Humans

By Gregory Wakeman

Tom Hanks plays Finch, whose post-apocalyptic journey depends on a flawed, yet loyal, teamKaren Kuehn/Apple TV+
Film
Finch
Miguel SapochnikAdvertisement

FINCH has all the elements to be a dark, but ultimately uplifting, post-apocalyptic, sci-fi comedy drama. Not only does it boast Robert Zemeckis as a producer, it also comes from Steven Spielberg’s studio Amblin Entertainment and marks the second feature film of Miguel Sapochnik, who directed key parts of the iconic HBO series Game of Thrones.
The primary reason it should captivate audiences throughout, though, is that Tom Hanks plays the title character. Hanks is in pretty much every scene as Finch, an ailing inventor who is the last person on Earth. Since he still has his trusty and beloved dog Goodyear by his side, Finch decides to build an android named Jeff to look after his companion once he is gone.
But after learning of an impending storm that is going to destroy his home, Finch decides to leave St Louis, Missouri, and drive Jeff and Goodyear across the US to San Francisco in his run-down motorhome.
Along the way, Finch tries to teach his constantly malfunctioning robot what it means to be human so that he can truly protect Goodyear, all while trying to find food and safety in the dangerous and ravaged post-apocalyptic world.
Unfortunately for Hanks fans, Finch never actually comes close to delivering on its potential. While Sapochnik is able to create impressively menacing visuals of enormous storm clouds wreaking havoc, this feeling of peril quickly dissipates. Once gone, it never returns, as there aren’t enough set pieces to make you sit up, let alone put you on the edge of your seat.
At the same time, while the reasons for the destruction of civilisation are heavily teased, Sapochnik’s direction and Craig Luck and Ivor Powell’s script lack the detail or weight to really make the film’s message about the dangers of climate change connect.
The main reason why Finch falls so short, though, is that the camaraderie and relationship between Finch, Jeff and Goodyear doesn’t come close to resonating. Since Finch is struggling with illness, Hanks’s portrayal is rightfully timid and frail. But this means he never manages to bring out the humanity of the character, who spends most of the film either coughing up blood or getting annoyed at Jeff.
Somehow, Hanks was able to develop a more emotional connection with a volleyball covered in blood in Zemeckis’s 2000 survival drama Cast Away than he is with Jeff and Goodyear. Finch was clearly inspired by that film, as well as Spielberg’s repeated use of science fiction to explore fatherhood. But it doesn’t add anything to the genre or explore the theme in an insightful manner.
It also doesn’t help that Caleb Landry Jones’s vocal performance as Jeff is too flat. As a result, the repeated attempts at comedy fail. Instead, we are forced to endure scenes of Jeff falling over or misreading situations because he takes things too literally. All of which quickly becomes tiresome.
Despite all this, Finch isn’t a complete miss. The score from Gustavo Santaolalla is particularly rousing, while Sapochnik and his editor Tim Porter make sure that there is a steady pace that averts a full descent into tedium. Jo Willems’s cinematography glistens, too. It perfectly complements Sapochnik’s framing, which means that a lot of the shots are utterly gorgeous.
It is just a shame that Finch doesn’t actually do anything more heartfelt and thought-provoking with these images. Instead, it is the cinematic definition of style over substance and is ultimately so disappointingly tame that not even the star power of Hanks can salvage it.

