Loose sediments structure the deep history of the youngest Himalayas, Churia, in Nepal. In the 1950s geological surveys of Nepal, the sediments of Churia featured as geologically loose , erodible, and fluviatile with scarce economic possibilities. By 1970, however, these sediments emerged as spatial compositions of key construction aggregates in the Tarai floodplains, generating immense political anxiety on the loose nature of their regulation and governance at the riverine sites of extraction. This article examines how the mobilization of Churia's geological history became the grounds for sand extraction from the Tarai riverbeds, eventually converting the fluviatile sedimentary cartographies into regulated domains of governance. I rely on the previously overlooked archival documents, labour participation, and ethnographic evidence on the sediments’ histories, characteristics, movements, and extraction to advance anthropology's timely concern with colonial geology, territorial control, and spatial mapping of geological history, economy, and governance. Yet, these anthropological concerns have kept the subterranean materiality largely fixed, rarely anchoring the critical role of a movable geology into extractive governance spaces. My research intervenes here to argue that the governance mechanisms in Nepal have used Churia's fluvial geology to legitimize riverbed extraction in the Tarai.

This paper contains an overview of the human colonisation of Australasia and Oceania over the last 65,000 years, and highlights the resultant diversity of settlement types, place and cultural landscape formations, and architectural solutions, but simultaneously gives attention to the long-term retention of particular traditions throughout the study region. The time, geographic and multi-cultural scales are thus vast, implying this is a study in the category of ‘deep history’. However, the author has drawn from his editing of the regional volume of ‘Australasia and Oceania,’ for the 2nd edition of the Encyclopaedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World, or EVAW 2, containing some 200 contributions on this region. Two migratory events are explored. The first is that of Aboriginal people into Australia some 65,000 years ago. The second is the Austronesian migrations into the Pacific Ocean from 5000 to 1500 BP. Despite millennia of cultural, environmental, climatic, economic and warfare disruptions, a series of continuities of tradition are identified and analysed in a limited manner due to the brevity of the paper. However, the paper provides a significant contribution in making such a broad-scale holistic overview of the pattern languages of building traditions that link communities in Oceania and Australasia arising from past migrations and drawing on multi-disciplinary sources.

The paper focuses on the issue of current and possible paths of development of the humanities, including the unceremonious question of why a society of technoscience and data-driving economy should continue to support our (humanities) institutes. The assumption of this question is the requirement of the applicability of knowledge and the priority of applied science (in the model of Research&Development&Innovation), usually taken into account in contemporary (global) science policy. Therefore, a serious (comprehensive) answer is needed here, starting from the question of what the humanities are (more broadly – human sciences), what they mean and why they mean in terms of their scientific status (i.e. subject, method and purpose), through three dimensions of methodological reflection (i.e. theory, methodology and institutionalization), to the question of what they may be in the near future – in the light of contemporary research on science and technology, in particular the philosophy of technology and the deep history. The author draws attention here to the tropes of the programs of “deep and technological humanities” and “preventive humanities” in relation to the 20th century tradition of the humanistic approach to science and technoscience and to the current European science policy (today especially towards the issue of artificial intelligence in the context of the “technological moment of the Anthropocene”). In this text, which is the first part of an intended series, a special point of reference are the considerations of the philosopher and historian Lewis Mumford in his works: Technics and Civilization (1934) and The Myth of the Machine (1967, 1970).

This article examines Langston Hughes’s engagement with the mid-twentieth-century emergence of fascism. While paying special attention to his framing of fascism as a logical continuation of a deep history of enslavement and colonization, this article argues that Hughes primarily advances an elastic definition of the term, one that points to the existence of imbalanced relations of power in the modern world. According to Hughes, fascism is omnipresent, finding expression in everything from Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia to post-war symbolic production. In addition to analysing Hughes’s examination of the depth of the fascist menace, which threatens to level every aspect of human culture, this article also attends to the practical possibilities that he finds in his moment of social crisis: according to Hughes, by unleashing its violence at a global level, fascism produces new social constellations that transgress the conventional lines of race, nation, geography, and history. Thus, resistance to fascism prepares the ground for collective emancipation. The article concludes by considering the ongoing cultural relevance of this body of writing in a world on the rightward swing: Hughes offers a set of insights and strategies of dissent at a moment when resistance to fascism remains necessary.

