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Greenland’s parliamentary election was held on March 11 against a backdrop of repeated calls from the Trump administration for America to annex the island. The poll delivered a momentous shift in Greenland’s political landscape as the pro-business Demokraatit (Democrats) emerged as the biggest winners overturning the two left-leaning parties which had formed the previous government.

Securing nearly 30% of the vote and gaining seven seats for a total of ten in the Inatsisartut (parliament), the party now holds the strongest mandate it has ever had. Close behind was the nationalist Naleraq party, which secured 24.5% of the vote and gained four seats, bringing their total to eight.

While both parties are united in their rejection of Trump’s ambitions and share a vision of Greenlandic independence, their approaches couldn’t be more different. Demokraatit advocates for a gradual, measured process, prioritising economic development. The party considers that economic self-sufficiency and strengthening domestic infrastructure are key preconditions to achieve independence. Naleraq, on the other hand, is pushing for a rapid break from Denmark. Its line is that Greenland will only be able to unleash its potential, economic and otherwise, once independent.

Independence has long been the dominant theme of Greenlandic politics. Ever since the territory gained home rule in 1979, most political parties across the spectrum have championed the idea of full independence from the kingdom of Denmark. Even the two major challengers – the Inuit Ataqatigiit, which lost five seats at the election to drop to seven, and the once-dominant Siumut, which lost six and now holds just four seats – are pro-independence.

But while independence remains a defining issue, the real story of this election is Greenland’s economy. The island is sitting on a treasure trove of rare earth elements, uranium, iron and other minerals critical to global industries. Yet despite decades of interest from foreign investors, strict regulations and environmental concerns have often slowed development.

With Demokraatit’s rise, that could change. The party is pushing for pro-business policies, including tax incentives, streamlined regulations and reduced state intervention in key industries like mining, fisheries and tourism. If successful, these reforms could transform Greenland into a major player in the global supply chain.

Despite its electoral gains, Demokraatit faces a challenge in implementing its economic vision. The party’s potential coalition partner, Naleraq, is deeply sceptical of foreign investment, at least when it comes from Denmark and Europe. While open to partnerships with the US, Naleraq is adamant that Greenland must retain full control over its resources, resisting any foreign influence that could compromise national sovereignty.

This ideological divide could create friction within a potential coalition government. Will Demokraatit’s pro-business agenda be tempered by Naleraq’s nationalistic stance? Or will the promise of economic growth push both parties toward compromise?

Global powers are watching

Greenland’s election came at a time when it was already the focus of world attention. Its strategic location and vast resources have attracted growing interest from global superpowers – none more so than the US. Trump has repeatedly expressed interest in acquiring Greenland, a move widely considered unrealistic, but indicative of Washington’s strategic priorities.

American presence in Greenland: Pituffik Space Base.
Ritzau/Alamy Stock Photo

American interest in Greenland isn’t new. The island is home to the Pituffik Space Base, formerly Thule Air Base, since the 1950s as a critical part of North American missile defence and whose Arctic position makes it a key player in both American territorial defence and Nato’s security architecture. Pituffik is the only non-Danish military presence in the territory and is the northernmost American military base.

But the White House’s rhetoric has taken a more insistent tone, raising questions about whether the US might attempt to exert greater influence over Greenland’s economic and political future. The interest in Greenland seems guided by at least two factors: its strategic position at the centre of the North Atlantic security complex and its economic potential with hard-to-access but abundant resources.

In both cases, the growing involvement of both Russia and China in the Arctic seem to make the US wary of a potentially independent Greenland getting closer to unfriendly great powers.

Denmark’s central government is walking a diplomatic tightrope when it comes to responding to the US government’s repeated intentions to annex Greenland. Copenhagen has sought to Europeanise the debate, floating the idea of Greenland joining the European Union. Taking this step would provide welcome economic support to the island but could also clash with Greenland’s scepticism toward European interference.

Greenland now stands at a crossroads. Domestically, negotiations between Demokraatit and Naleraq will likely shape the trajectory of the island’s economic and independence ambitions. Internationally, major powers – including the US, the EU and possibly even China and Russia – are positioning themselves to engage with Greenland’s untapped potential.

As the world’s focus on Greenland intensifies, one thing is clear: this Arctic nation is no longer a remote outpost. It is fast becoming a key battleground for economic, political and strategic influence in the North Atlantic. Läs mer…

Millions of people were abducted from west Africa and forcibly trafficked to the Americas over the 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade, from the 15th to the 19th century.

Slavery treated these people as forms of property. It forced them, with brutal violence, to work on plantations producing commodities such as cotton and coffee, sugar and tobacco. Their labour powered the world economy for several centuries.

While common understanding of this history has improved, less frequently remembered are those who spearheaded resistance against slavery. Revolutionary uprisings led by enslaved people themselves, as well as actions by radical groups such as Quakers and mutinous pirates, challenged slavery long before William Wilberforce and Britain’s abolition movement.

Now, an increasingly popular genre of the graphic novel is building public awareness and memory of these movements. Composing its stories of the past from framed documents, fragmented images and scraps of text, the form of the graphic novel resembles an archive. It is therefore well-placed to bring forgotten histories to life and to reflect on how those histories were recovered.

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Here are three recent graphic novels that can help us to remember resistance against slavery. They follow in the footsteps of historian Rebecca Hall’s collaboration with artist Hugo Martínez, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts (2021), which I would also strongly recommend.

1. Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History

By C.L.R. James, Nic Watts, and Sakina Karimjee (2023)

Verso Books

In the early 1930s, the anti-colonial historian, C.L.R. James, wrote a play about the 1791 Haitian Revolution and its leader, Toussaint Louverture.

