Neanderthals Would Rather Die than Talk to You

Hey there,

Welcome to The Abstract, a new weekly column from 404 Media about new, mind blowing scientific studies, explained in a way normal people can understand and hopefully tell their friends about. 

Doing impactful journalism unfortunately requires us to often focus on the darker side of technology, to the point where 404 Media can start to seem pretty gloomy. The Abstract, written by Becky Ferreira, formerly Motherboard’s beloved science writer, aims to give you a bit more variety from us.

Becky’s genius is not just her ability to process extremely complicated studies and explain them in a way that makes sense to anyone, it’s also that her writing makes one appreciate the amazing fact that you can open a journal any day of the week and learn something new about how the world works, where we come from, and where we are going. 

I hope you enjoy this as much as I do.

-Emanuel

Hi! I’m Becky Ferreira. I used to cover space, archaeology, paleontology, wildlife, and other natural mischief for Motherboard. Now, I cover those topics for a variety of publications; I’ve recently written about Moon poop, the Mars mania of 1924, the plight of endlings, and dinosaurs in space, which is my perennial obsession. I’ve also just finished a book about humanity’s quest to find aliens called First Contact, which will be out from Workman Publishing in fall 2025. 

One of my favorite parts of this job is reading scientific studies in full. I adore the jargon, the visualized data, and the way some tiny scrap of dirt or light can open windows into lost ecosystems, distant exoplanets, or the fundamental nature of reality. The specialized language of studies often inspires surprisingly lyrical turns-of-phrase like “origami tessellations,” “galactic cannibalism,” or “coda repertoire.” There are even emotive undercurrents of rivalry and admiration lurking in between the academized lines.

That’s why I’m so excited to launch The Abstract column with 404 Media. Every week, I'll round up the most exciting and mind-boggling studies I can find and summarize their results by quoting directly from the journal. I aim to show how scientists talk to each other, without getting too deep into the weeds. We’re experimenting with the format to gauge what works best, but I hope these weekly highlights offer an entertaining and enlightening glimpse of the vast annals of scientific arcana.

The Sun’s Epic Belches Are Timestamping Earth

“Extreme solar storms and the quest for exact dating with radiocarbon,” Heaton, T.J., Bard, E., Bayliss, A. et al. Nature

My general feeling is that humans really lost our way when we stopped actively worshiping the Sun. Not that the Sun cares, I just think we might benefit from constant ritualized reminders of the awesomeness of our star. This study speaks to this hunch by highlighting what an impact the Sun has on Earth when it gets stormed up and starts spitting out flares. These streams of energetic particles cause dazzling auroras on Earth, but they can threaten to wreak havoc on electronics and other infrastructure. 

Scientists recently discovered that the Sun's most epic "super-storms" produce so-called "extreme solar particle events (ESPEs)." Translation: super extreme particles that pelt Earth so hard they leave a mark.

About a decade ago, scientists found a wild spike in radioactive carbon-14 (an isotope of carbon) in cedar tree rings that correspond to the year 774-775. It was such a striking signal that they initially speculated that it might have been caused by particles shot out from a nearby supernova. As these stellar particles hit Earth, they would have stimulated the production of atmospheric carbon-14, which was recorded in tree rings around the world. 

But as it turns out, you don’t need a star to fatally explode in your vicinity to produce an ESPE. The Sun simply belches that hard sometimes, according to this new perspective in Nature (a perspective summarizes existing evidence with a personal viewpoint, rather than offering new results). 

The Sun probably shot out a huge flare at Earth some 1,300 years ago, basically timestamping our planet with carbon-14 ink. This discovery exposed a new record of the Sun’s activity, written in tree rings and other organic materials, dating back about 55,000 years. And because carbon-14 is the isotope used for radiocarbon dating, it also means ESPEs are like timestamps that calibrate the chronology of human and natural events, with calendar year precision. 

If we were hit by an ESPE like the 774-45 event today, it “could have disastrous effects on our telecommunications, electricity grids and satellite systems," write authors led by Timothy Heaton of the University of Leeds. "Understanding the frequency of such events and their possible size is therefore essential to prepare and build resilience into these systems" even as the discovery of ESPEs are also enabling "improvements in the dating precision achievable using radiocarbon, including the potential calibration to an exact year." 

