Attention to the Unseen

The Guardian reports: Scientists have found evidence for a mysterious “ghost population” of ancient humans that lived in Africa about half a million years ago and whose genes live on in people today. Traces of the unknown ancestor emerged when researchers analysed genomes from west African populations and found that up to a fifth of their DNA appeared to have come from the missing relatives. Geneticists suspect that the ancestors of modern west Africans interbred with the yet-to-be-discovered archaic humans…

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By Josie Glausiusz Around 200,000 years ago, in what is now northern Israel, a small band of tech-savvy humans dragged home and dismembered a bounty of wildlife. Using exquisitely pointed flint spearheads and blades, they hunted and butchered myriad prey, including gazelles, deer, and now-extinct aurochs, the ancestors of modern cattle. In the cool, humid climate of the coastal plain, these early Homo sapiens foraged for acorns in nearby forests of oak, olive, and pistachio. They ate the saline leaves…

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Neanderthal hunting grounds in southern Siberia — the Charysh River valley, with Chagyrskaya Cave in the centre of the photo. Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Author provided By Kseniya Kolobova, Russian Academy of Sciences; Maciej T. Krajcarz, Polish Academy of Sciences, and Richard ‘Bert’ Roberts, University of Wollongong Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) fossils were first discovered in western Europe in the mid nineteenth century. That was just the first in a…

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Skulls hold clues to intelligence. (Clockwise from left: Australopithecus, orangutan, gorilla, chimpanzee) Roger Seymour, Author provided By Roger S. Seymour, University of Adelaide How did human intelligence evolve? Anthropologists have studied this question for decades by looking at tools found in archaeological digs, evidence of the use of fire and so on, and changes in brain size measured from fossil skulls. However, working with colleagues at the Evolutionary Studies Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, we…

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By Christian Jarrett Whether they are proposing to build a wall or to exit an international coalition, populist politicians like to pitch themselves as keeping ‘outsiders’ at bay, and it clearly strikes a chord with their home crowd. To understand this phenomenon, evolutionary and social psychologists have offered a simple explanation. Humans, we’re told, have a deep-rooted inclination to mistrust ‘the other’ – people who do not belong to our community or ingroup. Classic work published in 1970 by the…

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By Richard Kemeny Giancarlo Scardia was in Jordan in 2013 as the Syrian Civil War ground on. He recalls seeing refugees gathered in giant camps and military aircraft moving toward the border. But Scardia, a geologist based at São Paulo State University in Brazil, wasn’t there to observe the conflict—his interest was in a much older story. Buried within layers of sediment in the Zarqa Valley in northern Jordan was a large cache of chipped rocks. Scardia and his colleagues,…

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