Humans

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

By Luke Taylor

The roar of the home crowd really does have an impactClive Rose/Getty Images
It is a long-held belief that football teams playing in their home stadium get a boost from their fans. However, quantifying this effect on match results was difficult until the pandemic created an unprecedented natural experiment when most of the 2020/21 season was played behind closed doors.
Statistics shared with New Scientist by London-based sports intelligence firm Twenty First Group show that home teams in Europe’s five major men’s football leagues lost a significant home advantage when their games … More

By Jacob Aron

Home feels a long way away when you don’t know who to trustFabio Formaggio/EyeEm/Getty Images
Book
The Apollo Murders
Chris Hadfield QuercusAdvertisement

I FOLLOW space flight pretty closely, and yet I couldn’t tell you the names of the people currently aboard the International Space Station (ISS) without looking it up.
We weren’t always this blasé about human space flight. In the early days of crewed missions, NASA’s Mercury Seven astronauts were magazine cover stars and celebrities. In the 21st century, though, most astronauts are completely anonymous.
Chris Hadfield, the Canadian former commander of the ISS, is a rare exception. He first flew to space in 1995, riding on NASA’s space shuttle to visit the Russian space station Mir. He came to public prominence much later, in 2013, during his third and final mission to orbit, when he used social media including Twitter and YouTube to swap messages with the likes of William Shatner and talk about life onboard the station.
All of this culminated with Hadfield releasing a cover of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, recorded in microgravity. The video has since been viewed more than 50 million times, and is still as awe-inspiring as ever. While on the ISS, Hadfield made space seem exciting and relevant to the average person in a way that it hadn’t been for many years. “Space flight isn’t just about doing experiments, it’s about an extension of human culture,” he told me when we spoke following his return to Earth.
Since retiring from the Canadian Space Agency, Hadfield has written a number of non-fiction books, including his autobiography, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth. Now, he has turned his hand to thrillers with The Apollo Murders, an alt-history set during the cold war that seemingly draws on his own space flight experiences and takes them to dramatic extremes.
The story unfolds in an alternative version of 1973, when a new kind of space race quickly gets ugly as both the USSR and the US are hoping to exploit an unusual find on the surface of the moon. Hadfield’s version of 1973 has two key differences from our own. First, the Apollo 18 moon mission was redesignated to be a military operation run by the US Air Force, rather than being cancelled along with Apollo 19 and 20 following the failure of Apollo 13, as happened in reality.
Second, the Soviet Union’s first attempt at launching an Almaz military space station was successful. The real version burned up in Earth’s atmosphere after failing to reach a stable orbit, though a second attempt succeeded in 1974.
These two historical tweaks set the stage for the first military encounter in space – an event that thankfully has never happened in the real world. Old rivalries between the nations play out alongside personal grudges and a rising uncertainty about who to trust. The fact that back-up is almost 400,000 kilometres away only adds to the tension. It also allows Hadfield to unleash his inner Tom Clancy to great effect.
As someone who has actually been to space, Hadfield makes his techno-thiller jargon read true, whether it is the details of managing air pressure changes during a rocket launch or the blow-by-blow mechanics of hand-to-hand combat in microgravity.
“The story is improbable but not implausible. Hadfield only includes events that could have actually happened”
Overall, the story comes across as improbable but not implausible. Hadfield is careful to only include events that could have actually happened. In this respect, there are echoes of the excellent Apple TV+ series For All Mankind, which also deals with an alt-history space conflict. While reading, I did wonder if Hadfield had been watching the series and taking notes – the book was written during lockdown in the covid-19 pandemic, so perhaps he had time on his hands.
Either way, I wouldn’t be surprised to see The Apollo Murders get its own turn on the screen, because it seems ripe for adaptation as a film or TV series.
If I have one quibble, it is with the way that Hadfield has written some of the dialogue between Soviet characters. Scenes with Russian speakers that take place in the USSR are written in plain English, but when they encounter people from the US, the writing switches to transliterated Cyrillic, which is then repeated in English, to grating effect.
Still, it is a minor point for what is otherwise an accomplished story from a first-time novelist. Hadfield leaves the door open for potential sequels in this universe, and I am keen to see what he does next.

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By Gege Li

The foraging of Hadza honey in Tanzania is under threat due to increasing demand for landKatiekk2/Getty Images
Book
Eating to Extinction
Dan SaladinoAdvertisement

