The high-stakes nature of Year 12 exams can bring out sudden anxiety in the best of students.

You might have felt this before or during an assessment. Sometimes it feels like a rising panic in your chest. Other times it’s like your mind has gone blank and you can’t remember anything. These feelings can make it difficult to focus.

The key to good exam performance is learning to manage your anxiety.

We are clinical psychologists who research academic stress. Here’s what can help.

Academic stress is common

Research shows one in six students experience extreme levels of stress during the final years of schooling. This involves unrelenting stress that disturbs sleep and wellbeing. While moderate stress is okay, too much stress can negatively impact academic performance.

In its simplest form, exam anxiety is a stress response like any other. It’s the activation of the body’s flight-or-fight response, which is triggered by the sympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system takes care of things like your blood pressure, heart rate and digestion – the things you don’t think about.

The flight-or-fight response occurs when our brain perceives we are in danger, whether it is physical danger, such as fear of being bitten by an angry dog, or psychological, such as stuffing up a speech.

What anxiety in an exam can feel like

The flight-or-fight response might lead to physical symptoms such as:

• an increased heart rate

• an increased rate of breathing

• sweating

• a feeling of unease in the stomach

• tightness in the chest.

While these symptoms might seem handy if you need to flee or fight, it’s hard to see how they are helpful in an exam situation. Who needs dizziness and sweaty palms when trying to solve a quadratic formula?

Your brain can catastrophise the situation

As you head into the exam you might also face thoughts such as:

I’m going to fail. I won’t be able to remember anything. My mind will go blank.

But this sort of thinking increases the perceived danger of the situation.

Research shows thinking less catastrophically, and more realistically, about a situation can help reduce anxiety.

1. Challenge negative thoughts

To challenge these negative thoughts before or during an exam, it helps to ask yourself questions such as:

• Is it realistic that I will completely fail the exam?

• Is it realistic that I won’t remember anything?

• Do I actually need to get a perfect score to get through this?

• What would a friend say to reassure me right now?

2. Focus on your breathing

Another practical way to help reduce anxiety is by slowing down your breathing rate.

In an exam scenario, a full meditation session might be out of the question. But there are still exercises you can do.

For example, while you wait for the exam to begin, or during reading time, try to take a long breath in while counting to four in your mind. Then breathe out over a count of four. Repeat this while slowing down your counting. After a few rounds you will hopefully notice your anxiety start to lessen.

3. Make an exam plan

Look through the exam during reading time and find the questions you feel most comfortable with. Once reading time is over, aim to tackle these questions first. This can help build your confidence during an exam.

If you have long answer or essay questions, it can help to read over all the questions before writing so that while you are answering the “easier” question, your brain will be working in the background, bringing forward information you can use when you answer the harder questions.

This works because information is stored in our brain using networks, so reading questions repeatedly can activate the links between concepts in those networks. This means information might be more readily available when you come back to the harder question.

Stress isn’t always a bad thing

If you’re still feeling stressed, the good news is that mild to moderate levels of stress have actually been shown to improve academic performance. This is because the flight-or-fight response also increases mental alertness and motivation.

After the exam is over, you might feel relieved or devastated, or something in between. It is normal to ruminate over the questions and how you responded to them.

One way to bring yourself back down to a calmer state is to do some exercise. Take a walk or go for a run. This burns up the stress hormone, cortisol, and can help you recover more quickly.

If this article has raised issues for you or your child, you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800.

Viviana Wuthrich, Professor of Clinical Psychology, Macquarie University and Jessica Belcher, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Psychological Sciences, Macquarie University

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

Animation has long had the unique ability to transport us to other worlds. But stop motion takes this further, with a level of skill and intentionality that provides a perfect counter to the droning hum of AI slop infecting our feeds.

Laika Studios’ latest stop-motion offering is Wildwood, a project that took an extraordinary 16 years to complete. That’s a long time, even by stop-motion standards (most of the studio’s stop-motion films took between three and six years to develop).

Yet the hard work has paid off. Wildwood is a triumphant film full of heart and moments of connection – an engaging story for lovers of both puppetry and fantasy.

Above all, it staunchly reaffirms the importance of human creativity in storytelling.

Enchanted forests and familial love

From the Forbidden Forest of Harry Potter, to Narnia, to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Wildwood adds to a long tradition of fantastical stories set in the enchanted forest.

Here, the forest becomes a place of learning and coming-of-age. And part of the film’s charm lies in its expansive world-building. Wildwood is a society, with its own politics, geography, customs, and distinct look and feel.

From the mossy towering trees and dense ferns of the Impassable Wilderness, to the red-roofed turrets and golden statues of the Pittock Mansion, the films environment mixes fantasy landscapes with a kind of Gilded Age-inspired opulence.

The story follows Prue, a 13-year-old from Portland, Oregon, who must save her baby brother Mac after he is swept away by a murder of crows and taken to the Impassable Wilderness.

In the forest, Prue finds and uneasy world on the brink of conflict, populated by talking animals, bandits, mystics and soldiers.

She soon learns her brother was taken by the Dowager Governess, a ruthless and power-hungry ruler who took Mac to complete a dark ritual needed to keep her land. What begins as a rescue becomes something more complex, and Prue discovers an inner strength she never knew she possessed.

The film offers a critical perspective humanity’s relationship with, and stewardship of, the natural world. It also examines trauma, familial devotion, and the ways in which powerful figures are driven by grief and ambition.

Rated PG-13, Wildwood is family-friendly, but certainly isn’t aimed exclusively at children. The plot delves into darker themes, with moments of genuine peril and intensity giving the film a more mature edge than its beginning suggests.

Between its epic battle scenes and complex cinematic shots, you will likely forget you’re watching a stop-motion film.

Materials and making

Backed by Nike co-founder Phil Knight, Laika’s previous offerings include Coraline (2009), ParaNorman (2012) and Kubo and the Two Strings (2016). The company excels at marrying stop-motion techniques with CGI and various digital effects.

It is particularly well-known for developing new stop-motion methods that use 3D printing instead of claymation – often printing thousands of distinct facial expressions and armatures to achieve seamless character performances.

In Wildwood, these capabilities and creative thinking shine. Each moment of the film encodes thousands of small decisions, made by a team of more than 1,000 creatives.