This essay is the outcome of a 2025 AAG panel on crises that raised issues such as: is crisis the norm, is crisis a useful analytical frame and are we living through exceptional times? Seeking to avoid prognostication, my response provides some answers while provoking additional questions. Political economy insights are summarized for their different views on analyzing crises (from polycrisis and longwave approaches to monocausal materialism) and early/mid-2025 political developments are engaged for what at this juncture may be promising avenues for urban and economic geography (on hegemony and legitimization, economic nationalism and left politics, and deep history).

The subtribe Leptoboeinae (Gesneriaceae) has undergone numerous taxonomic revisions due to ambiguous generic boundaries, complicating conservation and utilization efforts. In this study, we employed transcriptomes from a representative clade within the subtribe to construct a low-copy nuclear (LCN) gene data set. Plastid genomes and LCN genes, assembled from 66 samples, were used to investigate the phylogenetic structure, reticulate evolution and divergence times among the species of this subtribe. Firstly, phylogenetic analysis revealed that Boeica is polyphyletic and identified a new genus, Crassicaulis, which forms a sister group to the remaining genera within the subtribe. Secondly, complex cytonuclear conflicts and gene tree incongruence at genus-level nodes were identified. Multiple lines of evidence revealed two reticulate evolutionary events within this lineage, suggesting that Boeica porosa and B. stolonifera, as well as Boeica enpingensis, underwent hybridization during their speciation processes. Finally, divergence time estimation revealed that most genera emerged between 17 and 12 Ma. This study provides a well-resolved phylogenetic framework for the subtribe Leptoboeinae, describes a new genus and elucidates the subtribe's intricate reticulate evolutionary history. Furthermore, we propose that the mid-Miocene East Asian monsoon played a pivotal role in the diversification of this lineage.

Are more details better for deep histories?

Abstract This article focuses on the concept of “The Fourth Cinema” in which questions of morality and tragedy as well as deep history and recorded history are interwoven and inseparable. These questions are important not solely to clarify specific misinterpretations but also to resist an impending misinterpretation of the concept of the fourth cinema. Based on Wole Soyinka's “The Fourth Stage,” the article discusses how the metaphysics of sacrifice in Yoruba oral traditions can be taken from its ritual contexts to explain what I have termed “the fourth cinema.” In doing that, I give a new interpretation to Soyinka's “The Fourth Stage” and therefore develop the fourth cinema with the aim to discuss its philosophical, spiritual, and historical relevance in African cinema, such as Biyi Bandele's Elesin Oba, Femi Lasode's Sango, and Tunde Kelani's Saworoide. I therefore show the social relevance of the fourth cinema not solely in relation to the questions of morality and tragedy in the (post)colonial world but also to education and decolonial cinematic storytelling in Africa and beyond.

This article examines the possible interaction between Ancient Egypt and Išuwa, one of the states of the Armenian Highland. The interactions between the Armenian Highland and Egypt have a deep and intricate history, primarily documented since the Hellenistic period. However, a recently discovered inscription at the archaeological site known as the Kom el-Hettân, may provide new insights into the relationship between the Armenian Highland and Egypt. On the pedestal of one of the colossal statues of Amenhotep III, located within the temple complex, inscriptions identify various foreign nations through engravings of their representatives depicted as bound captives. The three captured figures represent the lands of “Ḫatti, Isyw, and Irṯw (Arzawa).” The land of Isyw may correlate with one of the ancient states of the Armenian Highland – Išuwa. This unique depiction prompts intriguing questions regarding the inclusion of an Išuwan figure in Egyptian iconography. The article is used general historical and comparative-historical analysis as the main research methods. The conducted research shows that there is no evidence that Egyptian expeditions ever reached the territory of the Armenian Highland or that they took captives from this region. This image may have a metaphorical, symbolic or propagandistic meaning, since the Egyptian pharaoh sought to emphasize the northern borders of his influence. An alternative explanation for the presence of the Išuwa country may lie in the context of repeated clashes between Mitanni and Ḫatti. It is possible that Hittite and Išuwan prisoners of war were sent by Mitanni to Egypt as diplomatic gifts and later depicted on the above-mentioned monument.

