Category: History
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How disease shaped humanity’s past
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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How migrants shape language
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ABOUT 5,000 years ago, a group of herders living in the grasslands north of the Black Sea headed west, taking their animals with them. They got as far as the Carpathian Basin — the western extremity of the vast Eurasian steppe centered on modern Hungary — but their descendants pushed farther, and within 1,000 years…
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Could English ever die?
GIVEN that a staggering 1,500 languages could vanish by the end of this century, by some estimates – close to a quarter of the world’s total – some may find it obscene to even ask this question. English is certainly not on the endangered list. As the one truly global language, it is more often…
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Silence is elusive
THE Big Bang was spectacularly mis- named, having been “the quietest firework of all time”. Sound waves need matter to propagate through, so the explosion that created it can’t have made a din… This article first appeared in Nature on 4 February 2025. To continue reading, click here.
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Closing in on the Yamnaya
MYKHAILIVKA, a village on the right bank of the River Dnieper in Ukraine, lies dangerously close to the front line of Russia’s war on its western neighbour. Seventy years ago, however, it was the site of an excavation by Ukrainian archaeologists. There, they discovered one of the earliest known settlements of the Yamnaya culture… This…