The Sun doesn’t just fuel almost all life on Earth. It’s also our astrophysical laboratory, the only star close enough to observe in sufficient detail.

This enormous ball of hydrogen and helium is made of plasma – extremely hot, electrically charged gas. The churning of plasma within the Sun produces an invisible magnetic field that envelops our entire Solar System.

Up close, at the Sun’s surface, the plasma is turbulent, dragging the magnetic field with it. It roils and bubbles and occasionally bursts out clouds of material known as coronal mass ejections.

Over the years, scientists have made many close-ups of the Sun’s surface with various telescopes and observatories. Now, we have the highest-resolution images yet, thanks to the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) on Maui, Hawai'i.

In a study published today in Nature, a team led by researchers from the US National Solar Observatory and Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research delivers new observations of the surface of the Sun with unprecedented precision – revealing a feature never seen before.

A solar mystery

The Sun’s magnetic field drives what we call space weather. Explosive flares in the outer atmosphere of the Sun – the corona – can cause radiation storms on Earth, disrupting satellites, power grids and communications.

And there’s a major mystery concerning the corona. The Sun’s surface is about 5,500°C. That’s much cooler than its core, about 27 million degrees Celsius. But the corona, rising above the surface, reaches millions of degrees.

To heat it, energy must pass through cooler intermediate layers. Why does the temperature, after dropping, suddenly rise again? To pin down which mechanism is responsible, we need to observe physical processes on the Sun’s surface that unfold over short times and small distances.

DKIST’s four-metre mirror, advanced optics and high-speed cameras resolve features as small as 20 kilometres across, which is tiny compared to the Sun’s radius of 696,000km. They’ve captured subtle brightness variations and magnetic structures with unmatched clarity.

Connecting the loops

On the Sun’s surface, the roiling flows of plasma drag magnetic fields with them. Sometimes they form coherent magnetic sunspots; at others times they twist and tangle.

These surface magnetic fields extend upward into the corona, and the mechanics at the surface cause magnetic fields aloft to snap and reconnect. This reconfiguration of the magnetic field can release stored energy into heat and fast flows, sometimes triggering explosive solar flares.

The key challenge is to connect these small, short events at the surface to the large-scale heating and eruptions in the Sun’s atmosphere above.

Solving that link would make a huge advance towards understanding why the corona is so hot. It would also improve our ability to predict space weather and how it might affect Earth, as well as interpret the magnetic activity and space weather of distant stars.

In the new study, the team presents the first clear evidence on the Sun of one of nature’s most striking patterns – the Kelvin–Helmholtz instability.

These rolling, wave-like billows form when fast fluid slides past slower fluid. Sometimes you can see it along the edges of windswept clouds.

This instability was theoretically predicted to exist in the Sun’s plasma, but it was unknown at what scales and what role it might play.

To turn observations into insight, the team paired DKIST data with sophisticated computer simulations, creating “synthetic observations” to match what the telescope saw.

This revealed these instabilities are likely key in mixing plasma and braiding the magnetic fields. It means small-scale billows and vortices near the Sun’s surface pump energy upward, priming the corona for its extreme temperatures and setting the stage for explosive flares.

Making a simulation always involves some approximations. The models can’t reproduce the Sun’s extreme physics, but they do closely match up to the observations, which is really impressive.

The simulation results also suggest that despite looking coherent on the surface, the magnetic fields beneath features like dark pores are fragmented.

This is super exciting, because we know that the magnetic field is generated somewhere inside the Sun – but we don’t know how or where. The fragmentation beneath suggests these magnetic features are only formed once they reach the surface, not deeper below. If correct, this will really challenge existing models of how sunspots and magnetic regions form.

The Sun is the only star we can study up close. By connecting its smallest magnetic twists to its largest outbursts, we unlock the key to interpreting every other star.

Hannah Schunker, ARC Future Fellow, Physics, University of Newcastle

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Intelligence is an energetically expensive luxury – as the rise of artificial intelligence has reminded us. The human brain is no exception.

Comprising roughly 2% of the body weight, it uses one fifth the body’s energy in the resting state – compared with less than half of this in non-human primates. A five-year-old child devotes 66% of the energy they need to stay alive to their brain.

How did our ancestors foot the energy bill to run their uniquely large brains? Eating more meat is often considered to be the answer. But there’s a catch. The brain relies on a form of fuel that is not present in meat: glucose.

