Humans

Goose bones from Stone Age China suggest the birds were being domesticated there 7000 years ago, which could mean they were domesticated before chickens

Humans

7 March 2022

By Michael Marshall
Chinese geese (Anser cygnoides f. domestica)blickwinkel/AGAMI/M. Guyt/Alamy
Geese may have been domesticated as early as 7000 years ago in what is now China, according to a study of preserved goose bones. That may make them the first bird to be domesticated, before chickens – although the timing of chicken domestication is uncertain.
The finding extends the history of goose domestication and potentially the history of domestic poultry as a whole, says Masaki Eda at Hokkaido University Museum in Sapporo, Japan.
Eda is part of a team that has excavated an archaeological site in east China called Tianluoshan, which was a Stone Age village between about 7000 and 5500 years ago. Its inhabitants “were basically hunter-gatherers”, says Eda, but they also grew rice in paddy fields.Advertisement
Join us for a mind-blowing festival of ideas and experiences. New Scientist Live is going hybrid, with a live in-person event in Manchester, UK, that you can also enjoy from the comfort of your own home, from 12 to 14 March 2022. Find out more.
The researchers have identified 232 goose bones at Tianluoshan and say there are multiple lines of evidence that some of the geese were at least partially domesticated.
Four of the bones belonged to immature geese that were less than 16 weeks old, with the youngest probably less than eight weeks old. This implies they must have hatched at Tianluoshan, says Eda, because they were too young to have flown in from elsewhere. However, no wild geese breed in the area today and it is unlikely they did so 7000 years ago, he says.
Some of the adult geese also seem to have been locally bred, based on the chemical make-up of their bones, which reflects the water they drank. These locally bred birds were all roughly the same size, indicating captive breeding. Finally, the researchers carbon-dated the bones and found that the locally bred geese lived about 7000 years ago.
Taken together, the findings suggest the geese were at an early stage of domestication, says Eda.

“It’s a major study in our understanding of poultry domestication,” says Ophélie Lebrasseur at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France. “They’ve been very thorough.”
“The main thing that stood out for me is the fact they actually did radiocarbon dating on the bird bones,” says Julia Best at Cardiff University in the UK. This makes the dating much more reliable than if they had simply dated the surrounding sediment.
If geese were domesticated 7000 years ago, that would make them the first bird to be domesticated, says Eda. The other candidate is chickens, but there has been a dispute over when and where this first happened.
Chickens were probably domesticated from wild birds called red junglefowl, which live in southern Asia. However, genetics has complicated the story, revealing that domestic chickens subsequently interbred with other birds like the grey junglefowl.
A study published in 2014 reported that chickens were domesticated in northern China as early as 10,000 years ago, based on DNA from bones. However, it isn’t clear that red junglefowl ever lived that far north, says Lebrasseur. Furthermore, the bones weren’t directly dated and “a lot of the things they claimed were chickens were pheasants”, says Best. Firm evidence of domestic chickens only appears from around 5000 years ago, she says.
This implies geese were domesticated before chickens, says Lebrasseur. “With the evidence we currently have, I think it is true,” she says. But she adds that bird domestications are understudied compared with those of mammals like dogs and cows, so the story could well change as more evidence emerges.
It is very difficult to say why the geese were domesticated, says Eda. Meat, eggs, feathers and bone tools are all possibilities, and they may have been used in ritual ceremonies. “One of the things we see with chickens is they’re often held in high esteem when they’re first domesticated,” says Best.
Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2117064119