From concept artists, to prop makers, production designers, costume designers and animators, a broad range of disciplines come together to produce the expansive fictional world.

As many as 24 different 3D-printed faces are used, per second, to bring the characters to life. One scene in the third act brings some 3,000 individual puppets onto a battlefield – an almost unfathomable spectacle.

This is slow, expensive and laborious work – work that few other studios would fund. That’s what makes it special. In the words of director Travis Knight:

At the time when entire worlds can be built with the click of a mouse, and videos generated from a prompt, choosing to make a stop-motion film feels like a quiet act of rebellion.

Wildwood is a wondrous film. There is tenderness in its small gestures, awe-inspiring set work, and something disarmingly moving in the knowledge that every frame represents a deliberate and painstaking choice.

Wildwood is in cinemas now.

Ari Chand, Senior Lecturer in Illustration and Animation, Adelaide University ; University of Newcastle

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

Between transit, immigration detention and life in camps, most refugees and asylum seekers are denied reliable ongoing access to education.

In response, some refugees set up schools for themselves. For instance, in 2014, Afghan Hazara refugees established a school in the West Java town of Cisarua – which has since expanded into a network. It’s one example from a long tradition.

In a new podcast called Emergency Exit, my colleagues and I explore the history of refugee-led universities set up in Australia’s internment camps during the second world war.

The Dunera boys

In the lead-up to WWII, more than 70,000 German nationals had fled to Britain to escape Nazi persecution.

With the outbreak of war in September 1939, they would be classified “enemy aliens”, and many were interned in British camps.

Australia followed suit; anyone here with German or Austrian nationality became an “enemy alien”. Many were also interned in camps.

As British camps became overcrowded, these men had to be transported elsewhere. So on July 10 1940, some 2,500 detainees embarked from Liverpool on the HMT Dunera, bound for Australia.

Among them were accomplished scholars, professors, musicians, linguists, artists and tradespeople. Some were teenagers whose education had been interrupted by the war.

During the Dunera’s 57-day journey, the refugees drafted their own constitution and established a university onboard the ship.

They continued to run these universities in internment camps in Tatura, Victoria, and Hay, New South Wales, teaching an eclectic program that included Malay, Greek, mathematics, bookkeeping, jazz and fashion drawing.

Leonhard Adam and the Collegium Taturense

At Tatura, the camp university was named the Collegium Taturense. Leonhard Adam was appointed pro-rector.

Adam was a distinguished lawyer and judge from Berlin. But because of his Jewish ancestry, he was disbarred from legal practice in 1933 under Nazi racial laws.

He fled to England, but was classified an “enemy alien” when the war broke out. Adam was interned on the Isle of Man before being transported to Australia on the Dunera.

In the Collegium Taturense, Adam taught jurisprudence, commercial law, Chinese and ethnology. He also painted scenes of life in internment.

By the time Adam arrived at Tatura, he already had some knowledge of First Nations laws and practices, which he’d acquired conducting fieldwork among prisoners of war during WWI.

In 1917, in Germany, he met Ngarrindjeri man Roland Carter and Ngadjonji man Douglas Grant, both First Nations members of the Australian Imperial Force.

Adam would later publish an article in a German law journal documenting their laws and customs, followed by his book Primitive Art (1940). The term “primitive law” was used at the time to describe Adam’s expertise within ethnology and anthropology.

After Adam’s release from internment in Australia in 1942, he was appointed as a researcher at the University of Melbourne. He gathered what would become a major collection of First Nations art and artefacts.

Margaret Pierce, advocate for interned refugees

An important goal of the Collegium Taturense was to support the education of teenage boys whose schooling had stalled.

Many of them had been rescued to Britain as part of the Kindertransport scheme. But once war was declared, those aged 16 and over were caught up in the “enemy alien” category. Some were interned and transported.

One of these boys was Kurt Henle, a teenager who aspired to study medicine.

At the Collegium Taturense, camp internees (supported by refugee advocates) ensured Henle followed the Victorian curriculum so he could formally seek admission to university.

His mother Clara Henle, who had fled to New York, corresponded with Margaret Pierce, an Australian Quaker who supported interned refugees. Clara thanked Pierce for showing “a most motherly feeling toward my son”, and urged her to make sure Kurt continued his studies.

This correspondence collection survives in the State Library of Victoria, and documents the bureaucratic cruelties that sabotaged Kurt’s academic ambitions.

Pierce campaigned for Kurt’s admission to study medicine at the University of Melbourne. The university did offer Kurt a place – as part of a war effort to increase the number of doctors – but Kurt needed to be released from internment to accept it.

Pierce appealed to the Australian government, only to be told that since Kurt had now turned 18, the only justification for his release would be to serve in the Australian military.

After the war, Kurt returned to England to study, later moving to the United States to become a professor of gastroenterology.

Access to education for refugees today

Bureaucratic categories continued to obstruct refugees seeking access to education for many decades.

In 1999, Australia introduced the temporary protection visa, which treated “unauthorised maritime arrivals” as full-fee-paying students – placing university education out of reach.

Decades of activism saw this regime end in 2023, after which Commonwealth-funded access to higher education became accessible to some 31,000 refugees.

More recently, the government began trialling a new university-based resettlement pathway. In it, the government matches prospective refugees with a participating university, and their student orientation includes their resettlement in Australia.

Refugee-led education continues in detention centres in Australia and overseas, such as at the Villawood detention centre in NSW, where visitors are taught about Australian refugee policies by detainees.

Katherine Biber, Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Technology Sydney

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

Governments and organizations around the world began scrambling on Oct. 21, 2026, to fix a vulnerability in software that runs their websites, a bug that could give hackers access to data and control of websites. The flaw in PHP, the programming language that powers much of today’s web, prompted urgent warnings from the U.S. National Security Agency, cybersecurity agencies and software vendors.

A researcher at Calif, a security research firm, found the flaw in August 2026 using an advanced artificial intelligence model from OpenAI. The firm alerted the nonprofit that manages PHP. However, word of the flaw leaked before the PHP organization released patches for its software, and according to Amazon Web Services officials, hackers began “broadly” attempting to exploit it.

The vulnerability has implications far beyond a single company or platform, because PHP is a key piece of software that helps run millions of websites. So, what is PHP, what role did AI play in uncovering the vulnerability, and should the average user worry?

