Philippa Kaur

By Michael Marshall

A grave in Vitry-la-Ville, France, that shows historical signs of being disturbedCourtesy Éveha-Études et valorisation archéologiques
In the Early Middle Ages, many European people reopened their relatives’ graves to recover family heirlooms. The practice had previously been interpreted as grave robbing, but closer examination has revealed patterns in the objects that were taken.
Alison Klevnäs at Stockholm University in Sweden and her colleagues compiled data from dozens of cemeteries dotted across Europe, from Britain and France in the west to Transylvania in the east. All of the graves dated from between AD 500 and 800.
Many of the graves had been reopened and objects removed, as evidenced by leftover traces such as metal flakes from a sword, but the most valuable items were not consistently taken. For example, at one site in Kent, brooches were removed from the corpse’s clothing, but silver gilt pendants and a necklace with glass beads were left behind. “They’re absolutely not trying to maximise profit from each reopening,” says Klevnäs.Advertisement

Instead, it seems the items removed were ones that had been passed down through generations, such as swords and brooches. Items that were personal to the individual, such as knives, were left in the graves – this is consistent with historical attitudes to such items. “They go back into those from living memory, so it’s something about connection to the relatively recent dead,” says Klevnäs.
A small fraction of the graves show evidence of being disturbed for a more sinister reason. “There are a few graves spread over the whole area where it looks like people are doing things to the bodies that suggest they are afraid of the undead,” says Klevnäs. “For example they turned the skulls around and prop it into place with stones backwards, or they might cut off feet.” But these graves account for less than 1 per cent of the total, she says.
The idea that corpses would be buried and then left entirely undisturbed is far from universal, says Klevnäs. Late Stone Age graves were designed to enable people to revisit the bodies. “We know there are these extended mortuary customs,” says Klevnäs. Today, many cultures have customs or festivals in which people interact with relatives’ remains.
Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2020.217
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By Chris Stokel-Walker

Few of the US patents granted for biomedical inventions go to female researchersLuis Alvarez/Getty Images
There are well-known biases that limit the number of women in science and technology. Now evidence has shown that fewer women are named on biomedical patents, which appears to have led to a reduced number of patented technologies designed to address problems specifically or disproportionately affecting women.
Rembrand Koning at Harvard Business School and his colleagues used machine learning to analyse more than 444,000 biomedical patents filed in the US between 1976 and 2010.
Algorithms analysed the text of drug and medical patents, attributing each with a male or female tag depending on what the text contained. For instance, texts mentioning “female organs” or “female genetics” were tagged as female. The researchers also cross-checked the gender of named inventors whenever possible.Advertisement
The proportion of patents awarded to inventor teams containing at least as many women as men has increased over the years, but not by much. Some 6.3 per cent of all patents awarded in 1976 fell within this category; in 2010, the equivalent figure was 16.2 per cent. In total, women were listed as co-inventors in just a quarter of all patents filed during the period analysed.

“We know there’s just a lot of sexism in society,” says Koning. “And we know that women face barriers just becoming scientists, and they face barriers when commercialising their ideas.”
Koning and his colleagues also analysed what the patents in the study were intended to achieve. Patents filed by all-female teams were a third more likely to focus on issues concerned with women’s health than those filed by all-male groups.
Teams in which most of the co-inventors were women were 18 per cent more likely to have filed patents for technologies that would help women.
Had there been equality in the number of men and women applying for patents, Koning and his colleagues estimate that there would have been roughly 6500 more female-focused inventions successfully patented between 1976 and 2010.
“Not only are women’s needs and problems invisible, when fewer women get patents and commercialise their ideas, this reinforces the stereotype that women do not create things of value and are neither inventors nor entrepreneurs,” says Jessica Lai at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aba6990

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By Michael Marshall

The ancient Hittite site of Yazılıkayaullstein bild via Getty Images
A shrine built more than 3000 years ago in what is now Turkey may be a symbolic representation of the cosmos, according to a new interpretation.
It has now been suggested that the elite of the Hittite society, an empire that dominated what is now Turkey between 1700 and 1100 BC until it was destroyed, created the Yazılıkaya shrine to embody their ideas about how the universe was organised.
Yazılıkaya contains many images in rock relief, and the researchers behind the new interpretation argue that these have symbolic meanings relating to the underworld, earth and sky, as well as to cycles of nature like the seasons.Advertisement
“There are many connotations with the names of the deities and the arrangements and groups, and so in retrospect it’s pretty easy to figure it out,” says Eberhard Zangger, president of Luwian Studies, an international non-profit foundation. “But we worked on it for seven years.”
“They may be onto something,” says Ian Rutherford at the University of Reading in the UK. “I’m not convinced of all the details, but very interested in the whole thing.”