More on these topics: More

In Dying Light 2, a variant of a virus has turned people into zombiesTechland
Dying Light 2 Stay Human
Techland
PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X/SAdvertisement
IN APRIL 2020, soon after the UK entered its first lockdown, I reviewed the zombie-packed Resident Evil 3, describing it as noticeably “pre-pandemic fiction”. Two years on, the pandemic is still going, and I am still playing zombie games. This time, it is Dying Light 2 Stay Human, and it is interesting to look at the game as a work of post-pandemic (mid-pandemic?) fiction.
It is a sequel to the 2015 game Dying Light, which saw a viral outbreak in the fictional Middle Eastern city of Harran turn people into zombies. The end of the game promised a cure to the disease, but as the introduction of Dying Light 2 explains – and stop me if you have heard this before – a new variant of the virus emerged in 2021 and spread rapidly. The zombies took over and civilisation collapsed. Cheery stuff.
The game picks up the story in 2036, where you play as a survivor called Aiden Caldwell. After being bitten by a zombie, you enter one of the last remaining outposts of society, known only as the City. There, you discover that all of the other survivors are also infected, but use a variety of tools to avoid zombification – hence the “Stay Human” part of the game’s title.
Full zombies can’t survive in sunlight, so City folk have set up ultraviolet lamps to hold back the infection. One of your early goals in the game is to acquire a wristband that provides an alert when you need a top-up of UV. Owning one of these wristbands is a condition of living in the City, perhaps a nod to the various covid passes that have been implemented around the world.
“Aiden has expert parkour skills that allow him to scale buildings and dodge undesirable characters”
With a wristband secured, the game settles into a rhythm. By day, you are more or less safe from zombies outside (though not from roving bandits), although it is risky to enter derelict buildings, where the undead tend to gather. Then, at night, the zombies hit the streets, so it is tricky to get around outside, but easier to explore within. Dodging zombies has its rewards: you get bonus experience points, which you can use to upgrade your abilities, handy for venturing out at night and for surviving a zombie chase.
For reasons that are never properly explained, Aiden has expert parkour skills that allow him to scale buildings, jump across rooftops and generally dodge undesirable characters. In a strange game design decision, features that would usually be part of the basic move set in this kind of game (such as the ability to slide) require unlocking upgrades, so it takes a while to accumulate the full set of skills.
That is a shame, because this freedom of movement is probably the best thing about the game. I had great fun racing through the city, but beyond the obvious covid-19 links, the meat of the game is nothing you haven’t seen before. Everything boils down to: go here, get this thing, kill these zombies, repeat.
As you explore the city, you get the opportunity to claim various locations, such as a water tower, for one of three factions: the slightly fascist Peacekeepers, the anarchic Renegades or the ordinary survivors. You get to pick a side, and Techland, the game’s developer, goes big on the idea that which you choose matters to the (entirely forgettable) storyline. But two years into the pandemic, I was more inclined to stick with the ordinary survivors. It is hard not to sympathise with people who have lived through a world-altering disaster and are just trying their best to carry on existing.
Jacob also recommends… More

Shop-bought strawberries can taste disappointing, but home grown ones are delicious. Here’s how to succeed in growing these delicate fruits, says Clare Wilson

Humans

2 March 2022

By Clare Wilson
GAP Photos/Julia Boulton
THERE are plenty of reasons people grow their own fruit and vegetables: it is a satisfying outdoor hobby, it gets you some exercise and the produce has low food miles, usually making it good for the planet too.
Another reason is that many home-grown fruits and vegetables taste better than the ones on sale in shops. The difference is particularly noticeable for some types of produce, such as new potatoes, asparagus, tomatoes, strawberries, raspberries and blueberries.
There can be several explanations. One is that the varieties grown by farmers are often different to those sold for home growing. Farmers use … More

Despite AI’s impressive feats at driving cars and playing games, a new book by psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer argues that our brains have plenty to offer that AI will never match