PHP: The foundation of the web

PHP is a programming language that powers most websites. For a modern website to provide dynamic content, visual elements and searchable features, a program must run on the web server and take user input, whether that is entering a web address or clicking links and buttons. Estimates suggest that around 70% of websites run on PHP.

PHP operates on a web server in two main parts: the core PHP system – the engine and runtime libraries – and the individual PHP scripts, which are the custom programs that actually implement a website. When you interact with a website, PHP scripts run, take user input and produce the output your web browser displays.

The vulnerability

The current security issue sits directly in the core PHP system and the libraries it uses. When a vulnerability exists at this deep level, it can allow an adversary to exploit the system. In this case, they can run unauthorized commands on the computer hosting the website, which allows attackers to access data and gain full control of the website.

This vulnerability is not a mistake in an individual website’s code. The issue lies in the core PHP system, making every unpatched system running PHP vulnerable. Since websites are accessible to anyone on the internet, adversaries can easily find PHP-based websites using automated tools. From there, they can run an exploit program that takes advantage of the vulnerability.

This exploit code is called PHP2Shell. This name comes from the fact that the exploit gives the attacker “shell access,” a cybersecurity term for direct command-line control of the computer running the website. Shell access bypasses the website interface, giving adversaries a window to enter commands and access all the website’s data.

AI: A double-edged sword

What makes this vulnerability particularly interesting is how it was discovered. This exploit came to light through a process known as coordinated disclosure, in which cybersecurity researchers report the flaw to PHP developers before publicizing it.

This discovery shows the power of AI in cybersecurity. For decades, finding subtle software flaws required large teams of specialists manually reviewing code. Today’s AI systems can examine vast codebases and identify unusual patterns in hours or days. These models can analyze millions of lines of code in seconds, spotting subtle memory management bugs that human auditors might miss over decades of software development. The PHP vulnerability has existed in the core PHP code for over a decade, and AI helped researchers find it.

However, this also shows that attackers can use these same tools to locate and exploit vulnerabilities. The same reasoning capabilities that help security researchers find flaws first can also let attackers rapidly scan the web for vulnerable targets and automate the creation of tools to exploit the vulnerabilities.

This illustrates why it is so critical for security teams to use AI to find vulnerabilities and report them safely and actively. AI can also help release patches that mitigate these vulnerabilities.

Should you worry?

Many government agencies, universities, hospitals and businesses rely on PHP-based systems. While individual internet users are unlikely to be directly affected, organizations that delay patching could expose sensitive data, risk having their operations disrupted or give attackers a foothold into larger networks.

PHP runs entirely on remote web servers. If you are an everyday internet user visiting websites, you do not need to download a patch or fix your personal computer.

However, if you manage a website, blog or server, even a small site built on popular content management systems such as WordPress, you should check your server administration panel or web host immediately to ensure your PHP software is updated to the latest patched version. If a third party hosts your website, check with them to see whether they have patched for these vulnerabilities.

The PHP2Shell discovery illustrates a new reality for cybersecurity. In our interconnected world, keeping web infrastructure secure is a continuous race. As AI tools become standard for both cyber defenders and online adversaries, maintaining fast patching habits remains our most essential defense.

Doug Jacobson, University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Iowa State University

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

Cast your mind back to your secondary school science classroom: the fiery glow of Bunsen burners, scratched safety goggles that never quite fit, and a giant periodic table pinned to the wall.

When you learned about the breakthroughs that shaped our world and the people who made them, whose names were attached? From Newton’s laws to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the ones you remember are almost certainly male.

That experience was not just down to individual teachers. It was and still is written into official GCSE and A-level course specifications. Because these early stages form the foundation of our science education, their omissions stick with us for life.

Half of the British population can’t name one woman scientist. Leaving women out of national specifications sends an implicit message about who science is really for.

In our new study, led by researchers at the University of Cambridge alongside IncludeHer, a collaborative project working to improve the representation of women in school science education, we analysed over 40 science specifications: the knowledge required to pass exams. We examined the specifications for six main exam boards for Key Stage 4 (GCSEs) and Key Stage 5 (A-levels), and for Scotland’s National 5s and Highers.

Our work builds on an earlier Australian study led by astrophysicist Dr Kat Ross, which uncovered a striking lack of female scientists in high school curricula. We set out to investigate whether UK specifications have similar omissions.

Across 224 unique scientists referenced in UK specifications, discoveries are taught almost exclusively through concepts named after men, with only three mentioning women in total.

Inge Lehmann, who discovered that the Earth has a solid inner core surrounded by a liquid outer core, is cited in A-level Geology via the “Lehmann discontinuity”.

Marie Tharp, who mapped the ocean floor and identified the Mid-Atlantic Ridge rift valley, is also mentioned in A-level geology. She provided vital evidence for continental drift, despite being prohibited from boarding research vessels for years and having her ideas dismissed as “girl talk”.

Finally, Rosalind Franklin is included in two biology specifications for her X-ray crystallography work revealing the double-helix structure of DNA. Her essential data was used without attribution during her lifetime.

At GCSE level, when science is compulsory for all students, Franklin is the only woman mentioned. At A-level, Lehmann and Tharp appear solely in geology, a subject taken by less than 2% of science students.

For centuries, social, economic, and institutional barriers limited women’s formal participation in science. Despite this, women made numerous key breakthroughs, and these are already taught to UK 14–18-year-olds. But the names of the women behind them did not make it onto the page.

Why representation matters

Diversity within scientific fields drives creativity and innovation, benefiting all of society. Yet women remain underrepresented. They make up only around one third of the global scientific community, with similar figures seen within the UK workforce.

This disparity starts early on in schools: although science uptake is balanced at Key Stage 4, just two years later at Key Stage 5, physics, mathematics and further mathematics only see participation from girls at 24.1%, 37.3% and 26.9% respectively in 2025. This imbalance continues into university, where women make up roughly 25% of physics undergraduate students in the UK.

Introducing relatable female role models into the classroom directly boosts girls’ confidence and fosters positive attitudes towards scientific careers. But because specifications dictate mandatory exam content, teachers currently have to go out of their way to add female figures on top of busy workloads. By making small, targeted changes directly to national specifications, we can make inclusion standard practice across all schools.

We propose inserting one female scientist per subject into topics that are already compulsory, but where the woman’s name is missing.

