved for us, too, although admittedly that was even further back.
Still, you can’t be too careful, and the past couple of years have taught us nothing if not the value of the precautionary principle, although possibly not even … More

There is a historical obligation for higher-income countries to transfer some of their vast and ill-gotten wealth to lower-income ones to compensate them for the damage they have done to the environment, writes Graham Lawton

Humans

| Columnist

20 April 2022

By Graham Lawton
B5HKJ9 The United Glass Limited Glass Works in Alloa, Clackmannanshire, Scotland, UK. Reflected in the River ForthDavid Robertson/Alamy

THE country I live in is one of the richest on the planet, but also one of the poorest. By GDP, the UK is a superpower with the fifth largest economy in the world. But in terms of intact biodiversity, it is in the bottom 10 per cent globally and the worst in the G7.
These two facts aren’t unrelated. The UK got rich – and has stayed rich – in no small part by overexploiting its natural resources. The agricultural and industrial revolutions turned great swathes of what was once green and pleasant into a polluted and overgrazed wasteland. Even today, more than two-thirds of the UK’s land area is farmed and 8 per cent is built on, leaving little room for wildlife. The nation’s Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII) – a measure of how much wild nature remains – is 53 per cent. The global average is 75 per cent. The ideal is 90 per cent plus.Advertisement
That pathway to riches is one that many less-wealthy countries aspire to. But it is also a pathway to mutually assured destruction. A global BII comparable with the UK’s would be catastrophic.
Preventing nature-rich countries from trashing their biodiversity is, of course, one of the goals of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), over which the latest round of negotiations took place in Geneva last month. Such talks naturally feature conservation targets, habitat restoration and so on. But they actually revolve around something else: money.
Before the meeting began, I spoke to conservation biologists about what to look out for. One of them, Stephen Woodley at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, told me bluntly: “It’s all about the money.”
Biodiverse countries are often GDP-poor, and many don’t see why they should be forced to remain so in order to rescue wealthy nations from catastrophe. And even where there is the will to preserve, countries often lack the necessary resources and need financial help. “The big issue is about wealth transfer,” Woodley told me. “I suspect that the negotiations will hinge on that.”
He was right. There were many sticking points, but by far the stickiest was finance. Reports from the meeting say that the spirit of the talks was mean, with negotiators generally putting national interests first. For rich countries, that meant digging their heels in over the payments.
“The US and Europe are responsible for more than half of global ecological destruction over the past 50 years”
If anything, the negotiations went backwards. The draft text at the start of the meeting included concrete figures, such as that lower-income nations should be given an extra $10 billion every year for conservation. By the end of the talks, all of those numbers had disappeared, replaced by a dog’s breakfast of watered-down and disputed suggestions.
This isn’t just greedy and immoral in the here and now. There is also a historical obligation for richer countries to transfer some of their vast and ill-gotten wealth to poorer ones, to compensate them for the damage they have done to the environment. A recent analysis published in The Lancet Planetary Health found that the US and Europe are responsible for more than half of global ecological destruction over the past 50 years. Other wealthy countries, including Australia, Canada, Japan and Saudi Arabia, are collectively responsible for another quarter, while the low and middle-income countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia are responsible for just 8 per cent.
Alongside greed, immorality and injustice, we can add short-sightedness. “We will pay this amount of money, either today, or we will pay substantially more later on in lost ecosystem services, clean water, clean air, pollination, all these things that we take for granted,” says Brian O’Donnell at the Campaign for Nature, an alliance of more than 100 conservation organisations. “If we destroy the ecosystems we rely on, the cost will be astronomical.”
This is depressingly familiar from climate talks. In 2015, wealthy nations promised to donate billions to lower-income ones to help them mitigate climate change and adapt, but have yet to cough up. They cynically stamp out attempts to extract compensation for “loss and damage”, apparently frit that this would be seen as an admission of guilt and open the floodgates to reparation claims.
There is hope. The clean text that the talks opened with was an ideal one drawn up by the CBD; the mess that emerged is a work in progress by the people who wield actual power. There is a history of brinkmanship at such talks and the CBD itself said that progress had been made.
And while countries like the UK will never accept that much of their wealth is an ecological overdraft that is now overdue, they are starting to understand that they have no option but to pay. “I think governments are starting to recognise that this is an investment rather than just a cost,” says O’Donnell.

Graham’s week
What I’m reading
The Age of Extremes: The short twentieth century, 1914–1991 by Eric Hobsbawm. Suddenly very relevant again
What I’m watching
Dinosaurs: The final day with David Attenborough on the BBC. Attenborough does it again.
What I’m working on
Whether to get a new cat. The old one sadly joined his younger companion.

