Attention to the Unseen

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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By Stephen E. Nash When most members of the general public think of the Stone Age, they probably envision an adult male hominin wielding a stone tool. That picture is laughably incomplete. It assumes that only adult males made and used stone tools, and that stones were the only materials in these ancient people’s everyday tool kits. Both assumptions are at best questionable; at worst, they are simply wrong. First, let’s tackle the stereotype about raw materials. Recent discoveries in…

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By Anna Goldfield The human body is often visualized as a symmetrical form: Picture the geometric precision of Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic drawing of a man’s proportions encased by a circle and square. In reality, we are actually quite lopsided. Most people have a dominant ear; the same is true for eyes, feet, and hands. Handedness is perhaps the most obvious of these asymmetries. From the time most children first start picking up and using objects, they tend to favor…

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Nicolas Primola/Shutterstock By Anthony Sinclair, University of Liverpool A 210,000-year-old human skull could provide new evidence that our species left Africa much earlier than previously thought. A new study published in Nature of two fossils found in Greece in the 1970s shows that one of them is the oldest Homo sapiens specimen ever found outside Africa by more than 50,000 years. This exciting discovery adds to a list of recent finds that shows the story of humanity’s spread across the…

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Rebecca Boyle writes: The sun’s rhythm may have set the pace of each day, but when early humans needed a way to keep time beyond a single day and night, they looked to a second light in the sky. The moon was one of humankind’s first timepieces long before the first written language, before the earliest organized cities and well before structured religions. The moon’s face changes nightly and with the regularity of the seasons, making it a reliable marker…

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