This means introducing Marie Skłodowska-Curie, who coined the term radioactivity and discovered polonium and radium, when teaching atomic structure and radioactivity, and Lise Meitner, who provided the first theoretical explanation of nuclear fission, when discussing this concept. GCSE astronomy should include Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered pulsars: rotating neutron stars used as cosmic clocks.

Biology teaching can include Dorothy Hodgkin on protein structure, the only British female Nobel laureate in science, and Tu Youyou, a Nobel laureate whose work led to the development of an antimalarial drug.

In chemistry, schools can teach about Stephanie Kwolek, the inventor of Kevlar, when covering polymers. For physics, they can include Annie Jump Cannon when describing the classification of stars. And in environmental science, classes can discuss the pivotal work of Susan Solomon for understanding Antarctic ozone depletion.

By making these simple additions to science specifications, we can change the message we send to the next generation. Whoever they are, every student sitting in a classroom deserves to know that the story of science belongs to them too.

Stephanie Buttigieg, PhD Candidate in Astronomy, University of Cambridge; Gregory Cooke, Postdoctoral Associate in Astrophysics and Astrobiology, University of Cambridge, and Skyla White, Research Fellow at Center for Space and Habitability, University of Bern

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

A sequence on the Bayeux tapestry shows King Harold alongside a crowd gazing at the sky, beneath the embroidered caption Isti mirant stella (“those people marvel at the star”). Above Harold sits Halley’s comet, with ghost-like invasion boats in the border below – a Norman framing of Harold as a doomed usurper whose betrayal invited destruction.

A comet, or the regum terror (terror of kings) as the contemporary Norman writer William of Poitiers put it, was widely taken as a portent of change in human affairs.

The accurate record of the appearance of the comet is not the point of the depiction in the Bayeux tapestry. As most western European sources concur, the comet appeared in the evening sky from April 24, 1066. It remained visible for one or two weeks – four months or so after Harold’s coronation.

Modern computation indicates that the comet came within about 15 million kilometres from Earth, supporting a contemporary Chinese report that it was as bright as Venus, with a tail extending 15 degrees across the sky. The sudden appearance of such a bright comet must have made a deep impression on those who witnessed it.

How the comet was recorded and described by medieval writers tells us a great deal about how medieval astronomy operated, its links with astrology and the wider context of global observation and book-learning in which it should be placed.

Interpreting the comet

William of Poitiers interpreted the comet as a portent of Harold’s ill-fated kingship. It is mentioned only in a section of his narrative set after the battle and the attempts to retrieve the fallen king’s body. He also noted the good fortune the comet indicated for Harold’s opponent.

Contemporary historian William of Jumièges saw the comet appear in the north-west with a three-forked tail. It stayed for 15 days. He believed it signified that changes were to come in rulership.

The Anglo Saxon Chronicles D and C (sets of annals in Old English), however, recorded the appearance of the comet but made no connection with regime change. The “haired-star”, they wrote, was “a sign such as men never saw before”.

Chroniclers of the next generation elaborated further on the comet as a portent. The English monk Orderic Vitalis (1075-c.1142) noted that it “learned astrologers who investigate the secrets of natural science” had declared it an omen of the transfer of a kingdom.

The English historian William of Malmesbury (c.1095-1143), meanwhile, stated that comets foretold “either a pestilence in the kingdom or a change in the kingship”. With regard to 1066, William puts the portent into the words of Aethelmaer, a monk: “It is a long time since I saw you; but as I see you now you are much more terrible, for I see you brandishing the downfall of my mother-country.” It is plausible that Aethelmaer had seen a comet before, perhaps the long-tailed, but faint, comet of 1018.

The medieval cosmos

Astronomers of medieval Christendom kept records of date, time, appearance and the comet’s effect. These records were conditioned by inherited learning and the conception of the ancient and medieval universe.

The medieval universe was considered divided into two realms. First, the superlunary – the realm of the planets and fixed stars, composed of the now debunked element ether. It was considered pristine and not subject to decay, moved only with diurnal motion (the apparent east-to-west movement of the planets and stars). Second, the sub-lunary, with spheres of the four elements, fire, air, water and earth, the latter still and at the centre and all subject to decay.

Everything below was affected by what was above in this universe, so human affairs were affected by the influence of the planets. This was a universe understood in astrological and alchemical terms.

Eleventh century medieval writers had an accumulation of texts on which to draw from ancient Rome and the early church. Works by theologian Isidore of Seville and the medieval scholar Bede, informed William of Malmesbury’s statement that comets presage pestilence or a change in royal power. Behind Isidore lies ancient discussion of comets, Greek and Roman, both of which were the inheritance of the European Middle Ages.

Differences in fundamental understandings of comets emerge in this inheritance. For the ancient Greek Aristotle, comets were a meteorological, sub-lunary phenomenon, on the grounds that the perfect spheres above the moon could have no place for intermittent comets. This was a position challenged by the Roman stoic philosopher Seneca and medieval Islamicate thinkers who placed comets as complex celestial phenomena occurring in the heavenly spheres above the Moon.

Different interpretation of comets, revealing of different theories on how the universe worked, were then bequeathed to the world of medieval Christendom.

The 12th century saw a very significant increases in intellectual resources for European scholars, with translations into Latin of Aristotle’s works on natural philosophy and many scholars writing in the medieval Islamic world as well. These included astrology as the companion to astronomy. The writings of the Persian astrologer Abu Ma’shar (787-886) on astrology and horoscopes was especially popular.

This richer inheritance is seen neatly in the English philosopher Robert Grosseteste’s (c.1170-1253) treatise On Comets, written after “the occasion of the great comet”, probably the reappearance of Halley’s comet in 1222.

The treatise attempts to reconcile how an intermittent phenomenon like a comet is possible in the super-lunary realm where things are constant and unchanging. Grosseteste outlines and rejects three ancient theories of comets largely on the grounds of logical inconsistencies. His preferred version blends alchemical and astrological language. Comets are a combination of earthly matter drawn upwards, he argued, and sublimated to celestial power directed by particular planets or stars. They cause dread among the people over whose regions they appear.

The doom embroidered into the Bayeux tapestry was far more than medieval superstition. In a cosmos where the heavens directly affected the life of the human world below, Halley’s comet, a portent of change, was easily interpreted as a fatal sign for Harold Godwinson.

