humans

humans born there will cease to be Homo sapiens

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with the mission Artemis II operational around the Moon, humanity has Mars among its colonizing desires. Past and present missions, such as NASA’s Curiosity rover, aim to analyze its surface for clues to past habitability. And although we have found them, leave a lot of unknowns. We haven’t set foot on Mars yet and we already have in mind how we will build the houses there (spoiler: with bricks and urine). And that if one day a human being is born in a possible human colony on Mars, it will not be homo sapiens on the anthropological level. Because in short, if we get to Mars and start being born there, we will no longer be the same species: Scott Solomon, an evolutionary biologist at Rice University, has been studying this question for years and has reached that conclusion, which he recently published in his work “Becoming Martian“. If you are born on Mars, you are not homo sapiens. Solomon differentiates between those who arrive from Earth to Mars and survive there, those colonists who arrive at the red planet with a body molded by millions of years of evolution here. But their creatures and their creatures will not have the same luck. In short, it will be the beginning of the end for homo sapiens. Mars has 38% of Earth’s gravity, radiation two or three times higherthere is no protective magnetic field nor the microbial biosphere with which our immune system It was evolving. All of the above constitutes an engine of biological change and evolution that has marked our anatomy and its absence, too. Why is it important. Evolutionary biology has a name for what will happen: allopatric speciation. That is, when a population is isolated and develops in a new environment, natural selection and genetic drift continue their course within the adaptation to the environment with respect to the original population (in this case, those who remain on Earth). The passage of time can cause the two groups to become so different that they are another species, a new human species. And something paradoxical would happen: by looking for planets other than Earth as an alternative to continue preserving the species, we would stop being the same. Context. You don’t have to go to future generations to see the consequences of space life. There is evidence of astronauts on the ISS who have suffered accelerated loss of bone mass, muscle atrophy, cardiovascular problems, vision problems and stress. Until your blood is mutating. The creatures born there will develop their skeleton and nervous system directly under these conditions. Salomon offers concrete changes: denser and shorter bones, greater eumelanin production (a type of melamine responsible for the dark coloration) as protection against radiation, an immune system calibrated for the closed environment of the colony and potentially vulnerable to diseases common on Earth. However, the most sensitive point is reproduction: we do not know for sure whether humans will be able to conceive, gestate and give birth successfully on Mars. Experiments with mammals in microgravity are worrying. The biologist also anticipates that childbirth on Mars would inevitably be surgical: the lower bone density and muscle atrophy make it an even more risky activity. What will happen next. For Solomon there are two possibilities: Let natural selection take its course and shape future generations. The second is to resort to genetic engineering: get ahead of the problem before sending them there. In any case, the macro result is the same: two branches of humanity evolving on separate paths, in different conditions and in different worlds. A dystopian future of genetics and ethics. It should be noted that thousands of generations are needed for speciation to occur, which gives sufficient time for humanity to take measures, such as frequent travel or assisted reproduction with transferred genetic material. Or that genetic engineering steps on the accelerator so much that natural selection takes a backseat. Ethics also comes in here: if a boy or girl is born on Mars and cannot return to Earth because their body cannot resist it, humanity will have made an irreversible decision without their consent. Solomon warns also of that gap in humanity in terms of identity and rights. These are questions that we cannot answer now, but that should be clear before the existence of a colony on Mars is seriously considered. In Xataka | Europe has thought of throwing three robots into a volcanic lava tube and now colonizing the Moon or Mars is closer In Xataka | If the question is “how are we going to build houses on Mars” the answer today is “with bricks made of urine” Cover | Photo of Dmitry Grachyov in Unsplash

AI chatbots are more flattering than humans giving personal advice. And that’s a problem

