Author: lauraspinney
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Elephant voices
IN Between the Ears: Elephant Voices, science journalist Laura Spinney explores a unique archive of elephant calls and behaviour with its creator, Joyce Poole, a world authority on elephant communication. They listen to moments of birth, joy, mating, danger and death from the perspective of the elephants – as well as hearing Joyce’s field note…
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Le chaos qui vient
DANS les années 1990, à l’heure où les historiens jetaient le marxisme par-dessus bord, beaucoup proclamaient la fin des révolutions. La lutte des classes et les soulèvements de masse semblaient derrière nous, rangés parmi les vestiges d’un autre siècle… Cet article a paru dans Le Point le 3 mars 2026. Pour continuer à lire, cliquez ici (abonnés…
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Mummy ethics
THOMAS Pettigrew, a nineteenth-century surgeon and antiquarian, threw parties in London at which he unwrapped ancient Egyptian mummies for his guests’ titillation. Modern scanning technologies mean that the unwrapping can now happen virtually, without the destruction that accompanies the physical act. But the ethical question remains: can we both treat the mummy as an object…
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Is it time to redraw our maps?
IN May, as part of his campaign to annex Canada, President Donald Trump called the border with his neighbour an artificial line that had been drawn with a ruler “right across the top of the country”. He suggested that the map of North America would look more beautiful without it… This article first appeared in The…
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How disease shaped humanity’s past
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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…
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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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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…
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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…