Our new study, published today in Science, shows that carbohydrates contributed more than half our total energy requirements over four million years of evolution. It holds important clues for why we crave sweet foods today – and how we can eat more healthily.

The matter of meat

Many anthropologists have credited meat eating as the stimulus to produce a large brain. After all, it required tools to butcher the carcass and access the fat-rich marrow inside bones.

Protein and fat in fruit and leaves are dilute, requiring hours of chewing, while animal foods are dense sources that can be devoured quickly. Bone marrow is a rich source of essential fats.

In truth, humans do not require more protein as a proportion of energy than other primates.

Our increasingly large brains and high reproductive rate demanded carbohydrate calories (found in plants but not meat), while our taller and heavier bodies needed fat calories to move those big muscles.

Although the body can synthesise glucose from precursors such as amino acids, the process is finite and energetically inefficient. Furthermore, there are limits on using just protein as fuel. For example, it can lead to a type of poisoning known as “rabbit starvation”.

A minimum amount of dietary carbohydrate was necessary. Our new study shows that, for much of evolution, the sugars in fruit and honey were the source.

Modelling ancient diets

We modelled the diets of hominins – the group consisting of humans and our immediate ancestors – over four million years of evolution.

First, we calculated overall demand for glucose by the organs and tissues which use it as their primary source of energy. Apart from the brain, red blood cells and the kidneys require glucose.

We then accounted for reproductive needs. The fetus and placenta use glucose not just as an energy source but as a structural component of growing tissues. Synthesis of DNA, RNA and nerve cell membranes requires glucose. During lactation, women use about 80g of glucose each day to produce the sugars in human milk.

Then we modelled the availability of macronutrients – carbohydrates, fats and proteins – from foods, starting with the diminutive ancient ape known as Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis).

This early ancestor of ours walked on two legs, and was likely to be a ripe fruit specialist like chimpanzees today. Over two thirds of her energy came from naturally-occurring sugars.

Indeed, some scientists think frugivory – a feeding strategy primarily characterised by eating fruit – kick-started the evolution of large brains because, living in tropical forests, our ancestors required good cognition to remember when and where the best fruits were ripening. They needed strategic thinking to beat the birds and other competitors.

We finished up with the known diet composition of contemporary human foragers in warm climates. In six incremental steps, we incorporated increasing proportions of animal-based food, starting with 5% of calories and finishing with 35–50%.

Around one million years ago, mastery of fire allowed cooked starch, which unlike raw starch can be easily digested to provide glucose, to replace some of the sugars. Relatively recently, about 100,000 years ago, grinding stones and hearths indicate that the starch inside cereal grains became more accessible.

Lessons for modern diets

Did early hominins consume sufficient carbohydrate to cover the obligatory demands of the brain and other tissues? Yes, if you were a male, but only just if you were a pregnant female.

As we ventured out of tropical environments into cold and arid territory, the intake of carbohydrates would have become limiting. Plants would be plentiful, along with protein and marrow fat, but fruit and honey would be seasonal.

We speculate that limited amounts of dietary carbohydrate selected for genes that result in higher blood glucose levels. This would improve the growth and future survival of the fetus.

Today, the same genes likely predispose us to type two diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Low carbohydrate diets may therefore be helpful in specific clinical contexts.

But our findings provide an evolutionary explanation why healthy humans require about half their energy as carbohydrates. They also give us insight into why humans crave sweetness – a pleasurable signal on the tongue that encouraged foods that fuelled the mind and body millions of years ago.

Intrinsically, sugars are highly reactive molecules that are bundled in nature with antioxidants and other natural compounds that reduce harm within the cell.

Ideally, we consume them in that form – as fruit – rather than refined sugars.

Jennie Brand-Miller, Emeritus Professor of Human Nutrition, University of Sydney; David Raubenheimer, Leonard P. Ullman Chair in Nutritional Ecology, Nutrition Theme Leader Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney, and Les Copeland, Professor of Agriculture, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The dodo has been extinct for more than 300 years, wiped out within decades of humans arriving on its home island of Mauritius, but it lives on in the public imagination.

This famous flightless bird has become a symbol of extinction. Its demise is often portrayed as almost inevitable: a supposedly foolish creature that naïvely approached the sailors who killed it.

Early accounts even describe people holding a captured dodo and letting it cry out so others would wander over. In the 18th century, Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus dubbed the species Dodus ineptus after its reputation for dim wits and silliness.