Humans

2 March 2022

By Chen Ly

IN THE 1950s, Herbert Simon – a political scientist and one of the founders of AI – declared that, once a computer could beat the best chess player in the world, machines would have reached the pinnacle of human intelligence. Just a few decades later, in 1997, the chess-playing computer Deep Blue beat world champion Garry Kasparov.
It was an impressive feat, but according to Gerd Gigerenzer, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, human minds don’t need to worry just yet. In How to Stay Smart in a Smart World, he unpacks humanity’s complicated relationship with artificial intelligence and digital technology. In an age where self-driving cars have been let loose on the roads, smart homes can anticipate and cater for our every need and websites seem to know our preferences better than we do, people tend to “assume the near-omniscience of artificial intelligence”, says Gigerenzer. But, he argues, AIs aren’t as clever as you might think.
A 2015 study, for example, showed that even the smartest object-recognition system is easily fooled, confidently classifying meaningless patterns as objects with more than 99 per cent confidence. And at the 2017 UEFA Champions League final in Cardiff, UK, a face-recognition system matched the faces of 2470 football fans at the stadium and the city’s railway station to those of known criminals. This would have been useful but for 92 per cent of the matches turning out to be false alarms, despite the system being designed to be both more efficient and more reliable than humans.
There are good reasons why even the smartest systems fail, says Gigerenzer. Unlike chess, which has rules that are rigid and unchanging, the world of humans is squishy and inconsistent. In the face of real-world uncertainty, algorithms fall apart.
Here, we get to the crux of Gigerenzer’s main argument: technology, at least as we know it today, could never replace humans because there is no algorithm for common sense. Knowing, but not truly understanding, leaves AI in the dark about what is really important.
Obviously, technology can be, and often is, useful. The voice and face-recognition software on smartphones are largely convenient and the fact that YouTube seems to know what I want to watch saves the hassle of working it out for myself. Yet even if smart technology is mostly helpful, and is showing few signs of replacing us, Gigerenzer argues that we should still be aware of the dangers it can pose to our society.
“Knowing, but not truly understanding, leaves artificial intelligence in the dark about what is really important”
Digital technology has created an economy that trades on the exchange of personal data, which can be used against our best interests. Companies and political parties can purchase targeted adverts that subtly influence our online shopping choices and, even more nefariously, how we vote. “One might call this turn to an ad-based business model the ‘original sin’ of the internet,” writes Gigerenzer.
So, what can be done? Gigerenzer says that more transparency from tech firms and advertisers is vital. But technology users also need to change our relationship with it. Rather than treating technology with unflinching awe or suspicion, we must cultivate a healthy dose of scepticism, he says. In an age where we seem to accept the rise of social media addiction, regular privacy breaches and the spread of misinformation as unavoidable downsides of internet use – even when they cause significant harm to society – it is perhaps time we took stock and reconsidered.
Using personal anecdotes, cutting-edge research and cautionary real-world tales, Gigerenzer deftly explains the limits and dangers of technology and AI. Occasionally, he uses extreme examples for the sake of making a point, and in places he blurs the lines between digital technology, smart technology, algorithms and AI, which muddies the waters. Nevertheless, the overall message of Gigerenzer’s book still stands: in a world that increasingly relies on technology to make it function, human discernment is vital “to make the digital world a world we want to live in”.