This article argues that the second book of Herodotus’ Histories, rather than being a lengthy and insufficiently historical digression, is a proportional response to the difficulties posed by the scale of Egyptian history and the unusual stability of Egyptian society to his understanding of historical change. To resolve these difficulties, I demonstrate that Herodotus develops an alternative framework for the interpretation of Egyptian history based on the Nile’s deposition of sediment, according to which historical change unfolds over the geologic timescale of millennia rather than the limited span of human lifetimes. In making this argument, I show that the Egyptian logos not only permits comparison to the modern intellectual project of deep history, but also makes a significant contribution to our understanding both of central themes of the Histories, such as the instability of human happiness and the influence of environments on human history, and of Herodotus’ methodology.

Bratakathas or narratives that form part of a set of mostly feminine rituals in Bengal have been the subject of scholarly interest for over a century. By the end of the 19th century, they had come to be seen as portals to a deep history of women by Abanindranath Tagore and others. In more recent decades, feminist scholars like Jasodhara Bagchi have tended to see them as technologies for patriarchic indoctrination. Both strands of scholarship confirm that these bratakathas present an idealised image of femininity. What this article does is explore the question of the historicity of these ideals. More specifically, it pursues two lines of enquiry. One looks at the ways in which ‘historical memory’ is evoked in narrativising these ideals of femininity. The second looks at how the ideals themselves change over time.

Despite structuring most of the urban world today, the deep history and long-term relationship between agricultural and urban spaces has been overlooked and undervalued in the Urbanocene. This article introduces a novel theory and method we term ‘patch urbanism’ to explore long-term relationships between settlement form and productive agricultural landscapes. We highlight the significance of such relationships in structuring extended urban regions throughout South, Southeast and East Asia today. Specifically, we examine the concept of patch urbanism in the context of Southeast Asia’s desakota landscapes using the largest city of the preindustrial world, Angkor, as an in-depth case study. By mapping and critically analysing archaeological features that structure current landscapes through modes of path dependency, we challenge dominant urban theories and the presentist bias in much urban studies research by emphasising the enduring spatial patterns across diverse cultural contexts, contradicting the notion that such patchy landscapes are inherently unsustainable, transient or merely transitional phases towards more centralised urban forms. The concept of patch urbanism offers a valuable lens for analysing and promoting sustainable transitions in urban regions, particularly in the context of Southeast Asia. This perspective challenges dominant urban theories by emphasising the historical resilience and ecological potential of dispersed urban forms. By embracing blue, black and green infrastructures, decentralised realities and adaptive rather than idealised approaches, patch urbanism provides an alternative framework for shaping sustainable and resilient cities of the future.

