Humans

By Adam Vaughan

The fightback against climate change is an all-hands-on-deck situationOneinchpunch/Alamy
“EVERYTHING is happening way faster than it happens in The Ministry for the Future,” says Kim Stanley Robinson of his latest novel, set in a world where an international agency is tasked with fighting for future generations on climate change. That vision was imagined mostly in 2018, which the US science fiction writer says now feels like “another geological age” because so much has happened, from Donald Trump’s election defeat to the covid-19 pandemic.
“Climate change seems to be the main topic on the table now, with all the storms, droughts, fires, freezings – the climate weirdness that has begun and looks like it will never cease in our lifetimes,” he says. Stanley Robinson – or Stan as he is often known – has repeatedly tackled climate change in his work, which is studded with heroic scientists and nods to scientific papers. His focus has increasingly moved beyond the problem of a rapidly warming world to what we should do about it. New York 2140, his 2017 novel, is a salutary warning of the risk of a drowned world if free market economics keep trumping the environment.
The Ministry for the Future hops from Switzerland to India and Antarctica as it mulls every climate fix imaginable, from the titular agency to legal and financial incentives, all the way to activists who are so desperate that they resort to extremism.Advertisement
Real-world versions of the ministry, such as Wales’s future generations commissioner, have suffered from a lack of clout. Does Stanley Robinson think his fictional one would work in reality?
“It would be a great thing, but it wouldn’t be simple or in any way easy to incorporate, because we’re so present-orientated,” he says. Moreover, it would be no panacea. “People would love to have the idea of a single fix, one thing will make everything right,” he says. “That’s just not going to happen.”
Nor is he comfortable with the answer being violent extremism and illegal “black ops”, which some of the book’s characters resort to. “I’m sure that there’s going to be people around the world who are really angry in coming decades and they will commit violence hoping to make a better situation, calling it resistance,” he says. “I think it would be better if we managed to forestall that with legal reforms that are really fast.”
So where does hope lie? In top-down efforts such as international diplomacy, in grassroots local efforts by citizens and everything in between, says Stanley Robinson. “It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation. The idea of either/or, or one’s better, one’s worse, all that needs to be thrown over the side,” he says. It is for this reason that Stanley Robinson thinks research into geoengineering methods, such as temporarily reducing the amount of the sun’s energy reaching Earth, is worth pursuing. All that matters is what works and is fast, he says.
He is also clear that our economic systems need reform. “It’s one of the reasons we aren’t reacting faster [on climate] than we are, because we’re locked into an ineffective system,” he says.
Stanley Robinson thinks the “capacious” nature of novels makes the form good at tackling the subject of climate change. He says its two strengths are giving readers time travel – “you are suddenly in a different time and space and really living it” – and telepathy. “You are in someone else’s head,” he says. But there are limits. “You can only push a novel so far. I don’t even believe in futurism or futurology – I’m a novelist.”
Yet he follows new science more closely than most novelists. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent report on the state of climate change science was “the ultimate in alarms going off”, he says. “The scientific community has been ringing that alarm since the late 90s. And the response has been slow and the resistance has been high.” But he fears the warning is being drowned by the noise of others, from pandemic disruption to “so-called political divides”, he says.
One of Stanley Robinson’s worries is a real-world equivalent of the deadly heatwave that opens his latest novel. “I fear that something like that is going to happen,” he says. He suspects such an event might topple a government but fail to affect global action. “The rest of the world will say, ‘oh, that’s what happens in the tropics’. We’re very good at ignoring stuff that happens elsewhere and saying ‘it can’t happen to me’.”
Stanley Robinson says he sees opportunity at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, UK, where he will give a speech. “My hopes are high COP26 will come up with something striking. Progress will be made.” He is also a big fan of US president Joe Biden. “He has been surprisingly good on climate. And I say this as a leftist.”
Kim Stanley Robinson uses climate science as inspiration for his novelsSean Curtin
And what next? More climate change-themed novels are in the offing. Stanley Robinson has already written novels set in Antarctica, including The Ministry for the Future, and now he wants to head to the other pole. “I’m looking at the Arctic – can we keep an ice sheet over the Arctic? It’s so important,” he says. If the idea grows into a story, it will explore a melting Arctic’s impact on governance, ecology and culture, not to mention the global climate as the region’s reflectivity changes.
“You can only push a novel so far. I don’t believe in futurism or futurology – I’m a novelist”
Sixteen years ago, Stanley Robinson told New Scientist he liked novels with happy endings. Does he hope for one on climate change? “We could have a good 21st century, we could have a good dealing with climate change, we could have a good Anthropocene,” he says. “This is what I charge the young science fiction writers with: you have to write that story so people can imagine it in advance – and then try for it.”

