Humans

An uplifting film tells the story of how George Jarrett Helm Jr became a leading voice in a movement for environmental and Indigenous rights in Hawaii

Humans

1 December 2021

By Simon Ings
The US military used Kaho’olawe as target practice for decadesCourtesy of CCFF 2021/Hawaiian Soul
Film
Hawaiian Soul
‘Āina Paikai
WHAT IS the best way to carry out activism? How should we communicate bad news in ways that stir into action those who, not unreasonably, just want to get on with their lives?
Hawaiian Soul, a 20-minute short film directed by Hawaiian film-maker ‘Āina Paikai, asks those questions through the dramatised experiences of one man: the Hawaiian falsetto singer and musician George Jarrett Helm Jr.
Born in 1950, Helm was a guitarist and singer with … More

A set of 3.7-million-year-old footprints were initially thought to have been left by a bear walking upright, but have now been reinterpreted as the prints of an unidentified hominin that walked a little bit like a modern catwalk fashion model

Humans

1 December 2021

By Michael Marshall
One of the hominin footprints preserved at Laetoli in TanzaniaScience Photo Library
Ancient footprints that were originally thought to have been made by a bear walking on two legs were actually made by an extinct human species. The discovery means there are now three known sets of hominin footprints from the same locale in Tanzania.
It isn’t clear which hominin species made the prints. The authors of the new study say they don’t match the other sets of footprints at Laetoli, a site in Tanzania, so were probably made by a different species. If this is true, it would mean that two hominin species coexisted in the same region at the same time.
“Not only are they not a bear, they are hominin and they are not the same hominin as those that made [the other footprints],” says Ellison McNutt at Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine in Athens.Advertisement
The footprints were discovered in 1976 by Peter Jones and Philip Leakey. Excavating at Laetoli, they found five prints in a place they dubbed site A. The tracks had been left in soft volcanic ash that subsequently hardened into rock.
The pair’s colleague Mary Leakey suggested that the prints had been left by a hominin. However, later studies suggested that they were actually made by a bear walking on its hind legs. As a result, site A fell into obscurity.
Meanwhile, more footprints were found at Laetoli in a location a few kilometres away, labelled site G, and these were definitely made by hominins. The trail stretches 24 metres and includes prints (one of which is pictured above) from three individuals walking together. Both sets of footprints are 3.66 million years old and are thought to have been made by Australopithecus afarensis, the species to which the famous Lucy fossil belonged.

Now, McNutt and her colleagues have re-excavated the site A footprints. “The bear hypothesis was very reasonable at the time,” she says, because the prints do look unusual. But the sediment in them was never properly cleaned out, so their true shape wasn’t known. McNutt’s team cleaned the prints thoroughly and produced 3D scans of them.
The researchers compared the tracks from site A with footprints made by humans, chimpanzees and American black bears. “There are a lot of things that make it distinctly hominin,” says McNutt. For example, the big toes were proportionally much larger than the second toes, which is seen in hominins but not in bears.
The team was “very clever” to re-excavate site A and “it’s quite convincing that it’s not a bear”, says Marco Cherin at the University of Perugia in Italy. “I think it almost definitely is a hominin.”
McNutt and her colleagues also argue that the prints don’t match the more famous tracks at site G, so were therefore made by a different species of hominin. For instance, individual footprints at site A were relatively wide for their length, compared with those at site G. The hominin also seems to have cross-stepped, meaning it brought its feet across its body’s central line – a gait seen in its most exaggerated form when fashion models walk down runways placing one foot directly in front of the other.
“It’s not afarensis,” says McNutt. “It is certainly Australopithecus or something very like it.” Beyond that, she says we can’t be sure. However, she adds that elsewhere in Africa, there is clear evidence of multiple hominin species coexisting in the same regions, so it wouldn’t be surprising if the same was true at Laetoli.
Cherin isn’t convinced about that. “For the moment, I would be most cautious about the possibility of having two hominin track-makers in Laetoli,” he says.
In 2016, Cherin’s team described two additional hominin trackways at Laetoli, at a place called site S. These were interpreted as belonging to A. afarensis, but they are a range of sizes, and Cherin says the site A prints don’t look very different in terms of their size and shape from the site S prints, which might suggest they were all left by members of the same species. He highlights a study published in July that shows it is necessary to have more than 20 prints to get a reliable picture of how an animal walked. There are only five prints at site A.
Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04187-7
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The extra-large, dagger-like canine teeth seen in male great apes have been missing from human ancestors for at least 4.5 million years – possibly because females opted for less aggressive partners

