LINKS - July 17th, 2024
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human . LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
Early Humans Left Africa Much Earlier Than Previously Thought
By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times
“Several new studies, including one published on Thursday, argue that the timeline was wrong. According to new data, several waves of modern humans began leaving the continent about 250,000 years ago.
“‘It wasn’t a single out-of-Africa migration,’ said Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania. “There have been lots of migrations out of Africa at different time periods.’”
Talking to your infant is likely a modern phenomenon. Here’s why.
“But there’s a problem with much of this research — it’s WEIRD, or originating from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic countries. In the United States and other WEIRD nations, people often live in small, isolated families, their lives augmented by technology. But for much of humanity’s existence, people didn’t live like this. The societal gulf raises two questions. Is frequent adult-to-child direct speech really the single, optimal pathway to language development? And could it be that children raised in Western settings learn language differently from how our ancestors did?”
Jurassic Park’s amber-preserved dino DNA is now inspiring a way to store data
“To test the resilience of the polymer, the researchers encapsulated strands of DNA containing the encoded Jurassic Park theme music and a human’s entire genetic instruction book in the amberlike material and then exposed it to temperatures of 55° Celsius, 65° C and 75° C at 70 percent humidity over seven days. The team used benign reagents, rather than hydrofluoric acid, to extract the stored DNA, then used DNA-reading techniques to retrieve the stored information, all in a matter of hours — not the days needed to do this with silica-based materials.”
Governing for the planet
By Jonathan S Blake, Aeon
“This basic mismatch between the scale of the problem and the scale of possible solutions is a source of many of today’s failures of global governance. Nation-states and the global governance institutions they have formed simply aren’t fit for the task of managing things such as viruses, greenhouse gases and biodiversity, which aren’t bound by political borders, but only by the Earth system. As a result, the diplomats may still come to agree on a pandemic treaty – they’ve committed to keep working – but, so long as the structure of the international system continues to treat sovereignty as sacrosanct, they will never be able to effectively govern this or other planetary-scale phenomena.”
Giant armadillo fossil reveals humans were in South America a surprisingly long time ago
By Katie Hunt, CNN
“The discovery, inferred from cut marks on the ice age creature’s fossilized remains, is significant because it adds to a flurry of recent finds that suggests the Americas were settled far earlier than archaeologists initially thought — perhaps more than 25,000 years ago.”