It’s 35°C in the shade, in the middle of Europe’s June heatwave, and Alexander Janas has just emerged from the Hohle Fels cave in southwestern Germany, where the mercury reads 9 or 10°C. “It’s wonderful to be inside,” says Janas, an archaeologist at the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and the Paleoenvironment in Tübingen, Germany.
Christopher Nolan’s 2026 film The Odyssey puts a 21st-century spin on Homer’s epic tale.Credit: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures/Shutterstock In He OdysseyHomer records the first imaginings of autonomous ships guided by what appears to modern readers to be remarkably artificial intelligence. The ships of the Phaeacians, which carry Odysseus home to Ithaca, “know every city, every
Prehistoric cave paintings in a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia.Credit: Mangiwau/Getty Photography Last September, a train left Surakarta, in central Java, Indonesia. On board was Eduard Pop, a paleoanthropologist at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands, and a specialist in homo erectus – a hominid, closely related to our own species, that emerged almost