Human language, in its many current forms, may owe an evolutionary debt to our distant ape ancestors who sounded off in groups of scattered individuals. Wild orangutans’ social worlds mold…
Category: Humans
How I’ll decide when it’s time to ditch my mask
For weeks, I have been watching coronavirus cases drop across the United States. At the same time, cases were heading skyward in many places in Europe, Asia and Oceania. Those…
How gene therapy overcame high-profile failures
Gene therapy pioneer Richard Jude Samulski remembers when he avoided the words “gene therapy.” In the mid-2000s, he told people he worked on “biological nanoparticles,” even attempting to trademark the…
What do we mean by ‘COVID-19 changes your brain’?
Like all writers, I spend large chunks of my time looking for words. When it comes to the ultracomplicated and mysterious brain, I need words that capture nuance and uncertainties.…
Ancient seafarers built the Mediterranean’s largest known sacred pool
On a tiny island off Sicily’s west coast, a huge pool long ago displayed the star-studded reflections of the gods. Scientists have long thought that an ancient rectangular basin, on…
Ancient Homo sapiens took a talent for cultural creativity from Africa to Asia
Creativity runs deep in human evolution. Stone Age people steered their cultures through some inventive twists and turns as far-flung groups of Homo sapiens independently learned to cope with harsh…
The world’s oldest pants stitched together cultures from across Asia
What little rain that falls on a gravelly desert located in western China’s Tarim Basin evaporates as it hits the blistering turf. Here, in this parched wasteland, lie the ancient…
A technique borrowed from ecology hints at hundreds of lost medieval legends
King Arthur’s lasting renown is one for the books. But a statistical spotlight now shines on medieval European literature’s round table of lost and forgotten stories. An international team used…
Homo sapiens may have reached Europe 10,000 years earlier than previously thought
Stone Age Homo sapiens began migrating into Europe much longer ago than has typically been assumed. Discoveries at a rock-shelter in southern France put H. sapiens in Europe as early…
‘Origin’ explores the controversial science of the first Americans
OriginJennifer RaffTwelve, $30 Scientific understanding of the peopling of the Americas is as unsettled as the Western Hemisphere once was. Skeletal remains, cultural artifacts such as stone tools and, increasingly,…