Giles Gasper, Professor in High Medieval History, Durham University and Brian Tanner, Emeritus Professor of Physics at Durham University, Durham University

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

More than one quarter of young adults in Britain now say their gym memberships matter more to them than holidays or eating out.

Sport England data shows that Gen Z has begun to turn away from running, swimming and fitness classes towards gym and strength training. For them, weight training is seen as the best form of exercise because it can help build strength, improve appearance and boost overall health.

People have argued about the best forms of exercise for over two centuries. While today’s fitness trends tend to be more about improving the body and overall fitness, health has rarely been the sole reason why certain exercise trends gained popularity through the eras.

Napoleon and gymnastics

In 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Prussia and, inadvertently, created the modern fitness industry.

As Napoleon’s troops stormed their way eastward, one Prussian man, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, began to seethe with anger. For Jahn, Prussian men had lost because they were physically weaker than the French.

The nation’s solution, according to Jahn, lay not in muskets – but muscles. So in 1811 Jahn opened a Turnplatz – an open-air gymnasium. Young men ran, jumped, climbed ropes, wrestled and vaulted. They also swung on two pieces of equipment that Jahn is believed to have invented: the parallel bars and the horizontal bar. Soon the trend spread to other nations, with England’s first outdoor gymnastics school opening in 1825.

The underlying logic behind Jahn’s Turnplatz system – that strong nations demanded physically strong troops – became a rallying cry for a wave of gymnastic and calisthenic systems for men and women across the century.

The birth of bodybuilding

A popular form of entertainment in the Victorian era were strongmen shows, where muscular men would perform theatrical acts of strength. One of the most popular performers of the time was Charles “Samson” Sampson, whose act involved snapping chains with his chest.

But in 1889, a new kind of strongman arrived on the scene. During one of Sampson’s performances, a moustachioed strongman named Eugen Sandow stripped down to his pants in a London theatre, responding to a challenge from Sampson. But what made Sandow different from Sampson and other strongmen of the era was his physique. He was lean and sculpted.

From 1889 until his death in 1925, Sandow became synonymous with the ideal body. He was deemed the “best specimen of manhood” by Harvard University physical educationalist Dudley Sargent. Sandow hosted the first major bodybuilding contest in London in 1901 and ran a health enterprise which spread across the British Empire, the Americas and Australasia. Thousands followed his mail-order courses, read his magazine and drank his cocoa.

Those lifting dumbbells and barbells to build their bodies like Sandow classed themselves as “physical culturists” in the same way that modern trainees may define themselves by Pilates, Hyrox or weight training.

Following Sandow and others, people trained for health but they also trained to become better workers, better spouses, to be more attractive or dynamic.

Although the state still mattered – Sandow even trained British troops for the second South African war – the emphasis slowly shifted to building the body for its own sake.

The post-war aerobics boom

The approach to exercise in the post-war era shifted due to an emerging new health concern: people were sitting down too much. This fear was fuelled by a 1953 work published by epidemiologist Jerry Morris which found that London bus drivers experienced higher instances of heart disease than conductors, who spent their day climbing stairs. The cause? Inactivity.

In the US, physicians began rallying against rising heart disease. Their radical solution was to advise people to run slowly for set periods of time – an activity we today call jogging. Pioneered in New Zealand and brought to the US in the 1960s, jogging soon kickstarted an “aerobics” boom.

New gym chains filled up with previously untrained enthusiasts running and doing aerobics classes. Aerobics classes were particularly popular with women. And in 1969, fitness instructor Jacki Sorenson originated the aerobics dance movement after she began setting routines to pop music, stitching together steps from jazz, folk, cha-cha and square dancing.

The popularity of aerobics only continued to grow throughout the 80s, thanks to actor Jane Fonda’s best-selling 1982 workout video which brought aerobics into the living room.

The muscle builders

In 1977 the world was introduced to Austrian bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger in the hit documentary Pumping Iron. Brash but charming, muscular but beautiful, Schwarzenegger and the entrepreneur pushing him, Joe Weider, popularised bodybuilding as we now understand it.

Pumping Iron hit cinemas at a time when aerobics had driven more people into gyms and new gym equipment made lifting weights far more accessible.

Schwarzenegger’s physique soon became a template for heroic figures in pop culture. Action stars, children’s toys and athletes all succumbed to the bodybuilding effect. Leading 80s megastar Sylvester Stallone even transformed his body with Schwarzenegger’s training partner Franco Columbu in preparation for Rambo and the Rocky movies.

Women were lifting, too. Lisa Lyon won the first women’s world bodybuilding championship in 1979. Two decades later women’s weightlifting reached the Olympics.

By the 2000s, lifting weights was no longer a fringe activity. Budget and 24-hour gyms were commonplace while sports such as CrossFit and powerlifting swelled with men and women. In recent years the hashtag #strongnotskinny has spread across Instagram and TikTok.

Exercise scientist Andrew Scott says that influencers have been a big part of this shift. None of this is new. Sandow sold his body on postcards and cocoa tins, Fonda sold hers on VHS and Schwarzenegger sold his at the cinema.

Once again, the world around us is changing how people move their bodies. Two hundred years ago, fitness served the country. Now it serves the algorithm.

Claire Warden, Professor of Performance and Physical Culture, Loughborough University and Conor Heffernan, Lecturer in the Sociology of Sport, Ulster University

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When I first saw Katsushika Hokusai’s Clear Day with a Southern Breeze (also known as Red Fuji, 1830-1833), I was struck by its lustrous red resonating against the receding blue of the sky. Clouds align gently in an almost humorous formation. Near the peak of the mountain, are creases of snow. At its foot we are drawn to a multitude of tiny trees amassed in chorus. Easy to overlook, they change the picture. The great mountain becomes itself in relation to everything that surrounds it.

Dulwich Picture Gallery is showing all of Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji, including ten added after the series became popular. Hokusai made them in his seventies in the early 1830s as cheap prints for ordinary people in Edo (today’s Tokyo). It is the first, and perhaps only, time the complete series will be shown together in the UK.

One image is instantly recognisable: The Great Wave (actually titled Under the Wave off Kanagawa). Seen alongside the others, it becomes one view among many – and a lesson in how quickly we settle on a single view of anything, including each other.