But new research shows this image is misleading. The dodo was likely no less intelligent than any modern bird. It may also have possessed a rare and overlooked ecological trait: an adaptation to life in low light.

A closer look inside a vanished bird’s head

With a team of collaborators across Canada, Australia, the United States, Europe and the UK, our new study looked in detail at the reconstruction of the dodo’s brain.

There are only three completely preserved dodo skulls in existence. Using high-resolution CT scans of all three, we could reconstruct the shape of the dodo skull and get a detailed idea of the size and shape of its brain.

This also allowed us to digitally measure the structures associated with vision, smell and cognition (or “smarts”). These scans can also be shared further with the research community.

The dodo was a member of the pigeon family, so its living relatives include the pigeons in our cities and the doves whose calls accompany mornings around the world. Pigeons are famous for their navigational skills and are widely used by scientists to study animal cognition.

Is there any indication that the dodo’s brain was much different? When we compared the dodo’s brain to that of pigeons, we found that the dodo’s forebrain, linked to cognition and memory, was similar in proportion to other pigeons, when compared to the rest of the brain.

In other words, there is no evidence the dodo was less intelligent than any other pigeon. This is also backed up by previous research suggesting that the overall brain size was similar relative to body mass compared to other pigeons.

So we think the dodo’s trusting behaviour was because it simply had nothing to fear until humans arrived, as is common for island species with no predators.

A giant pigeon with an unexpected twist

Where the dodo does differ dramatically from other pigeons is in its sensory systems, particularly its vision. The dodo’s optic lobes, the brain region that first processes visual information in the bird brain, are unusually small – not just compared to pigeons, but also compared to another extinct flightless relative, the Rodrigues solitaire.

Smaller optic lobes are typically found in birds adapted for a nocturnal lifestyle, such as owls, kiwi, and the Australian night parrot.

They are likely a product of specialising for low light vision, where the light received by the retina is “summarised” by fewer nerves. This increases the contrast of the image, making it easier to see in the dark.

Although we have no way to examine the retina of the dodo, the implication of small optic lobes is that it may not have been a strictly daytime bird. Instead, it may have been active at dawn or dusk or even at night, a behaviour otherwise unknown among modern pigeons and doves.

Why would a dodo be active in the dark?

If the dodo spent more time foraging in low light, what might have driven this behaviour?

One possibility is competition. Mauritius was once home to large populations of giant tortoises, which would have fed on many of the same fruits and plants as the dodo. By shifting its activity into the cooler, darker hours when reptiles are inactive, the dodo may have gained access to food with less competition.

This idea remains speculative, but the anatomical evidence clearly shows that the dodo’s sensory world was not what we once assumed.

A new picture of an old icon

Our findings challenge the longstanding stereotype of the dodo as a clumsy, foolish daytime forager. Instead, we may need to picture it navigating the dim Mauritian forests at sunrise or sunset and behaving with the same level of intelligence as its living pigeon relatives.

Vera Weisbecker, Professor in Evolutionary Biology, College of Science and Engineering, Flinders University; Andrew Iwaniuk, Professor of Neuroscience, University of Lethbridge, and Sara Citron, PhD Candidate in Neuroscience

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In one scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 thriller Vertigo, lead character John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart) is shown following Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) up a bell tower.

Scottie is afraid of heights. So when he briefly stops and glances down, he experiences a wave of vertigo. The stairwell distorts, seemingly stretching into the distance below him – a potent reflection of his dizzy and panicked state.

This scene is the first ever example of the “dolly zoom”, a dynamic visual technique achieved through camera movement and a zoom lens.

Also known as the “vertigo effect” or the “contra zoom”, it requires significant skill. The subject must remain the same size within the frame, while the background distorts by either stretching or compressing.

Most of us have a list of our favourite films and TV series of all time. But do you ever wonder how these were made?

In this series we go behind the scenes to reveal the ingenious tricks and innovations that have transformed screen production over the course of a century.

Another famous example comes from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), when police chief Martin Brody (Roy Schneider) realises the shark is attacking swimmers in the water.

In Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (2001), the technique is used to indicate impending danger, as Frodo (Elijah Wood) realises the Nazgûl are headed towards him and his party.

Combining artistic and technical creativity

The dolly zoom is said to have been invented by Irmin Roberts, a camera operator at Paramount, after Alfred Hitchcock requested a visual effect that would encapsulate the feeling of fainting.

