Humans

New evidence reveals that Arabia was not a mere stopover for ancestral humans leaving Africa, but a lush homeland where they flourished and evolved

Humans

18 August 2021

By Michael Marshall

Andrea Ucini
THE Rub’ al-Khali is both desert and deserted – a landscape of reddish sand dunes that stretches as far as the eye can see. This hyper-arid region in the south-east of the Arabian peninsula is approximately the size of France. Parts of it often go an entire year without rain. Almost nobody lives there; its name means “empty quarter”.
The rest of Arabia is less environmentally extreme, but still a very tough place to live without air conditioning and other recent technologies. However, the peninsula wasn’t always so parched. A mere 8000 years ago, it was wet enough for there to have been many lakes. The same was true at intervals throughout the past million years, when rivers criss-crossed Arabia, forming green corridors where lush vegetation and wildlife flourished amid the sand dunes. For much of recent geological time, the peninsula was at least partly green.
Arabia’s verdant past is no mere factoid: it suggests that the region was habitable at times in the distant past. That realisation has prompted archaeologists to start looking for evidence of occupation by humans, their ancestors and their extinct relatives. In just a decade, they have found countless sites where these hominins lived, stretching hundreds of thousands of years into the past. Arabia, it seems, wasn’t a mere stopover for hominins as they moved out of Africa into the wider world. It was somewhere they settled for long stretches of time. Indeed, many researchers now think Arabia should be thought of as part of a “greater Africa”, and that the peninsula played an important role in human evolution and expansion across the world.
For … More

By James Urquhart

Dog food often contains grains – and may have done so for thousands of yearsJaromir Chalabala / Alamy Stock Photo
Dog diets often contain more starch than those of their carnivorous wolf ancestors, and an analysis of fossilised dog faeces helps explain how the animals made the dietary change. Long before their genomes adapted to their plant-rich chow, their gut microbiome gained a starch-digesting profile.
Due to their close association with humans, it is thought that dogs’ diets shifted to less meat and more carbohydrates when farming began – an idea that was supported by an archaeological analysis … More

By Jon O’Brien

Alma and Tom gradually become closer in this offbeat love storyChristine Fenzl
Film
I’m Your Man
Maria SchraderAdvertisement

CAN happiness flourish even when it is knowingly built on fabrication? Is perfection conducive to a healthy partnership? Can artificial and emotional intelligence truly coexist? Fresh from her Emmy-winning success with the Netflix miniseries Unorthodox, Maria Schrader leaves such questions hanging in I’m Your Man, her fourth film.
Adapted from Emma Braslavsky’s short story Ich bin dein Mensch, this German-language tale stars Downton Abbey‘s Dan Stevens as Tom, the ideal life partner. He is a handsome sharp-dresser with blue eyes that could pierce a stone, a penchant for romantic gestures and a willingness to cater to every whim. He is also a humanoid robot.
Love in the time of algorithms has been explored in the Amazon anthology Soulmates and Netflix’s Osmosis and The One. However, the central coupling here is born out of necessity rather than a search for “the one”.
Academic Alma (Maren Eggert) has reluctantly agreed to house Tom in a three-week experiment, which will help finance her research. She is completely uninterested in sharing a bed, or even a conversation, with this apparent kindred spirit, created to make her happy. “Leaving me alone should be no problem at all,” she tells Tom, who can’t compute her disdain. “That’s what makes me happiest.”
I’m Your Man is a curiosity. You could call it a sci-fi rom, yet there is little if any sci-fi or, indeed, rom. The tech behind Tom comes into play just once when he briefly malfunctions, while the film’s Berlin setting is a near-future whose aesthetic is more soft pastels than dark dystopia.
Despite Tom’s best efforts to ignite a spark using the millions of data strands at his disposal, he is thwarted by a dismissive Alma at every turn. “Ninety-three per cent of German women dream of this,” he remarks, after running a candlelit bath, strewn with rose petals. “Guess which group I belong to,” comes the reply.
It is only when Tom tones down the programmed cliches and starts responding less, well, robotically that the iciness thaws. He senses the sadness behind Alma’s steely exterior, and his matter-of-fact, yet effective, probing renders their “couples counsellor” (Toni Erdmann‘s Sandra Hüller) obsolete. Before long, Alma surprises herself by defending Tom from a colleague with no sense of personal space.
If I’m Your Man had emerged from Hollywood, this would be the cue for wedding bells. But European arthouse tends to avoid wrapping things up neatly in a bow. Although she slowly succumbs to Tom’s attributes, both physical and mental, Alma always remains aware that she is being manipulated by his constant recalibration. Happily-ever-after never looks likely.
Still, the two stars ensure you remain invested in this relationship, wherever it leads. Eggert offsets Alma’s abrasiveness with a quiet vulnerability and compassion, particularly in the scenes with her cranky dad (Wolfgang Hübsch) who has dementia, which hint at her fear of ending up in a lonely state, too.
Meanwhile, Stevens is charm personified in a performance partly inspired by Cary Grant. His comic timing is exquisite, proving that his scene-stealing turn in last year’s Eurovision movie was no fluke.
Schrader has served up a new, if resolutely low-key, tragi-comic spin on the digital love story that combines depth, humour and, no matter how mechanical, heart.