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Before, to create your echo chamber you could only follow like-minded people on networks, now you can create your own personalized echo chamber with an AI. A Stanford study has thoroughly analyzed the excessive adulation of LLMs and the result is clear: if you want to be told what you want to hear, it is better to talk to the AI ​​​​than with a person. The study. The Researchers analyzed eleven language models, among which were the most popular ones like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or DeepSeek, and they fed them with data sets about personal dilemmas. In addition, they included 2,000 prompts taken from the Reddit community. Approximately one-third of all scenarios included harmful or outright illegal behavior. Then, they compared the LLM responses with human responses to see who tends to agree with the user more. In a second part of the study, they recruited 2,400 participants and had them chat with flattering and non-flattering language models. We like to be proven right. Chatbots tend to be much more flattering than a human when giving personal advice, but not only that, people generally prefer these types of responses. The models endorsed the user’s position 49% more than humans in general dilemmas and endorsed harmful behavior 47% more. In the second experiment, people who chatted with different models considered the sycophantic model more trustworthy and preferable. Furthermore, she came away more convinced that she was right and less willing to apologize or repair the conflict. Why is it a problem. According to the authors, LLMs can reinforce egocentrism and make people more morally dogmatic. According to Myra Cheng, co-author of the study, “By default, AI advice does not tell people that they are wrong or give them a reality check (…) I worry that people will lose the ability to deal with difficult social situations.” In addition, there is another worrying fact and that is that users perceived the models as equally objective, which suggests a lack of critical vision to be able to distinguish a flattering AI from a non-flattering one. AI is not a person. It is obvious, but the reality is that every day we address AI chatbots as if they were one. Thank him and ask him for things please It is a harmless symptom of our mania for anthropoformize everything. However, when We use AI as a substitute for a psychologist or when we establish intimate relationships with a chatbotthat’s where we start to step in swampy terrain. The authors of the study consider it urgent that companies introduce safeguards to reduce the excessive complacency of LLMs and advise avoiding using them as a substitute for a person to deal with personal conflicts. The counterpoint. There are voices that argue that AI is not generating these echo chambers, at least not with as much intensity as we have seen with social networks. According to John Burn-Murdoch in Financial Timeslanguage models tend to raise consensus with experts and generate more moderate opinions than networks. Their argument is that the economic architecture of networks rewards inflammatory and polarizing content, while chatbots compete to offer reliable answers to users who use them to make important decisions. It is not just an opinion, it has also done an experiment in which it has simulated thousands of political conversations between users with extreme positions and several of the main chatbots on the market. Based on electoral surveys and data on the use of these tools, it measures how positions would move if a part of the citizenry used AI to inform themselves. The author concludes that, on average, the models tend to push the most radical ones towards more temperate positions closer to the expert consensus, also validating many fewer conspiracy theories than those that routinely circulate on social networks. In Xataka | AIs have become accompanying tools against loneliness. For some researchers it is “junk food” Image | Zulfugar Karimov in Unsplash

robot vs robot battles where humans only watch

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In the year 2024, a relevant event occurred in the context of the war in Ukraine. So the number of drones produced for military use far surpassed to that of traditional armored vehicles, with tens of thousands of units deployed on the front. That change not only reflected a question of cost, but a profound transformation in how a modern war is conceived and fought today. One where humans have less and less to say. Forbidden to humans. In Ukraine, a new type of battlefield has emerged that breaks with everything known: the called “kill zones”those strips of several kilometers where any movement is detected and destroyed almost instantly by swarms of drones. In these spaces, human presence has become extremely limited and dangerous, almost inaccessible, forcing soldiers to remain buried for weeks or months and move alone in exceptional conditionswhile the terrain between the lines becomes a kind of permanent “no man’s land”, one saturated with sensors, mines and constant surveillance. If in the 19th century battles and quarrels were fought with steps and guns in duels in the sunTwo centuries later, duels have mutated into disputes between machines. Wars without troops. I remembered a few weeks ago the financial times that, in this new environment, direct combat between people has ceased to be the central element, replaced by confrontations where machines take center stage. Aerial drones patrol, detect and attack targets continuously, while unmanned ground vehicles advance, hold positions or execute ambushes in places where an infantryman I couldn’t survive. There have even been documented situations in which systems from both sides confront each other without direct human presenceevidencing a qualitative change in the nature of combat. Robots against robots. The most striking result is the appearance of authentic “duels” between unmanned systems, where UAVs and UGVs search, hunt and they destroy each other. Drones waiting on the ground like smart mines, vehicles that ambush routes supply or systems specifically designed to locate and neutralize other robots reflect an autonomous combat dynamic in constant evolution. Thus, each advance generates an immediate response from the adversary, creating a cycle accelerated innovation which is more reminiscent of a technological ecosystem or a futuristic war video game than a conventional war. Fully automated logistics. Even tasks that historically defined the rear, such as supplies, evacuation or minelaying, have been absorbed and replaced by machines. Now drones transport food, water and ammunition, while ground vehicles extract wounded people or deploy explosives in inaccessible areas. This change, furthermore, is not only tactical, but rather structural, because the battlefield seems not to admit The human presence continues, forcing a kind of outsourcing of essential functions to systems that can take risks that no soldier could accept. The leap to self-employment. They explained in Forbes that, although many of these systems continue to depend on human operators, the trend points towards a increasing autonomywith robots increasingly capable of detecting, deciding and acting with less intervention. If you also want, the integration of artificial intelligence, advanced sensors and coordination in swarms anticipates a scenario where hundreds of systems operate simultaneously in air, land and sea, further expanding these inaccessible areas and reducing the room for human maneuver. The future in real time. In summary, what is happening in Ukraine It is not only an adaptation to the current conflict, but it could be said that it is a preview of what they will be like. the wars of the future. The unprecedented combination of total surveillance, combat automation and progressive replacement of the soldier in the most dangerous areas is transforming war in an unprecedented confrontation between systemsone where humans are relegated to supervision and strategic decision-making. From that perspective, rather than a gradual evolution, the conflict in Eastern Europe has suddenly accelerated a transition that seemed very distant a few years ago, turning science fiction into something similar to an operational reality. Image | Telegram In Xataka | Ukraine has become the world’s leading specialist against Iranian drones. And he won’t share his antidote In Xataka | If Ukraine promoted the use of drones, Iran has triggered the Terminator algorithm. And that was already a problem in science fiction