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Researchers have uncovered 478 ceremonial sites that were probably built by the Olmec and the Maya thousands of years ago

Humans

25 October 2021

By Krista Charles

A lidar-based image of an ancient ceremonial site in MexicoTakeshi Inomata
Hundreds of ancient Mesoamerican ceremonial sites built over a period of about 600 years have been uncovered. This comes after the discovery of the first such site – Aguada Fénix – was announced in 2020
Takeshi Inomata at the University of Arizona and his colleagues used a form of remote sensing called lidar, which uses airborne lasers to form a 3D picture of the surface of the ground. They used this to discover 478 sites in an area covering 84,516 square kilometres in southern Mexico, some of which was covered by dense jungle.
The sites were made up of rectangular complexes, which the Maya and Olmec probably used for ceremonial gatherings. “People just come and go… sort of like a pilgrimage centre,” says Inomata.Advertisement
They consisted of a central open plaza, where people might have gathered, with a series of low earthen mounds along the edges where there might have been built structures. And they were probably constructed between 1050 and 400 BC by two ancient civilisations – the Olmec, which was the earliest known civilisation in the region, and the Maya, which may have learned from the Olmec and whose culture collapsed around AD 800.
“Nobody knew about those rectangular ceremonial sites until we found Aguada Fénix, so all these new findings are a revelation about this early period,” says Inomata. “That really made us rethink about the origin of Mesoamerican civilisation. Many of those complexes were built by people without too much hierarchical organisation.”
The sites were all relatively flat with a few small pyramids compared with later constructions in the region such as Chichen-Itza that typically contain large pyramids.
“We don’t know exactly what they might have looked like in life, but one could argue that they were small cities,” says Elizabeth Graham at University College London, who wasn’t involved with the study. “When I first started work in the 70s it was still a time where everyone thought cities developed in the Classic period around 200 AD. Now, steadily the period in which I guess you could say urbanism developed has been pushed back and pushed back.”
Journal reference: Nature Human Behaviour, DOI: 10.1038/s41562-021-01218-1

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By Elle Hunt

Jacques-Yves Cousteau was a pioneer of underwater researchThomas J. Abercrombie/National Geographic
Film
Becoming Cousteau
Liz GarbusAdvertisement

BY HIS own account, the film-maker and ocean explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau hated it when his work was labelled as “documentary”. “That means a lecture by a guy who knows more than you,” he wrote. “Our films are true adventure films.”
Becoming Cousteau, a new documentary about Cousteau’s life and legacy, captures that spirit without getting too swept away. The result is a captivating portrait of a complicated man who was as well-known and widely beloved as David Attenborough is today.
Veteran film-maker Liz Garbus was first approached by National Geographic to make a film about Cousteau’s life in 2015. It was only in 2019, after years of negotiation, that Garbus was granted exclusive access to the Cousteau Society Archives, controlled by Cousteau’s widow Francine. Their children, Pierre-Yves and Diane, have co-producer credits on the film, but in Garbus’s hands, the involvement of those closest to Cousteau serves as an asset, not a liability, helping to paint a picture of a true original.
Cousteau was a born explorer, with an insatiable drive to see the world and a talent for sharing what he found. He started making films aged 13 and, at 20, entered the French naval academy with a view to becoming a pilot. When his career in aviation was cut short by a car accident, he began swimming on the French Riviera to help heal his broken bones, before becoming fascinated with freediving.
Soon, he became frustrated with the limits of freediving and, with his naval colleagues, experimented with breathing apparatus that would allow them to spend more time underwater. This led to the invention of the aqualung, which made diving more accessible for both scientists and amateur explorers.
Archival footage captures the fear and thrill of those early dives, which weren’t so far removed from space exploration at the time in terms of the risks involved.
In 1947, diver Maurice Fargues died while attempting to set a new depth record with the aqualung. This only focused Cousteau’s mind further. Fargues’s death must not be in vain, Cousteau said.
“Cousteau abandoned his dream of undersea civilisations to fight for oceans that could support life at all”
His ultimate goal, at that time, was utopian, “paving the way to a time when human beings will live continuously under the sea“. For Cousteau, diving proposed a route to liberation not just for him, but for all humankind, “to eliminate all ties to the surface”.
The spirit of this mission was embodied by his research vessel the Calypso, spoken of by its crew as something between a safe haven and a spiritual calling. “This escape would not exist if people were happy on land,” says one sailor. Footage of life onboard from the mid-1950s through the 60s gave ocean exploration a certain glamour. It is no wonder Cousteau’s work inspired a generation of film-makers and seafarers.
While celebrating Cousteau’s many triumphs, Garbus also engages with his life and work through a contemporary lens, interrogating the cowboyish tactics – such as blast-fishing with dynamite and slaughtering sharks as sailors’ revenge – that were in line with the pioneering spirit of the time, but are antithetical to conservation interests today.
In 1953, the Calypso – only ever one cheque short of financial ruin – even accepted funding to search for oil in the Persian Gulf. “We just didn’t know any better at the time,” says a crew member.
Cousteau himself was quick to change course. By the 1970s he had stopped showing his early films, saying “the mentality has changed”, and threw himself into lobbying for protection of the marine ecosystem.
After documenting two decades of decline, he abandoned his dream of an under-the-sea civilisation to fight to ensure that oceans could support life at all. His series – “no more about dealing with beautiful little fishes, [but] the fate of mankind” – was dropped from US television for being doomsaying.
Cousteau’s warnings for future generations are even harder to hear now, after 50-plus years of inaction. But his story inspires hope about what can be achieved by one person with a vision.