Three versions of Mount Fuji hang together in the first room. In Red Fuji the mountain is almost pure form. A light blue variant, its ridge edged in heavy indigo, opens a way into the mountain. A third, with lightning like cracks in a pot, feels dark and unsettled.

On the opposite wall hangs The Great Wave. Its foam reaches out like grasping, knuckled fingers, and flecks scatter across the dark water like stars in the night. Everything should be in motion, yet the print holds a stillness. Beneath the wave is Fuji again: a tiny triangle here where Red Fuji’s was expansive. It is the same mountain, but now framed by the sea.

Elsewhere, people hurry over bridges, work in fields and travel along roads. Hills seem to wear patterned bandanas of farmland, while Prussian blue skies fade at a soft, feathered edge. Shapes mingle playfully: three haystacks echo the three small peaks of Fuji’s summit. Hokusai places us in between, looking down on people and up at the sky, but never from a position that reveals everything.

In the third room, one print stopped me. In Mishima Pass in Kai Province, travellers link arms around an enormous tree. I saw an affectionate embrace, then learned they may be measuring its girth. How quickly I had decided what these strangers felt.

As an art psychotherapist, I work with exactly this. We imagine what others might be thinking and feeling, drawing on our own experience – therapists call this mentalising, and doing it well means staying with curiosity rather than assuming we know. I have never been to Japan and cannot experience Fuji as Hokusai’s first viewers did. What reaches me is what colour, form and shape do, across that distance.

Hokusai’s giant tree also recalls an experiment on awe in which people who had gazed up at towering eucalyptus trees for a minute picked up more of a researcher’s “accidentally” dropped pens than those who had looked at a building. A print may not make us kinder, but when we do feel part of a bigger picture, we may just become a bit less absorbed in ourselves, and perhaps more open to others.

The curation is less subtle than the prints. Its dusky blue walls echo Hokusai’s colours, but I was left cold. I felt fixed as a viewer, each picture held apart when I wanted to see how they connect – although the soft lighting creates an atmosphere, a quietness that simply lets you be with them.

At the end of the series, pilgrims climb into Fuji itself. Each looks much like the next, like frames of a stop-motion film. Near the summit they crowd into a shelter in the rock, a small window into something none could enter alone. We no longer look towards a distant mountain; we are drawn into it, among people making their own way upwards.

I left thinking about The Great Wave very differently. I could see the little mountain beneath it, but also the trees, travellers and pilgrims. The Fuji I began with had amassed a sense of journey, unfolding across the series.

Hokusai: Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji from the Iuchi Collection is on at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London until January 17, 2027

Dominik Havsteen-Franklin, Professor of Arts Psychotherapies & Creative Health, Brunel University of London

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Moths seem to be made for Halloween. They’re largely nocturnal, often outlandish in appearance and bear creepy names such as Lunar Thorn, Cloaked Carpet, Bordered Gothic and (best of all) Puss Moth.

The webs of the ermine moth caterpillar cover trees like ghostly shrouds, while the hairy caterpillars of the oak processionary moth release rash-inducing toxins.

Spookiest of all is the Death’s-head Hawk-moth, which bears a skull-like mark on its thorax and can squeak like a mouse. This is the moth that appears, albeit in altered form, on the poster for the film The Silence of the Lambs (1991).

Two historical prints held at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam speak to the long-held suspicion of moths within European society. In one work by the printmaker C. Galle, a group sets out with lamps to destroy moths before they can eat the crops (or produce caterpillars that do). In another, by Jan Luyken, women inspect the holes that moths have made in fabric. The Old English origins of the word “moth” denote a primarily destructive, parasitical creature.

Meeting with moths

Unlike butterflies (who doesn’t like butterflies?) humans have always found moths hard to love. I certainly didn’t give moths much consideration until this year, when I started researching representations of moths and spending time with the moths themselves. I’ve since become something of a moth evangelist.

From March of this year my son and I set up a Skinner moth trap in our small suburban garden in Leicester, rising early every morning to identify the moths that visited during the night. My expectations were low, especially in the first few weeks, when we caught little. But then May and June came, and every morning brought new gifts. My son took charge of the counting and by September we had identified a hundred different species.

If you think moths are all small, brown creatures, think again. Even in the UK, and despite their rapidly decreasing numbers, moths are astonishingly diverse and outstandingly beautiful, ranging widely in size, colour and temperament. Some of them – most famously, the luminously pink and green Elephant Hawk-moth – are disarmingly cute and docile and will happily sit on your hand.

The art of moths

The magic of moths has attracted artists for centuries. A good place to start is the Flemish artist Joris Hoefnagel (1542-1601), whose delicate watercolour sketches of moths remain astonishingly lifelike. I especially like his depiction of the furry Hummingbird Hawk-moth: one of a few day-flying moths and one of a few species benefiting from recent rises in temperature.

Even more astonishing is the work of the pioneering German naturalist and artist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), who published three books detailing the metamorphosis of butterflies and moths (or what she called “summer-birds” and “moth-birds”). Merian’s elegantly composed images were the first to situate moths within their wider environment, identifying which species preferred which plants.

Outside of the world of natural history, moths have tended to be given a marginal role. However, some artists have been as drawn to moths as moths are drawn to light. In 1959, for example, the Scottish artist John Maxwell (1905-1962) painted a series of colourful, abstracted moth paintings, including Night Flowers and Garden at Night (Moth).

Moths are especially well served by contemporary artists. The Peruvian contemporary artist Lorena Solís Bravo has considered the moth through the lens of queer ecology. Their 2024 film myth, moth, mother celebrates the mystery and transformative power of moths. The Devon-based printmaker Sarah Gillespie, meanwhile, has created a series of mesmerising mezzotint prints of moths. “I wasn’t looking for moths when I started drawing them around ten years ago,” Gillespie has explained “they came and found me. Their numbers may be in appalling decline but for me their presence has become ever more insistent”.

More recently, the artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg unveiled The Length of a Moment, three public sculptures at Oxford North, which visualise the flight of a moth interacting with the scent of a flower. Situated in an area rich with historic meadows, this artwork draws attention to diminishing moth populations and the need for better environmental management.

