Humans

By Gege Li

Aly Song/Wellcome Photography Prize 2021
Wellcome Photography Prize 2021
THESE poignant and intensely personal images are among the winners and finalists in the Wellcome Photography Prize 2021, run by health research foundation Wellcome.
The competition focuses on three of the most urgent global health challenges: mental health, global warming and infectious disease. There are two top prizes, one for a single image and one for an image series.Advertisement
Above is The Time of Coronavirus by finalist Aly Song. Taken in April 2020, volunteers are disinfecting Qintai Grand Theatre in Wuhan, China, the city where covid-19 cases were first detected.
Next,  is a shot from Yoppy Pieter, winner of the image series prize, called Trans Woman: Between colour and voice. It shows one aspect of life for transgender women in Indonesia, with Lilis (centre), a trans woman, being tested for HIV in South Tangerang. It can be difficult for trans women in the country to access healthcare without official documents.
Yoppy Peiter/Wellcome Photography Prize 2021
Below is Climate Cost by finalist Zakir Hossain Chowdhury. The devastating image was taken three months after Cyclone Amphan struck Bangladesh in May 2020. The cyclone is estimated to have left half a million people homeless.
Zakir Hossain Chowdhury/Wellcome Photography Prize 2021
The final image, at bottom right, is Untangling by Jameisha Prescod, winner of the single image prize. It illustrates her isolation through a photo taken in her bedroom during lockdown. She turned to knitting to ease her mind, she says.
Jameisha Prescod/Wellcome Photography Prize 2021

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Newly discovered cave art gives fresh insight into the minds of our ancestors – and upends the idea that a Stone Age cultural explosion was unique to Europe

Humans

28 July 2021

By Alison George

This pig painting from Leang Tedongnge cave on Sulawesi is at least 45,500 years oldAA Oktaviana
IN 1879, an 8-year-old girl made a discovery that would rock our understanding of human history. On the walls of Altamira cave in northern Spain, she spotted stunning drawings of bison, painted in vivid red and black. More striking even than the images was their age: they were made thousands of years ago by modern humans’ supposedly primitive ancestors. Today, nearly 400 caves across Europe have been found decorated with hand stencils, mysterious symbols and beautiful images of animals created by these accomplished artists.
The discoveries led to the view that artistic talent arose after modern humans arrived in the region some 40,000 years ago, as part of a “cultural explosion” reflecting a flowering of the human mind. But more recent evidence has blown this idea out of the water. For a start, modern humans might not have been the first artists in Europe, as paintings discovered in a Spanish cave in 2018 have revealed. What’s more, a treasure trove of cave paintings emerging in Indonesia has dispelled the idea that Europe was the epicentre of creativity. Indeed, discoveries in Africa indicate that humans were honing their artistic skills long before groups of them migrated to the rest of the world.
The real puzzle is why Stone Age cave art seems to be concentrated in a few locations. Could it be hiding elsewhere in plain sight, unnoticed, unrecognised or obscured? Efforts are now under way to track down this missing art, with growing success. … More

By Michael Marshall

We are still learning more about the human genomeShutterstock / Explode
A new, more complete version of the human genome is already bearing fruit after being released two months ago. It has revealed enormous amounts of genetic variation between people that couldn’t previously be detected – variation that may underlie diseases.
“There were variants that were hiding in plain sight,” says Megan Dennis at the University of California, Davis.
Other studies suggest that the new genome will finally reveal the functions of seemingly useless “junk DNA”. This DNA is repetitive, which means it has … More

By Krista Charles

When looking at a scene (left), each quick eye movement creates motion streaks (right) on the retina that we don’t consciously perceiveMartin Rolfs
It has sometimes been assumed that we experience brief periods without vision every time we shift our focus from one point to another – but it turns out this is wrong.
Several times each second, we quickly change our line of sight, shifting our focus from one point in a scene to another. These fast, jerky eye movements, or saccades, each last less than 50 milliseconds, and our vision is reduced during that time. Some people have argued that our eyes lose their ability to process visual information in this time.
Richard Schweitzer and Martin Rolfs at Humboldt University of Berlin in Germany have shown that this isn’t the case: we are, in fact, able to absorb information from our surroundings during such rapid eye movements.Advertisement
“This kind of changes the way we approach perception because we used to think about motor actions and perception as two distinct things,” says Rolfs. “What this insight shows, I think, is that as we continue to interact between how we move and what we perceive, that it’s not two separate processes. It’s two things working together; they go hand in hand.”

