Humans

By Bencie Woll
Simone Rotella
Not so long ago, deaf children were punished in the UK for using sign language in the classroom. Recounting his experience in the 1960s, one deaf person told one of my colleagues many years later: “I had a lot of punishments for signing in classrooms… One morning at assembly, I was caught again, then ordered to stand at the front of the class. The headmistress announced that I looked like a monkey [and that she would] put me in a cage in the zoo so the people will laugh at a stupid boy in the cage.”
Thankfully, experiences like this are no longer as common. Sign languages have not only survived, but are now flourishing – so much so that many more people are getting the chance to learn them, which should be celebrated.Advertisement
British Sign Language (BSL) is used by tens of thousands of people in the UK, including around 90,000 deaf signers. For some of them, such as children with deaf parents, it is the first language they acquire. In the US, more undergraduate and graduate students have enrolled on courses in American Sign Language (ASL) than German each year since 2013.
Currently, the UK Department for Education has a draft BSL curriculum for England on its desk for GCSE students (14 to 16-year-olds), which could come into effect later this year. This would make it a modern language option alongside French, German, Spanish and Chinese. Both Scotland and Wales have BSL curricula in the works too.
Elsewhere, sign languages are gaining both recognition as official languages and a place on the national curriculum. South Africa has hired 60 instructors to teach South African Sign Language as part of a state-run adult literacy programme, and Jamaican Sign Language was introduced into Jamaica’s national curriculum earlier this month.
That sign languages are thriving should be welcomed for many reasons, including the cognitive benefits that learning them brings. Several studies have found that hearing people who learn sign languages perform better in tasks requiring spatial transformation abilities – which you might use when taking down directions. Space is an integral part of the grammar of a sign language, with verbs, nouns and pronouns using the space in which they are located as part of their meaning. A series of experiments by Mary Lou Vercellotti at Ball State University in Indiana also found that adult ASL students have enhanced face-processing skills, which are essential to reading emotions.
Learning a sign language can be enlightening, too. In a year-long study of preschool children by Amy Brereton at Trinity Washington University in Washington DC, hearing children who were learning ASL attained a greater appreciation of cultural diversity, as determined via classroom observations and interviews.
Part of the beauty of learning languages – both spoken and sign – is that you don’t need to be fluent to experience the benefits. In a recent British Academy project I led with my colleague Li Wei at University College London, we highlighted how learning languages shapes the mental functions you use in a range of other fields, from your social awareness to your creativity and grasp of mathematics.
Sign languages today are rich with communities and culture. Up until the 1980s, many deaf people essentially had to exist in the 19th century: no telephones, no radio, no television. But in many countries, social clubs, networks and advocacy groups for deaf signers have given rise to a diverse range of vernaculars. With the internet and social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, content creators are now sharing these with the world, bringing greater awareness and respect – and increased interest in learning these languages.
Bencie Woll is a professor of deaf studies at University College London

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By Sally Adee

Even a post-apocalyptic Earth retains a certain charm for humankindgremlin/Getty Images
Goliath
Tochi Onyebuchi
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SCI-FI dystopias of a ruined Earth are thick on the ground these days, filled with the wreckage of climate change: drowned continents, great extinctions and air that is no longer safe to breathe. In the more hopeful, people leave the planet in search of another world where they can start again, with lessons learned and a determination not to repeat the same mistakes.
In Tochi Onyebuchi’s Goliath, human nature is eternal. So, while the rich predictably leave for pristine space colonies, abandoning those who can’t afford to escape, there is money to be made from tourism to the ruins left behind. Some tourists find themselves captivated by the communities that have emerged, and decide to return to Earth. Gentrification ensues.
The premise is wry and au courant. In a lesser writer’s hands, it could lead to lazy and cynical caricatures, but Onyebuchi uses it only as a jumping off point into a deeper examination of the idea of home, and what we will do to get there.
Onyebuchi started out writing sci-fi for young adults before reaching a wider audience with the multi-award gobbling novella Riot Baby in 2020. He has a master’s degree in screenwriting, which is on vivid display in his hypnotic descriptions of Goliath’s two new human worlds.
We explore these through the eyes of several characters, including colony-dweller Jonathan, who looks out into star-spangled black space from a window in a sterile space station straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. On Earth, we meet Sydney, who watches a dandelion’s seeds get nibbled away by wind under a poisoned red sky.
“By detailing the two worlds, Onyebuchi makes it obvious why people start yearning for Earth”
The style is more than matched by the substance of the story, in which Onyebuchi takes his time to explore the main themes. The gentrification issue, for example, is treated not as an easy punchline but as a way into deeper questions about what we need.
When Jonathan travels from the colonies to Earth, he tours destroyed homes looking for one to fix up. Onyebuchi shows us what he starts with – a shell of a house filled with geological layers of detritus. Then, months later, Jonathan is accepted into the community, which allows him to connect to the lone cable still bringing electricity to the neighbourhood. His wonder and joy at something so ordinary as a working light switch is infectious, especially after the technological marvels he has been taking for granted in the colonies.
By detailing the contrasting textures of the two worlds, Onyebuchi makes it obvious why colony-dwellers start yearning for Earth. Home inspires such longing that people living in the clean, metallic colonies pay handsomely for individual bricks to be salvaged from demolished houses on Earth and sent into space. They fight on auction sites for tiny cacti.
Back on Earth, there are different tensions. Returning residents bring back things that Earth’s citizens were only too happy to see the back of, not least social inequality. Even in space, the richest live in the part of the space station with a view of the galaxies, while everyone else faces the unrecyclable detritus – including dead bodies – that surrounds the colonies in a ring.
What will the prodigal Jonathans bring back to Earth apart from their longing for home? And will the people they left behind be interested in anything they have to offer?
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A concoction of vilca seeds and fermented alcohol may have provided a mild hallucinogenic experience, enabling Wari leaders in South America to bond with their people