My favourite moth in art, however, comes courtesy of the 18th-century Indian artist Shaikh Zain al–Din. The moth that appears in his 1778 watercolour is the famous Death’s-head Hawk-moth. Here, however, it lacks the sinister and spectral nature of the moth from The Silence of the Lambs. Instead Shaikh Zain al–Din gives us a moth just going about its everyday (or every night?) business.

This isn’t the moth as a symbol of death, or as a muncher of clothes or crops (of the circa 2,500 species of moth found in the UK, only two actually eat clothes). This is a moth doing what moths do well: feeding from and pollinating plants, providing food for birds and looking rather beautiful while doing so. This image is a timely reminder that moths are much less weird and way more wonderful than most people think.

Samuel Shaw, Senior Lecturer in History of Art, The Open University

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

In September 2018, China Daily ran a story that found its way to my desk. It featured the photograph of a beautifully preserved fossil skull with huge brow-ridges, with a caption speculating – wrongly, as it would turn out – that it belonged to a species of human known as Homo heidelbergensis.

The article told a remarkable story about the discovery of this fossil some 85 years earlier. Japanese forces had been occupying the city of Harbin in north-eastern China in 1933. They ordered a team of local workers to help build a railway bridge across the Songhua River.

The workers uncovered the skull in river deposits, and one of them hid it from the Japanese by lowering it down a disused well. Feeling ashamed of having worked for the enemy, he kept quiet about the find for many years. Finally some 80 years later he told his son and grandson as he lay dying, which led to the almost intact skull being recovered and later donated to Hebei Geo University near Beijing.

That origin story is difficult to verify, and there were rumours that the fossil was actually a fake, but I was able to confirm first hand that it was real when I was invited to join Chinese researchers in studying this astonishing relic at the end of 2018. I jumped at this wonderful opportunity to help put one of the most complete human fossils ever found in its proper place in human evolution.

So many ways to be human

Establishing that place has got a lot trickier in the last 20 years or so. We think that humans (or hominins) split from the ancestors of our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, about 7 million years ago. For the next 5 million years or so, the hominins continued their evolution in Africa, and about 2 million years ago, began to disperse across Asia and Europe.

It used to be thought that human evolution then progressed from more primitive forms through to modern humans (Homo sapiens), either in just one region, most likely east Africa, or across the whole inhabited world, following the early exit from Africa. Now, we know it wasn’t so simple.

Welcome to our series on the great mysteries of archaeology. Viking explorers, Amazonian cities, artefacts from before civilisation. Archaeology may be all about the past, but it’s constantly shifting with every scientific discovery. This series will dig into some of the most fascinating debates in the field today.

There was a profusion of different kinds of humans, sometimes living at the same time and even in the same regions, as nature conducted multiple experiments over millions of years in how to become human. We are the sole survivors of all those experiments.

Even during the last 300,000 years the number of human species has been startling. The ancient Homo heidelbergensis, with their heavy-set physiques and large faces and jaws, was surviving in Europe – along with similar people in Africa – 300,000 years ago. The even more ancient Homo erectus, which had a smaller brain and angular flat-topped skull, was clinging on in parts of Indonesia until at least 100,000 years ago.

Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthal human), with a broad thick-set body and protruding midface around a large nose, was living in western Eurasia from at least 400,000 to 40,000 years ago. We Homo sapiens – first given that name in 1758, meaning “wise human” – existed at least 300,000 years ago, first in Africa and then globally within the last 50,000 years.

In addition, there are three enigmatic small-bodied forms (and also known to be small-brained in the first two cases) from the same recent period: Homo naledi (star human), Homo floresiensis (Flores human) and Homo luzonensis (Luzon human). These lived respectively in South Africa about 300,000 years ago; on the island of Flores, eastern Indonesia, from at least 190,000 to 50,000 years ago; and on the island of Luzon, the Philippines, about 130,000 years ago. All three seem to be long-lasting relics of even more ancient stages of human evolution.

The leading human species

Our study of the Harbin skull added yet another species to the list. When my Chinese colleagues sent me a full-size 3D print of this skull, I couldn’t believe it. I’ve seen hundreds of fossil human skulls, and this was the biggest I had ever set eyes on.

Our analyses showed it was clearly different from fossils of sapiens, neanderthalensis, heidelbergensis and erectus. It showed a distinctive combination of a very large brain size, a massive brow-ridge and a large, low but rather smooth braincase without the other bony ridges found in erectus and heidelbergensis skulls. It also had a big but modern-looking face with delicate forward-facing cheekbones but very wide nose and large eye sockets.

This warranted a new species name, and in 2021 my Chinese colleagues chose Homo longi, named after the Black Dragon River (Heilongjiang). Ever since, the skull has been known as Dragon Man. It appears that this species was in eastern Asia from at least 300,000 until about 45,000 years ago. All these human timespans are show on the chart below (click to make it bigger).

Human timespans

Enter the Denisovans

Not only did the skull turn out to be a new species of ancient human, it also helped to solve several mysteries about other discoveries. One of the keys was its single preserved tooth – a very large second molar, with no sign of a socket behind it for a third molar. In other words, Dragon Man did not have wisdom teeth.

These dental features provided a link with other less complete fossils from China that also had large molars but no wisdom teeth. This and other resemblances indicated that these were also Homo longi, overturning previous possibilities that they might have belonged to an Asian branch of Homo heidelbergensis or an interim species between Homo erectus and modern Asian humans.

It also shed light on the mysterious Denisovans, named after Denisova Cave in the Russian part of the Altai Mountains. Archaeologists had been digging there for decades, finding thousands of animal bones and stone tools, but only scraps of human bones and some large molar teeth.

In 2010 one of those bone scraps – part of a little finger – yielded ancient DNA matching the quality of modern bones. This was despite being about 60,000 years old, showing the astonishing preservation potential of this cold and dry cave in southern Siberia.

Thanks to DNA yielded from other fossils and even sediments from the site, we know the Denisovans occupied the cave intermittently from more than 200,000 until about 45,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens took over.

Placing the Denisovan genome on the human evolutionary tree was difficult, but also in 2010 a high quality Neanderthal genome was reconstructed from European fossils. The Denisovan genome was quite different both to this and to modern humans.

Fast-forward a decade and our analyses suggested that the molars found in Denisova Cave were also from the same species as the Dragon skull. More recently the Harbin skull has been analysed for DNA and fossil proteins, confirming both the connection to Denisova Cave and various other fossils found in China. These include a jawbone from a cave high up on the Tibetan plateau, bones dredged up by fishermen from off the coast of Taiwan, and remains recently described from a cave in the south-west of China.