It dramatised the story of the only successful slave revolt in history, when 100,000 slaves rose up against their white masters and eventually secured independence after almost 15 years of struggle.

James’s play was performed only twice in 1936, with the great African American actor Paul Robeson in the title role. The script was then lost for several decades, until 2005, when the historian Christian Høgsberg discovered a copy in the archives at the University of Hull and published a new edition of the play.

In 2012, graphic artist, Nic Watts and theatre practitioner, Sakina Karimjee, decided to bring James’s play back to life – not on the stage, but in the pages of a graphic novel.

Courtesy of Verso Books

James, who died in 1989, might not have guessed that he would one day be a co-creator of a graphic novel. But he would surely have been impressed with Toussaint Louverture, which takes readers through the Haitian Revolution in almost 300 thrilling pages.

The graphic novel uses its uniquely spatial medium to map the connections between the French Revolution, which proclaimed universal rights for all men, and the slave uprising in Haiti, which sought to realise those rights in France’s colonies. It is packed with powerful symbols and imagery that build a rich picture of the strategies and tactics that led to the uprising’s eventual victory.

2. Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay, A Graphic Novel

By David Lester, edited by Paul Buhle and Marcus Rediker (2023)

Verso Books

Historian Marcus Rediker has devoted his career to uncovering early histories of resistance against slavery and sharing them in compelling and accessible formats.

In 2021 he teamed up with the illustrator, David Lester, and longtime graphic historian, Paul Buhle, to translate this work into graphic novels.

The first, Prophet Against Slavery, takes readers back to a Quaker meeting house in the early 1700s. In its dramatic opening scene, Benjamin Lay disrupts the meeting with a piece of performance theatre. He appears to stab his own arm in protest against slavery, though we later learn that the spouting blood was in fact “red pokeberry juice”.

Lay was an innovator of performance protest, and he developed the strategy of boycotting commodities produced by slave labour. As Prophet Against Slavery details, he was one of the earliest and most outspoken abolitionists, campaigning for the end of the transatlantic slave trade almost a century before Wilberforce.

Courtesy of Verso Books

He was also a pioneer of veganism and an advocate for animal rights. Lay saw the parallels between early capitalism’s enclosure of common land in England and slavery’s enclosure of people’s bodies in the US. The claustrophobic borders of Lester’s graphic novel dramatise these acts of property making, even as they document Lay’s stubborn attempts to liberate the oppressed from bondage.

The enslaved themselves do not have a voice in Prophet Against Slavery. But Lester uses powerful charcoal sketches and image-only panels to make sure their presence is never forgotten.

These haunting images remind readers of the human cost of slavery without presuming to speak for those whose voices have been excluded from the written archive.

3. Under the Banner of King Death: Pirates of the Atlantic, A Graphic Novel

By David Lester and Marcus Rediker (2023)

Verso Books

Rediker and Lester teamed up again for Under the Banner of King Death. The title refers to the skull and cross bones flag that flies on the masts of pirate ships.

But this is not your conventional story of evil pirates drinking rum and hunting for gold (although there is some of that). It is rather a portrait of the pirate ship as a space of self-determination and political freedom at a time when, as Rediker puts it, “poor people had no democratic rights anywhere in the world”.

The graphic novel tells the story of John Gwin, an African-American man who escaped from slavery in South Carolina. After being kidnapped by the Royal African Company to labour on a slaving ship, he decides to resist. He rallies his shipmates, liberates the Africans below deck, and leads a mutiny to overthrow Skinner, the tyrannical captain.

With Skinner deposed, the pirates establish a commune at sea: “A world turned upside down,” as Gwin calls it. “All captains and officers elected. All tars [sailors] treated as brothers. No tyranny of the lash.” There is no hierarchy on this ship. Instead, they return to west Africa and begin breaking people out of slave castles along the coast.

Courtesy of Verso Books

Lester’s pen-and-ink sketches and frantic page layouts capture the scattergun nature of pirate life in the 17th century. It was a dangerous existence. Such was the threat posed by pirates to the ruling order that the British Navy worked quickly to capture them and make an example. Under the Banner of King Death starts and ends with hanging scenes, where pirates were put to death in public.

But while the British state could hang the pirates, it couldn’t kill their idea of freedom from slavery. Lester and Rediker recover this history and remind us of the revolutionary spirit that the skull and cross bones flag once represented.

These graphic novels commemorate new histories of resistance to the slave trade, while also reminding us of the historiographic work that must be put into recovering and retelling them, now and in the future. Läs mer…

Chimpanzees helped to make PG Tips tea famous with their iconic TV ads in the 1970s. But what happened to these animals afterwards? Our new study, using techniques previously used only on human remains, reveals the fascinating life story of Choppers, a celebrity chimpanzee, also known as Ada Lott from the PG Tips ads.

Zoos have transformed over the last century. They once focused on entertainment, but in the UK zoos now have a greater emphasis on education, conservation, research and welfare. And our new study, led by experts at National Museums Scotland, shows how these changes are written on Choppers’ body.

Choppers died aged 46 in 2016, which is close to the average age for a wild or captive chimpanzee. Following her death, Choppers was donated to the National Museums of Scotland, which enabled an analytical investigation into her life through her remains. Researchers from across the UK created the most comprehensive osteobiography of a zoo animal by bringing together archival, chemical and metric analyses.

Osteobiography involves the analysis of bones and other tissue. It is more commonly used in archaeology to reconstruct the life stories of ancient human subjects, such as Richard III, identifying where and how they lived in remarkable detail.