Humans

12 January 2022

By Michael Marshall
Anadenanthera colubrina, a tree species common to nearly all regions of South AmericanMatt Lavin/Flickr
Get high, make friends. Members of the Wari society, who lived in the Peruvian Andes more than 1000 years ago, may have mixed hallucinogenic seeds into their beer. Such a mind-bending drink might have offered a way for society leaders to create bonds with ordinary people.
“Being able to provide that experience would create heightened social status among Wari leaders,” says Matthew Biwer at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
The Wari culture flourished in what is now Peru between around AD 550 and 1000. Biwer calls them “the first example of an expansionary state in the Andes”, preceding the later Inca Empire. “There is no written record,” says Biwer, so we don’t know what they called themselves. But they left behind distinctive artefacts and structures including canals.Advertisement
Since 2015, Biwer and his team have been excavating a Wari site called Quilcapampa. He calls it “a waystation along a road” and says it was only occupied for a generation, between about AD 800 and 850.
In the centre of the site, the team found a pit filled with about a million seeds of Schinus molle: a kind of fruit known as molle, or sometimes Peruvian pepper. The molle fruits were used to make a fermented alcoholic drink, a bit like beer, known as chicha.

A few steps away, in a garbage pit, the team found seeds from vilca trees (Anadenanthera colubrina). Vilca seeds contain hallucinogenic substances and have been widely used in Andean cultures. “I haven’t tried vilca myself,” says Biwer, but ethnographic accounts often describe it causing “a sensation of flying”.
If you eat vilca seeds, your stomach enzymes deactivate the active compounds within them – so the seeds are more normally ground up and taken up the nose as snuff, producing a strong effect. However, chicha suppresses those stomach enzymes, so the combination of the two would allow “a very mild and controlled hallucinogenic effect”, says Biwer.
As the Wari state expanded throughout the Andes, its leaders needed ways to impress local people and create bonds with them. They often did so by holding feasts, says Biwer. Providing a hallucinogenic experience would have been an added selling point – especially as vilca doesn’t grow in the Quilcapampa area and must have been imported.
Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2021.177
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The characters used to write the Vai script, which was invented in Liberia in 1833, have become visually simpler over time, reflecting the evolutionary pressures acting on writing

Humans

11 January 2022

By Colin Barras
A character representing the syllable “bi” in Vai scriptKelly et al
The symbols we use to write words evolve to become visually simpler over time, and an analysis of a writing system from West Africa shows that they can do so over just a few generations.
The script used to write the Vai language was invented in Liberia in 1833 and is still in use today. Those who devised it may have had some awareness of the Latin and Arabic alphabets, but the Vai script isn’t modelled on either. Its characters denote … More

Cut marks on animal bones suggest ancient hominins butchered them for their meat, and that they were first on the scene instead of having to scavenge from carnivores like big cats

Humans

11 January 2022

By Michael Marshall
Notches on a bone left by human butchering activityJennifer A. Parkinson, Thomas W. Plummer, James S. Oliver, Laura C. Bishop
Ancient humans were regularly butchering animals for meat 2 million years ago. This has long been suspected, but the idea has been bolstered by a systematic study of cut marks on animal bones.
The find cements the view that ancient humans had become active hunters by this time, contrasting with earlier hominins that ate mostly plants.
The new evidence comes from Kanjera South, an archaeological site near Lake Victoria in Kenya. Kanjera South has been excavated on and off since 1995. It … More

By Colin Barras
Ancient Egyptians had a wide range of medical knowledgeAndrAfter virtually unwrapping the mummified body of a young girl who died 2000 years ago, archaeologists have found something unique: an ancient Egyptian bandaged wound.
The ancient Egyptians were no strangers to linen bandages, which they first used to wrap their dead more than 6000 years ago, about a thousand years before the first pharaohs rose to power. But until now, Egyptologists haven’t found bandages that were used to dress the wounds of living ancient Egyptians.
As part of a study … More

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Harrow by Pulitzer finalist Joy Williams explores a post-apocalyptic world where nature has been destroyed, and no one cares but a few older survivors who are plotting their revenge on those responsible.

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By Margaret Cuonzo

A WOMAN once approached me with a curious problem concerning her husband. Like most people who choose to get married, she had promised to love her spouse to the exclusion of all others. But there was a problem: according to her, the man she married simply wasn’t the same person any more. He had the same name and career, the same memories and skills. But over many years, an accumulation of small changes had, she felt, made her husband a completely different person.
This woman had approached me not because I’m an expert in matters of the heart, but because I had just given a talk about paradoxes. These puzzles have entertained and perplexed us for millennia. They force us to grapple with some of the deepest matters of logic and meaning. What does it mean for something to be “the same”, for instance?
I couldn’t offer the woman any simple answers. I reminded her that she had probably changed quite a bit since her youth too. And I pointed out that sometimes our intuitions about concepts like identity can be unhelpful.
In fact, the point goes well beyond relationships. Chewing over paradoxes can show us places where our intuitions need tweaking, and this applies everywhere from the foundations of mathematics to social media and our efforts to live more sustainable lives. Paradoxes have helped thinkers resculpt our understanding of key concepts and attain fresh scientific insights time and again. Now, a new way of thinking through paradoxes is emerging, one that holds promise because it puts our mushy human intuition front and centre.
One reasonable way … More