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By Michael Marshall

A panoramic view of L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, CanadaBob Hilscher/Getty Images
Before Christopher Columbus, Vikings were the first Europeans to reach the Americas. We now know to the year when they were there. Norse people were chopping down trees in Newfoundland in the year AD 1021, so they must have crossed the Atlantic Ocean by then.
“Exactly a millennium ago, human beings for the first time in history had got across [the Atlantic],” says Michael Dee at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Evidence for a Norse presence in North … More

By Ana Aznar

Michelle D’urbano
WE SHOULD really care about disgust. Not only does it protect us from coming into contact with possibly dangerous substances, such as rotting meat, but it is also central to understanding our moral compasses.
Yet, up until around 20 years ago, it was essentially absent from psychological research. Today, it is still shrouded in confusion. All other basic emotions, such as sadness and happiness, have a clear definition, but when it comes to disgust, psychologists are divided over whether it should actually be split into physical disgust and moral disgust, or whether it is only physical disgust that exists.
Physical disgust is that feeling caused by things such as vomit or faeces. This varies between people, but it helps protect us from touching or ingesting potentially dangerous substances that could put our survival at risk.Advertisement
Moral disgust, on the other hand, is normally described as the feeling you get when hearing someone has broken social norms or moral codes. Seeing a person steal or hearing about someone having an affair, for example, might be enough to set off this emotion in you.
Some psychologists argue that physical and moral disgust are two sides of the same coin. Others insist that, although the word “disgust” is used in both situations, when moral norms are broken, what people are actually experiencing is anger.
Disgust and anger are both negative emotions that have been linked with morality, but whereas disgust motivates us to avoid things, anger pushes us to confront whatever it is that is making us angry.
In my latest research, I have been examining the schism in psychology on disgust further using parent-child conversations. These are a valuable tool for developmental psychology as parents use them to teach their children about emotions, values and moral issues. They may also be particularly relevant to our understanding of disgust because children only begin to understand it when they are 3 to 4 years old, around a year later than the other basic emotions. This suggests there is a social component to disgust and that children’s understanding of it may be partly learned from their parents.
In the research, my colleagues and I asked 68 English-speaking mothers and their 4, 6 or 8-year-old children to discuss a series of short stories. In each of them, the main character performed either a physical transgression, such as wearing dirty clothes or sitting on a dirty chair, or a moral one, such as copying someone’s homework or jumping a queue. We then asked the mothers and children to talk about the emotion that they would feel after each transgression.
We found that both were more likely to say that they were disgusted by physical transgressions than they were angry. In contrast, when discussing moral transgressions, they were more likely to say that they made them angry rather than disgusted. Mothers and children also often said that these actions were wrong.
What this seems to suggest is that mothers and children are more likely to link disgust with physical transgressions and anger with moral ones.
Does this mean there is no such thing as moral disgust? We think it certainly points that way.
Our research won’t settle the controversy around the existence of moral disgust on its own. However, the more we learn about it, the closer we get to understanding how we develop a sense of morality.