The technique is named after two pieces of technology: a “dolly”, which is the wheeled platform that moves the camera, and the telephoto “zoom” lens.

The change of perspective comes as the camera zooms out while moving towards the subject – or vice-versa, zooms in while moving away from the subject.

While other techniques can provide a similar visual effect, such as the crane shot or drone shot, the perspective change that ripples through a dolly zoom stands out as being particularly unique, as it tends to offer more precision and smoothness.

Achieving this affect to a high standard takes considerable planning and coordination, even today, as remote technologies are used to manage the focus, frame and the speed of the camera.

Thanks to advanced software technologies, the dolly zoom effect can now also be achieved in post-production. This is an attractive option for low-budget filmmakers who can’t afford to buy or hire a zoom lens.

A collaborative effort

The dolly zoom requires collaboration between the director, production designer and cinematographer. Usually, all three will work together to decide which scene the effect will appear in, which location will work best for the shot, and the type of slider or length of track required to move the camera.

On set, the performance of the camera and grips department demand perfect synchronisation. Many rehearsals may be required to ensure the shot is executed faultlessly.

Consider this scene from Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) as an example.

Seated against a window, Henry (Ray Liotta) and James (Robert De Niro) are chatting and having lunch in a diner. As the camera moves towards them, the telephoto lens zooms out and, gradually, the cars on the street outside rise to prominence. The effect punctuates Henry’s disorientation as he realises he is being framed for murder.

This shot is more complex than it looks. The crew must coordinate the camera movement, and manual adjustments to the zoom and focus rings on the lens, to be perfectly timed with the actors’ performance.

An iconic visual trick

The dolly zoom has become an iconic visual motif that combines technical innovation with cinematic impact.

Almost 70 years on from its first use, it now appears relatively frequently in both film and television. The effect is even simulated in animation. In Ratatouille (2007), for example, it is used to emphasise Remy’s admiration towards his idol, Chef Gusteau.

The dolly zoom offers a way to creatively express a psychological experience that connects the viewer with the characters onscreen.

Susan Kerrigan, Professor Film and Television, Swinburne University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It is a sad day for Australian cartooning when an artist as good as Fiona Katauskas has not had her contract renewed. But that is what has happened at the Guardian Australia.

Katauskas is among the top daily political cartoonists in the country, with her cheerful visual style beautifully in tension with her salty satirical commentary.

She is at the top of her game, with her acerbic observations on national and international events a fine window on the passing parade of absurdity that passes for public life in the third decade of this increasingly silly century. Her great service has probably been to add some playfulness and wit to a publication that can be earnest, even ranty.

Katauskas is only the latest casualty in a cartooning industry still struggling to adapt to the 21st-century media business model. She joins other cartoonists, at home and abroad, who find themselves reliant on freelancing.

Emma Cook was let go from Stuff in New Zealand after eight years. Colin Wicking was never replaced at the NT News when he retired in 2022. It’s not a stampede of cartoonists leaving newsrooms, but the traffic is all in one direction.

The era of the permanent staff cartoonist is almost over.

What do cartoonists do?

Cartoonists, like Katauskas and her Guardian Australia stablemate First Dog on the Moon, are integral to the look and critical ethos of a paper, even one solely online.

They lighten the load of words with humour and occasionally spear you with satirical perception.

Australian cartoons moved from weeklies like the Bulletin into dailies during the early 20th century as an appeal to tired commuters to buy and read an afternoon paper. From the 1960s, they spread into the morning broadsheets to operate as satirical commentary as well as fun.

But newspapers are not doing well. Does anyone remember an “afternoon” paper or a “morning” broadsheet? When was the last time anyone felt the grime of newsprint or leafed through flimsy pages to find the cartoon?

But in the age of online publications and shrinking newsrooms, there are a few reasons to hang onto political cartoonists.

At a time when concentration spans are shrinking to evanescence, a picture with a pointed caption really can tell a thousand words.

Good cartoonists are court jesters who inspire loyalty in readers – something legacy publications are losing now that the platforms cannibalise their journalism.

Rupert Murdoch learned from his father, Sir Keith, that any newspaper worth the name needs cartoonists - in their days, Will Dyson, the Lindsays and Paul Rigby were all close to the Murdochs, father and son.

NT News aside, the metropolitan stable of Mark Knight, John Spooner, Warren Brown and Johannes Leak seems as solid as ever, and News Corp Australasia’s executive chairman Michael Miller has been steadfast in supporting the “immense skill” of his cartoonists.

