Humans

Reiner Bajo/Lionsgate
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Moonfall sees director Roland Emmerich try to top his other disaster films, such as The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day, by knocking the moon out of orbit and crashing it into Earth. In cinemas from 4 February.

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The Man Who Tasted Words and other unusually gifted or affected people are the subject of neurologist Guy Leschziner’s journey through our senses, setting out how we use them to understand the complexities of the world around us.Advertisement
Rolex/Ambroise Tézenas
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Thao Nguyen Phan has combined videos, silk paintings and mixed media to explore the history, industry and contested future of Vietnam’s Mekong river. The exhibition runs at Tate St Ives, UK, from 5 February.

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By Michael Marshall

WHO were the first people to reach the Americas? When did they get there, and how? These are among the most mysterious questions in prehistory, and have long been studied using traditional archaeology: bones, artefacts and so on. In recent years, however, the field has been revolutionised by genetic data. DNA from living people and preserved remains has both enhanced and transformed our understanding of the continents’ First Peoples (those who were on the continent before Europeans arrived) and how they got there.
Jennifer Raff is a genetic anthropologist at the University of Kansas who has been involved in many studies of ancient American DNA, so she is an ideal guide to the subject. Her book Origin bills itself as “a genetic history of the Americas”, and it largely delivers on that promise. The final third of the book, in particular, draws on genetic and archaeological evidence to tell the story as we see it now. This section is a model of clear and nuanced explanation: Raff highlights the uncertainties and caveats, but doesn’t allow them to overwhelm the story.
The earlier part of the book is less clear in places. Raff re-examines not only some of the Americas’ most important digs, but the problems inherent in interpreting the evidence from artefacts alone, before the advent of genetic technology.
She recounts, for example, how archaeologists were convinced that the first people in the Americas were the Clovis, who made a distinctive kind of stone tool. This idea became dogma, and any archaeological sites that seemed older than the Clovis were dismissed – often on flimsy grounds. Only in the past decade or so has pre-Clovis settlement become accepted.
Then there is the question of how the First Peoples got there. All the evidence suggests that they came from Asia, but there is an open question over the route they took. The evidence is complex and contradictory, and Raff is admirably fair-minded in the way she handles it.
These sections are crucial to the story because they elucidate just how much light genetics has been able to shed on the big mysteries. Unfortunately, they jump back and forth in time, both in prehistory and in the historical sequence in which the discoveries were made, which can get a little confusing. The problem is exemplified by the first page, where an arresting anecdote is interrupted by four footnotes.
Despite this, Origin has many strengths. Raff is a critical historian of her own field, who casts a beady eye over the crimes and misdemeanours committed by earlier generations of archaeologists in the Americas. She argues that the story of anthropology in the Americas cannot be separated from the genocide perpetrated by Europeans on First Peoples. Archaeologists frequently dug up buried bodies without consulting local Native American groups, who regard the bodies as their own ancestors – a belief that has often been validated by genetic evidence.
These attitudes also fed into scientists’ conclusions. When huge artificial structures were found in North America, Europeans attributed them to a lost group of “Mound Builders” and argued that they couldn’t be the work of First Peoples.
“Raff casts a beady eye over the crimes and misdemeanours of earlier generations of archaeologists”
It will make uncomfortable reading for people still wrestling with the legacy of the European colonial empires. Some scientists may prefer that these darker episodes not be mentioned, but I tend to agree with Raff that it is crucial to face them head on. She argues that scientists studying the history and culture of Indigenous peoples anywhere in the world must be in constant dialogue with them: asking permission before conducting new studies and asking what the Indigenous peoples themselves want to know.
Minor niggles aside, then, Origin is a very human book. The settlement of the Americas isn’t simply a scientific mystery to be solved. For Raff, studying the First Peoples is also about learning collaboratively and healing the wounds of history.