"We are now gaining deep insights into the extreme behavior of the Sun, societal evolution and the archaeological record, as well as the operation of the Earth system," the team said. "Whether used for precise dating, solar physics, or as a tracer of carbon dynamics, radiocarbon has shown itself to remain fundamental to understanding the world in which we live."

In other news:

Little Boy Makes Big Death

“Mega El Niño instigated the end-Permian mass extinction,” Sun et al, Science

The end-Permian event, which unfolded 250 million years ago, was the biggest mass extinction on record, killing off about 90 percent of life on Earth at the time. Debates have raged for decades about the exact drivers of the catastrophe, with theories involving volcanic eruptions, climate change, and other forces. Now, a team has implicated a possible new culprit: A "Mega El Niño."

“Because the oceans warm more slowly than land, and marine organisms have higher motility (actively or passively), terrestrial ecosystems are more vulnerable to extinction threats during intensified El Niños,” Yadong Sun and colleagues said. The fallout of the end-Permian event saw the marine extinction lag by about 40,000 years “a short interval geologically and one that is alarmingly now on human timescales as we move toward an ever more variable climate regime.” 

In other words, things that live on land (ahem, us) tend to die faster in a Mega El-Niño scenario, so we should try not to do an end-Permian own goal on ourselves with anthropogenic climate change. 

Neanderthals Would Rather Die than Talk to You  

“Long genetic and social isolation in Neanderthals before their extinction,” Slimak et al, Cell Genomics 

In 2015, scientists discovered the remains of a Neanderthal male who lived in France around 50,000 years ago. Nobody knows his Neanderthal name but he’s called Thorin by us, after the exiled Dwarf-King in The Hobbit. Analysis of Thorin’s genome reveals that his tribe, like many others, was isolated for tens of thousands of years, bolstering the hypothesis that our human cousins were loners—a temperament that may have helped spell their doom.

“These data draw a striking picture of late Neanderthals and their coeval H. sapiens populations, where small populations of Neanderthals appear to have been isolated during tens of millenia, both culturally and genetically, leading to an increase in homozygosity levels,” Ludovic Slimak and colleagues said. (Translation: Neanderthals were inbred). 

“These genetic, social, and cultural divergences among these populations may have induced fragilities among long-isolated Neanderthal groups facing sapiens populations structurally organized on large and complex social networks,” the team said. “Much more than an event, the decline of the Neanderthals would then represent a complex process where the history and ethology of these populations may have played a key role in the structure of their remarkable extinctions.”

Fish Checking Before Wrecking

“Cleaner fish with mirror self-recognition capacity precisely realize their body size based on their mental image,” Kobayashi et al, Scientific Reports

Cleaner fish check out their body size in mirrors before picking fights with other fish, which scientists claim makes this species “the first non-human animal to be demonstrated to possess private self-awareness.” 

“Here, we show that cleaner fish, having attained [mirror self-recognition], construct a mental image of their bodies by investigating their ability to recall body size,” said Taiga Kobayashi and colleagues. “A size-based hierarchy governs the outcomes of their confrontations.” 

Extra points for the terms “mirror-naïve” and “mirror-experienced”: Which are you? 

The Rich: It’s Worse than You Think  

“Underestimation of personal carbon footprint inequality in four diverse countries,” Nielsen, K.S., Bauer, J.M., Debnath, R. et al. Nature Climate Change

It’s no shocker that rich people are chugging and crushing our planet’s finite resources like beer cans. But the degree to which they are using up the world is, apparently, even worse than popularly feared. 

“Extensive research has documented profound inequality in personal carbon footprints between and within countries,” Kristian Nielsen and colleagues said. “In this study, we investigated perceptions of within-country carbon footprint inequality across four socioeconomically heterogeneous countries”—Denmark, India, Nigeria, and the United States. 

“Our results reveal a widespread underestimation of personal carbon footprint inequality, including among the wealthiest population segments, and that such underestimation may translate into lower climate policy support and higher perceived fairness of carbon footprint inequality, even after revealing actual inequality in personal carbon footprints,” the team said.

Thanks for reading The Abstract! See you next Saturday.