As a celebrity, Choppers’ life has been extensively documented. This combination of
archival material and osteobiographical analysis provides one of the most complete
assessments of the life of an animal in zoo care.

The findings of our study paint a rich picture of Choppers’ key life events, including evidence of injuries sustained when she was poached from the wild at just six weeks old. Choppers had a broken right arm, which seemed to have healed badly. Her lower arm bones were bowed and much shorter than her left side. She seems to have not been able to bear much weight on this arm, which likely contributed to joint disease here and elsewhere in her skeleton.

It is also likely that many, if not all, of her social group were killed in her capture. The physical trauma would impact her throughout her life, impairing her movement and exacerbating degenerative issues associated with old age.

Analysis of Choppers’ tooth enamel indicates a geographical and dietary shift between the ages of three and four, coinciding with her relocation to the UK from Sierra Leone. In the following three years she played the grandmother character in the PG Tips adverts, which ran in the UK throughout the 70s and 80s and featured a family of tea drinking chimps.

A collection of PG Tips adverts using chimpanzees.

The long-running ads helped PG Tips become the market leader of tea in Britain for 35 years. Her performance career was short, ending before the onset of puberty, and Choppers probably retired at around the age of six or seven. In part this is due to behavioural change as adult chimpanzees become less predictable, but also as a result of human perceptions of the cuteness of adult chimpanzees compared to infants.

Choppers transitioned from a relatively active life with high levels of direct interaction with humans, to a sedentary life with two companion chimpanzees, Noddy and Brooke, who were also retired from the entertainment industry. She was cared for by Twycross Zoo in Leicestershire for the rest of her life.

Choppers’ upper jaw was significantly elongated compared with wild chimpanzees, reflecting an early diet of sugary soft fruit, but also of her performance diet that mimicked that of humans. The PG Tips advertisements followed on from a longstanding trope in the mid-20th century of chimpanzees participating in tea parties, eating cake, drinking “tea” and apeing human behaviour. The chimpanzees drank fruit juice or milk rather than tea during tea parties and advertisements.

Choppers’ skull (right) alongside that of a wild chimp.
Duncan McGlynn, Author provided (no reuse)

In recent years there has been a shift towards tougher, less sugary vegetables in the diets of zoo primates, which is leading to improvements in their health and behaviour.

Later in life, Choppers was housed for a time with another chimpanzee, Bobby. Together they had one daughter, Holly.

Across the world today, there is considerable variation in zoo regulation, management and welfare. Despite accreditation of zoos and improved regulation, the illegal trafficking of chimpanzees and other primates into private collections and disreputable zoos continues. Choppers’ story is testament to the many thousands of chimpanzees that were (and still are) forcibly extracted from the wild for zoos, circuses, laboratories and private collections.

Choppers was not an unusual chimpanzee, but her story is an individual one, which resonates with human attitudes towards wildlife, zoos, entertainment, welfare and quality of life. Läs mer…

For years, nature has been blamed as a blocker of economic growth. After some ministerial bluster about not letting newts and bats get in the way of growth ambitions, the UK government released more details of its plans to get Britain building again.

The centrepiece of its aspirations to balance both nature and economic growth is a nature restoration fund, to be set up in England through changes to habitat regulations. This should allow developers to stay within their legal obligations towards nature through a payment scheme without delaying their projects.

The broad concept is that, as an alternative to relocating important species or improving habitats on the site of a proposed development, a developer could pay into the nature restoration fund. This would pay for larger, more strategically located schemes to protect the species in question.

The fund simplifies and streamlines the regulations while collecting funds to promote more, bigger, better and increasingly joined-up sites for nature.

Protecting nature is not just about bats and newts. According to trade association the Home Builders Federation (HBF), there are 160,000 homes being delayed by what are known as “nutrient neutrality” measures. These rules were a response to growing public concerns about land and water pollution caused by nutrient loads – pollutants such as nitrogen and phosphorus – associated with livestock farming and spillages from sewage works.

Government agency Natural England advised 74 local authorities that they should not allow any more house building in their areas unless this pollution could be mitigated. But this has led to lengthy and expensive project-by-project reviews to identify potential damage.

How will a fund help?

The fund will build on some schemes that are already known to work. One such scheme works for the protection of great-crested newts. Another successful scheme is Thames Basin Heaths project, working to protect and enhance heathland sites where rare birds such as nightingales breed. Crucially, this scheme allows new development to go ahead in adjacent areas.

The fund will be run by Natural England, which aims to draw on these experiences to unblock development at a large scale rather than at single-site level, pooling contributions from developers to pay for mitigation measures when there is a risk to nature.

If a particular “blocking” issue is identified, experts from Natural England will produce a plan, which must be approved by the environment secretary. A levy on developers will then pay for mitigation measures “in perpetuity” (often 30 years), allowing the development to get under way.

Read more:
The government has revealed its plans to get Britain building again. Some of them might just work

Environmental experts have cautiously welcomed the general principles and approach of the nature restoration fund. But there has also been concern about whether the plan is well enough thought through. There are also questions on how well it will integrate with other schemes.

A widespread worry is for the future of biodiversity net gain – which includes measures for creating and improving habitat banks using biodiversity units, effectively a form of “nature market”. This approach sets a target of 10% for biodiversity improvement based upon the combined distinctness, condition and significance of affected habitats over the lifetime of the development. But these measures are only just getting started.

The concern is that providers of sites for these habitat banks – which might be councils, landowners, charities or private businesses, for example – might get cold feet and pull out if they can’t be certain that their plans will be compatible with the nature restoration fund.