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By Simon Ings

WHEN Spanish and other European forces entered South America in the 15th century, they used dogs as weapons to massacre the indigenous human population. Sometimes, their mastiffs, enormous brutes trained to chase and kill, even fed on the bodies of their victims.
This didn’t quell the affection in South America for dogs, though. Ferocious as they were, these beasts were also novel, loyal and intelligent and a trade in them spread across the continent.
What is it about dogs that makes them so irresistible?
In Our Oldest Companions, anthropologist Pat Shipman traces the ancient drivers that led to our species’ special relationship with dogs. It is an epic, and occasionally unnerving, tale of love and loyalty, hunting and killing, gleaned from a huge amount of archaeological and palaeogenetic research.
In Shipman’s view, there was nothing inevitable about the development of the grey wolf – a fierce, meat-eating competitor – into the playful friends that we know today. As Shipman puts it: “Who would select such a ferocious and formidable predator as a wolf for an ally and companion?”
To find the answer, says Shipman, forget the old tale in which someone captures a baby animal, tames it, raises it, selects a mate for it and brings up the friendliest babies.
Instead, she argues, it was the particular ecology of Europe about 50,000 years ago that drove grey wolves and human interlopers from Mesopotamia to develop a symbiotic relationship that set the stage for our future friendship.
“Who would select such a ferocious and formidable predator as a wolf for an ally and companion?”
Working together allowed humans to tap into the wolves’ superior speed and senses, and to gain their protection against other large predators including lions. The wolves, in turn, benefited from a human’s ability to kill prey at a distance with spears or arrows.
It was a partnership that allowed them to net enough food to share, and to outcompete the indigenous Neanderthals who didn’t have a team of super-fast predators to help them.
This idea was explored in Shipman’s 2015 book The Invaders In Our Oldest Companions, she develops her argument by exploring parts of the world where dogs and humans didn’t evolve similar behaviours.
Australia provides Shipman with her most striking example. When Homo sapiens arrived in Australia, around 65,000 years ago they came without domesticated dogs, because, at the time, there was no such thing.
When the ancestors of today’s dingoes were brought to Australia about 3000 years ago, their charisma earned them a central place in Indigenous Australian folklore, but there was no incentive for the two species to live and work together. Australia was less densely populated by large animals than Europe and there were only two large mammalian predators, the Tasmanian tiger and the marsupial lion, to deal with. As a result, says Shipman, while dingoes are eminently tameable, they have never been domesticated.
With the story of humans and dogs in Asia, Shipman goes against the grain. While some researchers argue that the bond between wolf and man was first established here, Shipman is having none of it. She points to a crucial piece of non-evidence: if dogs first arose in Asia, then where are the ancient dog burials?
Cute, but there was never a good enough reason to team up with dingoesJulie Fletcher/Getty Images
“Deliberate burial,” writes Shipman, “is just about the gold standard in terms of evidence that an animal was domesticated.” There are no such ancient graves in Asia, she points out. It is on the right bank of the Rhine in what is now Germany, that the earliest remains of a clearly domesticated dog were discovered. Known as the Bonn-Oberkassel dog, and dating from 14,200 years ago, it was found in 1914, tucked between two human skeletons, the grave decorated with works of art made of bones and antlers.
From there, domesticated dogs remained firmly in our hearts and homes There are now more than 300 subspecies, although overbreeding has left hardly any that are capable of carrying out their intended functions of hunting, guarding or herding.
Shipman passes no comment on this, but I can’t help but think it is a sad end to a story that began among mammoths and lions.

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By Carissa Wong

Ancient faeces found in salt mines in Hallstatt, AustriaAnwora/NHMW
Fungi found in faeces from Iron Age people who worked in salt mines in what is now Austria suggest that people were eating blue cheese and beer at least 2700 years ago.
There is earlier evidence for ancient cheese, found in Early Bronze Age tombs in Western China from nearly 4000 years ago, but these fossilised faeces provide the earliest evidence that “people produced cheese with even a flavour that is found in blue cheese”, says Frank Maixner at Eurac Research in … More

By Carissa Wong

Modern cultivated tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) seed vesselsblickwinkel / Alamy
Seeds discovered at an ancient campsite in Nevada indicate people have been using tobacco for at least 12,300 years, which is far longer than previously thought.
Tobacco plants are native to North America, and humans are thought to have reached the continent around 20,000 to 16,000 years ago. “This suggests that people learned the intoxicant properties of tobacco relatively early in their time here rather than only with domestication and agriculture thousands of years later,” says Daron Duke at the … More