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Your brain is exquisitely sensitive to your surroundings, tuning into external cues and distractions whether you like it or not. Understanding how this happens could change the way we work

Humans

11 August 2021

By Annie Murphy Paul

Objects we place in our workspace reinforce our sense of identityMelanie Acevedo/trunkarchive.com
IN THE summer of 2001, Sapna Cheryan was a new graduate interviewing for internships at tech firms in California’s Bay Area. At one company, she recalls, the workspace looked like a computer enthusiast’s basement hang-out, full of action figures and Nerf guns, with a soda-can model of the Golden Gate Bridge. To her, it seemed designed to promote an exclusive conception of the firm’s ideal employee. As a young woman of colour, she felt unwelcome, even alienated. She accepted a place at another company – one with a workspace that was bright and inviting.
Five years later, Cheryan’s next move was to Stanford University in California to start a PhD investigating how physical cues in our environment affect how we think and feel. She is among a growing number of psychologists and cognitive scientists whose research challenges the idea that the brain is like a computer. Computers are indifferent to their surroundings: a laptop works the same in a fluorescent-lit office or a leafy park. The same isn’t true of the human brain. In fact, Cheryan and others have found its performance to be exquisitely sensitive to the context in which it operates.
This research seems especially relevant right now. During the pandemic, many of us were abruptly forced to work and learn in different surroundings, and the effect of place on cognition came into sharp focus. As some of us return to offices and schools, we have an opportunity to reimagine these spaces in accordance with what researchers have … More

Michelle Durbano
THE Tokyo Olympics have brought some of the fastest times ever seen on the athletics track. At an astonishing number of races, athletes are beating personal bests along with national, Olympic and world records. Elaine Thompson-Herah set a new Olympic record in the women’s 100 metres, breaking Florence Griffith Joyner’s record set over 33 years ago. World records were smashed in both the men’s and women’s 400 metres hurdles, by Karsten Warholm and Sydney McLaughlin respectively. In both these events, the silver medallist also ran faster than the previous world record.
Is this just an unusually good Olympics for record-breaking races or is something different going on? Part of the answer can be found by looking down at an athlete’s feet.
If you look closely, you might spot some new technology known as “super spikes” – and underfoot, there is a high-tech track.Advertisement
Recently, track spikes – shoes that have spikes on the underside to give runners grip – have seen a similar shift in the performance-enhancing technology that previously took over marathon racing shoes. Marathon “super shoes” first emerged in 2017 with Nike’s Vaporfly 4%, which gave athletes average energy savings of 4 per cent compared with competitors not wearing them. By now, almost every brand has a super shoe, and the new technology is being applied to track spikes.
Similar to their super shoe counterparts, super spikes combine soft, compliant and resilient foam with a stiff, curved carbon-fibre plate. The exact benefits of super spikes are difficult to quantify, but each component probably plays a role.

Traditionally, track spikes have tried to lessen the amount of midsole foam to reduce weight and energy absorption. However, new technology is lightweight and the foam is better at returning energy to the athlete than foams before it, giving back as much as 80 to 90 per cent. In this way, the foam acts as a spring with each step the athlete takes.
The role of the carbon-fibre plate is less clear. Research has shown that stiffening track spikes will reduce the amount of energy lost during toe flexion. This may increase the demands on the ankle. However, it has also been shown that if an athlete is strong enough to meet these increased demands, the plate allows them to get a more effective push off.
Another new technology contributing to athletes’ speed in Tokyo is the track. While it may look like a regular track, Mondo, the company behind it, spent three years researching and developing the surface specifically for Tokyo 2020. The track has been precisely tuned to allow shock absorption and energy return, playing a similar role to the foam in spikes.
Research on engineered track surfaces is as old as 1978, when it was found that a compliant, resilient track surface could improve times by as much as 2.9 per cent. Although the exact savings of the Tokyo track are unknown, its developers have said it could improve times by as much as 2 per cent compared with previous Olympic tracks.
While it is tempting to attribute the record-breaking times to the new spike and track technologies alone, other factors are at play too. The games being delayed by a year due to the covid-19 pandemic may actually have benefited some athletes, giving them more time to train. Other, more variable, factors, such as the weather, can affect how an athlete performs on any given day. And above all, we cannot ignore the effort and talent of the athletes competing in these races. It may just be that we have got a particularly talented crop this year.
Overall, the record-breaking times seen in Tokyo are likely to be a combination of all the above, including fast shoes, fast tracks and extremely talented athletes. ❚
Laura Healey is a manager of footwear innovation at Puma 