It’s a pity the individually brilliant artists News employ lack diversity as a group. It has been a while since only white guys were funny, and News has never had a woman in the role of regular cartoonist.

Australian cartooning more broadly had been progressing in the opposite direction, diluting the “boys club”. Cathy Wilcox, the cartoonist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, has been the great leader in this, and of the whole profession.

With Katauskas and Megan Herbert, also at the Nine papers, the Australian media was beginning to capitalise on a long tradition of Australian women cartoonists stretching back to May Gibbs, through the McCrae and Paterson sisters, Alice Solly on Aussie, Mollie Horseman, Joan Morrison and Jean Cullen on Smith’s Weekly, and the great Fairfax cartoonist and Walkley winner, Jenny Coopes.

What will live on

Cartoonists have to draw a joke that works, so they are always in danger of introducing witty and divergent perspectives to a publication. And we need these perspectives to be local – generated by humans, not artificial intelligence.

A cartoon has to speak to its immediate context to engage with the readers and the issues on the ground. Cartoons from London cannot cover the blood-sport of Australian politics competently. We need Australian artists reflecting on local and international events from within our own pre-occupations.

AI visuals can certainly be pretty (even though they look like Watchtower or Awake illustrations), but it’s unlikely “slop” will ever be witty. The large language models are designed to generate seamless mediocrity – the most likely word or image available to address a prompt. By contrast, cartoons often show their seams, and they only work when they subvert mediocrity.

AI cannot be programmed to be zany like Brown, edgy like Katauskas, or subtle like Wilcox.

Without gigs in newspapers, the cartoon function will nevertheless live on in Australia. Talented artists won’t be able to resist the temptation of drawing our would-be emperors in their glorious mental and moral nakedness.

But it’s a shame it is currently so hard to make a decent living in this important public service.

Richard Scully, Professor in Modern History, University of New England and Robert Phiddian, Professor of English, Flinders University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The first time I saw it, I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at. A northern white-cheeked gibbon at Shanghai Zoo was holding and caressing a mouse that had wandered into its enclosure. It wasn’t trying to eat it or chase it away. Instead, the gibbon treated the tiny rodent with remarkable gentleness. I couldn’t stop wondering why.

Years later, while studying wild black-and-white snub-nosed monkeys in the mountains of south-west China, I watched playful juveniles repeatedly trying to climb onto the backs of domestic pigs. Again, these weren’t the kinds of interactions I expected to see between different species.

A new study my colleagues and I conducted brings together 427 documented cases of primates interacting with other species, spanning several decades from the 1970s to 2025. Our findings reveal that these encounters are far more widespread than scientists had realised.

Over the years, I had begun collecting reports of similar encounters from scientific journals, photographs, videos and observations shared by other primatologists. What initially seemed like a handful of quirky anecdotes gradually turned into a much broader pattern. These interactions appeared to represent a surprisingly widespread aspect of primate behaviour.

This behaviour may shed light on one of the defining features of our own species: our extraordinary relationships with other animals.

I’ve long been interested in how tolerance evolves, not only between members of the same species but also between strangers more generally. Humans are unusual in the degree to which we cooperate with unrelated people. We are perhaps even more unusual in the close relationships we form with other animals.

Scientists have long known that different animal species often associate with one another. Monkeys, for example, can improve their predator detection or increase foraging opportunities when they move around as a mixed-species group. Another example is how birds frequently follow monkeys through forests to feed on insects disturbed by their movements.

But our study focused on social interactions.

The cases we reviewed involved 88 primate species and their interactions with 127 other animal species. The diversity of these species was astonishing. It included mammals such as sheep, tapir, deer, domestic pigs, cats and dogs, as well as owls, lizards, toads and even insects.

The most common behaviour was play and grooming. But we also found reports of primates carrying, huddling and sharing food with and occasionally adopting members of another species. Most interactions were initiated by the primates themselves.

One of my favourite examples is the now well-known case of Japanese macaques grooming and riding on the backs of sika deer. It remains a remarkable example of two very different species repeatedly interacting peacefully over long periods.

I was also fascinated by some of the less familiar observations, such as a langur attentively stroking a squirrel, a silverback gorilla carefully cradling a tiny wild bushbaby, a bonobo gently holding a mongoose pup and macaques grooming stray dogs.

