Author: lauraspinney
-
How disease shaped humanity’s past
—
by
DISEASE historians have a problem. While examining samples of ancient human DNA, geneticists have come across genes belonging to the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, revealing that it ravaged Eurasia 5000 years ago. That’s nearly 3500 years before the “first plague”, also known as the Justinian plague, after the Roman emperor of the day. What to…
-
Cracking the linguistic code
EVERY year since 2008, with a gap for Covid-19, linguist Nicholas Evans has taken a banana boat six hours along the coast of New Guinea to reach a village called Bimadbn. There he spends the next six weeks documenting a previously unwritten language called Nen… This article first appeared in The Observer on 25 October 2025. To…
-
The linguist they can’t shut up
NICHOLAS Evans was wading out to a boat moored in the shallow Gulf of Carpentaria, off the northern coast of Australia, when he felt what he thought was a baby shark nipping at his heels. The “nips” were actually bullets hitting the sea on either side of him… This article first appeared in The New World…
-
Was prehistory a feminist paradise?
THERE is a stubborn and widely held idea that in some earlier phase of our species’ existence, women had equal status to men, or even ruled, and societies were happier and more peaceful for it. Then along came the patriarchy, and much bloodshed and oppression later, here we all are… This article first appeared in The…
-
The modern foundling wheel
WHEN Romina discovered she was pregnant in 2021, she was 39 years old and homeless, without a euro to her name. She did what many a lonely and frightened woman has done throughout history, on learning that she was going to have a baby, and pretended she wasn’t. “If you don’t think about it, it…
-
Childcare issues
THE story of human evolution has undergone a distinct feminisation in recent decades. Or, rather, an equalisation: a much-needed rebalancing after 150 years during which, we were told, everything was driven by males strutting, brawling and shagging, with females just along for the ride. This reckoning has finally arrived at language… This article first appeared…
-
Wonder women
THE young man, no older than 25, had gone to the afterlife with an opulent assortment of grave goods, including an entire elephant tusk. Archaeologists who excavated his 5000-year-old remains in 2008 from a site near Seville, Spain, dubbed him the “Ivory Man” and suggested that he might have been the most important person on…
-
Science on the catwalk
IRIS van Herpen leads photographer Ilvy Njiokiktjien and me into a cluttered storeroom and I shut the door. “Ooh!” we gasp, as we gaze at a board that van Herpen holds up in the darkness. Outside the room, the board looked much like a child’s glue painting, with silicone piping arranged on it in a…
-
Should babies vote?
TWO years ago, Alisa Perales sued California and the US government because they wouldn’t let her vote. The academically gifted Perales, who was eight years old at the time, argued that the rule excluding under-18s from democracy, which is enshrined in the US constitution, amounted to age discrimination… This article first appeared in The Guardian on…