Summary:The ecological and evolutionary consequences of ongoing extinction episodes remain poorly understood1, despite mounting evidence of global biodiversity loss. To assess how human activities are reshaping tetrapod evolution, we estimate species-level extinction probabilities (‘pEX’) over the next ~50–500 years2,3 using time-calibrated phylogenies4–8, 35 ecological and environmental attributes9, and current-day, expert-assessed threats for 33,281 terrestrial vertebrates2. We find a critical, divergent association between extinction risk and macroevolutionary patterns10: in birds, lizards, and snakes, both evolutionary distinct and rapidly diversifying lineages are most imperiled; while in amphibians and mammals, threat is concentrated in less distinct and slowly radiating groups. Overall, species with high fecundity, intermediate body sizes, and broad geographic ranges are more likely to persist through the ongoing extinction crisis11–14. Without intervention, current-day threats alone suggest a 15% decline (~5,000 extinctions) in species richness and a 16% loss in median speciation rate from 0.11 to 0.094 lineages per million years within the next 500 years. Notably, mammals are projected to experience the largest declines in future speciation potential, despite lower overall imperilment than turtles, crocodilians, or amphibians. Across tetrapods, projected evolutionary distinct extinctions are concentrated in tropical regions, whereas faster-radiating lineages face widespread risk across deserts, tropical islands, and temperate zones. These results uncover ecological and evolutionary drivers of the ongoing reorganization of Earth’s biodiversity, underscoring the urgent need for coordinated conservation efforts to preserve both deep evolutionary history and future potential for evolutionary responses.

This article traces how forests in Turkey acquire meaning through their entanglement with nationalism, securitization, and racialized governance. The catastrophic wildfires of 2021, which destroyed over 150,000 hectares along the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts, became a site where ecological devastation was quickly translated into nationalist paranoia. Refugees and Kurdish insurgents were accused of arson, and fire was narrated as evidence of invasion, conspiracy, and betrayal. These claims drew on deeper histories in which forests have been managed through militarized strategies—burned during counterinsurgency operations, surveilled for signs of fugitivity, and recast as threatened zones in the service of territorial control. Building on the concept of “political forests,” the article shows how wooded landscapes in Turkey function as terrains of belonging, where ecological crisis intensifies nationalist claims, legitimizes violence, and reinforces exclusionary forms of governance. The 2021 fires illuminate the ways forests matter as stages for securing identity, policing movement, and naturalizing punitive state power.

The rapid rate of virus evolution, while useful for outbreak investigations, poses a challenge for accurately estimating long-term viral evolutionary divergence and leaves us with little genomic traces at deep evolutionary timescales, complicating the reconstruction of deep virus evolutionary history. Recent advancements in protein structure prediction and computational biology have opened up new avenues and enabled us to peer back further in time and with greater clarity than ever before. Here, we review recent approaches to reconstructing the deep evolutionary history of viruses. In particular, we focus on how Bayesian models that account for evolutionary rates that are time-dependent may provide better estimates of the timescale of virus evolution. We then outline approaches to structural phylogenetics and their application to reconstructing the evolutionary history of viruses. Despite current limitations, including structural prediction uncertainty, conformational variation, and limited benchmarking, structural phylogenetics appears promising, particularly where sequence-level homology is eroded. The availability of and ease with which virus structures can now be predicted is likely to drive additional statistical and software developments in this area. Ultimately, answering fundamental questions of virus origins and early diversification, long-term host associations, virus classification, and the timescale of viral diseases will likely require unifying sequence and structural information into a temporally aware evolutionary inference framework.

Biological control, the practice of using one species (biocontrol agent) to control the population of another (a host or prey species, hereafter target), can be a successful method to reduce pest species in agricultural and natural systems worldwide. Successful biocontrol agents often share a deep evolutionary history with their targets that results in high target specificity and synchronized phenology. However, with rapidly changing climatic conditions, users of biocontrol agents have questioned how climate change will affect both well-established and more recent biological control relationships. Using a meta-analysis of data collected from a systematic literature review, we evaluated the evidence for the impact of changing temperatures on the efficacy of biocontrol agents and corresponding responses in their targets. Overall, most studies of climate change impacts on biocontrol agents take place in the laboratory and focus on arthropod agents that are parasitoids. Results from our meta-analysis reveal that changes in temperature are projected to impact biocontrol agents and their targets similarly, with no overall significant changes to biocontrol agent or target performance. However, our results also show that temperature responses vary widely across study systems, as illustrated by case studies showing both positive, neutral, and negative effects of temperature on biocontrol agent efficacy, as well as variation in responses across the three core biological control measures of success: survival, reproduction, and efficacy. Our work highlights important knowledge gaps including how climate change will affect both biocontrol agents and their targets simultaneously. Additionally, we find that most current studies of climate impacts examined temperature relationships, predominantly of agricultural biocontrol agents. Increasing the breadth of studies is crucial for understanding the potential for climate change to affect the success of current and future biological control programs.