Many of these interactions may provide benefits similar to those seen within species. Grooming can help remove parasites, improve hygiene and reinforce social bonds. Play contributes to the development of motor coordination, social skills and cognitive flexibility.

Some interactions happen where primates and other animals spend time together because of shared foraging opportunities or protection from predators. For example, tropical primates form associations with other primate species and jointly forage in the tree canopy. In these cases, social interactions, such as grooming or play, may simply emerge from repeated contact and social familiarity.

Yet not all observations fit this pattern. Why would a langur stroke a squirrel, or macaques groom stray dogs? Such interactions suggest that primates may possess a broader capacity for social flexibility, curiosity and tolerance towards other species than researchers previously appreciated.

We also found consistent patterns in who interacted. Young primates were much more likely to play with members of another species, whereas adult females were more often involved in grooming. This mirrors well-established age and sex differences in many primate societies, where juveniles spend much of their time playing and females often invest more heavily in caregiving.

It would be tempting to describe all these encounters as examples of friendship. But the reality is more complicated. Some primates carried infants of another species in ways resembling adoption or caregiving, yet rough handling or neglect sometimes resulted in injury or death. We also documented cases where primates appeared to abduct a young animal from its group, while a small number of interactions were clearly abusive, involving violence.

Most interactions were probably of relatively short duration. However, there are some reports of cases that lasted for weeks. For example, the adoption of a marmoset by a capuchin monkey.

In zoos and other human-care settings, some species appear to form long-lasting relationships with animals of other species. In 2017, a macaque living in an Israeli zoo called Niv adopted a chicken and treated it like it was her own baby.

Our study found these interactions were not more common among great apes – they occurred across all major primate lineages.

These unusual encounters are more than fascinating natural history.

As forests become increasingly fragmented and wildlife is forced into closer contact with people, livestock and domestic animals, opportunities for cross-species interactions are changing rapidly. Primates now encounter dogs, cats and other human-associated animals more often than they once did.

Some of these interactions may be benign or even beneficial. Others could increase the risk of diseases spreading between wildlife, domestic animals and humans. Understanding when and why different species tolerate one another therefore has important implications for both conservation and public health.

The findings may also help improve animal welfare. Zoos increasingly house compatible species together, and understanding which species are more likely to form positive relationships can help managers make better decisions.

Perhaps most interesting of all, our findings suggest that some of the ingredients (curiosity, tolerance, caregiving and play) underlying those relationships may have deep evolutionary roots.

Cyril Grueter, Adjunct Associate Professor, The University of Western Australia; University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The ability to cross oceans has long been a marker of human endeavour, but when did the seas change from being barriers to movement into the maritime highways we know today?

For many years the answer was thought to lie in the Neolithic period – the time when humans made the profound transition from hunting and gathering to practising agriculture and living in settled societies.

Our team’s discovery of the presence of European hunter-gatherers on the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta, reported last year, has overturned this view. It showed that people reached Malta from their starting point in Europe (presumably Sicily) at least 8,500 years ago.

In a new study, we show that these populations were engaging in repeated long-distance sea journeys of at least 100km, well before the advent of farming.

Researchers have known that the occasional very ancient sea crossing must have been made. The most famous example may be the colonisation of Australia, tens of thousands of years before the present.

However, sustained, long distance sea voyaging – particularly to small and remote islands – was long thought to have been beyond the capabilities of hunter-gatherers, who are dependant on the bounty, or deprivation, of natural resources.

This was also the case for Europe’s last hunter-gatherers, in the period of time known as the Mesolithic, the era before the Neolithic. During the Neolithic, a new population introduced agriculture to Europe from Anatolia (which comprises most of the landmass of modern Turkey).

Enter the recent findings from the site of Latnija, on Malta. Did the surprising presence of European hunter-gatherers on Malta reflect a one off, accidental crossing – or perhaps people who somehow became marooned on the island? Conversely, was this Mesolithic presence a reflection of something altogether different, and more complex?

Shifting seas

To explore these possibilities, we investigated whether Malta could support a viable forager population size that could have lived in isolation for the 1,000 year occupation of the island during the Mesolithic.

First, we explored the impacts of changing sea levels since the Last Glacial Maximum (the height of the last ice age), from around 21,000 years ago. This was when waters began to rise from their lowest levels of around 130m below modern sea level. By doing this, we were able to track changes in the size of Malta and its connectivity with surrounding islands and land masses.