More on these topics: More

Josie Ford
The order of not things
Cambridge – of Cambridgeshire, not Massachusetts, before anyone jumps in – is famed as the academic home of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, three philosophers who did much to elucidate, not to say obfuscate, language, logic and meaning. It is very much in their spirit, we assume, that Cambridge City Council recently advertised an extra rubbish bin collection following staff absences, stating “bins will be collected in the order in which they were previously not collected”.
“Is it quantum mechanics then that enables us to determine the order in which things don’t happen?” asks Alison Litherland, we imagine hovering indecisively over her bins. Quite possibly. Our starting point must be the following question: if a bin isn’t collected, but no one sees it not collected, has it been not collected at all?
In purely practical terms, the only way of finding out is by looking in the bin, making this a particularly pure instantiation of Erwin Schrödinger’s cat paradox. Maybe Schrödinger’s trash didn’t have quite the same ring to it. As far as your problem goes, Alison, we fear that repeated measurement of identical bins may allow you to build up a picture of when it wasn’t collected, but this will only have statistical validity.Advertisement
Poet didn’t know it
Feedback is delighted to find, while searching for something else, that the physicist James Clerk Maxwell (died 1879) is listed as an author on the New Scientist website (born circa 1996).
Further investigation reveals a series of poems published by Maxwell in these pages in 2011. We are somewhat lacking context, but his Valentine By a Telegraph Clerk (Male) to a Telegraph Clerk (Female) bears rereading, with its culminating verse: “Through many a volt the weber flew,/And clicked this answer back to me;/I am thy farad staunch and true,/Charged to a volt with love for thee.”
Sweet, if of its time. Following our musings on how old the internet thinks you can be (26 February), at 180, we may have found our oldest contributor.
Standard elephants
Metrologists at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris may still be basking in the replacement, in 2019, of the international prototype kilogram – a platinum-iridium hulk that would feel exactly like 1 kilogram if dropped on your foot – by a fancy-schmantzy definition in terms of various physical constants. But as regular Feedback readers know, they are missing the… in the room. The elephant is well-established as the actual international standard unit of mass.
Proof positive, a report from The Hamilton Spectator in Ontario, Canada, sent in by Doug Thomson. A clean-up after storms there in January required the removal of “145,000 tonnes of snow – about 20,000 large, frozen elephants worth”. We can only imagine the difficulties of dealing with these homesick and discomfited beasts. The icing on the elephants clearly adds something to their weight, as we conventionally take an adult male African bush elephant to weigh about 6 tonnes.
Even as we hear calls for a standard prototype elephant kept under glass somewhere growing louder, news reaches us of a breakaway movement in New South Wales, Australia. Many of you highlight news of the seizure of 9.7 hectares’ worth of illicitly grown tobacco at Koraleigh “weighing the equivalent of 13 bulldozers”.
How many bulldozers of tobacco fit into Sydney Harbour, we wonder. Meanwhile, Brian Horton consults the delightful website “What Things Weigh” to find bulldozers range from a baby 8 (good old non-metric) tons to a fully grown 180 tons. Suffice to say, the amount of tobacco seized at Koraleigh was some 42 standard elephants.
His mummy’s voice
The interwebs have delighted themselves recently at a story first reported by New Scientist in 2020, that researchers have recreated the voice of an Egyptian mummy held at Leeds City Museum, UK.
The experience is slightly hard to reproduce on the printed page, but oddly, in some of the clips now circulating, the mummy is clearly saying “UUUUGRHH”, whereas two years ago it was a far more refined “EEEEERGH”. Mummies could presumably have made more than one sound, says a colleague – not unreasonably, with the qualification “when alive”. “This is the replication crisis writ large,” says another, damningly.
Vive la résistance!
Much as we try to stop buttered toast falling on our pages, right side up or no, still it rains down. But we are in a philosophical frame of mind, so we are grateful to J. Feralco for the reminder of a corollary to Murphy’s Law, first established by humorist Paul Jennings in the 1940s: “The chance of the bread falling with the buttered side down is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet.”
This came as part of his Report on Resistentialism, a school of philosophy encapsulated by the phrase “Les choses sont contre nous” – “things are against us” – established on Paris’s Left Bank by “bespectacled, betrousered, two-eyed” thinker Pierre-Marie Ventre. Resistentialism holds that there are limits to the sway humans can hold in a world of largely hostile, uncooperative things. It is worth rummaging around for the whole essay online as a parable for These Uncertain Times.
Got a story for Feedback?
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

The new slapstick sci-fi offering by French directorial royalty Jean-Pierre Jeunet is plagued by predictable innuendo

Humans

2 March 2022

By Gregory Wakeman

Romance can get complicated when you are locked in with a sex robot while the androids attackBruno Calvo/Netflix
Bigbug
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
NetflixAdvertisement

