As Eliran Arazi spends time with the Andoque, an Indigenous people in southern Colombia along the Caquetá River, he finds himself increasingly drawn into their tales that interweave sexuality with the creatures of the jungle. Gradually, those stories begin to shape his own way of thinking about seduction in modern life, as his mind spins off its own fantasies. A fascinating piece that blurs the lines between writer and subject, leaving the reader in a dreamlike state.

A few days later, jaguar footprints appeared along the long path leading to a small harbour on the Caquetá River. For the next week, Dufi’s family expressed concerns about venturing down that path, especially alone, for fear of a jaguar attack. When I mentioned my plan to go there for a phone call, hoping for better reception by the river, one of Dufi’s sons again cautioned me about the jaguar. Dufi, however, quickly reassured me. I had nothing to fear because jaguars dislike the soapy, perfumed scent of white people, which, he added, is precisely the smell that attracts dolphins.

As I reached the Caquetá in the late afternoon, I sensed the dolphin smell again. Odours and attraction, I thought – at least it works both ways.

“Sound is a tangible way of connecting to aspects of nature that are hidden from humans. The deep ocean, the dark night, and now the dense earth beneath our feet,” writes Ella Browning. And you can hear underground for yourself in the fascinating recordings she includes in her essay on earthworm “munching.” In this emerging field of soil ecoacoustics, researchers—including Browning—are finding links between ecosystem recovery and the character of underground soundscapes. Healthy soil literally sounds different. This piece will change how you view the ground beneath your feet.

A core principle of ecoacoustics is that complexly noisy natural places are healthier natural places. This means that it’s not just the volume of noise, but the diversity of sound that indicates habitat health. The dawn chorus in an intact Bornean tropical forest is magical in its complexity, especially if you’re lucky to experience it mixed in with the whoops of a troop of gibbons swinging through overhead, as I was during a visit in 2019.

In contrast, cities are generally not ecologically healthy and, while they are incredibly noisy places, they are filled with the harsh, more monotonous sounds of car engines and other machines, and often little biotic sound. Soundscapes dominated by anthropogenic sounds have been linked to poor mental health in people, whereas the opposite has been found for natural sounds like birdsong or forest soundscapes.

When we think of the ancient world, Greece and Rome usually come to mind, with perhaps a smattering of Cleopatra and Egypt thrown in. This is true not only for the general public but for scholars too, who have tended to keep a narrow focus on these cultures. But, as Carlos Noreña reports, we are on the brink of an exciting shift that explores the patterns of connectivity and exchange that shaped a truly global ancient world. After all, when eighth‑century Central Asian silver vessels turn up in an archaeological dig in Scotland, you have to broaden your view.

The physical geography of temperate Afro-Eurasia, then, enabled a particular configuration of long-distance connectivities. But how extensively and how deeply was this transcontinental region interconnected in antiquity? Should we see ancient Afro-Eurasia as an integrated ‘world system’? We can reconstruct the broad contours of such a system in the Middle Ages, from the middle of the first to the middle of the 2nd millennium CE. This was the world brilliantly brought to light, and to much fanfare, in the recent ‘Silk Roads’ exhibit at the British Museum in London. What made the show so remarkable was quite simply the assemblage, in a single space, of a wide assortment of premodern objects that had travelled over vast distances before settling in far-flung locales. A humble, 6th-century glass bowl from Iran was found in Nara, Japan. From a shipwreck near Sumatra in Indonesia, divers recovered a 9th-century turquoise-glazed ceramic amphora from West Asia. There were luxury goods on display, too, including a spectacular 7th-century golden necklace found in the eastern Mediterranean with lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and rock crystal from Madagascar, and a remarkable set of 8th-century ivory chess pieces from South Asia discovered in Samarkand in Uzbekistan. These long-distance connections reached into the far west of Eurasia, too, as revealed by the fragments of a 10th-century Chinese silk tunic found in Sweden, or the 8th-century Central Asian silver vessels that made their way to Scotland.