It is literally the largest and heaviest machine ever built by humans and it does one thing: extract coal.

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In North Rhine-Westphalia, western Germany, the largest machine that man has put on earth operates. Forget about huge ships, aircraft carrier either oil platforms: It’s an excavator. It is called Bagger 293, and its very existence is the moving memory of what industrial engineering is capable of when it is demanded without limits. What is it, exactly? The Bagger 293, also known as the MAN TAKRAF RB293, is a bucket wheel excavator (those that have a giant toothed disc at one end) designed for open pit mining. It was built by the German company TAKRAF, a subsidiary of the MAN group, between 1990 and 1995 in Leipzig. His goal from day one was only one: extract lignitethe so-called brown coal, in the Hambach mine, one of the largest mining operations in Europe. Today it remains operational, owned by RWE Power AG, Germany’s second largest energy producer. Numbers. It is 96 meters high, equivalent to a building of more than 30 floorsand 225 meters long, which is more than two football fields placed in a row. It weighs 14,200 tons. The Guinness Book of Records officially recognizes it as the largest and heaviest land vehicle in the world. Shares title with its predecessor, the Bagger 288although the 293 surpasses it in size and capacity. It also cannot be transported. And moving it about 120 kilometers requires more than three weeks of continuous work, with progress of just 5 or 6 kilometers a day. How it works istea monster. The heart of the machine is a 21.3 meter diameter rotating wheel armed with 18 buckets, large steel buckets, each capable of loading up to 15 cubic meters of material per cycle. That wheel spins non-stop, tearing off layers of earth and rock to reveal the veins of lignite, which are then transported by giant belts to the electricity generation plants. Under normal conditions, the Bagger 293 can move up to 240,000 tons of material in a single day. Furthermore, it is estimated that what it does in one day is equivalent to the manual work of about 40,000 miners. All this with only five operators on board, controlling the system from a central cockpit. electric appetite. To start such a structure, a direct external energy source of 16.56 megawatts is needed (about more than 22,500 HP if we do the conversion). This would be approximately equivalent to the electricity needed to supply a city of about 20,000 inhabitants. On the other hand, it should be noted that the Bagger 293 does not have its own conventional engine, it is permanently connected to the industrial electrical network. Its 12 steel tracks, each 3.8 meters wide, distribute the immense weight over the ground in a controlled manner so that the ground does not give way under it. Leaf where you work. The excavator works in the Hambach mine, the largest open-pit mine in Germany, with an approved area of ​​up to 8,500 hectares and a depth that reaches 500 meters below ground level. According to Bloombergthe mine produces around 40 million tonnes of lignite per year, enough to power around 8 million homes. But the mine is not without controversy. Brown coal is the most polluting fossil fuel per unit of energy produced, and the exploitation of Hambach 90% of the historic Hambach Forest has been wiped outan ecosystem more than 12,000 years old. As of 2012, environmental activists They occupied the remaining trees for years in a protest that ended up becoming a symbol of the climate debate in Germany. In 2018, tens of thousands of people demonstrated against the mine’s expansion. Greta Thunberg herself visited the place in 2019stating that he found it “devastating” to see places like the Hambach mine. In January 2020, the German government agreed to preserve the remaining forest, and in August of that same year Germany committed to its definitive exit from coal by 2038. According to Global Energy Monitormining at the Hambach mine will cease in 2029, and the plan is to transform the territory into a reclaimed landscape that will include a large artificial lake. Images | Andreas Lippold (Wikimedia Commons), Stefan Fussan (Wikimedia Commons), Steve Rowell In Xataka | The key hidden infrastructure for AI is not data centers: it is undersea cables and the Middle East leads the way

