Humans

Early start for advanced tools
Large-scale production of sophisticated stone tools, using standardized assembly steps, emerged a surprisingly long time ago. Between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago, unidentified members of the genus Homo regularly made slender, sharp-edged blades and other animal-butchery implements at Qesem Cave in what’s now Israel, say archaeologist Ron Shimelmitz of Tel Aviv University and his colleagues. Analyses of thousands of Qesem stone artifacts, and experimental reproductions of these finds, indicate that the implements were made in stages requiring as much planning as Neandertal tools that didn’t appear until 200,000 years ago, the researchers will report in the Journal of Human Evolution.  —Bruce Bower

A fate worse than death
Patients in persistent vegetative states often get tagged as having less mental capacity than the dead. Ending up in biological limbo is also regarded as a fate worse than death, say psychologist Kurt Gray of the University of Maryland in College Park and his colleagues. Religious and non-religious participants alike attributed less mental activity to vegetative patients than to the dead, due to afterlife beliefs and a tendency to assume that deceased but unseen people still have minds, the scientists will report in Cognition. Religious people also usually advocated life support for vegetative patients despite regarding such states as worse than death. —Bruce Bower

Food fights
Violent protests in North Africa and the Middle East in 2008 and 2011 coincided with large spikes in global food prices, a new study shows. The analysis, which spans January 1990 to May 2011, suggests that high global food prices are a precipitating condition for social unrest, say Yaneer Bar-Yam and colleagues at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Mass. Their study, posted at arXiv.org on August 11, also calculates a food price threshold above which vulnerable populations typically find themselves in desperate straits. This indicator could help guide policy interventions.—Rachel Ehrenberg