Up next week: Annalee Newitz

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A suspense-filled documentary sees Free Solo’s Alex Honnold and 80-year-old ecologist Bruce Means set out to climb a remote table-top mountain deep in Guyana’s Amazon rainforest

Humans

20 April 2022

By Gregory Wakeman
Federico Pisani, part of the documentary team, on the cliff face of Weiassipu in GuyanaNational Geographic/Renan Ozturk
Explorer: The Last Tepui
Renan Ozturk, Drew Pulley, Taylor Rees
Disney+Advertisement
THOSE of you who have seen the astounding National Geographic documentary Free Solo will know just how mesmerising it can be to watch a professional climber scale the side of a mountain.
A new documentary, Explorer: The Last Tepui, shares a lot with Free Solo, which won the 2019 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Not only does it also star rock climber Alex Honnold, it shows him dangling off the side of a mountain in precarious positions that will make your stomach drop in terror.
While his athletic feats are astounding, Honnold isn’t the most captivating character in the film. That honour goes to Bruce Means, who has spent his academic career finding and cataloguing new species throughout South America to prove to the world and its governments that the area is a biodiversity hotspot to be protected at all costs.
In Explorer: The Last Tepui, the 80-year-old ecologist and conservationist is intent on climbing the 300-plus metres to the peak of a remote table-top mountain, or tepui, deep in Guyana’s Amazon rainforest.
Means, Honnold, expedition leader Mark Synnott and a world-class team of climbers have to hike 56 kilometres over 10 days across increasingly treacherous terrain to reach the base of the tepui. This is a very big deal because Means has problems just bending his knees.
Once at the tepui, team members plan to climb to the top and then pull Means up, which will allow him to explore the cliff wall for novel animal and plant species.
Directors Taylor Rees, Renan Ozturk and Drew Pulley do a superb job of setting up the aim of the expedition, as well as the myriad difficulties that could blight it. Fully aware of the extraordinary visuals and fascinating characters that they have at their disposal, they take a step back and allow the majesty of the rainforest to take over, while giving the highly intelligent and passionate specialists room to describe what makes it so special.
Some of the shots that Matthew Irving, director of photography, captures are awe-inspiring, and the directors also provide plenty of long, lingering views of mountains, creatures, streams and waterfalls, which allow viewers to soak up the natural beauty, listen to the sounds of the animals and get lost in the frame.
What makes the documentary so riveting is Means’s detailed explanations as he walks with the team through the forest, which is dense with trees and vegetation. The ecologist’s positive and self-deprecating nature makes him instantly likeable, while his endless knowledge and devotion to nature and science are so contagious that they will make viewers of all ages appreciate the diversity of our environment.
His efforts are made all the more valiant by his admission that if he makes it to the summit, it will be the culmination of his life’s work. Unsurprisingly, because of the unforgiving terrain they must cross to reach the tepui, various major obstacles soon get in the way of the party. Means’s strain at holding up the expedition because of his age and health doesn’t just make him more lovable, it injects real suspense into the documentary, which will debut on Disney+ on 22 April for Earth Day.
The constantly changing viewpoints and potentially life-threatening issues ensure that Explorer: The Last Tepui remains compelling to the very last frame. Even though it is just 54 minutes long, you will still feel utterly exhausted, as well as inspired, by the time it is over.

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Ending a relationship by disappearing without explanation, known as “ghosting”, seems to be a distinct form of social rejection – and psychologists are discovering why it is so painful

Humans

20 April 2022

By Amelia Tait
Offwhite
IT WAS 2015 when Jennice Vilhauer’s clients started telling her ghost stories. The Los Angeles-based psychotherapist had more than 10 years of experience helping people with their depression, anxiety and relationship issues – but suddenly, clients began telling her about a new problem, one that left them extremely distressed.
They were victims of ghosting, where one person ends all communication with another, disappearing like a phantom. Messages are ignored and just like that, the person you had a connection with – typically a romantic partner, but sometimes a friend or colleague – chooses to disengage with no explanation. But when Vilhauer searched for more information, she found little research on this phenomenon. So she started publishing her own observations online and was soon inundated with emails from people who had been ghosted. “There’s been an enormous explosion of interest in this because it’s happening so frequently,” she says.
Which begs the question, what is uniquely painful about ghosting? After all, it nearly always hurts when a relationship ends. Is being ghosted any more distressing in the information age than, say, in the Wild West, when your lover hopped on their horse and left you in a trail of dust without so much as a forwarding address? We are now beginning to find out, as well as building a picture of why people ghost, how quirks of the brain can make it feel worse than it ought to and how, counter-intuitively, ghosting may be getting less painful.
Unexpected disappearance
Back in 2015, ghosting hurt so badly because it was completely unexpected, says Vilhauer – it wasn’t something people mentally prepared for when entering a … More

New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

Humans

20 April 2022

Watch
The Velvet Queen herself – the snow leopard – comes to selected UK and Irish cinemas on 29 April, accompanied by wolves, bears, yaks, birds and the fabulous and untouched landscapes of the Tibetan plateau.

Read
Wild by Design by environmental historian Laura Martin examines how we ended up casting ourselves as the “managers” of wild spaces, and goes on to ask whether we can design natural places without destroying wildness.

Watch
The philosophy and science of the disrupted mind are explored by philosopher Noga Arikha and neuroscientist Katerina Fotopoulou in this online talk by The Royal Institution at 7pm BST on 26 April.Advertisement More

The new science fiction novel from Station Eleven’s author is mostly set centuries into the future – but also contains scary glimpses of a pandemic-strewn past

Humans

20 April 2022

By Clare Wilson
Time travel isn’t all fun and games in Sea of TranquilityShutterstock/Tomertu
Sea of Tranquility
Emily St John Mandel
Picador
IT SAYS a lot about Emily St John Mandel’s imagination that while there are multiple instances of time travel in her new book, Sea of Tranquility, this is only one of several intriguing plot strands.
The novel, Mandel’s sixth, is a welcome return to science fiction after her contemporary outing, The Glass Hotel. Her highly successful fourth novel, Station Eleven, is set 20 years after a deadly pandemic, and … More