Science had always believed that only humans understand geometry. Until we noticed the crows again

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The perception of geometric regularity in shapes, a variant of elementary geometry, has long been considered an ability that only human beings had. And it is no wonder, since from quite early stages of development and across multiple cultures, our species has demonstrated a natural understanding of spatial rules. But this has changed in a species similar to crows. A radical change. Although this innate quality of humans was quite well established, science has now shown that the crows too They have geometric understanding. A cognitive milestone that rethinks what we thought we knew about animal intelligence and the evolution of pure mathematics. A myth. The scientific bases showed a notable gap between human abilities and those of the rest of the animal kingdom with regard to euclidean geometry. Previous research had already seen that primates lacked the ability to recognize geometric regularity in tests of visual perception of shapes, something fundamental, since they may be the first that come to mind when thinking about this property. And this was crucial to determining that humans have an innate ability to process geometric regularity, since the recurring inability to species like baboons After intensive training he laid these foundations. However, the researchers decided to explore these abilities in birds known for their impressive cognitive and arithmetic skills. Touch screens. To test birds’ spatial intuition, scientists from the University of Tübingen They designed an experiment based on the detection of visual anomalies. In this case, two 10- and 11-year-old male crows were trained using touch screens located inside conditioning chambers. Here the birds could observe an array that displayed six simultaneous shapes on the screen and the task was to detect an “intruder”, that is, to peck at the shape that differed in its visual parameters with respect to the other five base stimuli. The tests. For the final test, five reference quadrilaterals were used, ordered by their level of regularity: the square, the isosceles trapezoid, the rhombus, the right hinge, and a completely irregular shape. From here on, the “intrusive” figures were artificially generated moving the lower right vertex of the original figure at a fixed distance equivalent to 75% of the average distance between the vertices. Results. The most impressive thing seen was the immediacy of understanding the problem, as the crows were able to apply the concept of detecting the intruder immediately upon being exposed to the new sets of quadrilaterals. Both subjects dramatically exceeded the 16.7% chance level during their first trials, demonstrating that they understood the task without hesitating or mindlessly pecking. Furthermore, during the first 60 trials, the first crow achieved 48.3% success and the second crow 56.7%. The most impressive thing. The most revealing data from these tests was precisely that the birds showed significantly better performance with shapes that presented properties of pure Euclidean geometry, such as right angles, parallel lines or symmetry. It is crucial here to highlight that this performance advantage did not require extensive prior training, but rather the regularity effect was present from the very beginning of the testing phase. Because? Faced with the logical question of why crows achieved what other primates failed, the authors of the study recognize certain important methodological differences compared to classic experiments with baboons. In this case, they point out that the crows were subjected to a strict progress criterion during training, needing to maintain 75% correctness over five consecutive sessions. In contrast, baboons only needed to reach a criterion of 80% correct responses only once, without the need for consecutive sessions. And although this difference may make a direct and exact comparison between the species difficult, the main finding is incontestable: crows recognize geometric regularity. Images | Tyler Quiring In Xataka | Punch, the monkey clinging to a stuffed animal and a victim of bullying, has achieved the impossible: uniting the Internet under the same cause

International law was written with humans who decide in mind. AI just broke that chain and no one knows who answers now