The skull therefore turns out to be the most complete example of a species that palaeoanthropologists have been circling for some time. It’s now known by both names: Denisovan and the more formal Homo longi.

The great river of life

Having established Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes, it has been possible to compare them with those of people from around the world today. The results have been very surprising.

If people today had evolved from Neanderthals, we might have expected that modern Europeans would show the highest levels of Neanderthal DNA in their genomes, since Europe is where most Neanderthal fossils have been found over the last two centuries. It turns out they do have Neanderthal DNA, at a level of about 2%. But that level of DNA is also found throughout the world today, apart from Africa, where the level is generally much lower.

When similar comparisons were made for Denisovan DNA there were even more surprises. The highest levels were not in modern Siberians or Chinese, but in people from places like the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and Australia – in some cases at levels of around 4%.

How can we explain these unexpected results? Well, we know that the vast majority of our modern human genome – more than 90% – derives from Africa. About 50,000 years ago, having evolved there, the main ancestral wave of early Homo sapiens migrated to western Asia. There they encountered local Neanderthals and did a bit of interbreeding.

That may seem impossible for different species, but today we know from thousands of genome studies that closely related species can often breed hybrids successfully. Examples include jackals and wolves, polar bears and brown bears, and Canada and Greylag geese. It can take millions of years for enough genetic differences to accumulate to make such interbreeding impossible, and that hadn’t happened in the cases of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Those intermixed Homo sapiens in western Asia then spread out to every corner of the world, taking their Neanderthal DNA with them. A lot of it was selected away since it was potentially harmful, causing genetic incompatibilities in regions like the brain and reproductive organs. But other segments were kept as they helped survival, for example protecting against diseases outside of Africa. Over time, the Neanderthal DNA settled down to about the 2% of the modern genome that we see outside of Africa today.

As for the Denisovans, they too interbred with early Homo sapiens groups reaching east Asia. This happened at a lower level in mainland Asia, and seemingly at a much higher level as the Homo sapiens spread across islands of south-east Asia like Borneo and Sulawesi. So far there is no evidence that those other late-surviving relatives such as Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis contributed detectable amounts of their DNA to our genomes today. Either there was no interbreeding, or the species were too different to produce viable hybrids.

We don’t yet have fossil remains from those islands to prove the Denisovans were there before Homo sapiens, only archaeological evidence such as butchered animal bones and stone tools. But assuming this idea is correct, the Denisovans must have been a very successful and adaptable species, surviving freezing winters in northern China but also thriving in tropical grasslands in places like Sumatra. As previously mentioned, they were even living on the Tibetan plateau at altitudes above 3,000 metres.

And by the way, the same Russian cave provides evidence of another dimension to this story. DNA shows that Neanderthals were also there some of the time, and that the two species interbred. We know this from another bone fragment, whose owner, a young girl, was the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and Denisovan father.

What we got right and wrong

Most of what I’ve talked about here, we’ve only learnt in the last 16 years. For my PhD more than 50 years ago I was testing the then widespread idea that modern humans evolved directly from Neanderthals. I spent my time measuring and comparing fossil skulls, using the primitive measuring techniques and limited computing power available at the time.

I concluded that we did not evolve from them. I could see no sign that Neanderthal fossils in Europe were gradually changing towards a more modern anatomy. They weren’t developing a more rounded braincase, a smaller browridge or a more pronounced chin.

Yet now, with genetic powers that I could never have imagined, we can see that my PhD quest only gave part of the answer. Certainly we did not evolve from Neanderthals but yes, they are partly our ancestors because of that ancient interbreeding. Twenty years ago I would have told you that any interbreeding with Neanderthals was trivial in the big picture.

Together with the findings about interbreeding between modern humans and Denisovans, I have to concede that our more recent origins are only mostly out of Africa, not 100%. It means the Neanderthals and Denisovans didn’t die out completely 30,000 or 40,000 years ago: bits of their DNA live on in us today, and some of it is still active.

As for our African beginnings, it was in the 1980s and 1990s that these became clear as DNA sequences from recent human populations accumulated, as well as better fossil material. However, recent evidence suggests that our African origins were quite complex, with several lineages evolving in parallel in different parts of the continent and mixing now and again. For instance, some geneticists think ancient interbreeding with Homo heidelbergensis could have contributed to our evolution, so the human origin story keeps getting more complex.

What’s next

It’s difficult to imagine what even the next ten years will bring, as work on ancient DNA is developing so fast – along with the newer field of ancient proteomics, which studies fossil proteins. Scientists are turning to these because DNA survival is patchy, especially in warm conditions and deep time.

For example, scientists are looking for traces of the connective tissue collagen, which is widespread in our bodies, skeleton and teeth. Collagen is much more resilient than DNA, and has already been identified in fossils that are millions of years old. As the work progresses and we can sequence the different amino acids in these ancient proteins, we will start to gather knowledge of fossil relationships where DNA cannot reach, as has already been achieved for the Dragon Man fossil.

The fossil record itself will undoubtedly continue to surprise us with unexpected finds, hopefully including eagerly awaited Denisovans from the islands of south-east Asia. Also waiting to be found somewhere are fossils of first-generation hybrids between our species and the Neanderthals, and our species and the Denisovans.

Meanwhile I’m still pursuing the biggest puzzle of them all. Why are we the only surviving species out of dozens that preceded us, and the half-dozen that were still living alongside us 100,000 years ago? Did we overcome them through our better brains or better adaptations or did we just get lucky, time after time, as first the Neanderthals went under, then all the others?

I suspect competition for often limited resources was an important part of the story, where we may have been that bit more efficient than our surviving relatives, but we simply don’t know the full solution yet. More discoveries from archaeology, fossils and DNA will lead us closer to the answers.

For you: more from our Insights series:

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• Kyrgyzstan’s Dordoi Bazaar: a world made from shipping containers and a city within a city

• The grief myth: it doesn’t come in stages or follow a checklist – like love, it endures

• Free will: does refusing to believe in it make you a ‘bad’ person? Research is challenging this old idea

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Chris Stringer, Honorary Professor, Institute of Archaeology, UCL; Natural History Museum

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