Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. In 1929, the American anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir told a group of unwitting study participants ...

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An informative and important study of the lessons to be learned from past civilisations Today the world faces a water crisis. One billion people (a seventh of the population) don't have access to ...

The Prehistory of the Mind by Steven Mithen, Thames & Hudson, £16.95, ISBN 050005081 3 Reviewed by Roger Lewin * STEVEN Mithen takes on no small task in this fascinating book, The Prehistory of the ...

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or ...

New research has pinpointed the likely time in prehistory when humans first began to speak. Analysis by British archaeologist Steven Mithen suggests that early humans first developed rudimentary ...

Lucky Chris Stringer, to have spent the last forty years immersed in new discoveries about the origin of our species. I don’t suppose that when he began his PhD research in 1970, setting off on a tour ...

"Useless ... quite different from language ... a technology not an adaptation". This is Steven Pinker's view of the importance of music in human evolution. Needless ...

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. What came first, language or music? Does linguistic ability diminish musical ability? How did ...

Sometimes the surprise is in discovering just how much we don’t know. In 2008 a bone from a child’s little finger was found in Denisova Cave in the Atlai Mountains of Siberia. Few other bones were ...