JEAN-PIERRE JEUNET is widely regarded as one of the finest French film-makers of the past 30 years, having overseen the likes of Delicatessen, A Very Long Engagement and the much adored 2001 romantic comedy Amélie.
Bigbug is Jeunet’s first feature film since 2013’s The Young and Prodigious T. S. Spivet and his first French-language film since 2009’s Micmacs. As fans of his work might expect, Bigbug, a futuristic sci-fi comedy, is downright bizarre.
Set in Paris in 2045, it takes place in a world where humans rely on robots to satisfy their every desire. Then four of Alice (Elsa Zylberstein)’s antiquated domestic robots decide to take her hostage, trapping her inside her home with her date Max (Stéphane de Groodt), his son Léo (Hélie Thonnat), her daughter Nina (Marysole Fertard), her ex-husband Victor (Youssef Hajdi) and his new girlfriend Jennifer (Claire Chust). Alice’s nosy neighbour Françoise (Isabelle Nanty), who happens to be visiting along with her sex robot Greg (Alban Lenoir), also gets locked in.
What starts off as a minor inconvenience soon gets real when it emerges that the latest generation of robots, the Yonyx (all played by François Levantal), is trying to take over the world. As the Yonyx get closer to Alice’s home, the humans start to turn against each other and the older robots, who may or may not be trying to keep them safe.
While Jeunet’s previous films are similarly quirky, in Bigbug, he plays for much bawdier laughs. Sometimes, it works. A robot’s analysis of why Max is lying to Alice at the start of the film, for instance, suggests that Jeunet might be about to explore artificial intelligence in a unique and irreverent way.
Unfortunately, though, that level of insight never materialises, and this early scene is about as funny as Bigbug gets. Sure, Victor’s increasing anger at being trapped inside is amusing to watch unfold, plus there are a handful of other slapstick moments that you can’t help but smile at. But in general, it is surprising how predictable most of the gags are.
Filming began in October 2020, and it seems that Jeunet has tried to channel the mental and emotional struggles of quarantine during covid-19 and to critique both the world’s reliance on technology and its infatuation with social media. Unfortunately, whatever message he is attempting to get across never really materialises. In its place are crude innuendos and sex jokes.
Some of Jeunet’s more unusual creative decisions also make Bigbug less successful than it should be. It is jarring that, despite the mighty financial backing of Netflix, the special effects look so cheap as to be genuinely off-putting. What’s more, while the characters are almost entirely motivated by sex and the film includes several scenes that are definitely not suitable for children, the world Jeunet has created looks and feels cartoonish.
Alice’s home, her clothes, her robots and even the flying cars all appear to have been inspired by The Jetsons, while the villainous Yonyx, who all look and act the same, could have been ripped straight from a 1970s comic book.
While these elements don’t come close to gelling, Jeunet’s light direction, bright colour palette and attractive set design do at least make Bigbug watchable. It helps that the script also takes some unexpected twists and turns that see the characters getting romantically entangled in ways that you might not initially expect.
But considering Jeunet’s past cinematic triumphs, and after so long away from the camera, Bigbug just doesn’t provide enough laughs or sufficient thematic depth to be anything other than disappointing.

More on these topics: More

Katie Yu
Watch
Upload, a sci-fi comedy that satirises the idea of a digital afterlife, returns for a second season. Created by Greg Daniels (Parks and Recreation, Space Force), the series will be available on Amazon Prime Video from 11 March.

Visit
New Scientist Live will be at Manchester Central and online from 12 March. With talks from over 40 speakers across four stages, there are also live, hands-on demonstrations and exhibitions. 14 March is dedicated to schools and home learners.