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In The Riftbreaker, you scout an alien world and prepare it for colonisationEXOR Studios
Game
The Riftbreaker Exor Studios
PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X/SAdvertisement
WHEN writing this column, I try to remember that many of New Scientist‘s readers don’t play video games. With that in mind, I try to pick titles that have something to say about science or technology but don’t require knowledge of gamer terminology. This month, I have failed, but stick with me while I tell you about one of the most entertaining games I have played this year.
The Riftbreaker casts you as Ashley Nowak, an explorer sent on a one-way trip to the distant planet of Galatea 37. Really, you play as her hulking mech suit, dubbed Mr Riggs. The story is paper-thin – there is a brief mention of Earth being uninhabitable after the “Yellowstone event”, presumably a reference to the potentially apocalyptic supervolcano in Wyoming. Your job is to survey the planet, construct a “rift gate” to enable teleportation back to Earth and to prepare Galatea 37 for colonisation.
It all starts fairly simply, as you set up wind turbines and solar panels to power automated mines and gather resources. But then you come under attack from the local animals – overwhelming hordes of reptilian beasties. Mr Riggs is bristling with weapons to defend yourself. You can also set up walls and turrets to build a defensible base. Then there are the natural disasters, such as earthquakes and meteor strikes, and bad weather that interferes with your power generation.
“Before you know it, you are chasing supply bottlenecks while occasionally pausing to mow down aliens”
This loop – gather resources, improve your weapons and your base and defend yourself – propels the entire game, deftly blending two genres known as real-time strategy (RTS) and twin-stick shooters. The former usually involves building up an army and smashing it into another until one of you is wiped off the map. The latter is about controlling a character and ducking out of the way of enemies as you try to take them down.
Combining these genres is a pretty weird idea, but The Riftbreaker really makes it work, as your base and Mr Riggs work in tandem to hold back the aliens. What I particularly like about The Riftbreaker is that, unlike mission-based RTS games such as genre classics StarCraft or Command & Conquer, your base persists throughout the entire game, meaning it grows into a sprawling behemoth. I occasionally found myself stumbling across sections that I had built hours earlier and had completely forgotten about.
As you grow your base, the game introduces another concept that regular readers will know I am a big fan of: supply chains. While your initial buildings are made of easily available carbon and iron (or “carbonium” and “ironium” as the game strangely calls them), building the rift gate requires rarer materials such as uranium and cobalt that can only be found by visiting other areas of Galatea 37 and setting up outposts, which in turn need supplying. Before you know it, you are chasing the bottlenecks in your system while occasionally pausing to mow down aliens. It is as if Ellen Ripley got a side gig as a logistics manager.
While playing, I did wonder if I should feel bad about strip-mining an entire planet. This point is touched on with a few lines of dialogue, and while you can choose to use only solar, wind, biomass or geothermal power throughout the game and receive a “going green” achievement for doing so, burning your way through the biosphere is too much fun to miss. More

Myths and stories trump rational reasoning when it comes to analysing distant threats like climate change. But we have tools to combat that – and it’s a myth irrationality is on the rise

Humans

17 November 2021

By Graham Lawton
Feodora Chiosea / Alamy
TAKE a look at the data to the right, showing crime rates in US cities according to whether or not they ban concealed handguns. Based on these numbers, would you conclude that gun control reduces crime? Take as much time as you want.
If you answered no, give yourself a pat on the back. Most people answer yes, dazzled by the large number of cities with gun control and decreasing crime. But what matters is the proportion of cities with falling crime. That’s 75 per cent for cities with gun control and 84 per cent for those without. The rational conclusion is that gun control increases crime, or at least doesn’t decrease it.

Before you punch the air or a passer-by, the data is fake. But faced with it, supporters of gun control are more likely to jump to the wrong conclusion. Opponents of gun control scrutinise the data more cautiously and more often spot the real pattern.
The test is designed to winkle out a pervasive and intractable source of human irrationality, the myside bias. It expresses the tribal thinking that evolution has gifted us (see “Why are we good and evil?”): a tendency to seek and accept evidence that supports what we already believe. “You direct your reasoning to end up with a conclusion that is already a sacred belief or a shibboleth in your side, your team, your coalition, your party, your posse,” says Steven Pinker at Harvard University, author of Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters.
On … More

It’s easy to think human conscious experience is unique, but a better understanding of consciousness’s mysteries comes by tracing it back in the evolutionary tree

Humans

17 November 2021

By Alison George
Shutterstock/Jolygon
THE smell of coffee, the blue of the sky, the anticipation of seeing a loved one: it is impossible to imagine our lives without the vivid conscious experiences of our every waking moment. And yet they have vexed philosophers for centuries. “The nature of consciousness is extraordinarily difficult to define,” says Eva Jablonka at Tel Aviv University in Israel.
It was once thought of as an immaterial force, a “ghost in the machine” separate from physical reality. Today, however, many neuroscientists argue that our felt experience is simply the product of our brain’s inner workings. That makes the question of “why?” loom large. Many actions controlled by the brain occur unconsciously, beneath the level of our awareness. Why make exceptions?
Grasping this means thinking outside our own box, says Anil Seth at the University of Sussex, UK. “Human consciousness is not the only form of being conscious,” he says. We tend to emphasise conscious experiences that make us think we are better and smarter than other animals, like our ability to recognise ourselves in a mirror, he says. “This is not very helpful.”
The absolute fundamental of consciousness – having an actual experience of things – is something seemingly shared by many other organisms. “In my view, there are grades and varieties of awareness, and there is no principled dividing line about which – SHAZAM! – the light of consciousness is turned on,” says Daniel Dennett at Tufts University in Massachusetts.
With a broader view of consciousness, we can look back along the tree of life to get an idea about its earliest glimmers. Jablonka, together with Simona Ginsburg at the … More

