Social sciences

Genetic data for 13 Neanderthals from 2 Middle Palaeolithic sites in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia presented provide insights into the social organization of an isolated Neanderthal community at the easternmost extent of their known range.

Archaeogenetic study of ancient DNA from medieval northwestern Europeans reveals substantial increase of continental northern European ancestry in Britain, suggesting mass migration across the North Sea during the Early Middle Ages.

Around 31,000 years ago, a young individual from Borneo had part of their left lower leg surgically amputated, probably as a child, and lived for another 6–9 years after amputation.

A dynamic optimization approach using plant species data from 458 forest ecoregions suggests a strategy for when and where to conserve forests globally over the next 50 years to maximize the conservation of plant biodiversity.

Analyses of data on 21 billion friendships from Facebook in the United States reveal associations between social capital and economic mobility.

Social disconnection across socioeconomic lines is explained by both differences in exposure to people with high socioeconomic status and friending bias—the tendency for people to befriend peers with similar socioeconomic status even conditional on exposure.

男人和女人的数量之间的差异listed as authors on scientific papers and inventors on patents is at least partly attributable to unacknowledged contributions by women scientists.

Correcting public misperceptions about the views of doctors on the COVID-19 vaccines can have lasting impacts on public uptake of the COVID-19 vaccines.

Two remarkably large sites in southwest Amazonia, belonging to the Casarabe culture, include complex civic-ceremonial architecture and large water-management infrastructure, representing a type of tropical low-density urbanism that has not previously been described in Amazonia.

Strategically perceiving and conceiving problems facilitates the effective use of limited cognitive resources.

Replacing 20% of per-capita ruminant consumption with microbial protein can offset future increases in global pasture area, cut annual deforestation and related CO₂emissions in half, and lower methane emissions.

Psychosocial measures improve the cost-effectiveness of multi-faceted interventions against extreme poverty.

Human genetic variants that impair genes that are intolerant of damaging genetic variation are associated with lower reproductive success that is probably mediated by genetically associated cognitive and behavioural traits, particularly in males.

Machine-learning algorithms can take advantage of survey and mobile phone data to help to identify people most in need of aid, complementing traditional methods for targeting humanitarian assistance.

Ithaca—a deep neural network for textual restoration, geographical attribution and dating of ancient Greek inscriptions—collaboratively aids historians’ study of damaged texts.

A cultural assembly of traits at a 40,000-year-old archaeological site at Xiamabei, China supports a model of repeated early human expansions, cultural exchange and innovation in east Asia.

When people learn more about a stranger, they think a stranger knows more about them, and when tested in a field experiment, this shifted residents’ perceptions of police officers’ knowledge of illegal activity.

DNA analysis of 6 individuals from eastern and south-central Africa spanning the past approximately 18,000 years, and of 28 previously published ancient individuals, provides genetic evidence supporting hypotheses of increasing regionalization at the end of the Pleistocene.

A global assessment shows that increases in the number of wet days and extreme daily rainfall adversely affect economic growth, particularly in high-income nations and via the services and manufacturing sectors.

Disturbances in the radiocarbon record anchor a precisely dated archaeological stratigraphy of a medieval trading emporium in Denmark in time, revealing that the Viking expansion was associated with competition for trade routes rather than with raids.

Archaeological and ancient DNA analyses of 35 individuals entombed at Hazleton North long cairn approximately 5,700 years ago are used to reconstruct kinship practices in Early Neolithic Britain.

By tracing the changing size of ostrich eggshell beads, climate is shown to have an important role in influencing when and where regional African populations interacted.

A massive field study whereby many different treatments are tested synchronously in one large sample using a common objectively measured outcome, termed a megastudy, was performed to examine the ability of interventions to increase gym attendance by American adults.

A new method quantifies the social makeup of online communities, and applying it to 14 years of commenting patterns on Reddit shows increased polarization in 2016, driven by new users to the platform.

Data collected from crisis helplines during the COVID-19 pandemic show that pandemic-related issues replaced rather than exacerbated underlying anxieties, and demonstrate that helpline data are useful indicators of public mental health.

In this Perspective, a group representing a range of stakeholders makes the case for a set of five proposed globally applicable ethical guidelines for ancient human DNA research.

Analysis of ancient proteins suggests that Early Bronze Age dairying and horse domestication catalysed eastern Yamnaya migrations.

Principles from the field of fair division are used to develop selection algorithms for citizens’ assemblies that produce panels that are representative of the population while simultaneously selecting individuals with near-equal probabilities.

Two randomized controlled trials demonstrate the ability of text-based behavioural ‘nudges’ to improve the uptake of COVID-19 vaccines, especially when designed to make participants feel ownership over their vaccine dose.

To enable net-negative CO₂emissions, the repayment of previously accrued carbon debt by establishing the responsibility for the net removal of CO₂by carbon-emitting parties through carbon removal obligations is necessary.

The ability of people to understand the thoughts and actions of others—known as social sensing—can be combined with computational social science to advance research into human sociality.

这个角度讨论了挑战的社会al science practices imposed by the ubiquity of algorithms and large-scale measurement and what should—and should not—be measured in societies pervaded by algorithms.

The combination of computational and social sciences requires the integration of explanatory and predictive approaches into ‘integrative modelling’, according to Hofman and colleagues.

The Gaia database is used to identify stars from which astronomers on orbiting planets could see Earth transiting the Sun in the past, present and future.

Observational and experimental studies of people seeking to improve objects, ideas or situations demonstrate that people default to searching for solutions that add new components rather than for solutions that remove existing components.

This Review proposes an interdisciplinary framework for researching climate–society interactions that focuses on the mechanisms through which climate change has influenced societies, and the uncertainties of discerning this influence across different spatiotemporal scales.

与Twitter用户调查和田间试验show that prompting people to think about the accuracy of news sources increases the quality of the news that they share online.

Analyses of a global database reveal that in many developing countries progress in learning remains limited despite increasing enrolment in primary and secondary education, and uncover links between human capital and economic development.

An analysis of the search behaviour of recruiters on a Swiss online recruitment platform shows that jobseekers from minority ethnic groups are less likely to be contacted by recruiters, and also provides evidence of gender-based discrimination.

Estimates of global total biomass (the mass of all living things) and anthopogenic mass (the mass embedded in inanimate objects made by humans) over time show that we are roughly at the timepoint when anthropogenic mass exceeds total biomass.

A model shows that human mobility is organized within hierarchical containers that coincide with familiar scales and that a power-law distribution emerges when movements between different containers are combined.

The authors review how the presence of organized crime in the fisheries sector hinders progress towards the development of a sustainable ocean economy and highlight practical opportunities to address this problem at both the local and the global level.

An epidemiological model that integrates fine-grained mobility networks illuminates mobility-related mechanisms that contribute to higher infection rates among disadvantaged socioeconomic and racial groups, and finds that restricting maximum occupancy at locations is especially effective for curbing infections.

Direct electrical stimulation of the brain in rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) predictably varied subjective valuation and choices, linking valuation and economic decision making to the orbitofrontal cortex.

Local exposure to inequality in low-income areas is positively associated with support for a tax on wealthier individuals to address economic disparities.

A Bayesian age model suggests that human dispersal to the Americas probably began before the Last Glacial Maximum, overlapping with the last dates of appearance for several faunal genera.