The Thames Basin Heaths scheme has been protecting the breeding grounds of nightingales.
Erni/Shutterstock

There is concern, too, about how payments from the nature restoration fund would be calculated. These will need to be locally appropriate and not pit nature restoration and biodiversity net gain against each other if, for example, landowners are forced to choose a particular scheme for their land that they are then committed to for decades. With two parallel systems in play, the relationship between them must be crystal clear, otherwise shared goals could be missed.

Another question is whether Natural England can be both regulator and financial beneficiary of the new scheme. There have been calls from some of those already involved in nature markets for some form of independent oversight.

And it will also be vital that the new scheme respects what’s known as the “mitigation hierarchy”. This hierarchy aims to avoid, reduce and then mitigate any impacts on nature on-site in that order. Then developers should consider off-site measures in areas where there could be greater gains for biodiversity.

But a danger here is that this could disconnect people from nature even further by mitigating ecological loss miles away from the site of the damage. This disconnection is considered to be a critical underlying cause of biodiversity loss.

There is much to like about the nature restoration fund, but there is a risk that little will be achieved without the government showing genuine ambition and allocating enough money and staff to properly monitor and enforce it over the long term. Only time will tell whether it achieves the government’s goal of speeding up development.

At the moment, it is not clear how the fund will complement similar schemes and there is a danger of creating a complex patchwork in nature restoration funding. But if it works well, it could provide a richer funding ecosystem for nature recovery – a much-needed boost for England’s nature-depleted landscape. Läs mer…

The history of medicine is filled with remedies that, viewed through a modern lens, seem perplexing, misguided or downright macabre. Among these is “mumia” — a medicinal substance derived from mummified human remains.

From the 12th to the 17th century, physicians across Europe prescribed powdered mummy as a cure-all for ailments ranging from internal bleeding and broken bones to epilepsy and melancholia.

Once regarded as a potent elixir infused with the life force of the ancients, mumia was a staple in apothecaries, sought after by the wealthy and recommended by the learned. Yet, as medical knowledge evolved, so too did attitudes toward this unusual remedy, and by the 18th century, it had largely faded into obscurity.

The belief in mumia’s healing power was deeply rooted in prevailing medical theories of the time. One such theory was the doctrine of signatures, which held that natural substances resembled the ailments they were meant to cure.

Mummified flesh, preserved for centuries, seemed an obvious candidate for treating decay, wounds and internal deterioration. Another influential idea was vitalism, the notion that life force could be transferred from one body to another, particularly from a preserved human to a living patient.

Adding to this was the European fascination with the medical traditions of the Islamic world. Arabic physicians such as Avicenna had described the therapeutic use of bitumen – a naturally occurring tar-like substance also called mūmiyā – that had medicinal applications in wound healing.

When these texts were translated into Latin, European scholars mistakenly conflated mūmiyā with Egyptian mummies, assuming that the embalmed dead were imbued with similar restorative properties. The result was a booming trade in ground-up human remains, with mummies sourced from Egyptian tombs, grave robbers and even local execution sites.

Grave robbers got in on the racket.
David Leshem/Shutterstock

Mumia was prescribed for an astonishing array of conditions. Physicians believed it could speed up healing, prevent infection and even cure epilepsy. Ingested in powdered form or mixed into tinctures, it was recommended for internal bleeding, strokes and tuberculosis. Some suggested it could ward off melancholy or restore youthful vitality, making it a popular remedy among the European elite.

Apothecaries stocked mummy powder alongside other human-derived medicines such as powdered skull (cranium humanum) and distilled human fat (axungia hominis).

The more ancient the remains, the more potent they were thought to be. However, as the demand for mumia outstripped the supply of genuine Egyptian mummies, opportunistic traders turned to more recent corpses – some even resorting to robbing the gallows to meet the market’s needs.

Eventual decline

Despite its widespread use, mumia was not without its detractors. By the 16th century, some physicians began to question both its efficacy and its ethical implications. The Swiss physician Paracelsus (1493–1541) argued that only fresh human remains – not ancient, embalmed flesh – had medicinal value, while others dismissed the practice as nothing more than superstition.

The growing emphasis on empirical science in the 17th and 18th centuries further eroded faith in mumia. As anatomy and pathology advanced, the idea that centuries-old preserved tissue could heal the living seemed increasingly implausible. At the same time, public attitudes toward human remains began to shift.

The rise of Egyptology and archaeological interest in mummies reframed them as historical artefacts rather than medical commodities, making their consumption distasteful even to those who had once sworn by their healing properties.

By the early 18th century, mumia had largely disappeared from medical practice, relegated to the annals of history as an example of medicine’s sometimes gruesome past.

Mumia’s decline serves as a reminder of how medical knowledge evolves, shedding once-revered treatments in favour of evidence-based approaches. Yet, while medicinal cannibalism may seem shocking today, the pursuit of miraculous cures continues. From stem cell therapies to longevity supplements, the desire to harness the essence of life itself persists – albeit with more scientific rigour.

Looking back at the use of mummified medicine, we are reminded that the boundary between science and superstition is not always as clear as we might like to believe. Läs mer…

The ancestors of humans started making tools about 3.3 million years ago. First they made them out of stone, then they switched to bone as a raw material. Until recently, the earliest clear evidence of bone tool making was from sites in Europe, dated to 400,000 years ago. But archaeologists have now found and dated bone tools in Tanzania that are a million years older.

The tools are made from the bones of large animals like hippos and elephants, and have been deliberately shaped to make them useful for butchering large carcasses.