During the Last Glacial Maximum, Malta was connected to Sicily by a land bridge, and this connection remained as sea levels continued to rise until around 14,000 years ago, when the land bridge began to be inundated. Continued sea level rise meant that within less than a thousand years, Malta had become far smaller and remote from Sicily, needing a long-distance sea crossing for connectivity.

By the time of the Mesolithic occupation, Malta had almost reached its present configuration, with no significant difference in distances to Sicily. Having understood how sea level rise impacted the size and accessibility of Malta, we next explored how its specific ecological conditions impacted its ability to support forager populations. Since hunter-gatherers are reliant on what nature provides, their population sizes have a direct relationship with ecological productivity.

Accordingly, we modelled the relationship between population density among contemporary forager populations and what’s known as net primary productivity – effectively the baseline of wild resources available to hunter-gatherers. We then extrapolated these findings back into the past using high resolution computer models of past climates (palaeoclimate models).

This enabled us to calculate the total population size that could be supported first on the combined landmass of Malta and Sicily, and then as separate islands as sea levels rose.

Our upper estimates for the total population sizes suggest that after the inundation of the land bridge to Sicily, the total population size that could be theoretically supported on Malta dropped rapidly to 319 people by 13,800 years ago.

There is no evidence yet that people were living on Malta this early, but our models showed that any populations present would have continued to drop in size as sea levels rose until around 9,000 years ago, when it could have accommodated around 170-144 people.

Finally, we compared these findings to thresholds, informed by conservation genetic studies, for the long-term viability and stability of a population. These thresholds suggest the need for an effective (reproducing) population size of 1,000 or more, equivalent to a total population size of 2,500-3,000 (because the total population size includes both younger and older people who are not reproducing).

Long distance voyages

This suggests that Malta was incapable of hosting an isolated, viable population that could have lived continuously through the 1,000-year time frame during which it was settled by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.

Consequently, we can rule out the persistence of a population stranded on Malta as sea levels inundated the land bridge to Sicily. We can also exclude a single, perhaps unintended, voyage leaving marooned mariners on Malta.

The only alternative is that these Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were making repeated, long distance sea voyages between at least Malta and Sicily, the closest land mass, to maintain the genetic connections that ensured at least a millennium of Mesolithic viability on Malta.

These insights are reshaping our perceptions of late European hunter-gatherers and the sophistication of their societies. To maintain repeated, long-distance overseas connections, they must have had, and conserved, an extensive knowledge of land, sea and sky, as well as the technological know-how for building and preserving sea craft.

We don’t know for certain what type of vessels the hunter-gatherers were using, although we know that dug-out canoes existed at this time. The crossings to Malta occurred several thousand years before the earliest evidence for sails – making the achievement even more impressive.

From wayfinding to getting food at sea overnight, they then had to be able to live sustainably on a small, semi-arid island, which required a finely-tuned knowledge of diverse food sources shaped by the seasons.

With these implicit capabilities, we can then start to ask, where else did they go? There is already evidence of connectivity between Europe and North Africa during this time. Previous work using ancient DNA found the distinctive signature of European hunter-gatherer ancestry in people living in pre-Neolithic Tunisia.

All this suggests we may be looking at a hitherto unknown web of overseas links that marked the beginning of the connected world we know today, centuries before the first farmers reached the central Mediterranean.

Understanding how these groups remained ecologically resilient, while also shaping ecosystems to their needs, may yet prove to have important lessons for humanity’s current and future challenges in a rapidly warming world. As we continue to unravel Malta’s unprecedented hunter-gatherer past, we hope to shed light on this lost ecological knowledge.

James Blinkhorn, University Research Fellow, Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, University of Liverpool and Eleanor Scerri, Independent Group Leader, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Amid family feuds, damaging headlines and questions about its future role, Britain’s royal family has spent much of the past decade managing its public image. But the importance of good royal PR dates back centuries.

Long before communications teams and media advisers became fixtures of royal life, Queen Caroline (1683-1737) attempted a remarkable piece of image management. Faced with the challenge of making a German royal dynasty seem unmistakably British, she turned to one of Britain’s most powerful national stories: the legends of King Arthur and Merlin.

As the wife of the king of Great Britain and Ireland, George II (1683-1760), Caroline belonged to the House of Hanover. The German dynasty had inherited the British throne only two decades earlier and was still viewed with suspicion by many of their subjects. At the same time, an increasingly public feud between the king and his heir, Frederick, Prince of Wales, threatened to undermine the image of stability that a country recently torn apart by civil war, religious schisms and political revolution so desperately needed.