Kevin Padraic Donnelly. <i>The Descent of Artificial Intelligence: A Deep History of an Idea 400 Years in the Making</i>.

Abstract Africa has the oldest artefacts and evidence for fire. It is where Homo sapiens evolved and developed novel technologies before dispersing into the rest of the world some 70ka ago. There is, however, no reliable evidence in Africa for artificial shelters and dwellings older than 20ka. This paper sets out to understand why such basic architecture appears so late in a continent with great environmental variation and a deep history of innovation. The approach combines evidence from micro and macro scales of analysis. The micro scale uses ethnoarchaeological studies of Africa’s small circular houses to examine how and why gender separates their occupants both spatially and through their access to food stores. At the macro scale, the absence of food stores among Africa’s extant hunters and gatherers is predicted from environmental factors that apply to the whole continent. Without food storage there are no significant dwellings. I then turn to the archaeological evidence for the appearance of dwellings and storage from Africa and the Levant, a contiguous region where huts are known at 23ka. The evidence for dwellings in Europe is then considered. While dwellings are earlier here than in Africa and the Levant none are reliably older than 32ka. They are found with evidence for food storage. The paper explores the implications of this chronological framework for a major transition in hominin evolution that, before agriculture, involved intensification in subsistence combined with storage, and a novel architecture of gendered spaces now found worldwide.

Mountaineering, which involves high levels of risk and challenge, is an extreme sports activity with a deep history, requiring superior physical fitness, mental strength and technical knowledge. The high level of risk inherent in mountaineering also brings with it injuries, which negatively affect athletes' performance and lead to traumatic experiences that cause anxiety. This research aims to examine in depth the injury concerns of licensed mountaineers. The present research conducted as a qualitative study with the phenomenological approach and the data were obtained through in-depth interviews conducted face-to-face. In the interviews conducted with 12 professional mountaineers selected with the criterion sampling method, an interview form consisting of semi-structured questions developed by the research team based on Lazarus' Cognitive-Motivational-Relational Theory was used. The obtained data were analyzed with the content analysis technique. The research results reveal that the injury concerns of mountaineers are related to the themes of risk management, psychological resilience, mental strengthening and strategic thinking in the cognitive dimension; amotivation, passion and taking precautions in the motivational dimension; and resistance, environmental support, environmental pressure, developing self-awareness and persuasion in the relational dimension. These results show that the performance of athletes in the Cognitive-Motivational-Relational dimensions is affected by injury fear. Therefore, it shows that injury fear is a critical factor that must be taken into consideration and managed in order to ensure sustainability in mountaineering.

Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of plague, has triggered multiple pandemics throughout human history, yet its long-term evolutionary patterns and reservoir dynamics remain poorly understood. Here, we present a global phylogenomic analysis of ancient and modern Y. pestis strains spanning from the Neolithic and Bronze Age to the present day. We show that pandemic-causing lineages did not arise from a single ancestral strain but instead emerged independently along deep branches of the Y. pestis phylogeny. Pandemic-associated Y. pestis strains were recovered exclusively from human remains and display clear local temporal divergence, indicating evolution driven by human transmission during outbreaks. These findings support the hypothesis that plague emergence is driven by complex, regionally rooted reservoirs, with recurrent spillovers into human populations across millennia. Our work highlights the need to view plague not as a series of isolated outbreaks but as a long-standing zoonotic threat shaped by deep evolutionary history, host ecology, and human societal structures.