History

Washington Post - For decades, scientists who studied early modern humans believed that our ancestors initially inhabited only small areas of Africa, the savannas of the eastern and southern part of the continent, and then moved north into Asia, Europe and beyond. In this view, early humans bypassed West and Central Africa, especially tropical forests. These areas, the argument went, were populated much later.But now, a growing group of researchers has cast doubt on this narrative. Working in Senegal, Cameroon, Malawi and elsewhere, they are uncovering evidence that early humans spread across much more of Africa before venturing elsewhere. This work has moved the field beyond the old out-of-Africa narrative and is transforming our understanding of how multiple groups of early modern humans intermingled and spread across the continent, providing a more nuanced picture of our species’ complex origins.

“It’s becoming more and more clear that humans didn't originate in a single population in one region of Africa,” says Eleanor Scerri, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany. “If we really want to understand human evolution, we need to look at all of the African continent.”

NY Times -In “The Secret Lives of Numbers,” Kate Kitagawa, a mathematics historian, and Timothy Revell, a science writer, intend by reasoned and scholarly means to overthrow the “assumption that the European way of doing things is superior.”Their book begins with prehistoric counting methods (one of the earliest was based on the number 60, unlike our own base-10 system) and goes on to the fourth-century Alexandrian women Pandrosion, a geometer who solved the difficult problem of doubling the volume of a cube (ancient mathematicians lacked the algebra that makes this straightforward), and Hypatia, who wrote mathematical commentaries, including on Apollonius’ “Conics,” an investigation of circles, ellipses and other shapes. Kitagawa and Revell speculate that Johannes Kepler, who described the orbits of the planets in the 17th century, may have been influenced by her contributions.

Overlooked or forgotten accomplishments by women mathematicians are a recurring theme. There is a chapter on Sophie Kowalevski, a 19th-century Russian who became the first woman math professor, in Sweden. Employing methods that no one before her had thought of using, Kowalevski solved a recalcitrant problem involving the mathematics of a spinning top.