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By Jason Arunn Murugesu

School children in the UK tend to place male characters in the stories they writemartin-dm/Getty Images
Stories written by children are far more likely to feature male characters – regardless of whether the writer is a boy or a girl.
Yaling Hsiao at the University of Oxford and her colleagues analysed more than 100,000 short stories written by British children, aged 5 to 13, for a national writing competition organised by the BBC in 2019.
The researchers wanted to find out how a child’s gender influenced the gender of the characters … More

Discoveries of mass graves of Indigenous children in Canada have prompted new scrutiny of the residential school system – including the role physicians played in unethical experiments, says paediatrician Samir Shaheen-Hussain

Humans

4 August 2021

By Roxanne Khamsi

Unmarked graves were found in this cemetery near a former residential school outside Cranbrook, CanadaDave Chidley/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
IN RECENT months, more than 1300 unmarked graves of Indigenous children have been discovered in Canada. They were found at the sites of former residential schools, facilities authorised and funded by the Canadian government to assimilate Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture. Between the 1880s and 1990s, 150,000 children were taken from their families and placed in these schools, which were largely run by the Catholic church.
The recent discovery of these graves has sent shock waves around the world and confirmed what many Indigenous communities have long maintained – that children sent to these schools lived in dangerous and traumatic conditions, and many of them entered never to be seen again.
The legacy of prejudice that led to separating children from their parents continues to affect Indigenous communities in Canada today. Until recently, for example, when Indigenous children living in remote areas of Quebec needed emergency evacuation for medical care, their parents were barred from accompanying them. Samir Shaheen-Hussain, a paediatric emergency physician, was part of a successful campaign in 2018 to change that.
His participation in activism for Indigenous rights inspired him to look more closely at the residential school system. In his new book, Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting medical colonialism against Indigenous children in Canada, Shaheen-Hussain examines the role that doctors and scientists working at the schools played in perpetuating the system and endangering children’s lives. He writes that not only did they let deadly diseases such as tuberculosis run … More

By Layal Liverpool

Systemic inequalities mean Black people often face worse health outcomesER Productions Limited/Getty Images
Inflamed: Deep medicine and the anatomy of injustice
Rupa Marya and Raj Patel
Allen LaneAdvertisement

THE covid-19 pandemic exposed stark inequalities globally, with socially and economically disadvantaged groups facing higher than average risks of becoming seriously ill and dying.
“Not all patients were equal,” write Rupa Marya and Raj Patel in their new book, Inflamed. The authors, both academics and activists, write: “[In the US,] Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC) were over-represented, their bodies subject to inflammation of all kinds, long before the SARS-CoV-2 virus ever settled into their lungs. Not only lack of access to health care, but systemic social and economic disenfranchisement rendered their bodies most susceptible to Covid when it hit.”
Inflammation is the body’s response to infection or damage. Immune cells spring into action and a flurry of chemicals are released to promote repair and recovery – for instance, by destroying invading microbes or healing a wound. Once healing is complete and balance restored, inflammation should subside.
But sometimes it persists, transforming the body’s healing mechanism into what the authors describe as “a smoldering fire that creates ongoing harm”. For doctors to truly identify and treat the underlying causes of ill health, the two argue, they must begin by understanding how systemic racism and inequality contribute to this type of persistent, harmful inflammation in people’s bodies.
Inflamed delves into a growing body of research examining how inequality drives health disparities. For instance, Black people in the US are more likely to earn less and have more debt compared with white people, contributing to chronic stress. They are also more likely to be exposed to environmental health hazards, such as lead in drinking water, and to live in areas with limited access to affordable, healthy food options, making it difficult to maintain a healthy diet.
“High mortality rates in Black infants are halved when they are cared for by Black physicians”
All these factors, driven by systemic racism, combine “to create a potent pro-inflammatory threat”, write Marya and Patel. They add that the unequal distribution of these triggers of inflammation may explain why Black people have the highest rates of cardiovascular disease in the US.
Daily discrimination damages people’s health too, argue Marya and Patel. For instance, a 2018 US study found that Black men who reported directly experiencing unfair treatment by police, or hearing stories about it, had on average shorter telomeres – caps of DNA that protect the ends of chromosomes, and that shorten each time a cell divides – compared with Black and white men who didn’t report experiencing this trauma. “Racism is a cognitive load that is experienced throughout the body,” write the authors.
Doctors also contribute, they argue. In the US, Black newborn babies die at more than twice the rate of white newborns. Research suggests this mortality rate is halved when Black infants are cared for by Black physicians. Meanwhile, race-based medical practices, such as the use of an adjustment for Black race in equations used in many countries to estimate people’s kidney function, also contribute to health disparities.
Doctors need to be more aware of how someone’s environment and life experiences contribute to disease, say the authors. Even something as simple as air quality differs significantly depending on the environment, they say, with disparities within countries and between them. Most deaths linked to air pollution occur in low and middle-income countries.
Inflamed takes the reader on a journey deep inside the human body, travelling through the immune, circulatory, digestive, respiratory, reproductive, endocrine and nervous systems. In doing so, it reveals how external inequalities affect these systems and cause serious harm.

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