The discovery of bone implements that are the oldest ever found, by far, casts light on human evolution. It shows that our hominin ancestors were able to think about and make this technology a lot earlier than anyone realised.

I am a scientist who co-directs a multidisciplinary research project team at the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, focusing on hominin evolution. Our project’s main goal has been to investigate the changes in hominin technology and behaviour that happened between 1.66 million and 1.4 million years ago.

We’re interested in this time period because it marks a pivotal change in human technology, from the rudimentary stone knives and cores of the Oldowan culture to the more advanced crafted stone handaxes of the Acheulean culture.

We found the Olduvai bone tools in 2018 and recently described them in the journal Nature. They show that by 1.5 million years ago, our ancestors (Homo erectus) had already developed the cognitive abilities required to transfer skills from making stone tools to making bone tools.

This leap in human history was a game-changer because it allowed early hominins to overcome survival challenges in landscapes where suitable stone materials were scarce.

Tools at Olduvai

Olduvai Gorge is a Unesco World Heritage site. It became well known in 1959 through the pioneering work of palaeontologists Louis and Mary Leakey, whose discoveries of early human remains reshaped our understanding of human evolution. The site offers an unparalleled window into human history, spanning nearly 2 million years.

Read more:
Finds in Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge reveal how ancient humans adapted to change

Aside from fossilised bones, it has yielded the most detailed record of stone tool cultures in the world. It has documented the evolution from the simple chopping tools and stone knives of the Oldowan industry (about 2 million years ago) to the more advanced Acheulean tools (1.7 million years ago), such as handaxes, cleavers, picks and spheroids and then on – through arrowheads, points and blades (about 200,000 years ago) to the micro-blades of the Later Stone Age (about 17,000 years ago).

All these tools provide a glimpse into the ingenuity and cultural advancements of our early ancestors.

And now the picture has new detail.

Our team uncovered 27 ancient bone tools during excavations at the T69 Complex, FLK West site at Olduvai. We know how old they are because we found them securely embedded underground where they had been left 1.5 million years ago, along with thousands of stone artefacts and fossilised bones. We dated them using geochronological techniques.

Reopening of Trench 69 at Olduvai Gorge in 2020. After each field season, archaeological trenches are backfilled.
Photo: J.K. Njau, Author provided (no reuse)

Unlike stone, bone shafts crack and break in a way that allows the systematic production of elongated, well-shaped artifacts. Flaking them by hitting them with another object – a process called knapping – results in pointed tools that would be ideal for butchering, chopping and other tasks.

The knapped tools we found were made from large shaft fragments that came from the limb bones of elephants and hippos, and were found at hippo butchery sites. Hominins likely brought elephant bones to the site on a regular basis, and obtained limb bones from butchered hippos at the site itself.

What Homo erectus knew

The find shows that 1.5 million years ago, Homo erectus could apply knapping skills to bone. Homo erectus, regarded as the evolutionary successor to the smaller-brained Homo habilis, left a lasting imprint on history. Its fossils, found at Olduvai, offer a glimpse into a span of about a million years, stretching from 1.5 million to roughly 500,000 years ago.

Now we know that these hominins not only understood the physical properties of bones but also knew about skeletal anatomy. They could identify and select bones suitable for flaking. And they knew which animals had skeletons large enough to craft reliable tools after the animals’ death.

Read more:
Large mammals shaped the evolution of humans: here’s why it happened in Africa

We don’t know exactly why they chose bones as a raw material. It may have been that suitable stone material was scarce, or they recognised that bones provided a better grip and were more durable.

Fossil extraction and preparation is conducted at Olduvai Gorge field labs. Here, Naibo Mesi and Agustino Songita work on one of the bone tools from Trench 69 Complex.
Photo: R. Peters., Author provided (no reuse)

Why haven’t such old bone tools been found before? The answer is likely that they are destroyed by weathering, abrasion from water transport, trampling and scavenger activity. Organic materials don’t always get time to fossilise. Also, analysts were not used to looking for bone tools among fossils.

This discovery will likely encourage researchers to pay closer attention to the subtle signs of bone knapping in fossil assemblages. This way we will learn more about the evolution of human technology and behaviour. Läs mer…

Death threats, kidnapping, unlawful detention, torture and assassination are some of the crimes being committed against journalists in Nigeria, according to a recent report. Another recent report details how the police and politicians are responsible for 70% of these harassment cases.

They point to the increased level of threats that Nigerian journalists endure in their fourth estate role, serving as the voice of the people and holding government to account.

This isn’t new. The harassment of journalists is baked into Nigerian history. But today journalists are also attracting online threats and harassment from members of the public.

I teach and research media and politics, with a focus on online journalism in Nigeria. What’s clear is that the digital age has brought with it a complex relationship not just between journalists and the state, but also with citizens.

All these parties need to turn down the heat, in the interests of free and fair information, particularly in a young democracy like Nigeria.

A long history of violence

The history of Nigerian journalism is characterised by violence from British colonial powers, from 1859 when the first newspaper was established, and also from indigenous politicians. There’s always been a suspicion that a free press could empower ordinary citizens and cause a shift in the power base.

This isn’t unfounded. Journalism contributed to ending colonialism. But, after independence in 1960, the political class feared that an unfettered press would be difficult to control. Particularly when the country came under oppressive military rule from 1966 to 1999.

There was always a fair amount of goodwill towards the press from citizens. But the ownership and control of major media houses by prominent Nigerian politicians, alongside the rise of social media, has changed the picture.

The public used to act as the buffer for journalists, defending them from the attacks of government officials. Now some Nigerians have joined in attacking and harassing journalists in Nigeria.

