It used to be easy to separate man from beast. Then we realised animals, too, can experience sophisticated emotions and communicate through language. But there is one thing that is beyond even our closest relatives, chimpanzees – and that is the ability to be spiteful. Image: fwooper
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New Scientist Image: Nao Iizuka When a country’s environment agency slaps 33 restrictions on...
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Silence is golden, but it is not the preserve of men. It seems that verbosity may be governed by personality type, not gender. Far from being tight-lipped, males managed an average of around 16,000 words a day – the same number as female students. Image: slightly everything
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You might expect a gerbil to end up inside a snake. But part of a snake ending up in a gerbil? A small chunk of snake DNA has indeed turned up in wild gerbils, and it could one day show up in a host of other species too. Image: born1945
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In the face of global climate change 74,000 years ago, humans came up trumps. Evidence from India shows that the global cooling following a massive volcanic eruption at the time did not decimate human populations as originally thought. Some have proposed that human populations shrank during the “volcanic winter” following the Toba eruption, but new data suggests otherwise. Image: widakso
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