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Darwinian natural selection could help halt human "mad cow disease", experts say after finding a tribe impervious to a related fatal brain disorder.

A conservation expedition to a remote area of Paraguay poses a risk to isolated tribal groups, according to an indigenous peoples' protection group.

When in difficulty, human cultures, however elevated, are predisposed to default to institutions (or classes) which in turn are predisposed to default to tribes, which in turn so easily default to cliques, which in turn default to single leaders. The last are the equivalent of daddies of the original family-sized groups in which we and our predecessors lived, and in which our genes have been shaped, for millions of years. The default tends...

Tests given to an Amazonian tribe called the Mundurucu suggest that our intuitions about geometry are innate. Researchers examined how the Mundurucu think about lines, points and angles, comparing the results with equivalent tests on French and US schoolchildren. The Mundurucu showed comparable understanding, and even outperformed the students on tasks that asked about forms on spherical surfaces.

Gyani Maiya Sen, a 75-year-old woman from western Nepal, can perhaps be forgiven for feeling that the weight of the world rests on her shoulders. She is the only person still alive in Nepal who fluently speaks the Kusunda language. The unknown origins and mysterious sentence structures of Kusunda have long baffled linguists.