We are tiny specks of life in a vast, indifferent cosmos – but to say that decreases the value of our existence is to measure ourselves against the wrong thing

Life

17 November 2021

By Tiffany O’Callaghan
Wenmei Zhou/Getty Images
WE CAN attempt to answer the question of why we exist in a literal sense: by tracing our human story back through the whorls and rifts of evolution, through the contested origins of life on Earth and the collapsing cloud of dust and gas that became our home planet 4.5 billion years ago, back to the birth of our universe some 13.8 billion years ago – and perhaps further still (see “Why is there something rather than nothing?”).
Yet none of this story of happenstance helps us in finding the kind of meaning we crave: meaning in significance. “Now we know that the cosmos contains at least a million billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars, most of which have planets around them. In one of these zillions of planets, as probably in many others, chemistry became complex and evolved in all sorts of critters, one of which, not particularly good in surviving, is humankind,” says physicist Carlo Rovelli at Aix-Marseille University in France. “It is clear that any ambition of this humankind to be particularly significant in the grand scheme of things looks silly.”
That realisation was certainly a big deal when it first brought gods and mythologies we created crashing down, says Victor Strecher, who studies the importance of purpose for our well-being at the University of Michigan. That started in earnest in the 1700s, as scientific inquiry began to upend our assumptions about our central place in the universe. Simultaneously, the industrial revolution first saw people leaving long-established rural communities and venturing out into a wider world in large numbers.
The mistake, says … More

People who are less confident at work were rated as having better interpersonal skills, suggesting there may be upsides to impostor syndrome

Humans

14 November 2021

By Alice Klein
People who doubted themselves more were rated as having better interpersonal skills by their supervisorsSFIO CRACHO/Shutterstock
People with “impostor syndrome”, who feel underqualified for their jobs, tend to make better employees because they compensate by striving to be likeable, empathetic and collaborative, new research suggests.
The term impostor syndrome was coined in 1978 by two psychologists who studied women with illustrious careers. These women still believed they were “really not bright” and thought they had risen to their distinguished positions through luck or error.
These impostor thoughts have since been found to … More

By Michael Marshall
Gray WolfAB Photographie/Shutterstock
Hello, and welcome to Our Human Story, New Scientist’s monthly newsletter all about human evolution and the origin of our species. To receive this free monthly newsletter in your inbox, sign up here.
This month, prompted by the arrival of our family’s new kitten Peggy, I’m gently pawing at humanity’s relationship with animals. In recent years, we’ve learned a lot about when and where different species were domesticated – but to me this just raises even more questions.
Animal friends
It’s a truism that humans have exerted an outsized influence on the natural world. We have domesticated dozens of animals and plants. There are the familiar examples like cats, chickens and maize, but also many that aren’t so familiar in the Western world, like the dozens of crops domesticated by farmers (if that is exactly the right word) in the Amazon rainforest over millennia.Advertisement
As with many aspects of prehistory, the more we learn, the older domestication looks. Until relatively recently, it was thought that every domestication took place within the past 11,000 years. This period is known as the Holocene, when the climate has been relatively stable and when some humans took up habits like sedentary farming, urban living and writing. But one domestication preceded it: dogs.
We still haven’t pinned down when and where this happened, but dogs were being buried alongside people as if they were pets at least around 14,000 years ago, and they may have split from wolves up to 40,000 years ago. There was possibly more than one domestication event, with only some leaving living descendants. But what’s clear is that it was pre-Holocene and before the advent of permanent settled farming. It may have begun with a form of cooperative hunting.
Set against this are the many clear examples of domestication during the Holocene. For example, I recently wrote about a massive genetic study of horses, which showed that modern domestic horses are descended from a population that lived in what is now Russia, around the Volga and Don rivers, about 4200 years ago. The domestication may have begun a little earlier, but only by a few centuries.
How can we explain why domestication happened so late?
Fascinated by beasts
People were obsessed with animals long before we domesticated any. We can see this in prehistoric art, of which we have clear evidence dating back to 45,000 years ago. Think of the cave paintings in Chauvet cave in France, which Werner Herzog brought to the screen in Cave of Forgotten Dreams. They’re startling in their realism and sense of movement. And they’re almost entirely paintings of animals.