Advertisement
Read
An Infinity of Worlds may exist in the universe. In this eye-opening account of cosmic inflation, physicist Will Kinney points out that if this were true, it would raise difficult questions about what the cosmos actually is. More

The sarsen stones of the Stonehenge monument could have been designed as a calendar to track a solar year, with each of the stones in the large sarsen circle representing a day within a month

Humans

2 March 2022

By Alison George
Stonehenge – an ancient calendar?nagelestock.com / Alamy
Stonehenge has long been thought to be an ancient calendar due to its alignment with the summer and winter solstices, but exactly how the calendar system worked was a mystery. Now a new analysis shows that it could have functioned like the solar calendar used in ancient Egypt, based on a year of 365.25 days, with each of the stones of the large sarsen circle representing a day within a month.
“It’s a perpetual calendar that recalibrates every winter solstice sunset,” says Tim Darvill of Bournemouth University, UK, who carried out the analysis. This would have enabled the ancient people who lived near the monument in what is now Wiltshire, UK, to keep track of days and months of the year.
The key to unlocking this calendar system came from the discovery in 2020 that most of the sarsen stones were quarried from the same location 25 kilometres away, and were placed at Stonehenge at around the same time.Advertisement
Join us for a mind-blowing festival of ideas and experiences. New Scientist Live is going hybrid, with a live in-person event in Manchester, UK, that you can also enjoy from the comfort of your own home, from 12 to 14 March 2022. Find out more.
“All except two of the sarsens at Stonehenge come from that single source, so the message to me was that they’ve got a unity to them,” says Darvill. This indicates that they were intended for a common purpose. To find out what, he looked for clues in the numbers.
The sarsens were arranged in three different formations at Stonehenge around 2500 BC: 30 formed the large stone circle that dominates the monument, 4 “station stones” were placed in a rectangular formation outside this circle, and the rest were constructed into 5 trilithons – consisting of two vertical stones with a third stone laid horizontally across the top like a lintel – located inside the stone circle.
“30, 5 and 4 are interesting numbers in a calendrical kind of sense,” says Darvill. “Those 30 uprights around the main sarsen ring at Stonehenge would fit very nicely as days of the month,” he says. “Multiply that by 12 and you get 360, add on another 5 from the central trilithons you get 365.” To adjust the calendar to match a solar year, the addition of one extra leap day every four years is needed, and Darvill thinks that the four station stones may have been used to keep track of this. In this system, the summer and winter solstice would be framed every year by the same pair of stones.
This Stonehenge calendar system “makes a lot of sense,” says David Nash at the University of Brighton, UK.  “I like the elegant simplicity of it.”
Others are not so sure. “It’s certainly intriguing but ultimately it fails to convince,” says Mike Parker Pearson of University College London, UK.” The numbers don’t really add up – why should two uprights of a trilithon equal one upright of the sarsen circle to represent 1 day? There’s selective use of evidence to try to make the numbers fit.”

Although a calendar with 30-days months and an extra “intercalary” month of five days might not be familiar to us today, such a system was used in ancient Egypt from around 2700 BC and other solar calendars had been developed in the eastern Mediterranean region at around that time.
In the Egyptian calendar these five extra days were “very significant, religiously speaking,” says Sacha Stern, an expert in ancient calendars at University College London. This has led Darvill to think that the five trilithon structures at Stonehenge might have marked a five-day mid-winter celebration, an idea bolstered by the fact that the tallest stone at the monument, part of one of the trilithons, points to the sunrise on the midwinter solstice.
The similarity between the Stonehenge calendar and that used in ancient Egypt hints that the idea for the Stonehenge system may have come from afar. Recent archaeological finds support the idea of long-distance travel and trade around that time. Isotope analysis of the body of the Amesbury Archer, who was buried 5 kilometres from Stonehenge around 2300 BC, revealed that he was born in the Alps and came to Britain as a teenager, and a red glass bead found 2km from the monument appears to have been made in Egypt around 2000 BC.
However, Stern is not convinced by the argument that the Stonehenge calendar system originated elsewhere. “I wonder if you need to invoke the Egyptians. Why can’t we just imagine that [the people who built Stonehenge] created the whole system by themselves? They certainly knew when the solstice was, and from that point onwards you just have to count the days, and it won’t take long to figure out how many days you need in the year.”
Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2022.5

More on these topics: More