Humans

29 November 2021
, updated 20 November 2021

By Clare Wilson
An Ardipithecus ramidus skull found in Awash, EthiopiaPvE / Alamy
Male hominins may have lost the extra-large canine teeth that are seen in most other male primates at least 4.5 million years ago – relatively early in our evolution. This suggests that male human ancestors became less aggressive with each other around the same time, possibly because females preferred less aggressive mates, says a researcher behind the finding.
Modern-day human males have proportionately the smallest canines of all male great apes. For most other primates, such as gorillas and chimpanzees, males have significantly bigger canines than females. Larger canines have been linked with more fighting between males for access to females.
It is unclear when in our evolutionary history male canines shrank, because fossils that are several million years old lack DNA that could be sequenced and assigned to a sex. The ancestors of humans and chimpanzees split about 7 million years ago, so the change in tooth size is thought to have happened at some point since then.Advertisement
Gen Suwa at the University of Tokyo in Japan and his colleagues measured the dimensions of more than 300 fossil teeth spanning 6 million years of hominin evolution. These included 24 from Ardipithecus ramidus, one of the earliest known hominins, which lived about 4.5 million years ago.

The A. ramidus canines didn’t clearly fall into two distinct groups, so the team developed a statistical technique for analysing subtle variations to distinguish male and female teeth. To check its accuracy, the group tested their technique on modern samples from primate teeth for which the sex was known.
Using the technique, the team found that male A. ramidus upper canines were 1.06 times larger than female ones, while the lower canines were 1.13 times larger than those in females – similar to the situation with modern humans. Those of modern chimpanzees, by comparison, are about 1.3 times larger in males for both upper and lower canines.
This suggests that male human ancestors have had relatively small canines for at least 4.5 million years – and that they were less aggressive toward other males than other great apes, says Suwa. “Smaller canines may evolve if females prefer to mate more with males that are prone to less aggression,” he says.
Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2116630118

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A pendant carved with mysterious dots and unearthed in a Polish cave is thought to be over 40,000 years old

Humans

25 November 2021

By Alison George
The pendant is decorated with dots in an asymmetrical loop patternAntonino Vazzana – BONES Lab
A pendant carved from mammoth ivory is the oldest known ornate jewellery made by humans in Eurasia. The discovery is shaking up our understanding of the emergence of so-called symbolic behaviours in the region.
The oval-shaped pendant, 4.5 centimetres long and 1.5 cm wide, was unearthed in Stajnia cave in Poland. It has two holes drilled into it, presumably to be used for thread, and is decorated with a sequence of more than 50 small indents in a looping curve.
“It’s a beautiful piece of past work from Homo sapiens, an amazing piece of jewellery,” says Sahra Talamo at the University of Bologna, Italy, who led the team that analysed the pendant.Advertisement
Using a new radiocarbon dating technique, the researchers discovered that the pendant was created 41,500 years ago, making it the oldest of its kind found in Eurasia. “We were quite shocked,” Talamo says.
This predates other objects and personal ornaments with punctured dot motifs found in France and Germany by 2000 years. It also highlights Poland as an important region for artistic innovation for the first wave of modern humans in Europe who developed new types of decoration for their bodies as a marker of personal or cultural identity.

The pattern of dots on the ivory forms an asymmetrical loop, but exactly what they mean is still an open question, says Talamo. “The most beautiful interpretation is that it is a lunar calendar,” she says.
The motif is similar to the one found on the Blanchard plaque from France, an engraved bone dated to around 30,000 years ago, which has been postulated to be a hunting tally to count the number of animals killed, or a marker of the position of the moon over time.
The excavations at the Stajnia cave also reveal how modern humans were in Poland around 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. “Poland was not supposed to have Homo sapiens there at this time,” says Talamo.
Journal reference: Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-01221-6

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

Humans

24 November 2021

Josie Ford
The future, now
Are you the sort of person who looks at the word “challenge” and sees “change”? We are, but then we are also the sort of person that sees the words “henge” and “leech”.
This probably means we aren’t the sort who will be duly inspired by “Leading with Purpose – The University of Alberta Brand Story”, a video introducing that institution’s new “One University” brand strategy. Having had it served up to us by a mole underneath its lawns, we find ourselves overcome with increasing waves of emotion.
“Leading with purpose means we never rest on our laurels,” we learn, to the backing … More

Many people experience maths anxiety and some even mention feelings of “rage and despair”. One way to improve the subject’s perception is by playing down the Platonists, suggests Michael Brooks