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A partial skull from China represents the earliest human with a “modern” brain size. It could represent an unknown group of ancient humans, or perhaps one of the enigmatic Denisovans

Humans

26 January 2022

By Michael Marshall
Fragments of a large ancient human skull known as Xujiayao 6Xiu-Jie Wu,Christopher J.Bae, Martin Friess, Song Xing, Sheela Athreya, Wu Liu
An ancient human that lived in China at least 160,000 years ago had an unusually large brain for the time – comparable to the brain size of people alive today. The find is more evidence that hominin evolution went in many different directions, rather than taking a straight line from small brains to large ones.
It is also possible that the skull belonged to a mysterious kind of hominin called a Denisovan. Very few Denisovan bones are known, so … More

Kseniia Zagrebaeva
“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These are three unalienable rights emphasised by the US Declaration of Independence as being the duty of their leaders to protect and secure.
The third one gives perhaps most pause for thought. What should governments – and all of us – be doing to maximise societal and personal happiness? Indeed, what even defines happiness?
Politicans and philosophers have wrangled over the apparent contradictions and conflicts that such questions throw up for centuries. Meanwhile, a simple equivalence has come to be made across the world. Many believe that happiness comes with having a bigger cake and … More

By Elle Hunt

Kirsten and her close friend August stick together to surviveHBO Max/Warner Media
TV
Station Eleven
Created by Patrick SomervilleAdvertisement

EARLY in the covid-19 pandemic, as people struggled to make sense of the unfolding global crisis, many turned to stories almost as often as the latest news and science.
In January 2020, Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion entered the top 10 of the UK iTunes movie rental charts nearly a decade after its release. And much to the bemusement of its author, Emily St John Mandel, the 2014 dystopian novel Station Eleven – in which the “Georgia flu” kills most of the world’s population – suddenly gained a new audience. “I don’t know who in their right mind would want to read Station Eleven during a pandemic,” Mandel said at the time.
The book has since been adapted into a 10-part miniseries by screenwriter Patrick Somerville, who also wrote for The Leftovers, another critically acclaimed drama about the collapse of civilisation. His adaptation of Station Eleven was released to rave reviews in the US and Australia.
Station Eleven follows Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis), first as a child actor (Matilda Lawler) orphaned by the Georgia flu in present-day Chicago and then 20 years in the future, where she makes a living as a roving performer in a theatre troupe called the Travelling Symphony. She and her friends tour the settlements of the Great Lakes performing music and Shakespeare plays to survivors, lifting their spirits and sharing their motto (originally from Star Trek: Voyager): “Survival is insufficient”.
These two timelines, year zero and year 20, blur and merge with Kirsten’s fears for the future and recollections of her traumatic past, both of which intrude on her present. In particular, her thoughts return to Jeevan (Himesh Patel) and his brother Frank (Nabhaan Rizwan), who took her in during the first weeks of the pandemic. Kirsten also repeatedly returns to a graphic novel, called Station Eleven, which she clung to as a child, and which takes on totemic importance in the post-pandemic world.
“The episodes in year zero show a world unsettlingly like 2020, with cities emptied and aircraft grounded”
Most of the characters we meet have some connection to the graphic novel and, in the series, its spaceman protagonist Doctor Eleven takes on a comforting presence, watching over Kirsten and her friends like a sort of benevolent god. The connections between characters are gradually revealed as the series slides back and forth in time. Miranda (Danielle Deadwyler) is the author and illustrator of the graphic novel, while her ex-husband Arthur (Gael García Bernal) is a movie star who was acting alongside young Kirsten in King Lear in the “before”. He dies on stage from Georgia flu.
Though the pandemic of the TV show is a near-extinction event, the episodes set in year zero show a world unsettlingly like 2020, with supermarket shelves stripped bare, cities emptied and aircraft grounded. It also captures the lockdown surge in creativity as Kirsten, Jeevan and Frank find purpose and unity in making music and plays as the end of the world unfolds around them.
By year 20, the parallels with our covid-19 pandemic are minimal. There is even a generation of “post-pans”: 20-somethings who never saw the world as we know it and who press Kirsten for stories of smartphones and Uber as if they were fairy tales. They weren’t that great, she reassures them.
Not everyone is at peace in the post-pandemic world, as Kirsten and her friends discover with often devastating results. However, without shying away from confronting the turmoil and trauma of massive societal change, Station Eleven paints a surprisingly uplifting picture of the future, showing how civilisation might be rebuilt with art and community at its centre. It is a comforting vision as we ease into year three of living with covid-19.
Mandel recently said she felt “profoundly uncomfortable” that her novel dealing with a fictional pandemic was being boosted by a real-world life-or-death one. But as these uncertain times continue, Station Eleven‘s vision of the future – where humanity endures, and beauty is cherished – is a reassuring one to share in.