Online harassment

We know that journalists in Nigeria under-report the harassment they receive. Many don’t view acute forms of harassment – verbal abuse, online disrespect and maltreatment – as an issue. One of our studies found they regard this as mere online banter, verbal sparring and attention seeking. But dismissing harassment doesn’t make it go away or stop. It just makes it worse in frequency and form.

Read more:
Threats to press freedom are taking on different forms across Africa

Our studies indicate that online harassment of journalists is prevalent and escalating. This type of harassment is usually sustained and it often moves from one social media platform to another.

In some cases, it spills from online to offline. The burning of the Television Continental station in Lagos in 2020 is just one example. The harassment is usually personal. Threats to the lives and safety of journalists are becoming common.

Data Boys and corruption

Nigerian journalists have reported that the harassers particularly target investigative and political reports, as well as perceived unethical conduct by journalists.

The result is that political reporting is becoming difficult. A critical report about a politician makes the journalist an enemy of the politician. The politician will then unleash their supporters and paid influencers (known as “Data Boys”) to harass and hassle the journalist.

The Data Boys phenomenon as we know it today began during Nigeria’s 2015 general elections. Data Boys are groups of young people on a politician’s payroll. They help to promote the politician’s image online and generally do their bidding. The politician sends them money to buy internet data and shares promotional “news” about themself. The Data Boys are also paid to attack any perceived enemy of the politician.

It’s an increasingly successful political tactic in Nigeria. As a result, journalists have started censoring themselves.

Data Boys aside, we asked ordinary Nigerians who reported engaging in online harassment why they picked on journalists. They indicated that perceived journalistic malpractice was their main reason. They accused journalists of being part of the problem because they believed many were corrupt and in the pay of politicians. Adding fuel to the fire is that Nigerian politicians are also often media owners.

Some solutions

One of the reasons that a culture of harassment continues is the failure of law enforcement. Those who harass journalists are not made to account for their actions. Strengthening harassment laws in Nigeria would give law enforcement the tools needed to curb it.

There are no explicit laws around online harassment in Nigeria, just sexual and physical assault laws. This has to change if journalists are to be protected. All respondents in our studies, both journalists and the public, highlighted the law as a cardinal factor to fight harassment.

Another solution is that journalists need to be accountable, transparent and ethical. Journalists themselves have raised these concerns about their profession.

Yet in our studies journalists did not highlight transparency or an improved code of conduct as ways to improve the harassment situation in Nigeria.

Read more:
Western media outlets are trying to fix their racist, stereotypical coverage of Africa. Is it time African media did the same?

Their detachment can come off as arrogant and has the potential to worsen hostility towards them. All the suggested solutions to online harassment made by journalists in our studies were external to them, like media sensitisation campaigns, improved workplace security and proper punishment for offenders. Their attitudes, we found, could be misconstrued as lacking self-reflection or empathy.

Journalists, their harassers and politicians will all need to make changes or be brought to book if the problem is to be solved. Until then, online harassment is harming journalism as a profession in Nigeria. And this has the potential to have a negative impact on democracy. Läs mer…

An estimated 1 in 10 people worldwide have diabetes. Africa is the region with the fastest growth and it’s estimated that the number of people on the continent with diabetes will more than double in the next 20 years, increasing to about 55 million people by 2045.

Having diabetes has serious consequences for health and is associated with increased risk of developing diseases related to damage to the heart (heart attacks), blood vessels (strokes, foot ulcers), kidneys (chronic kidney failure), and the nervous system (blindness, loss of sensation).

When it comes to nerve damage, it typically affects long nerve fibres that supply the feet and can sometimes affect fibres that supply the hands too (a so-called glove and stocking distribution).

It is the nerve fibres that detect sensations such as touch and temperature that are often worst affected, resulting in numbness. The numbness that develops can be a nightmare for people and is often described as their “feet feeling dead”.

A peculiarity of this numbness is that it may be accompanied by intractable pain. This type of pain, resulting from damage to sensory nerve fibres, is called neuropathic pain.

As scientists in the field of pain and pain management we work on neuropathic pain in people living with diabetes and its management. In this article we aim to draw attention to the problem and discuss how it can be managed.

Nerve damage

It has been estimated that up to 50% of people with diabetes will develop damage to peripheral nerves during their lifetime, and up to 50% will experience pain because of that nerve damage.

The predictors of developing nerve damage are well established. Older age, increased duration of diabetes, and poor control of blood glucose concentration are the main culprits. What determines whether the nerve damage is associated with pain is largely unknown.

Neuropathic pain is often described as a “burning” pain, and is frequently
accompanied by other sensations such as “pins and needles”, and pain that feels like stabbing, shooting, electric-like shocks, and deep aching.

In some people there is very little or no numbness. In these people pain can often be triggered by gentle touch and movement across the skin (for example, bed sheets brushing across a foot, putting on socks), and cool and warm temperatures that are not normally felt as painful.

Sometimes my feet will hurt really badly and I can’t get up and can hardly walk. – Anonymous patient

Having such intractable pain has devastating consequences for quality of life.

Pain sufferers have less social interaction with family and friends, and find it much more difficult to enjoy their favourite activities. Sleep is significantly disrupted.

Having neuropathic pain is associated with high rates of anxiety and depression. To make matters worse, the sleep disruption, anxiety and depression may feed back into a vicious cycle to worsen and maintain the pain.

