Pathways, April 2026

Each month, we keep track of the different paths that modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we recently found in our modern life.

Our April 2026 Pathways digest delves into some recent work in anthropology, particularly the discipline’s narratives of the emergence of modern humans.

In a recent essay in Aeon, Vivek V. Venkataraman unravels the multiple meanings of the “man the hunter” theory of human origins, disentangling myth and science. As he observes, “The issue isn’t whether hunting shaped humanity.” We know that it did. Rather, the issue is that "evolutionary explanations are only as good as the linguistic vehicles that carry them.” 

Perhaps the most significant recent finding in the story of human origins occurred last August, when Brian Villmoare, an anthropologist at UNLV, discovered fossils in Ethiopia that showed that “Australopithecus, and the oldest specimens of Homo, coexisted between 2.6 and 2.8 million years ago at the same place in Africa.” The implication, as Villmoare observes, is that

“We used to think of human evolution as fairly linear, with a steady march from an ape-like ancestor to modern Homo sapiens. Instead, humans have branched out multiple times into different niches. Our pattern of evolution is not particularly unusual, and what has happened to humans has happened to every other tree of life…Nature experimented with different ways to be a human as the climate became drier in East Africa, and earlier more ape-like species went extinct.”

Just a few weeks ago, scientists published a paper about a Neanderthal infant from Amud Cave in Northern Israel. The infant “offers a rare case where both teeth and bones are preserved well enough for direct comparison. The mismatch between age estimates based on teeth and those based on body size shows a growth pattern different from modern humans within the first months of life.” This suggests that Neandertals had a unique “developmental strategy” in the early part of life that differentiates them from modern humans.

Another study, published in Science this April, shows that malaria induced by Plasmodium falciparum had a profound impact on early humans by influencing where members of our species lived in Sub-Sahara Africa from roughly 74,000 to 5,000 years ago. The results reveal that this disease dispersed early humans, thereby shaping genetic exchange between different groups, and also “highlight the importance of considering disease distributions when modeling past human demography, demonstrating that factors beyond climate underlay population structure, patterns of habitat choice, and dispersal.” 

That last assertion—that factors beyond climate ought to be considered when we try to reconstruct population structures of prior humans—points to what was at one time called the “law of environmental limitation,” a theory that much recent work in anthropology has continually overturned. It was this theory that led anthropologists to believe that the Maya lowlands, comprising southern Mexico, Belize, and northern Guatemala, was more likely to support small tribes than a complex civilization because of its thin soils and thus limited ability to produce large amounts of food. But as Marcus Haraldsson notes in the Guardian, with the decoding of Maya hieroglyphs in the 1980s and now the emergence of Lidar technology (“light detection and ranging”), we now have a much better sense of the extent of Maya civilization. Where previous estimates put the total population at 2 million people during the classic era (from roughly AD 600-900), anthropologists like Francisco Estrada-Belli have now concluded that their population was at least five times larger, between 9.5 and 16 million.

And Lidar is only one of many shiny new tools that anthropologists now use to decode the past. As Jacob Mikanowski wrote in an essay about “the new science of history” a few years ago, “scientists’ ability to extract information from material remains has grown exponentially” due not just to using old techniques with new levels of precision but also due to brand new methods for dating and imaging. This means that “Today, historians are not only reading manuscripts; they are testing the pages themselves to track the genes of the flocks of cows and sheep whose skins were used to make the parchment.” The “new science of history” promises many new discoveries. 

Last, a bonus video that narrates the emergence of distinctly modern forms of storytelling in the nineteenth century. As Catherine Nichols argues, the good-versus-evil narratives of our day (think Star Wars and Harry Potter) are basically nonexistent in the West’s folk tales prior to the Brothers Grimm. Did modernity invent the “bad guy”?

See you next month!