Unearthed

I planted some crocus bulbs. The ground is hard, stony and unyielding. I forced a strong trowel into the soil as far as I could, waggled it to and fro, pulled it out, rotated it 90 degrees, pushed & waggled again. I repeated this as many times as necessary to create a bit of loose tilth, then pushed a dibber into the ground to create a round hole [insert square peg joke here], placed a bulb at the bottom - pointy end up - and filled the hole with spare soil from a bucket. Hard labour - luckily, a couple of dozen bulbs, not 100

An unexpected consequence was that this activity provoked fascination among the nearby earthworms, who emerged on the surface to see what I was doing. I lost count - maybe 5 or 6 during the hour I was there, and the first one appearing within moments of me starting work. I know that worms respond to vibration, and this is why blackbirds hop around (why do we say 'hop' when in fact they are jumping?) on the lawn, but I have never experienced it quite so dramatically

Charles Darwin not only published the book that shifted the frame of reference for modern thought, he spent 40 years experimenting on earthworms, including their sensitivity to vibrations. His resulting publication on "Vegetable Mould" is his lesser known book

A thoughtful article in yesterday's paper invited me to imagine a chain of 2000 women holding hands: daughter, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and so on. By the time we get to the 2000th 'great', we are looking at someone who walked on the earth at the same time as at least 4 other distinct species of hominids. Homo Sapiens (us!) was in close contact with at least two of these (Neanderthal and Denisovan people), and we and they interbred many times - we still carry within all of us the generic material that was exchanged during those unions

Svante Pääbo has just won a Nobel prize for a lifetime of work on the techniques to isolate and analyse tiny quantities of ancient DNA and prove these things to be true - the latest stride in the journey that began with Darwin's spark of genius. In its way, it seems to me, Pääbo's work is as fundamental to our understanding of what it means to be human as Darwin's was almost two centuries ago

A few short steps from earthworms to the meaning of life