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Pete Hegseth’s threat to Dario Amodei has a subtext that goes far beyond the $200 million contract that the Pentagon can cancel: If the US military deploys AI-controlled autonomous weapons without the safeguards that Anthropic requiresyou will have removed the only firewall that has historically prevented an illegal order from being executed. Why is it importantand. The entire legal and ethical system of the US military rests on a principle that seems obvious but has important consequences: a soldier can and should disobey a manifestly illegal order. It is the mechanism that, in theory, prevents war crimes. A drone AI-controlled autonomous vehicle does not have that mechanism. You can’t refuse. You can’t hesitate. He cannot be tried in a court-martial. Between the lines. Amodei speaks of “autonomous weapons that fire without human intervention” to point out a legal vacuum. If an AI makes the decision to kill, who is responsible criminally? The programmer? The general who activated the system? The president who signed the order? International humanitarian law (including the Geneva Conventions) was written with human beings making decisions in mind. And now AI dissolves that chain of responsibility. The backdrop. The mass surveillance argument is also a bitter pill to swallow. The Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution protects citizens from warrantless searches and interventions. It works, among other reasons, because the State has never had the physical capacity to process everything that happens in public spaces. And in the same way, with AI that operational limit disappears: we move to millions of conversations recorded in real time, transcribed, classified and connected in just seconds. What was previously impossible due to lack of human resources becomes routine with a LLM. Constitutional protection until now has depended, in part, on the inefficiency of the State, its limitations. Yes, but. The Pentagon has an argument that cannot be ruled out: other democracies are also developing these capabilities, and China or Russia are not going to wait for the United States to resolve their ethical dilemmas. The practical question is whether having those unrestricted capabilities makes you safer or simply more dangerous to your own citizens. The big question. OpenAI and Google have accepted the Pentagon’s conditions“all legal uses” without specific exceptions, and xAI has just been cleared to operate on classified systems. Anthropic has been left alone in its position. And what is at stake now is not whether Claude survives as a military supplier or not, it is whether the AI ​​industry is going to set some limit on what it sells to the State, or whether that debate will be settled directly by Congress, the courts or, in the worst case, the first serious incident that no one could have foreseen. It seems like a matter of time. In Xataka | AI is already a battlefield: Anthropic has just accused DeepSeek and other Chinese companies of “distilling” Claude Featured image | Xataka

AI consumes obscene amounts of energy. Sam Altman compares it to the cost of “training” humans

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman participated in an event organized by The Indian Express. During the interview made some striking statements, but the greatest of all of them was the one he dedicated to talking about what it costs to train an AI model. In fact, he complained about how many of ChatGPT’s energy consumption discussions they are unfair. Training humans also consumes a lot. The interviewer asked Altman about ChatGPT’s energy consumption and Sam Altman took a few seconds to answer the question, and then made a peculiar comparison (my bold): One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is that it talks about how much energy it takes to train an AI model compared to what it costs a human to perform an inference query. But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes about 20 years of life and all the food you eat during that time before you become intelligent. And not only that, it took the widespread evolution of the hundred billion people who have lived and learned not to be eaten by predators and to understand science and so on to create you. The fair comparison is if you ask ChatGPT, how much energy does it take once their model is trained to answer that question compared to a human? And AI has probably already caught up in terms of energy efficiency if we measure it that way. A previous Epoch AI study corroborates that energy consumption during inference (when we actually use ChatGPT, for example) is low. Source: Epoch AI. Training is one thing, inference another.. The answer may be controversial, but to a certain extent it is logical: learning, both in the case of humans and AI, takes time and consumes many resources, but that cost is one thing and the cost of inference, of “applying that training”, is another. Once we have learned, it is not too difficult to answer things. This is what Altman is trying to point out here, who recognizes that AI does indeed consume a lot of energy in training, but that it has then become very efficient in the inference phase, when we actually use ChatGPT. The problem is that although Altman has already spoken that in inference consumption is minimal, does not provide evidence of this. The water problem is no longer a problem. He also spoke about the controversial water consumption that was theoretically carried out in large AI data centers. Although he acknowledged that this was a problem when “we used to use evaporative cooling in data centers.” Now, however, “we don’t do that,” he recalled, and made it clear that those accusations that “ChatGPT uses 17 gallons per query, or whatever” is totally false, “totally crazy, it has no connection with reality.” But again, there is still no official data from AI companies in this section. How much does AI really consume? The truth is that at this point we still do not have really clear data on how much the AI ​​consumes both in the training phase and in the inference phase. There are those who have investigated energy and water consumption and have made a mistake. wildly exaggerating the databut for example in the US, where a large number of data centers are concentrated, there is no legislation that forces transparency with those figures. Increasingly more efficient models and data centers. One of the most interesting studies was the one made by Epoch AI in February 2025, and at that time it was also concluded that AI did not actually consume as much as it was said to consume. In fact, it consumed relatively little and the models have only improved in efficiency. Chips and cooling systems have also improved, and although data centers have certainly require enormous amounts of energywe continue blindly in this section. In Xataka | Spain has a plan to capture more data centers than anyone else: “shield” them from energy costs