OUR diets are more homogenous than at any other point in human history, says food journalist Dan Saladino. Particularly in the West, a revolution in farming methods since the second world war has led us to a point where much of what we eat comes from just a few established varieties of crops and animals, controlled by a handful of companies.
This has undoubtedly had many benefits for humanity, making food supplies more predictable, cheaper and more accessible, and helping to curb malnutrition. Yet in his new book, Eating to Extinction: The world’s rarest foods and why we need to save them, Saladino argues that it has also pushed thousands of little-known foods, many with beneficial characteristics or rich historical and cultural significance, to the brink of extinction.
“The human diet has undergone more change in the last 150 years (roughly six generations) than in the previous one million years (around 40,000 generations),” he writes. This is worrisome, because restricting ourselves to such a narrow range of varieties diminishes the genetic variation that might protect crops and livestock from disease.
It also narrows the diversity of our gut microbiome, which is vital for our health and well-being, and risks the loss of entire culinary traditions forever. As Saladino puts it, “where nature creates diversity, the food system crushes it”.
Through a narrative that weaves science and history with stories spanning every corner of the globe, Saladino makes an urgent call to protect the world’s rare foods. The alternative, he warns, is a future where we lose our grip on nature and the vital services it provides, perhaps permanently.
The book is split into 10 parts, each focusing on a different category: wild foods (hunted or foraged); cereals; vegetables; meat; fish and seafood; fruit; cheese; alcohol; stimulants (tea and coffee) and sweet foods. In every chapter, Saladino highlights a few ingredients and traces their origins, meeting the people who are championing food biodiversity. Often, these individuals represent the last line of defence between a food and its extinction.
Saladino covers so much ground that it is hard to touch on even a fraction of the foods he explores. Just one example of a rare food with a remarkable story to tell is Hadza honey, foraged by some of the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies – the Hadza people of Tanzania.
Through a relationship forged over millennia, the Hadza have learned to work together with honeyguide birds so both can reap the rewards of the nutritious honey found high in baobab trees.
But this special dynamic is under threat: the rising demand for land for crops and livestock is spilling into Hadza territory, putting their livelihoods at risk and depleting the supply of honey and other wild foods on which they depend. Saladino makes the impact of these potential losses clear, often rounding off a chapter with a moving story that underscores how tragic it would be if these foods ceased to exist.
Packed full of knowledge about a host of ingredients that you probably didn’t even know existed, Eating to Extinction captures the urgency (and cost) of heading towards a future that is less nutritionally diverse.
“We cannot afford to carry on growing crops and producing food in ways that are so violently in conflict with nature; we can’t continue to beat the planet into submission, to control, dominate and all too often destroy ecosystems,” Saladino concludes. “The endangered foods in this book helped make us who we are; they could be foods that show us who we become.”

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By Simon Ings

National Library of Scotland
Film
Living Proof: A climate story Emily Munro
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An era-defining investigation of how growth occurs in nature and society, from tiny organisms to empires and civilisations, exploring the pitfalls of the drive to go big.
MOST environmental documentaries concentrate on the environment. Most films about climate change focus on people tackling the crisis. Living Proof, assembled and edited by Emily Munro, a curator of the moving image at the National Library of Scotland, is different.
It is a film about working people and their employers, about people whose day-to-day actions have contributed to Scotland’s industrialisation, its export of materials and methods (particularly in the field of offshore oil and gas) and the associated environmental impact.
Collated from an array of public information films and promotional videos from the 1940s onwards, and set to a contemporary soundtrack, Living Proof is an archival history of what Scotland has told itself about itself. It also explores the local and global repercussions of those stories, ambitions and visions.
Munro is in thrall to the changing Scottish industrial landscape, from its herring fisheries to its dams, from its slums and derelict mine-heads to the high modernism of its motorways and strip malls.
Living Proof is also – and this is more important – a film that respects its subjects’ changing aspirations. It tells the story of a nation that is trying to do right by its people.
It will come as no surprise, as Glasgow prepares to host the COP26 global climate conference, to hear that the consequences of those efforts haven’t been uniformly good. Powered by offshore oil and gas, and a redundancy-haunted grave for a dozen heavy industries, from coal mining and shipbuilding to steel manufacture, Scotland has a somewhat chequered environmental history.
“Much harm has been done to the planet in the name of doing what is best for the people”
As Munro’s film shows, however, the environment has always been a central plank of arguments both for and against industrial development in Scotland. The idea that people in Scotland (and elsewhere) have only now considered the environment is nonsense.
Only towards the end of Munro’s film do we meet protesters of any kind, deploring the construction in 1980 of a nuclear power plant at Torness, about 50 kilometres east of Edinburgh. Munro is less interested in the protest itself than in one impassioned speech that completes the argument begun in the first reel (via a public information film from the mid-1940s): that much harm has been done to the planet in the name of what is best for the people who depend on it, both as a home and a source of income.
This, indeed, is where we began: with a vision of a nation that, if it cannot support its own people, will go to rack and ruin, with (to quote that 1943 information film) “only the old people and a few children left in the glen”.
Living Proof critiques an economic system that, whatever its promises, cannot help but denude the planet of its resources, often at the expense of its people. It is all the more powerful for being articulated through real things: schools and pharmaceuticals, earth movers and oil rigs, washing machines and gas boilers.
Reasonable aspirations have done unreasonable harm to the planet. That is the real crisis elucidated by Living Proof. It is a point too easily lost in all the shouting. And it has rarely been made so well.
Simon also recommends…
Film
Bodysong
Simon Pummell
This BAFTA award-winning documentary about the human condition is woven from a dizzying array of archive resources.
Book
Growth
Vaclav Smil

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