Yazılıkaya is an open-air shrine and was one of the most important sites of the Hittite Empire. The remains of the Hittite capital Ḫattuša can be found near the modern village of Boğazkale in central Turkey. Yazılıkaya is within walking distance of the ancient capital.
At Yazılıkaya, the Hittites carved and modified natural rock outcrops to create two roofless spaces, decorated with rock relief images of their deities. They used the site for centuries; its present form dates from about 1230 BC.
It isn’t clear why the Hittites built Yazılıkaya or what they used it for. Many ideas have been proposed – for instance, that one of the spaces was used in new year ceremonies, and that the other was a mausoleum for a Hittite king.
In 2019, Zangger and his colleague Rita Gautschy at the University of Basel in Switzerland suggested that some of the carvings of gods might be a calendar, able to track both solar years and lunar months. Such a calendar would have been centuries ahead of its time, and the interpretation was greeted with scepticism.
Now, the pair and their colleagues have taken a new tack. Instead of focusing on the possible uses of the carvings, the researchers have considered what these might have meant to the Hittites.

“They had a certain image of how creation happened,” says Zangger. He says the Hittites imagined that the world began in chaos, which became organised into three levels: “the underworld, and then the earth on which we walk, and then the sky”.
As part of this, Zangger says the Hittites would have highlighted the circumpolar stars, which never sink below the horizon. He argues that one prominent group of deities in Yazılıkaya represents the circumpolar stars. “There are images like that in Egypt,” he says, and the Hittites were influenced by many neighbouring societies, including Egypt. Other carvings may have links to the earth and the underworld.
The second aspect of Hittite cosmology was “recurrent renewal of life”, says Zangger – for instance, day following night, the dark moon turning into a full moon and winter becoming summer. The calendar-like carvings reflect this cyclical view of nature, he argues.

“As an idea, it’s not far-fetched,” says Efrosyni Boutsikas at the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK. Other cultures, ranging from nearby Mesopotamia to distant Mesoamerica, used religious monuments to link terrestrial life with the wider universe. “Obviously that makes sense, because that’s exactly what religion does. It addresses universal concerns and the place of the people in the world,” she says.
However, Boutsikas is concerned that many of the team’s interpretations of the images aren’t based on Hittite texts, which say little about astronomy. Instead, the researchers have often used texts from Mesopotamian societies, which influenced the Hittites but were also distinct. She says the evidence would be stronger if similar links between gods and astronomy could be found at other Hittite sites.
Journal reference: Journal of Skyscape Archaeology, DOI: 10.1558/jsa.17829
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By Davide Abbatescianni

kartemquin films
The Ants and the Grasshopper
Raj Patel and Zak Piper
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ANITA CHITAYA is an extremely determined person. A leader in the Malawian village of Bwabwa, she converts men to gender equality, fights to end child hunger and was ready to take on an impossible mission: travelling to the US to persuade then president Donald Trump that climate change is real and a threat to both rich and poor.
Chitaya is at the heart of The Ants and the Grasshopper by directors Raj Patel and Zak Piper, shown at the 2021 Sheffield Docfest this month. The film emerged from work by Patel, a professor in food systems at the University of Texas at Austin. It starts with Chitaya’s life in Bwabwa, moves to her journey across the US in hope of accessing the White House, and ends with a short epilogue after her return.
The opening section makes the origins of Chitaya’s gender work clear. After a tough childhood, she was forced into an “abduction marriage” by her husband-to-be Christopher, his friend Winston and a group of other men. She didn’t feel she could fight because of a strong local belief that refusal to marry might have killed her mother.
Some time later, she met Esther Lupafya, an activist and nurse who co-founded a non-profit organisation called Soils, Food and Healthy Communities (SFHC), and her life changed. SFHC now works with more than 6000 farmers in northern and central Malawi, who exchange knowledge to improve soil fertility, food security and nutrition, and in the process encourage gender equity and resilience against climate change.
Christopher seems to genuinely regret his past deeds and does his best to support Chitaya, but Winston stubbornly refuses to help his wife Jenifa cook, farm, water plants or do other chores seen as women’s work. At SFHC, Chitaya learns more about climate change, convincing her neighbours to build clay stoves and reduce their firewood use. Unsurprisingly, she accepts the directors’ invitation to fly to the US with Lupafya.
“Many in the US don’t fully understand what it means that we in Malawi live on the same planet as them”
During one early visit, to the village of Wonewoc, Wisconsin, Chitaya and Lupafya explain how climate change helped make their soil arid. One young farmworker argues that the world is undergoing a “weather cycle”, refusing to accept the phenomenon’s scale.
As it unfolds, the film shows encounters with farmers and activists both urban and rural, who in turn reflect awareness, advocacy, indifference or mild scepticism, as Patel and Piper struggle to make the links between gender inequality, poverty, racism and environmental issues explicit.
Anita Chitaya wants people to understand the impact of climate changekartemquin films
It is ambitious for a 74-minute film, and the directors take unwarranted shortcuts. We see only individuals on whom their encounter with Chitaya had a positive effect in the long term. In the epilogue, the farmworker from Wisconsin regrets laughing at Chitaya’s concerns. He now runs an organic chicken farm, proving he has changed. We also learn that 18 months after her visit, Democrat senator Jeff Merkley co-sponsored the Green New Deal, although the impact of Chitaya’s efforts is unclear. Merkley’s office is as close as she gets to the White House.
The Ants and the Grasshopper attempts a fresh take on complex issues, but remains on the surface because it draws on too much material. It is the powerful portrait of Chitaya’s courage, however, that makes the film worth watching. In one of the last scenes, Winston pounds maize and joins a cooking demonstration, proving he has finally learned the value of caring.
But shortly after an image of a dead grasshopper borne away by ants, Chitaya says that many in the US don’t fully understand what it means that “we live on the same planet as them”; there are many ants, but only a few lifting the grasshopper. A deeper focus on her fight against climate change and local inequality could have delivered a stronger message, but may not have been as messily truthful.