We believed that imagination was exclusive to humans. Kanzi, the bonobo who drinks “invisible coffee”, has just proven the opposite

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For decades, cognitive science has drawn a firm red line between us and the rest of the animals that is the imagination. Although animals can use tools and even solve complex problems, the ability to disconnect from immediate reality and imagine a scenario that does not exist was considered something exclusive to humans. Until Kanzi arrived. Kanzi. A bonobo that is world famous for its mastery of lexigrams to communicate and that has now starred a published study this week in the magazine Science that could rewrite the books of evolution. And it is no wonder, since Kanzi not only knows how to order food, but also knows how to pretend to eat it when it’s not there yet, and being completely aware of what it does. The tea party. The study published earlier this month presents the strongest evidence to date for the representation of pretend objects in a great ape. And for a human Pretend you are drinking coffee by imagining you have a cup in your hand It is something very simple to do. But until now in apes it was something unthinkable. But to prove us wrong about our exclusive quality, the studio designed an experiment where they sat Kanzi down and interacted with empty objects. Specifically, they pretended to pour juice from an empty bottle into a juice or eat “grapes” that did not really exist. But the best thing is that it was not a simple imitation, but Kanzi followed the game with astonishing precision as if he really imagined it. The juice trick. The objective here was to rule out that Kanzi was simply copying movements without understanding the basic concept, and to do this the team designed three tests. The first of them began with the researcher pretending pouring juice into one of several empty glasses. Kanzi was then asked to interact with them by picking one up. In this case, in 68% of the 50 tests, Kanzi chose the glass that “contained” the imaginary juice, ignoring the other identical but “empty” glasses. Fact versus fiction. This is where the crucial point of the investigation is, since if Kanzi were confused, he would treat real and imaginary juice the same. This was not the case, since when given a choice, Kanzi preferred the real object in 78% of the cases. Something that may seem insignificant, but that shows that it maintains two simultaneous mental representations: the physical reality of the empty glass, and the fake reality where we play that the glass has juice. The same thing happened when imaginary grapes were used instead of juice, where Kanzi maintained a 69% success rate in identifying the location of the pretend food. Decoupling reality. The technical term being discussed here is decoupled secondary representation, which is the brain’s ability to hold an image of the world that contradicts direct sensory information. That is, what is being seen or heard. Until now, it was debated whether this ability emerged with modern human language, but Kanzi’s results suggest that this “spark” of imagination was already present in the common ancestor we share with bonobos and chimpanzees. between 6 and 9 million years ago. This is something that also changes our understanding of childhood play, since when a two-year-old takes a banana and pretends it is a telephone, he is exercising a cognitive muscle that evolution has been refining long before telephones or cultivated bananas existed. Exception or rule. It must be taken into account that these experiments have not been done with just any bonobo, but rather an “enculturated” ape since it has spent its life surrounded by humans and trained in the use of lexigramsmaking it have extraordinary capabilities. This gives rise to some critics, such as comparative psychologist Daniel Povinelli, who usually argue that these results could be the result of intensive training that “humanizes” the ape’s mind, rather than a natural capacity in the wild. Although it is something that the investigation tries to counteract with rigorous controls to ensure that Kanzi was not responding to human clues. Images | Will Rust In Xataka | Humans are evolving live on the Tibetan plateau. And understanding what happens there will be essential in space

In medieval Europe, not only humans ended up on the gallows. Other criminals were also executed: the “murderer” pigs