There are days when I’d really like to go somewhere or do something and just
don’t go. I know it will hurt. There’s no point in doing it. – Anonymous patient

Medications to manage the pain

Neuropathic pain is not responsive to the medications used to treat conditions such as headaches and joint pains (for example, paracetamol and ibuprofen).

Instead, neuropathic pain is responsive to medications that in some cases are also used to treat conditions such as depression and epilepsy.

Examples include:

low doses of tricyclic antidepressants (for example, amitriptyline)
a class of antidepressants called serotonin and noradrenaline re-uptake inhibitors (for example, duloxetine)
anti-seizure drugs like gabapentinoids (for example, gabapentin and pregabalin).

However, there is very little information to guide doctors to predict which drug will work best for a patient.

So, often finding the correct treatment is a trial-and-error approach, which can be frustrating for both patients and doctors.

Coping mechanisms

Chronic pain management is also about teaching people to cope with their pain so that they get back to enjoying their lives and are no longer consumed by the pain.

Such interventions include the practice of mindfulness, cognitive behavioural therapy, and other self-management activities specifically designed for people with chronic pain.

With the rapidly growing number of individuals with diabetes, it is more important than ever that we detect and treat the pain caused by nerve fibre damage.

Public education and increased awareness of this painful consequence of diabetes will hopefully encourage affected people to seek early medical attention, thus allowing management of the condition, maintaining well-being and restoring function. Läs mer…

Canadians head to the polls on April 28. Like other recent general elections, both in Canada and around the world, this federal election campaign is sure to be characterized by polarized misinformation.

We all have someone in our families or social circles who has political opinions grounded in false or misleading information. Whether the source of that information is Russian bots on social media, high-profile podcasters or Fox News, it’s easy to dread election-time conversations as misinformation strains our most important relationships.

But perhaps we can approach these conversations as an opportunity to push back against growing polarization in our communities.

My research shows that polarization and misinformation often go hand in hand, and when they do, the information being spread is strongly resistant to being corrected by way of evidence.

But when we truly begin to listen to the people who believe misinformation, we can often help counter false claims. So in this upcoming election, how can we push back against election misinformation when we hear it? Let’s examine some strategies.

Read more:
5 expert tips to protect yourself from online misinformation

The role of anxiety

Most people think that others who believe misinformation will change their minds if provided with the right evidence, but that’s simply not true.

People have good reasons for not wanting to change their minds, even when confronted with contradictory facts. One of the key personality traits linked to the belief in misinformation turns out to be anxiety. This can manifest in ways that resist correction.

For example, most of us feel anxious when we have to hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time. So if we already believe misinformation and are confronted with evidence to the contrary, we may reject the evidence to avoid the dissonance of managing both beliefs.

Additionally, people might believe something because others in their social group believe it, meaning there is social anxiety associated with rejecting the group’s belief, even if it’s wrong.

Finally, anxiety about the future can drive people to accept misinformation that helps to relieve those fears.

Taken together, this means that correcting political misinformation, which involves all three of the above triggers — self, social and future anxiety — cannot be accomplished solely by providing evidence. We need to mitigate these anxieties while engaging in gentle correction since outright correcting can make the anxieties worse.

A person uses a computer keyboard. Online misinformation can run rampant during high-stakes election campaigns.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graeme Roy

The ‘AIMS’ method

Motivational interviewing is a proven method of pushing back against another type of polarizing misinformation: health misinformation.

One particular approach to motivational interviewing, known as the AIMS method, has been successfully tested in Canada for countering vaccine misinformation.

AIMS stands for Announce, Inquire, Mirror and Secure. It provides a way to address misinformation while building the sort of connection and trust that people need to reduce the anxiety that is the trigger for believing misinformation in the first place.

The first step, Announce, is where the topic is approached. In the medical world, this usually occurs when a doctor announces that it’s time for a vaccine, but in the world of political misinformation, the announcement doesn’t have to come from a professional.

Health-care workers watch from a window as demonstrators gather outside Toronto General Hospital in September 2021 to protest COVID-19 vaccines, COVID-19 vaccine passports and COVID-19 related restrictions.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young

Instead, Announce can occur when the person you are talking to announces a piece of political misinformation, like the claim that the government is vaccinating people for the purposes of controlling the population. Announce is basically where the process of addressing misinformation begins.

Inquire is the step where motivational interviewing really begins to differ from a conventional approach of simply providing evidence to back up a false claim. In this second step, it’s important to ask questions, and approach the misinformation with a sense of curiosity.

Basically, as you probe more and more deeply, you’re trying to understand the anxieties that are driving the misinformation belief.

As you ask questions, you begin to also engage in the third step, Mirror. Mirroring means checking in, and repeating what you’re hearing so that the person you are talking to recognizes they’re being heard. At this stage, you can begin to introduce pieces of evidence that disprove the claims being made, but only after you truly understand the person’s concerns and can reflect them back.

It’s also important to manage how you introduce contradictory evidence. It must be done with compassion and a gentle but reassuring manner.

Finally, when all the concerns have been addressed, you can begin the final step, which is to Secure trust. Here you can follow up on the announcement that sparked the discussion — the original piece of misinformation — and see if the person you’re talking to now feels differently than they did before.

Importantly, you may not be successful at securing this step in just one conversation, but if you have conducted the other steps properly, you will have built important trust that, over time, is more likely to help you counter future misinformation with the person you’re talking to.

Misinformation about COVID-19 on a smartphone during the pandemic.
(Shutterstock)

Preserving relationships

Combating any misinformation, and especially political misinformation, is not a quick or easy process. It may have to take place in repeated discussions over a long period of time.

Political misinformation is particularly difficult to counter because political views are often tied deeply to people’s self-identity, and also because political misinformation is often shared within social groups.

