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Colin Barras asks whether Homo sapiens domesticated ourselves to become more social and less violent than other hominin species, such as Neanderthals ( 24 February, p 28 ). He mentions language as an effect of this change, but I wonder whether it was not language that caused this initially. If Homo sapiens was the first …

Did we domesticate ourselves ? Perhaps not. Domesticated species commonly have floppy ears. What species has been associated with us for thousands of years, but rarely has them? Clearly humans were domesticated by cats.

So, letting the future affect the past might explain quantum weirdness ( 17 February, p 28 ). That's a mind-bending postulate for the desired effect. Take your example of a measurement on one photon instantaneously affecting the measurement of its entangled partner, regardless of the distance between them and of the speed of light. Adam …

Retrocausality, the future's influence upon the past , is not so weird. I often experience it. For example, if I am due to have an unusually early meeting in the morning, it causes me to set my alarm clock for an hour earlier the night before.

I was fascinated by your article on the future coming before the past . I started this congratulatory letter early next year, but set it aside when I saw that it didn't get accepted. Upon reading the "Incontrovertible proof of the block universe" article after it appeared in next week's issue, I thought I would …

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Now she's just wondering when they're going to leave home and pay their own bills Yvie attempts empathy with the 520-million-year-old fossil Fuxianhuia protensa seen caring for four offspring ( 10 March, p 6 )

The tale of interstellar interloper 'Oumuamua was fascinating ( 3 February, p 28 ). But I was puzzled by astronomer Karen Meech's conclusion that it is elongated, with a length as much as 10 times its width, based upon the variation in its brightness as it tumbles through space. Couldn't a spherical body with a …

Jake Buehler's report on rock art in Saudi Arabia is premised on the idea that it tells us what animals lived there ( 10 February, p 8 ). But the artists may have been drawing African animals because they or their forebears came from Africa, and they aimed to preserve the memory for their children.

• John Hume breeds rhinos to harvest their horns ( 13 January, p 42 ). • Security researcher Nitesh Saxena is at the University of Alabama at Birmingham ( 3 March, p 9 ). • Reaching for a clockwork calculator, we find that 30 years passed between 1975 and 2005 (Old Scientist, 3 March ).