Humans

| Comment

24 November 2021

By Michael Brooks
Simone Rotella
WE HAVE a problem with maths. Our approach to the subject has led to a situation where 30 per cent of US adults are defined as having “low numeracy”: they can’t make calculations with whole numbers and percentages or interpret simple statistics in text or tables.
Some 49 per cent of UK adults – 17 million people – have no more numeracy than we expect of primary school children. Around 93 per cent of US adults describe themselves as experiencing some level of “math anxiety”, involving negative emotions – and possibly an elevated heart rate, clammy hands and dizziness – when asked to interact with mathematical problems.
I blame this on our obsession with the ancient Greeks. Many of our intellectual traditions hark back to this time and place, from the scientific use of Greek letters to the adoption of the Greek term “academia” as our society’s repository of knowledge. Last week, a new exhibition opened at the Science Museum in London that celebrates the ancient Greeks as thinkers who embraced a fusion of arts, science and religion as they “sought to understand the world in a logical and mathematical way”. But that depends on how you view logic and mathematics.Advertisement
Is it logical to assume that “all is number”, as the Pythagoreans did? This led them to give certain numbers a special status and to dismiss the idea of nothingness, and thus zero as a number. While accepted in Chinese and Indian cultures, negative numbers were also impossible for the ancient Greeks to accept.
And what is actually divine about the “divine proportion”, sometimes known as the golden ratio? Although we often give the idea credence, there is no evidence that humans naturally credit this mathematically derived geometry with special aesthetic powers, as disciples of Euclid contend. The Greeks routinely ascribed mystical powers to shapes and forms: Plato described the 12-sided dodecahedron as the shape that God used “as a model for the twelvefold division of the Zodiac”. But there isn’t anything holy about this geometric form. Sometimes a shape is just a shape.
Putting such ideas on a pedestal is problematic because it has created a cloud of awe and “otherness” around mathematics. This has percolated through to how we teach it and how it is received. Maths is endowed with an almost sacred status for the power of numbers. Those who share this faith become insiders. Those who don’t feel excluded.
Among significant numbers of school students, this results in a sense that maths “just isn’t my thing”, creating anxiety about having to deal with it. In the UK, 36 per cent of 15 to 24-year-olds experience maths anxiety. Some young people even have feelings of “despair and rage” about maths. The evidence shows that this anxiety lasts into adulthood, as does abandonment of the subject. Only one in five UK adults say they would be proud if their child were good with numbers, compared with one in two for reading and writing.
Celebrating a non-Greek, more utilitarian approach to numbers could help here – and would be much more faithful to the true history of mathematics. Sumerian construction workers used what we call Pythagoras’s theorem to create perfectly square corners long before the Greeks arose. The Babylonians used algebra as a tax-calculation tool. At the time of the ancient Greeks, Indian thinkers were using negative numbers in debt management.
Mathematics is a social utility, like law and democracy. It isn’t a religious movement. Perhaps we should solve this problem like the ancient Sumerians did, by grouping maths among the humanities, rather than as an adjunct to the natural sciences. Maybe then maths will finally belong to us all.

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Nazire Avlar/Shutterstock
IT IS sobering to think that if the Neanderthals had continued for 2000 more generations, they would still be sharing the planet with us today. Our other close relatives, the mysterious Denisovans, came even closer to surviving to modern times, and would have needed just 750 more generations of their lineage.
Instead, we Homo sapiens find ourselves alone, the sole survivors out of the seven or more types of human that we once shared a planet with. It is easy to assume that we killed the others off, but the most likely explanation for their demise is that dramatic … More

By Gege Li
[embedded content]
Photos Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)
MAGNIFICENT adventures are captured in this selection of images from the ongoing Lights and Shadows exhibition, organised by the Royal Geographical Society in London.
The scenes from travels and expeditions on display are taken from the society’s historic image collection, and reveal the marked progress of photography between 1851 and 1962.
Herbert Ponting/Royal Geographical Society-IBGAdvertisement
Antarctica’s striking vastness is captured in the above image by Herbert Ponting, photographer and film-maker for the British Antarctic Expedition from 1910 to 1913, led by Robert Falcon Scott.
The next image was taken in 1935 on Kellas Peak, which is on the border between India and the Tibet region and is named after Scottish mountaineer and chemist Alexander Kellas.
Herbert Ponting/Royal Geographical Society-IBG
The four smaller images show, clockwise from top left: Mount Fuji in Japan, taken by Ponting in 1907; Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary – the first people to summit Mount Everest, in 1953 – drinking tea in the Western Cwm valley that forms part of the route up the mountain, taken by fellow expedition member George Band; waves from the Southern Ocean crashing aboard the cargo vessel Moshulu in 1939, taken by apprentice seaman Eric Newby; and, finally, the crew of the lifeboat James Caird, which included Ernest Shackleton and expedition photographer Frank Hurley, pulling the boat across Antarctic ice after their ship, Endurance, sank in 1915.
Herbert Ponting/Royal Geographical Society-IBG
Lights and Shadows is at the Royal Geographical Society in London until 10 December, and also online.

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