ancient Australia

From a European / Western perspective, we're used to thinking of Australia as a new world that has only recently been discovered and settled by our heroic ancestors. Ironically, however, the out of Africa emigration of modern humans that eventually spread around the world appears to have reached Australia a lot earlier than Europe, never mind the Americas.

We still know far too little about the 70,000 years of human history in Australia and the larger landmass of Sahul which also comprised Papua New Guinea and Tasmania. Recent research, however, has yielded insights into likely scenarios how the migration into Sahul may have fitted with the changes of environmental conditions. For the later stages of Australia's hidden history, genetic and linguistic evidence are now coming together to reveal a coherent story. I've rounded up some of these studies in my latest feature which is out now:

Ancient Australia

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 11, 03 June 2024, Pages R513-R515

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2024.

The thread for 2023 is here .

Aboriginal rock art created by the Wunambal People in the caves at Wary Bay, Bigge Island, Kimberley, Western Australia. The painting shows a Wandjina figure representing a cloud and rain spirit. (Photo: John Benwell/Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0 Deed).)

cat gods and coexistence

The recent paper on how worshipping cat gods helps people in India to coexist with leopards and even tigers inspired me to look for other examples. Naively, I assumed I would find similar stories around the world, but most of the surviving cultures codifying coexistence with dangerous wildlife led me back to India. So it became a slightly lopsided tour du monde, but I also have mentions of Central America, Australia, and Nigeria in there. The feature is out now:

A culture of coexistence

Current Biology Volume 31, Issue 15, 09 August 2021, Pages R931-R934

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Children play with Waghoba at Manali temple
Source.
(this picture didn't quite make it into the published article)

global genomes

Open Archive Day

I recently reported about the research on hidden biases that are widespread even among people with liberal / egalitarian worldviews who would find the discrimination resulting from bias unacceptable.

One area where biased outlooks have harmed science is modern genomics. The most interesting revelations about the diversity, history and evolution of our species are to be expected from detailed analyses of African genomes as well as from comparing them to genomes representing the endpoints of the migrations that distributed our species around the world.

Instead, genomics spent its first ten years on sequencing males of European origin like Craig Venter and James Watson. Only in recent years, more than a decade after the first genome, has science begun to do our globalised species justice.

A year ago I wrote a feature on how the study of genomes of the native populations of Australia and New Guinea helps our understanding of human migrations and diversity. This feature is now on open access:

Out of Africa, into Australia

Australian genomes

After rapidly developing the second and third generation sequencing methods that make it feasible and indeed affordable to sequence many human genomes, research has been slow to turn to address human genetic diversity (most of which is in Africa, not between the arbitrarily defined "races") and the migrations in which our ancestors spread out around the globe. Even though extinct relatives including Neanderthal and Denisovan have had their genomes published years ago, it's only now that Australia and Papua New Guinea are receiving adequate attention. The genomes of their indigenous populations cast a unique and revealing spotlight on the history of our species.

Read all about it in my latest feature:

Out of Africa, into Australia
Current Biology Volume 26, Issue 21, 7 November 2016, Pages R1119–R1121

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Since modern humans expanded into the Australian continent some 40,000 years ago, they developed a rich landscape of cultural and linguistic diversity — until the arrival of the colonialists who failed to appreciate their ancient civilisation. (Photo: © Wayne Quilliam Photography/Yothu Yindu Foundation.)

Australia's wildlife in peril

As the Great Barrier Reef is beginning to suffer catastrophic bleaching from the current El Niño warming, Australia's unique biodiversity on land is also under threat from deforestation and habitat loss. I've rounded up a few of the issues currently being fought over especially in Queensland in my latest feature which is out now:

Fate of Australia's wildlife in the balance

Current Biology Volume 26, Issue 7, 4 April 2016, Pages R257–R259
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2016.03.035

Summary and restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

The iconic koala is one of many species losing large areas of habitat as deforestation accelerates in the state of Queensland. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons.)

hopes and fears for coral reefs

My latest feature in Current Biology is on the recent findings of resilience in coral reefs, and the continuing threats they face:

Hopes and fears for future of coral reefs

Copyright © 2013 All rights reserved. Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 15, R635-R637, 5 August 2013 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.07.062

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PS: This is post number 1111, by the way.

dial M for Milly

Dial M for Murdoch

Tom Watson and Martin Hickman

Like many others, I suppose, I only really started paying proper attention to the phone hacking scandal when the Milly Dowler story broke on July 4th, 2011. Until then, the hacking saga was mainly about royals and some football people being hacked, and I’m not interested in either group of people, and didn’t have a high opinion of the papers involved and their editors to begin with, so there was no surprise element. The Milly moment changed everything, as it demonstrated very clearly how the tabloid folk trampled even on the people they pretended to stand up for (such as victims of crime). And it was immediately clear to me (if not to Rupert M) that this time they would not get away with it.

Luckily, a few brave investigators and reporters including the authors of this book and the Guardian’s Nick Davies pursued this story relentlessly from the beginning and worked hard to make the rest of us pay attention too. For us who missed all or parts of the beginnings, this book is a great way to catch up with the story and learn how all the different threads, including not just the phone hacking but also an unsolved murder case and multiple cases of police corruption, fit together and feed into the tangled web of inquiries we are witnessing today.

Up to and including the Milly moment, the book reads like a gripping thriller, as the quest for the truth looks very much like a lost cause for the fearless investigators who suspected that criminal actions were widespread at NI but couldn’t prove it yet. After the closure of News of the World, as our heroes are clearly on the winning stretch, the book loses momentum a little bit. It quotes from relevant inquiries in detail, even though at least today’s UK readership will remember the crucial moments of the last few months, so they could have been summarised a bit more concisely. It will be different for readers in a few years time, but by then the book will have to be updated anyway, to include new findings and those that are at the moment blocked by legal concerns.

Those lucky enough to live in a country whose media are not dominated by News Corp can read it as a fascinating tale of media power and corruption, essentially a modern day Macbeth. The moral is, if you give someone a bit of power, they will want more, and they will begin to think they can get away with murder.

amazon.co.uk

PS after posting this review on amazon, I immediately got two "unhelpful" votes, which is very untypical (I've been at 84% helpful votes for years now). I deleted the review and reposted an improved version, thinking maybe it was really not helpful enough, and got a fresh unhelpful vote within 12hours. I can only conclude that some NI-friendly troll is keeping an eye on these reviews and marking down those that praise the book.

save the whales

It's rare that a political leader does a green thing to save his skin, but this appears to be happening in Australia where a majority is angry about Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean, and PM Kevin Rudd is now beginning to make good on his election promise to take action against it.

My news feature on whaling (also covering recent findings on how whales work as carbon capture and storage device, providing another reason not to slaughter them) is out in Current Biology today:

Whaling battles
Current Biology, Volume 20, Issue 6, R256-R257, 23 March 2010
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literary space

I am now officially famous in Australia, as Angela has kindly included a photo of my office in her "Literary Space" series on her brilliant blog Literary Minded. Here is a permanent link to my entry.

PS on a vaguely related note, there is a German painter called Kerstin Drechsel who made huge canvases of messy homes, you can watch a short video about her work here.