The pair worked with 20 volunteers who were asked to seek out and focus on a visual target displayed on a screen, which naturally encouraged their eyes to dart around performing saccades. However, the target on the screen was shown using a high-speed projector that was capable of generating about 70 images during each 50-millisecond-long saccade. This meant the researchers could have the target move smoothly so that its position at the end of the saccade was different from its position at the start.
The volunteers detected this within-saccade movement: at the end of the saccade, when their eyes looked for the target again, they seemed to have anticipated where the target would now be located. The researchers could confirm this because the volunteers were able to correct their eye movement to locate the target more quickly than would have been the case had their eyes not detected the target’s movement during the saccade.
“The paper suggests that during eye movements, what is left of motion streaks (the traces left in our visual system by fast-moving objects) helps perception, whereas it is a disturbance when the eyes are steady,” says Paola Binda at the University of Pisa in Italy. “This point would need direct testing, of course, but it is an intriguing one.”
“The only potential criticism I can see is that the results were obtained with stimuli ingeniously designed to investigate these effects, but it is not clear whether any of this occurs in natural vision – as the authors admit,” says Karl Gegenfurtner at Justus Liebig University Giessen in Germany.
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abf2218

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By Krista Charles

Reconstruction of the roman road in the Treporti channel in the Venice lagoonAntonio Calandriello and Giuseppe D’Acunto
An ancient and now submerged road has been discovered in the Venice lagoon in an area that would have been accessible by land 2000 years ago during the Roman era.
Fantina Madricardo at the Marine Science Institute in Venice and her colleagues made the discovery after mapping the floor of an area of the lagoon called the Treporti channel.
“We believe it was part of the network of Roman roads in the north-east of the Venice area,” says Madricardo.Advertisement
In the 1980s, the archaeologist Ernesto Canal proposed that there are ancient human-made structures submerged in the Venice lagoon. This suggestion prompted decades of debate, but couldn’t be confirmed until now as the previously available technology was insufficiently advanced to explore such a challenging environment.
“The area is very difficult to investigate by divers because there are strong currents and the water in the Venice lagoon is very turbid,” says Madricardo.
The team used a multibeam echosounder mounted on a boat to form a picture of what lies underwater. This device sends out acoustic waves that bounce off the lagoon floor, allowing the team to reconstruct images of whatever structures are down there.

The researchers found 12 structures up to 2.7 metres tall and 52.7 metres long that extended along 1140 metres in a south-west to north-eastern direction in the configuration of a road. The presence and layout of these structures suggest that there may have been a settlement in the area. It was then submerged about 2000 years ago – partly due to human activity that diverted the flow of rivers and starved the area of the sediment that was needed to keep it above water.
“Presumably, the road is giving access to this rich environment. The margins of the land and the water are full of resources that people might have been exploiting,” says James Gerrard at Newcastle University in the UK. “It’s not normal to find, if you like, ‘drowned’ landscapes or be able to study them in this kind of detail.”
Journal reference: Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-92939-w
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By Christa Lesté-Lasserre

The well-preserved head of Tollund Man A. Mikkelsen
An ancient man ate a simple meal of cooked cereals and fish before being hanged and dumped in a bog 2400 years ago.
Tollund Man was roughly 40 years old when he died in what is now Denmark. He was probably offered as a human sacrifice, and the peat bog he was buried in mummified his body in extraordinary detail. Dozens of other Iron Age Europeans were sacrificed in the same way, and they are collectively referred to as “bog bodies”.
Danish scientists first analysed Tollund Man’s intestinal contents shortly after his body was discovered in 1950. They found 20 plant species and one species of parasite.Advertisement
But now Nina Helt Nielsen at Museum Silkeborg in Denmark and her colleagues have run new analyses on the contents of Tollund Man’s large intestine, investigating plant fossils, pollen and – for the first time in any bog body – a full range of non-pollen microfossils, steroids and proteins.
Ingredients that made up Tollund Man’s last mealN.H. Nielsen
The research revealed the presence of intestinal worm proteins and eggs – belonging to whipworm (Trichuris), tapeworm (Taenia) and mawworm (Ascaris) – as well as the man’s partially digested dinner. He ate porridge made up of around 85 per cent barley, 5 per cent flax and 9 per cent seeds from a plant called pale persicaria. Food crust indicated that the porridge was slightly burned and had been cooked in a clay pot.

About 20 other species represented less than 1 per cent of the whole meal and were probably consumed accidentally. Tollund Man had also eaten a fatty-boned fish, like eel. He probably picked up the parasites from eating poorly cooked meat and drinking unclean water well before his death, says Nielsen.
As for his last meal, it was mostly ordinary for the time. “I’m pretty sure we would see something similar if we analysed the gut contents of other bog bodies,” says Nielsen – although the pale persicaria seeds might have been a special addition as part of a sacrificial ritual.
At about 1350 kilocalories, Tollund Man’s last meal would have provided half his daily nutritional needs – and has been preserved in such detail that “we could almost reproduce the recipe”, she says.
Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2021.98

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A project testing great apes’ puzzle-solving abilities could offer insight into the mental abilities underpinning language. Solving the puzzles involves the same sorts of mental abilities humans use in speech, so by studying the gorillas, Birkbeck researchers hope to learn more about language development in another great ape: us. New Scientist has been following this pioneering research, discovering that humans are not as unique as we’d like to think.

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By Clare Wilson

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There are many ways that our great ape relatives can remind us of ourselves: through their anatomy, cleverness and social relationships, for instance. But never has the resemblance been so striking for me as today, when I watch gorillas carrying out a very human past-time: solving puzzles.
The gorillas in question live at Port Lympne Reserve in Kent in the UK. The task involves moving a hazelnut treat down a vertical maze using sticks or the inbuilt cogs, until it is released at the bottom. It is very similar to a game I loved as a child, called Downfall, … More