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By Simon Ings

Georgia King plays failing artist Leena in ParallelShane Harvey
Parallel
Isaac Ezban
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WHAT if you could step through a mirror and visit other versions of the world? Would you explore these alternate Earths? Would you try to find a better home for yourself – in a world, perhaps, where a loved one hasn’t died?
Or, as happens in Parallel, Mexican director Isaac Ezban’s first English-language thriller, would you simply go around stealing?
Of the four young friends who discover a dimensional portal in the attic of their rental, only Devin (Aml Ameen) thinks it might be a means of personal salvation. As a boy, he flew into a rage at his fraudster father, who killed himself the next day. Now Devin is in search of a version of the world where his father lives, and the rift can be healed.
His friends, however, simply want to get rich. The four have been working together on a parking app called Meter Maid: an idea so uninteresting, I wonder if it is meant as an early comment on their lack of real talent.
Behind their mirror, through which they pass, Alice-fashion, into other versions of the world, time runs faster. For a moment, it seems that to get stupidly rich, all they have to do is bring back the winning lottery numbers from alternate realities. But the worlds they visit, though very similar, are different enough that the winning numbers don’t match up.
Is there a way to exploit these little differences? Screenwriter Scott Blaszak’s first feature fizzes with incidental invention as the friends explore the commercial and financial angles of their multiverse. Their solutions are tailored to character. In the end, Josh (Mark O’Brien), the group lightweight, goes chasing women across the multiverse. Meanwhile, failing artist Leena (Georgia King) fills portfolios with plagiarised pictures and Noel (Martin Wallström, effectively reprising his role in Mr Robot) steals the intellectual property of unwitting inventors. No spoilers about the end result of all this, but it is a catastrophe worth waiting for.
“Handed a world of infinite possibility, all the film’s characters can do is play out their failings”
Parallel is no masterpiece. Made on a shoestring, and boasting a silly and intrusive soundtrack, its fairly familiar premise depends on the sharpness of its ideas. Luckily, Blaszak knows what he is doing, and has given us characters who, while engaging enough, aren’t good people. Handed a world of infinite possibility, all they can do is play out their failings.
They aren’t even very curious. Bankrolled with money stolen from their “alt” selves, they consume, but they cannot create. Their cruelty is as devastating as it is casual. By bringing an alt Josh into our world, Noel destroys at least one innocent life. Then the alt Josh begins to mentally disintegrate, tormented by the tiny but ubiquitous differences between his world and ours.
Ezban’s direction is efficient, more than inspired. Those wondering what he could achieve on a bigger budget might not have too long to wait. He has been hired by Sony Pictures to direct the adaptation of Dan Simmons’s horror novel Summer of Night.
Meanwhile, Parallel is a well-constructed calling card. It is a film with heroes that are meant to be likeable, flawed as they are. Pulling its punches in this way gives the enterprise a curiously dated feel. I was reminded in particular of Joel Schumacher’s Flatliners and The Lost Boys. Not every movie has to plummet the depths of despair, of course. But I do wish Parallel‘s cast (Wallström in particular) had been handed more of an opportunity to chew up the set.

Simon also recommends…
The Man in the High Castle
Philip K. Dick
This alternate history traces the lives upended by intrigues between Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, the post-war rulers of the southern and western United States.
The Butterfly Effect
Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber
Writer-directors Bress and Mackye Gruber (later of TV’s Kyle XY fame) created a low-budget mind-bender, as Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher) travels through his memories to fix his past.

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Visit
Fantastic Beasts, both real and magical, stalk London’s Natural History Museum until 3 January, revealing how mythical and imaginary creatures are inspired by real-life animals. With nods to all the connected films.

Read
The Ascent of Information, by astronomer Caleb Scharf, argues that data of all sorts is really an aggregated organism, controlling our behaviour and evolving alongside us. Terrifyingly, it has goals and needs.
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Watch
Apples, directed by Christos Nikou, is a much-praised comedy-drama about a man developing a new identity after an amnesia pandemic. Available on demand from Curzon Home Cinema. See a full review on our website. More

By Clare Wilson

Duncan Mcewan/naturepl.com
AS MOST of the UK recovers from a frigid April and a soggy May, its gardens are starting to perk up. That means so are caterpillars, aphids such as greenflies, and other plant-feeding invertebrates generally seen as the gardener’s foes.
A common reaction to seeing prized plants covered with bugs is to reach for the pesticide spray. But we should temper that instinct, says Andrew Salisbury, principal entomologist at the UK Royal Horticultural Society. Many invertebrate species in the UK and elsewhere are in decline, and gardens can be a haven – the UK’s home gardens collectively add up … More