A Science-Minded Artist Shrinks the Universe to Human Scale
A Scottish multidisciplinary artist, she has worked with scientists across the globe on exhaustively researched projects, including The Future Library, an anthology of 100 previously unpublished books written by some of the 21st century's most celebrated writers.
In 2022, astronomers helped her count the times the sun has risen since the Earth was formed — to the most accurate level scientists can — for a piece titled '—there lay the Days between—.' Years earlier, she had worked with scientists specializing in light at the firm Osram to develop lightbulbs that simulate the lunar glow.
And yet, 'I never want to go into space,' Paterson said in a video interview. Asked whether her works are portraits of Earth or of us, she said, 'It's going to be us.'
'If all those cosmic sequences hadn't happened, we wouldn't be here breathing and talking together,' she explained.
Ultimately, she said, in all her work, she has always been trying to 'get a little bit closer to that understanding of quite how precious life is.' That lifetime pursuit underpins three current projects: a series of paintings on view in an exhibition in Cumbria, England, and 'Afterlife,' which will soon be installed at the Folkestone Triennial 2025 in Kent, England; and 'True North,' which has taken Paterson from Japan to the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, where she has just completed a residency.
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When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Our species is the last living member of the human family tree. But just 40,000 years ago, Neanderthals walked the Earth, and hundreds of thousands of years before then, our ancestors overlapped with many other hominins — two-legged primate species. This raises several questions: Which other populations and species did our ancestors mate with, and when? And how did this ancient mingling shape who we are today? "Everywhere we've got hominins in the same place, we should assume there's the potential that there's a genetic interaction," Adam Van Arsdale, a biological anthropologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, told Live Science. In other words, different hominin species were having sex — and babies — together. This means our evolutionary family tree is tangled, with still-unknown relatives possibly hiding in the branches. 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Ackermann studies variation and hybridization — the exchange of genes between different groups — across the evolutionary history of hominins, to better understand how genetic and cultural exchange made us human. And she thinks hybridization both within and outside Africa played a significant role in our origins. Evidence of such hybridization has come out in a steady stream since the first Neanderthal genome was sequenced in 2010. That research program, which earned geneticist Svante Pääbo a Nobel Prize in 2022, revealed that H. sapiens and Neanderthals regularly had sex. It also led to the discovery of the Denisovans, a previously unknown population that ranged across Asia from about 200,000 to 30,000 years ago and that also had offspring with both Neanderthals and H. sapiens. "You have so much complexity that it makes no sense to say there was only one origin of sapiens. There can't be one universal model that explains literally every human on Earth." 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When genetic diversity is lost through population isolation and decline, groups may become particularly susceptible to new infections or unable to adapt to new ecological circumstances. For instance, one theory holds that Neanderthal populations declined and eventually went extinct around 40,000 years ago because they lacked genetic diversity due to inbreeding and isolation. Related: Did we kill the Neanderthals? New research may finally answer an age-old question. Discovery of "ghost populations" Some of the newest research goes deeper into evolutionary time, identifying "ghost populations" — human groups that went extinct after contributing genes to our species. Often, archaeologists have no skeletal remains from these populations, but their echoes linger in our genome, and their existence can be gleaned by modeling how genes change over time. For instance, a "mystery population" of up to 50,000 individuals that interbred with our ancestors 300,000 years ago passed along genes that created more connections between brain cells, which may have boosted our brain functioning. The population that hybridized with H. sapiens and helped boost our brains may have been a lineage of Homo erectus. This species was once thought to have disappeared after evolving into H. sapiens in Africa, but anthropologists now think H. erectus survived in parts of Asia until 115,000 years ago. In fact, our evolutionary history may include the mating of populations that had been separated for up to a million years, Van Arsdale said. These "superarchaic" populations are increasingly being discovered as we mine our own genomes and those of our close relatives, Neanderthals and Denisovans. For instance, a genetic study published in 2020 identified a superarchaic population that separated from other human ancestors about 2 million years ago but then interbred with the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans around 700,000 years ago. Experts don't know exactly what genes this superarchaic ghost population shared with our ancestors or who it was, but it may have been a lineage of H. erectus. Evolutionary blank space But there's a large, unmapped region of human evolutionary history — and it's crucial for our identity as a species. The period when H. sapiens was first evolving in Africa, and the more distant period of human evolutionary history on the continent that predates the Homo genus, remains a huge knowledge gap. That's in part because DNA preserves well in caves and other stable environments in frigid areas of the world, like those found in areas of Europe and Asia, while Africa's warmer conditions usually degrade DNA. As a result, the most ancient complete human DNA sequence from Africa is just 18,000 years old. By contrast, a skeleton discovered in northern Spain produced a full mitochondrial genome from a human relative, H. heidelbergensis, who lived more than 300,000 years ago. "Maps of human ancient DNA are overwhelmingly Eurasian data," Van Arsdale said. "And the reality is that's a marginal place in our evolutionary past. So to understand what was happening in the core of Africa would be potentially transformative." This is where current DNA technology falls short. Small hominins that walked on two legs, called australopithecines, evolved around 4.4 million years ago in Africa. And between 3 million and 2 million years ago, our genus, Homo, likely evolved from them. H. sapiens evolved around 300,000 years ago in Africa and then traveled around the world. But given the scarcity of ancient DNA from Africa, it is difficult to figure out which groups were mating and hybridizing in that vast time span, or how the fossil skeletons of human relatives from the continent were related. Related: 'It makes no sense to say there was only one origin of Homo sapiens': How the evolutionary record of Asia is complicating what we know about our species A new technique called paleoproteomics could help shed light on our African origin as a species and even reveal clues about the genetic makeup of australopithecines and other related hominins. Because genes are the instructions that code for proteins, identifying ancient proteins trapped in tooth enamel and fossil skeletons can help scientists determine some of the genes that were present in populations that lived millions of years ago. Still, it's a very new technique. To date, paleoproteomic analysis has identified only a handful of incomplete protein sequences in ancient human relatives and has thus far been able to glean only a small amount of genetic information from those. But in a landmark study published this year, researchers used proteins in tooth enamel to figure out the biological sex of a 3.5 million-year-old Australopithecus africanus individual from South Africa. And in another study, also published this year, scientists used tooth enamel from a 2 million-year-old human relative, Paranthropus robustus, to identify genetic variability among four fossil skeletons — a finding that suggests they may have been from different groups, or even different species. Paleoproteomics is still pretty limited, though. In a recent study, scientists analyzed a dozen ancient proteins found in fossils of Neanderthals, Denisovans, H. sapiens and chimpanzees. They found that these proteins could help reconstruct a family tree down to the genus level, but were not useful at the species level. Still, the fact that protein data can be used to reconstruct part of the braided stream of early humans and to identify the chromosomal sex of human relatives is encouraging, and further research along these lines is needed, experts told Live Science. Some are confident new approaches could help us unpack these early interactions. "I think we're going to learn a lot more about Africa's ancient past in the next two decades than we have so far," Van Arsdale said. Ackermann is more cautious. To really understand when, where and with whom our human ancestors mated and how that made us who we are, "we need to have a whole genome" from these ancient human relatives, she said. "With proteins, you just don't get that." Sheela Athreya, a biological anthropologist at Texas A&M University, is optimistic that we can use these new techniques to tease apart our more distant evolutionary past — and that it will yield surprises. For instance, she thinks what we now call Denisovans may actually have been H. erectus. RELATED STORIES —DNA has an expiration date. But proteins are revealing secrets about our ancient ancestors we never thought possible. —28,000-year-old Neanderthal-and-human 'Lapedo child' lived tens of thousands of years after our closest relatives went extinct —Never-before-seen cousin of Lucy might have lived at the same site as the oldest known human species, new study suggests "Absolutely in my lifetime, someone will be able to get a Homo erectus genome," Athreya said, likely from colder areas of Asia. "I'm excited. I think it'll look Denisovan." Either way, it's clear that a whole lot of mixing made us human. The Homo lineage may have first evolved in Africa, Athreya said. "But once it left Africa, you have so much complexity that it makes no sense to say there was only one origin of sapiens. There can't be one universal model that explains literally every human on Earth."