Caroline’s solution to this problem was unexpected. In 1735, she commissioned a curious attraction in the gardens of her palace at Richmond. Known as Merlin’s Cave, it looked like something from a fairy tale: a gothic thatched building filled with wax figures of Merlin, legendary prophets and other figures from Britain’s distant past. Many contemporaries thought it bizarre, with one critic dismissing its inhabitants as “a great many strange puppets”.

Yet Merlin’s Cave was far more than an eccentric garden folly. Although an unlikely tool of statecraft, Caroline’s use of Arthurian iconography sought not only to strengthen the Hanovarian claim but also to promote a shared British identity at a time of political uncertainty.

Myth as messaging

Although the House of Hanover had inherited the British throne in 1714, it did not yet possess a deep-rooted place in the nation’s imagination. George I (who reigned 1714-1727) preferred his native Hanover to his new dominion and had relied heavily on interpreters and intermediaries throughout his reign. This exposed the dynasty to accusations that they were foreign rulers.

Supporters of the exiled Stuart dynasty, known as Jacobites, continued to regard James II’s son, the “Old Pretender” James Francis Edward Stuart, as Britain’s legitimate king. They had attempted ill-fated but bloody uprisings in 1715 and 1719. On his accession to the throne in 1727, George II therefore faced a challenge that was both political and cultural: he needed to not only rule Britain, but to persuade his people that he belonged there.

Arthurian legend offered a solution to this problem. Unlike the Jacobite claim, which emphasised hereditary right, it provided access to something broader and potentially more powerful: the idea of a shared British past. Arthur and Merlin were useful precisely because they belonged to no single dynasty. They could be appropriated to cultivate a different kind of legitimacy – one founded on patriotism, national identity and Britain’s historical traditions.

Queen Caroline was well placed to appreciate Arthur’s political usefulness. Unlike her husband, who famously cared little for the arts, Caroline was an enthusiastic reader who understood the political value of culture. Raised in the intellectually vibrant courts of Berlin and Hanover, she had access to extensive libraries that exposed her not only to Arthurian myth but to traditions linking the House of Guelph – the Hanoverian dynasty – with medieval English royalty.

While earlier monarchs such as Henry II and Edward I had often appropriated Arthur directly as a model of kingship, Caroline shifted attention towards Merlin. Throughout Arthurian tradition, Merlin acts as an adviser, genealogist and interpreter of Britain’s future. He guides Arthur while also foretelling the destiny of the realm. By placing Merlin at the centre of her cave, Caroline was employing these associations to connect the past, present and future in ways that linked the Hanoverians both to Britain’s ancient heritage and its future success.

This symbolism became even more pointed because the royal family itself was divided. George II and Caroline had a strained relationship with their son, Frederick, and contemporary supporters interpreted Merlin’s inclusion as a call for reconciliation. In a 1735 poem inspired by Merlin’s Cave, the Anglo-Welsh writer Jane Brereton has Merlin urge Frederick to fulfil his filial duty and “perpetuate Brunswick’s Race”, suggesting that at least some observers understood the Cave’s symbolism as a plea for dynastic harmony as well as political stability.

Not everyone was convinced, however. Caleb D'Anvers – a pseudonym for Nicholas D'Anvers, editor of the satirical journal The Craftsman – mocked Merlin’s Cave as an eccentric curiosity. Opposition writers, meanwhile, turned Merlin into a vehicle for attacks on both Caroline and her ally Sir Robert Walpole. Yet the very nature of these responses suggests that Caroline’s critics understood the political message she was trying to convey. Their objections stemmed not from confusion, but disagreement.

In the deeply divided political culture of the 1730s, Whig celebrations of Britain’s legendary past could easily become targets for Tory and Jacobite satire. The negative responses to the cave demonstrate that Caroline’s political opponents recognised her intentions well enough to parody them.

Merlin’s Cave therefore offers a revealing glimpse into the political uses of myth in 18th-century Britain. In turning to Arthurian legend to promote the image of a stable, legitimate and distinctly British monarchy, Caroline understood a lesson that monarchies continue to grapple with today: legitimacy depends not on inheritance, but on the stories people tell about who belongs to the nation and who should shape its future.

Amy Louise Blaney, Associate Lecturer (School of Humanities) and Knowledge Exchange Coordinator, University of Wolverhampton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.