This holds true across Europe – where most studies of cave art have been done – and elsewhere in the world, including Indonesia. Ancient painters spent enormous effort portraying animals in a realistic way. But they couldn’t be bothered with illustrating people: when people are depicted in cave art, they’re rarely better than stick figures.
In a sense, the absence of people in the art is the more mysterious bit. Why weren’t people interested in depicting each other?
Most cultures place enormous symbolic importance on animals. Think of English lions (even though there haven’t been wild lions in Britain for millennia), American eagles and the many versions of “familiars” and “were-animals” that have arisen in cultures all over the world. Think of the rabbits of Watership Down, Anansi the West African spider god, and the ancient Egyptian worship of cats.
It’s almost too easy to think of reasons why prehistoric people were interested in animals. First, humans and our ancestors have been eating meat for a very long time. Exactly when we started is contentious, but we’ve certainly been at it for hundreds of thousands of years. This must have required an enormous amount of knowledge: of the animals’ movements, their behaviours, how they defended themselves. To make a success of their lifestyle, prehistoric people had to take a keen interest in animals.
Similarly, plenty of animals posed a danger. Predators like cave bears and sabre-toothed cats are just the most obvious. There are also inherent dangers from massive herbivores like mammoths and giant ground sloths: even if they don’t want to eat you, they can still trample you.
I’ve been reading John Bradshaw’s The Animals Among Us, and he argues that understanding animals is as profoundly human as language or self-reflection. I think he might be right. The capacity and urge to understand animals, to predict what they will do and even manage their behaviour, is an ancient one.

Wild domestication

The more I think about domestication, the more I’m baffled at how late it happened. Our species has existed for something like 300,000 years, and other hominins like Neanderthals were similarly skilled at dealing with animals. Why weren’t dogs domesticated 100,000 years ago, or even earlier?
I don’t think it is a matter of intelligence. The fact is that domestication doesn’t require unusual foresight or brainpower. If it did, it wouldn’t happen in the natural world. Think of the many ants that have domesticated other species. There are ants that plant seeds, cultivate fungus, “milk” aphids for sugary liquid or even farm other animals for meat. I very much doubt that the ancestral ants had any kind of plan for this. Instead, I think that the species involved found advantages in living together and gradually adapted over many generations. If ants can domesticate other species in this unconscious, gradual way, so could prehistoric people. Why didn’t they?
I don’t have a firm answer for this, but I do have a tentative thought. It’s a curious fact that not many animals were domesticated in the Americas, compared with Eurasia and Africa. Llamas and alpacas are almost the only ones. A lot of ink has been spilled, for instance in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, trying to work out why American animals were so resistant to domestication. I wonder if it’s because people hadn’t been living there as long. There have been hominins in Eurasia and Africa for millions of years, but people only made it to the Americas in the past few tens of thousands of years. Maybe the animals in Eurasia and Africa had simply had longer to adapt to the two-legged apes in their midst, priming them to be domesticated. The American animals had a shorter history with people.
In other words, I think the reason most domestications happened in the past 10,000 years isn’t because people only then thought of it, but because species need to co-exist for a long time before they can form such close relationships. My colleague Krista Charles recently reported that wolf puppies raised by humans become just as close to their carers as dog puppies. Wolves are still wild animals, yet they can form relationships with us that most animals can’t.
I’m pretty sure this doesn’t make sense of everything. It does seem like a gigantic coincidence that so many domestications happened in the past 10,000 years, but I’m very uncertain as to why. A particular problem is that domestications happened for different reasons: dogs seem to have been helping us hunt, while horses may have first been domesticated for their milk. So, it may be a mistake to look for a single overarching explanation.
To see what I mean, take the baffling example of tobacco (baffling to me anyway as I’ve always absolutely hated the smell). We recently learned that people were using tobacco at least 12,300 years ago. That’s millennia before the plant became domesticated. It has no nutritional value and doesn’t even give you interesting hallucinations – but people smoked it anyway.