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Josie Ford
Guess the planet
Feedback has always been mildly sceptical of, not to say narked by, requests to click on pictures of bicycles and fire hydrants to prove we aren’t a robot. True, no one has ever seen an algorithm riding a bicycle, but when the shape-shifting terminator bots finally arrive, they will probably take on innocent forms such as fire hydrants. It might take one to know one.
At least they won’t be able to get social security benefits in Spain. Genís Cardona from Solsona, Catalonia, reports accessing an official Spanish government portal for tax and welfare services and being requested to answer a quiz question: “Which of the following is a planet? A. Banana; B. Pluto; C. Scissors; D. Bee”.
A decade and a half on, Pluto’s controversial demotion from planethood clearly still rankles in some quarters. Like Genís, we appreciate the spirit of this open defiance of the International Astronomical Union’s edicts. Come to think of it, though, does anyone know which side the robots are on?Advertisement
Flipping bird
Our mention of “New Zealand’s most annoying tūī” (1 January) prompts Matthew Arozian to write from Baltimore, Maryland, with the heartfelt insight that the Carolina wren – Thryothorus ludovicianus, we savour on our tongue – weighs approximately 18 to 22 grams yet produces calls that can reach 110 decibels.
He asks us to imagine the cacophonous circus of a brood being taught to fly just outside his home-office window. We close our eyes, rapidly open them again and sympathise. Mind you, the transcendent benefits for our well-being of being within and bonded to nature are well known, Matthew. Call it home delivery.
Polly the pickled parrot
Staying with our feathered frenemies, our Australasia correspondent Alice Klein provides an addendum to our item last week about alcoholic overindulgence in the animal kingdom with the story of Broome Veterinary Hospital in Kimberley, Australia, which ABC News reported in December was treating a spate of red-winged parrots apparently boozed up on fermenting mangoes.
As Michael Considine, a biologist at the University of Western Australia, pointed out, volatile compounds released by the fermentation of fallen mangoes attract the birds, encouraging them to propagate the plant’s seeds – even if, by whumping into windows, falling over and generally sitting around dazed and vulnerable to predators, the parrots’ own chances of survival aren’t exactly enhanced.
Evolution in the raw, and a reminder to the rest of us not to drink and fly.
Can’t find the words
The Guardian reports rage and distress at copycat app versions of the online word game Wordle that assault the original’s innocent ethos of freedom from both charge and data hoovering. For those who haven’t yet fallen down this rabbit hole, Wordle confronts its players with a blank series of five letters to fill in, giving them six attempts to arrive at the actual five-letter word that the computer was thinking of, once told whether their letters appear in that word.
As Fields medal-winning mathematician Tim Gowers has highlighted, this gamifies entropy in an information theory sense, as the information required to specify a given object. This makes it Solid Science, but Feedback has now fallen down the rabbit hole at the bottom of the rabbit hole with Sweardle, a game that does the same thing with a more limited set of four-letter words, and Letterle, which gives a maximum of 26 goes to guess a single letter. We know all of this is contributing to the heat death of the universe, but we can’t stop now.
Tin lid on it
Of which, many thanks to those of you who wrote in varying degrees of delight and distress over our fiendishly difficult holiday word search featuring the names of all the known fundamental particles, the chemical elements and the amino acids that make up life’s proteins (18/25 December 2021, p 43). We are treating it as a slow-burning abvent calendar – a term we just invented, and we expect letters about – finding one a day as Christmas recedes.
For those of you whose year is off to an even slower start, we forward Bob Ladd’s query, which we take as expressing both delight and distress, asking how you might design the same word search with no accidental instances of TIN – apart from those required in TIN and ASTATINE, say. That sounds like a case for the entropy theory of information to us. And in response to Mike Clark’s query, we don’t know whether it is SULPHUR or SULFUR yet, either.
Whale units
Still in holiday mode, Harry Lagoussis writes from Athens concerning our statement that a lump of ambergris, or ancient whale poo, the size of a human head “could fetch you £50,000 or more” (18/25 December 2021, p 56).
“Does that make the ‘shithead’ the standard unit of ambergris volume? And, perhaps more importantly, if 1 shithead = £50,000, does that justify the use of the selfsame unit when discussing the global financial system, celebrity net worth etc.?” he asks. At a punt, it’s no and no, but we will ask our ever-vigilant subeditors. And with that, we tiptoe out of the room.
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Our life satisfaction is shaped by many things including our genes and relative wealth, but there is now good evidence that you can boost your basic happiness with these key psychological strategies