But if you engage in motivated interviewing this election season, you may make a small difference. At the very least, you will help to preserve relationships with friends and loved ones that are often frayed when political misinformation enters the picture. Läs mer…

In 1990, George Franklin was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison based on the testimony of his 28-year-old daughter Eileen. She described seeing him rape her best friend and then smash her skull with a rock.

When Eileen testified at her father’s trial, her memory of the murder was relatively fresh. It was less than a year old. Yet the murder happened 20 years earlier, when she was 8 years old.

How can you have a one-year-old memory of something that happened 20 years ago? According to the prosecution, Eileen repressed her memory of the murder. Then much later she recovered it in complete detail.

Can a memory of something so harrowing disappear for two decades and then resurface in a reliable form?

This case launched a huge debate between memory researchers like me who argue there is no credible scientific evidence that repressed memories exist and practicing clinicians who claim that repressed memories are real.

This controversy is not merely an academic one. Real people’s lives have been shattered by newly recollected traumatic experiences from childhood. I’ve seen this firsthand as a memory expert who consults on legal cases involving defendants accused of crimes they allegedly committed years or even decades ago. Often the only evidence linking the defendant to the crime is a recovered memory.

But the scientific community disagrees about the existence of the phenomenon of repressed memory.

Freud was the father of repression

Nineteenth-century psychoanalytic theorist Sigmund Freud developed the concept of repression. He considered it a defense mechanism people use to protect themselves from traumatic experiences that become too overwhelming.

Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
Paul De La Roussert/Wikimedia Commons

The idea is that repression buries memories of trauma in your unconscious, where they – unlike other memories – reside unknown to you. They remain hidden, in a pristine, fixed form.

In Freud’s view, repressed memories make themselves known by leaking out in mental and physical symptoms – symptoms that can be relieved only through recovering the traumatic memory in a safe psychological environment.

In the 1980s, increasing numbers of therapists became concerned about the prevalence of child sexual abuse and the historical tendencies to dismiss or hide the maltreatment of children. This shift gave new life to the concept of repression.

Rise of repressed memory recovery

Therapists in this camp told clients that their symptoms, such as anxiety, depression or eating disorders, were the result of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse that needed to be remembered to heal. To recover these memories, therapists used a range of techniques such as hypnosis, suggestive questioning, repeated imagining, bodywork and group sessions.

Did recovered-memory therapy work? Many people who entered therapy for common mental health issues did come out with new and unexpected memories of childhood sexual abuse and other trauma, without physical evidence or corroboration from others.

But were these memories real?

The notion of repressed memories runs counter to decades of scientific evidence demonstrating that traumatic events tend to be very well remembered over long intervals of time. Many victims of documented trauma, ranging from the Holocaust to combat exposure, torture and natural disasters, do not appear to be able to block out their memories.

In fact, trauma sometimes is too well remembered, as in the case of post-traumatic stress disorder. Recurrent and intrusive traumatic memories are a core symptom of PTSD.

No memory ≠ repressed memory

There are times when victims of trauma may not remember what happened. But this doesn’t necessarily mean the memory has been repressed. There are a range of alternative explanations for not remembering traumatic experiences.

Trauma, like anything you experience, can be forgotten as the result of memory decay. Details fade with time, and retrieving the right remnants of experience becomes increasingly difficult if not impossible.

Someone might make the deliberate choice to not think about upsetting events. Psychologists call this motivated forgetting or suppression.

There also are biological causes of forgetting such as brain injury and substance abuse.

Trauma also can interfere with the making of a memory in the first place. When stress becomes too big or too prolonged, attention can shift from the experience itself to attempts to regulate emotion, endure what’s happening or even survive. This narrow focus can result in little to no memory of what happened.

A forgotten memory isn’t just waiting around to be rediscovered – it’s gone.
malerapaso/E+ via Getty Images

False memories

If science rejects the notion of repressed memories, there’s still one question to confront: Where do newly recollected trauma memories, such as those triggered in recovered-memory therapy, come from?

All memories are subject to distortions when you mistakenly incorporate expectations, assumptions or information from others that was not part of the original event.

Memory researchers contend that memory recovery techniques might actually create false memories of things that never happened rather than resurrect existing memories of real experiences.

To study this possibility, researchers asked participants to elaborate on events that never happened using the same sorts of suggestive questioning techniques used by recovered-memory therapists.

What they found was startling. They were able to induce richly detailed false memories of a wide range of childhood traumatic experiences, such as choking, hospitalization and being a victim of a serious animal attack, in almost one-third of participants.

These researchers were intentionally planting false memories. But I don’t think intention would be necessary on the part of a sympathetic therapist working with a suffering client.

Are the memory wars over?

The belief in repressed memories remains well entrenched among the general public and mental health professionals. More than half believe that traumatic experiences can become repressed in the unconscious, where they lurk, waiting to be uncovered.

This remains the case even though in his later work, Freud revised his original concept of repression to argue that it doesn’t work on actual memories of experiences, but rather involves the inhibition of certain impulses, desires and fantasies. This revision rarely makes it into popular conceptions of repression.

As evidence of the current widespread belief in repressed memories, in the past few years several U.S. states and European countries have extended or abolished the statute of limitations for the prosecution of sexual crimes, which allows for testimony based on allegedly recovered memories of long-ago crimes.

Given the ease with which researchers can create false childhood memories, one of the unforeseen consequences of these changes is that falsely recovered memories of abuse might find their way into court – potentially leading to unfounded accusations and wrongful convictions. Läs mer…