Don’t miss this story
Ettore MazzaEttore Mazza
A new hominin species has been named – but it may not stick. Researchers led by Mirjana Roksandic have proposed Homo bodoensis as a new name for a bunch of African fossils that lived hundreds of thousands of years ago in the Middle Pleistocene. This is a particularly confusing period of human evolution: there were several species co-existing, and many of the fossils are hard to classify, so we don’t know how widespread each species was, how long it lasted, or which species gave rise to which others. It’s all a bit of a muddle. H. bodoensis is meant to be an umbrella term for all the African hominins with big brains that were alive at the time. It has the advantage of simplicity – and the reference to the Bodo cranium discovered in Ethiopia makes it an African name, which I think is a good thing. However, the rules of nomenclature say that the earliest species names have priority, and several of the fossils in question have already been given names.
From the archive
The ancient Maya culture is one of the most fascinating in archaeology. It’s surprising to me that there are so few depictions of the Maya in books and film, at least in the English language. The Maya were one of the most technologically advanced cultures in the Americas for hundreds of years. They had writing and drew accurate astronomical tables, planted orchards of nut trees, created vivid blue dyes, and built vast cities. Archaeologically, the most conspicuous things are the enormous monuments they built – more of which are found every year. Around AD 800, the Maya stopped building monuments and this has been interpreted as a collapse of the civilisation, probably fuelled by an intense drought. I think it’s more correct to say that the Mayan social structure collapsed – that is, the elites were deposed. It wasn’t that everybody died so much as there was a revolution.
Also in New Scientist
1. Tatanka Iyotake, popularly known as Sitting Bull, was one of the most famous Native American leaders – and a new DNA study adds to evidence that he has living descendants.
2. We now know that Vikings were in North America in the year AD 1021, exactly 1000 years ago – although they might have arrived even earlier.
3. Iron Age miners ate blue cheese and drank beer, according to a study of their faeces.
See you next month!

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Millet farmers living 9000 years ago in what is now north-east China may have spoken a proto-Transeurasian language that gave rise to Japanese, Turkish and other modern tongues

Humans

10 November 2021

By Carissa Wong
A woman carrying millet, a crop whose cultivation prompted the spread of the proto-Transeurasian languageFrank Bienewald / Alamy
A vast Transeurasian language family that contains the Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Turkish and Tungusic languages has had its origins traced back 9000 years, to early farming communities in what is now north-east China.
Transeurasian languages are spoken across a wide region of Europe and northern Asia. Until now, researchers assumed that they had spread from the mountains of Mongolia 3000 years ago, spoken by horse-riding nomads who kept livestock but didn’t farm crops.
Martine Robbeets at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena and her colleagues used linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence to conclude instead that it was the onset of millet cultivation by farmers in what is now China that led to the spread of the language family.Advertisement
The team did this by studying the linguistic features of the languages and using computational analysis to map their spread through space and time based on their similarities to each other. Doing so allowed Robbeets and her team to trace the proto-Transeurasian language back to the Liao river area of north-east China around 9000 years ago.
This is the exact time and place that millet is known to have been domesticated, according to archaeological evidence, says Robbeets.

By adding genetic information and carbon-dating millet grains, the team revealed that the proto-Transeurasian-speaking population split into separate communities that then started adopting early forms of Japanese, Korean and the Tungusic languages to the east of the original site, as well as early forms of Mongolic languages to the north and of Turkic languages to the west.
“We have languages, archaeology and genetics which all have dates. So we just looked to see if they correlated,” says Robbeets.
Around 6500 years ago, the descendants of some of these farmers moved eastwards into Korea, where they learned to cultivate rice around 3300 years ago, spurring the movement of people from Korea to Japan.
“We all identify ourselves with language. It’s our identity. We often picture ourselves as one culture, one language, one genetic profile. Our study shows that like all populations, those in Asia are mixed,” says Robbeets.
The researchers were also surprised to discover the first evidence that Neolithic Korean populations reproduced with Jōmon people, who were previously thought to have lived solely in Japan.
“This study highlights the richness of the narrative that can be developed when linguistic, archaeological and genetic data are all considered,” says Melinda Yang at the University of Richmond in Virginia.
Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04108-8

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