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For centuries, medieval Europe It was a place where justice was dispensed not only in the courts, but in the squares, in full view of everyone, with public rituals designed to repair order when someone broke it in an intolerable way. At that time, the fear of the unforeseeable did not come only from armies, plagues or famines, but also from what moved through the streets and corrals. In the France Medieval times, for example, the public ritual of punishment (carriage amidst mockery, solemn sentence and execution before the community) did not always have a human as the protagonist: sometimes, the condemned was a pig. The image, which today seems like an oddity from a black chronicle or a folkloric exaggeration, was real enough to leave repeated documentary traces: animals led as prisoners, hung upside down until they died and treated, in practice, as perpetrators responsible for a crime that had broken the social balance. The pig as a real threat The frequency of these cases is better understood by remembering that the medieval world lived attached to animals and their risks. Pigs, in particular, were useful because they ate everything and could feed on scraps, but that same omnivorous condition made them dangerous if they roamed free near small children. The records collect numerous episodes in which pigs killed and even devoured children, a violence that today clashes with the modern image of the docile and slow animal, but which was then associated with specimens closest to the wild boar: fast, strong and capable of imposing themselves physically in seconds. Medieval archives collect cases like the one from 1379when a group of pigs in Saint-Marcel-lès-Jussey killed the son of a swineherd, or the from 1386 in FalaiseNormandy, where a sow destroyed a child who ended up dying. Also that of 1457 in Savigny, Burgundywhen little Jehan Martin was killed by a sow and, especially disturbingly, his six piglets were found nearby, stained with blood. They were not vague rumors, but stories that were fixed with names and placesand that fueled the need for a public response that was not limited to a simple private loss. In France, these events often led to in judicial proceedings formalities in which the animal was imprisoned, transferred and executed as if it were a common criminal. Sources talk about expenses registered normally (cart, prison, executioner even brought from Paris) and an administrative routine that suggests that, for the people of that time, it was not an absurd spectacle, but a legitimate mechanism of justice. The strangeness, therefore, was not that there was violence, but rather that the violence was channeled through a trial with the appearance of ordinary procedure. When money is not enough A practical explanation of these processes was that medieval justice tended to seek reconciliation between partiesand many disputes could be resolved with compensation or agreements. But when a child death came into the picture, that logic was broken: the damage was too serious and the money could be insufficient to close the social wound. In that context, the court intervened to “take control” of the conflict, separate it from private revenge and offer an institutional solution that would distribute the emotional and political burden of the outcome. Trials also functioned as a form of organize the story: It was not just about punishing the animal, but about clarifying human responsibilities. If a pig was known for being dangerouswhy was he allowed to loiter near children? Was there negligence on the part of the owner? a chain of negligence? There was even a suggestion of the possibility of darkest questions: if the child was “unwanted”, if he or she was deliberately left in a risky situation or if the accident hid an intention. The court, by intervening, not only imposed a penalty, it produced an official explanation that the community could accept. Sometimes, the local machinery was not the last word and the matter escalated towards higher authorities. In the case of 1379, some of the accused pigs belonged to an abbey, and from there a petition was sent to Duke Philip “the Bold” requesting clemency. They defended that their animals had not participated and that they were “well-behaved pigs.” The duke heeded the request and issued a pardon for the animals of the abbey, showing that these processes, strange as they may seem, were inserted in real networks of power, influences and political decisions. Far from being simple superstition or peasant rage, these executions could serve to assert authority. The right to erect a gallows and execute criminals it was a privilegeand taking a case to the end allowed a local lord to exhibit the ability to punish and control order. There are episodes that reinforce that reading: a pig murderer from the 15th century it remained imprisoned five years before being executed, and formal letters were sent for permission to build a gallows. When the duke finally agreed, the triumph was not only symbolic: in addition to showing power, the lord stopped carrying the practical cost of keeping the animal imprisoned and feeding it. Plus: another key is the medieval vision of reality as a logical system created by godwith animals destined to serve humans. For a pig to devour a child was an unbearable investment of that order, a rupture of hierarchies that demanded public reparation. In that mental framework, the trial and execution were not theater: they were a way of “putting back together” what had been broken, of affirming that the world still had rules and that chaos, even when it came from an animal, could be put back into place by a solemn act of justice. Image | Ernest Figueras, Zoe Clarke In Xataka | The Middle Ages were not as dark as they told us In Xataka | 900 years ago, Europe had its own Manhattan: the impressive skyscrapers of more than 100 meters of Bologna

We humans like beer. The big question is whether we like it enough to have invented agriculture