Humans

19 January 2022

By David Robson
Tara Moore/Getty Images; Matt Dartford
WHAT MAKES PEOPLE HAPPY?
You probably know the type: those Pollyannas who seem to have a relentlessly sunny disposition. Are they simply born happy? Is it the product of their environment? Or does it come from their life decisions?
If you are familiar with genetics research, you will have guessed that it is a combination of all three. A 2018 study of 1516 Norwegian twins suggests that around 30 per cent of the variance in people’s life satisfaction is inherited. Much of this seems to be related to personality traits, such as neuroticism, which can leave people more vulnerable to anxiety and depression, and extraversion, which encourages more gregarious behaviour. Both traits are known to be influenced by a range of genes.
To put this in context, the heritability of IQ is thought to hover around 80 per cent, so environmental factors clearly play a role in our happiness. These include our physical health, the size and strength of our social network, job opportunities and income. The effect of income, in particular, is nuanced: it seems that the absolute value of our salary matters less than whether we feel richer than those around us, which may explain why the level of inequality predicts happiness better than GDP.
Interestingly, many important life choices have only a fleeting influence on our happiness. Consider marriage. A 2019 study found that, on average, life satisfaction does rise after the wedding, but the feeling of married bliss tends to fade over middle age. Needless to say, this depends on the quality of the relationship: marriage’s impact on well-being is about twice as large … More

By Gege Li

An artist’s impression of how Earth’s first multicellular animals looked on the sea floorMark Garlick/Science Photo Library
Book
Otherlands: A world in the making
Thomas HallidayAdvertisement

OUR planet has existed for some 4.5 billion years In that time, it has undergone extraordinary changes, with landscapes and life forms that would seem almost alien to us today. Yet clues to their existence and fate can be found buried deep within Earth’s layers.
Otherlands by palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday provides a unique portrait of these strange and remarkable environments and the species that inhabited them. Through rich, detailed descriptions of ancient organisms and geological processes that draw on the fossil record and his own imagination, Halliday transports us back through deep time, from the relatively recent – tens of thousands of years ago – to when complex life first emerged in the Ediacaran period hundreds of millions of years ago.
Each chapter spans a geological time period, focusing on a specific part of the world that stands out either for the quality of the fossil evidence or a notable event.
Halliday is careful to not only give attention to charismatic animals like dinosaurs and woolly mammoths, but also to plants, land masses and oceans, using the latest research to back up his conclusions.
In one chapter, we discover that giant penguins flourished in the then-rainforests of Antarctica during the Eocene. In another, how Jurassic seas in what is now Germany contained vast tropical reefs built by glass sponges that looked like “frozen lace”, as marine pterosaurs soared in the skies overhead. We also see how, during the Devonian period, Scotland was home to metres-high fungi that would have resembled “half-melted grey snowmen”.
As well as painting an intricate picture of the worlds that once existed, Halliday also highlights the fleeting existence of humanity. Our ancestors make the briefest splash onto the scene in the Pliocene around 4 million years ago, when early hominins appeared in the fossil record in what is now Kanapoi in Kenya.
If Earth’s history were squeezed into a single day, written human history would make up the last 2 thousandths of a second, Halliday points out. And yet “our species has an influence unlike almost any other biological force”. It is also far more destructive than the prominent natural disasters of the past.
Here, the book carries a clear message: that we must do something about the urgent climate situation we find ourselves in and the coming human-induced mass extinction. This, he argues, warrants a meticulous look back through Earth’s palaeontological record to understand how things might turn out in the future, and how we might take control of them.
This message is, by now, one we are used to hearing. For me, the most distinctive feature of the book is the way that Halliday chooses to describe the past. He encourages us to treat his writings like “a naturalist’s travel book, albeit one of lands distant in time rather than space”. This provides a sense of adventure and exploration where we see “short willows write wordless calligraphy in the wind” 20,000 years ago, or walk across “centuries-old mattresses of conifer needles” 41 million years ago.
It is refreshing to come across a book on palaeontology and geology that doesn’t just state what we know and why. Instead, Halliday uses scientific information to provide insights into worlds long gone. He is appropriately lavish in his depiction of the variety and resilience of life, without compromising on scientific accuracy.
To read Otherlands is to marvel not only at these unfamiliar lands and creatures, but also that we have the science to bring them to life in such vivid detail.

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