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The big question is not whether it was the chicken or the egg first, but rather what our ancestors began to make first: bread or beer? Does about 12,000 years We humans promote one of the most important chapters in our history in the Middle East, the Neolithic Revolution. From being nomads who lived by hunting and gathering, we became sedentary creatures who cultivated the fields. The change was so momentous that anthropologists have long wondered what caused it. It would be reasonable to think that the search for something as simple as bread, but there are those who believe that the answer is another: beer. What if the great catalyst that led us to plow and harvest the fields was not the search for bread but our ancestral hobby to raise your elbow? Cereals, what do I want you for? Scientists have spent the last few decades unraveling the mysteries from our most remote past, but there is one (fundamental) one that they have not yet agreed on: What the hell led humanity to change hunting and gathering for a sedentary life based on agriculture and livestock? What was the catalyst for the Neolithic Revolution, one of the most momentous periods of all time? Since since humans have been human, they need to eat, the answer seems simple: if those men and women settled to plant wheat and barley, it had to be to make bread, right? That is, they began to spend hours and hours tending their fields to obtain grain with which to nourish themselves. In the 50s however a question began to creep into the anthropological debate: What if what really interested them in grain was not bread or porridge but beer? But… And why is that? The debate is not new. It has been on the table for some time and is heated from time to time with new discoveries, such as the one announced in 2018 by a group of Stanford researchers who found “the oldest record of alcohol”, clues that tell us about the manufacture of beer ago 13,000 years. The last one to raise the discussion was Michael Marshall, a scientific journalist and columnist for New Scientist. In December he published a wide chronicle in which he reviews the latest findings on the subject and (most importantly) exposes how much it is costing anthropologists to reach a conclusion. The benefits of beer. To understand the discussion, we must first clarify a key point: neither the bread nor the beer of the Stone Age were like the bread and beer that we know today. The latter in fact has little or nothing to do with the refreshing amber liquid that they serve us in bars. It was more like a puree, a “sweet, slightly fermented porridge,” clarify Professor Jiajing Wang, from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. “They germinated the grains, cooked them and then used wild yeast.” The result was a nutritious, caloric, protein-rich concoction that could even be safer than drinking water from rivers and wells. After all, it was the result of fermentation. Added to that was its alcohol content, a “social lubricant” that we still use in the 21st century to relax and socialize. Archaeologist Brin Hayden highlights, for example, its use in events that helped structure communities. There is research which suggest that (at least some communities) used it in rituals and for veneration of the deceased. Much more than suspicions. If the debate has been on the table since the 1950s, it is basically because it has been nourished by archaeological findings. Researchers have found traces that tell us about beer brewing at least 5,000 years ago in southern egypt and northern china or how he does 10,000 years Shangshan culture They brewed rice beer. One of the most important revelations in recent years, however, was the one achieved in a cave in Israel in 2018 by a team led by Professor Li Liu, from Stanford University. There they found evidence of beer brewing before the first cereals cultivated in the Middle East. The finding is related to the Natufiansa town dedicated to gathering and hunting, although they also tended to stay for long periods in the same place. “The oldest”. After analyzing residues located in 13,000-year-old mortars located in a cave in Raqefet, a Natufian cemetery near Haifa, Liu and his colleagues discovered remains of beer. Quite a milestone, like she herself stands out: “It is the oldest record of alcohol made by man.” “This discovery indicates that alcohol production was not necessarily a result of agricultural surplus production, but was developed for ritual and spiritual purposes, at least to some extent, before agriculture.” Issue settled? At all. To understand the complexity of the subject, it helps to review the discovery announced in 2018. At least at that time, the oldest known remains of bread, extracted from a Natufian site located east of Jordan, had between 11,600 and 14,600 years old. The traces of beer discovered by Liu’s team move in a similar range: a priori, they could be dated between 11,700 and 13,700 years ago. One of the keys to the problem, explains Marshall in your articleis that basically the making of bread and beer leaves very similar traces, basically starch residues. “We still don’t have conclusive evidence to answer that question,” Liu recognizes on the question of whether we turned to beer or bread first. The reality is more complex: because we don’t know, we don’t even know if some of those foods were the great catalyst that led our ancestors to change their lifestyle. “I wouldn’t be surprised if both were the motivations.” At the end of the day, the ‘beer first, bread first’ debate does not seek definitive conclusions so much as vindicating the weight of both foods. Both beer and bread, bread and beer, played a decisive role in diets and rituals. Images | Gary Todd (Flickr), Enhin Akyurt (Unsplash) and Gerrie van der Walt (Unsplash) In Xataka | The Wari … Read more

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