Humans

By Katie Smith-Wong

Michelle Fournet and researcher Natalie Mastick Jensen listen in to whalesApple
Apple TV+: premiere 15 June
Fathom
Drew XanthopoulosAdvertisement

MOST of us introduce ourselves for the first time by saying hello and giving our name. But what if you were trying to greet another species and understand its background? This is the premise of Fathom, a new documentary by director Drew Xanthopoulos, known for directing The Sensitives, which explored the lives of people who are debilitatingly sensitive to our world.
Fathom follows biologist Ellen Garland at the University of St Andrews, UK, and marine acoustician Michelle Fournet at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, on their respective studies into humpback whale songs and social communication.
While Fournet analyses different whale calls as she tries to create a conversation between humpbacks to understand their communication better, Garland studies the cultural transmission, vocal learning and function of whale songs. We watch as the two prepare for field studies in Alaska and French Polynesia.
Fathom‘s languid pace prevents viewers from completely immersing themselves. Although this leaves you waiting for something to happen, it allows Xanthopoulos to hone in on detail and show marine bioacoustics at its slow work. The scientists use hydrophones to acoustically track whales, capturing different calls, most notably the “whup” call, which Fournet studies.
Basing herself in Hobart Bay, Alaska, she is forthcoming about the challenges of surveying 30 whales in a month using focal follows, which involves tracking a specific animal, and playbacks, in which she rebroadcasts natural or synthetic signals to animals and notes their response.
Her candour about the likelihood of failure because of logistical complications brings a level-headedness amid the lofty ambitions, and her willingness to adapt her approach to fine-tune the “conversation” shows flexibility.
As she analyses audio tracks of a series of “whups” and begins to understand their significance, we share her sense of achievement from a groundbreaking insight: that humpbacks use sound to perceive not only each other but their surroundings.
In 1996, marine biologist Philip Clapham described whale song as “probably the most complex in the animal kingdom”, justifying the task of deciphering it as a single research topic. Indeed, Garland has her work cut out: whale songs are mostly used by males for mating purposes. But she identifies that the same series of calls (also known as songs) are “culturally transmitted”, and evolve across vast distances.
Throughout, the haunting sound of whale songs beautifully accompanies Xanthopoulos’s serene cinematography, underlining the simplicity of nature while evoking a sense of isolation. As a result, Fathom captures the calmness of the scientists’ surroundings, while the precise yet soft black-and-white visualisations of the whale call are reminiscent of another film with language at its heart: the 2016 sci-fi film Arrival.
As Garland eloquently points out: “Some things we do are not innate – they are learned. They tell us who we are connected to and where we belong. We call these things culture. We call our communication ‘language’.” For some reason, she adds, we think that what whales do is different.
Fathom celebrates not only the steps towards understanding another species, but the women helping us get to the finishing line.

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Frank Masi/Paramount Pictures
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The Tomorrow War propels schoolteacher-turned-conscript Dan Forester (Chris Pratt) 30 years into the future, to fight an alien threat on the brink of eradicating humanity. Amazon Prime Video, 2 July.

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Gathering Moss by botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer explains the overlooked plant’s key place in the natural world, as well as revealing historical and sacred truths, and its scientific delights.Advertisement
Garry Jones
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UnNatural History, an international exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry, UK, explores the role of naturalists and artists as an intrinsic part of the increasingly complex science of natural history. Runs until 22 August. More

By Elle Hunt

Is the reducetarian diet for you? Sundry Photography/Getty Images
When it comes to eating meat, it is never purely about protein. Some carnivores are so committed, they recognise vegetables only as side dishes, while those who abstain from animal products will almost certainly refuse a steak from an ethical, organic supplier – but might do so in favour of an intensely processed vegan proxy. Our attitudes to eating animals are highly personal, but increasingly consequential. Is it possible to strike a middle ground?
Meat Me Halfway, by Brian Kateman at non-profit organisation the Reducetarian Foundation, is a thoughtful, engaging documentary about our attachment to eating animals, and how we might move on from it.
It follows Kateman as he seeks to unpick the resistance he has encountered in encouraging people not to give up meat altogether, but simply to eat less. As a failed vegetarian in college, he co-founded the Reducetarian movement to target those who would never dream of going entirely (or even mostly) plant-based.Advertisement
Eating less meat seemed a no-brainer to Kateman when considering its benefits to individual health and in terms of lowering greenhouse gas emissions and lessening our reliance on the structural cruelty of factory farming. Yet he was met with scepticism and ridicule from committed carnivores, and anger from animal rights activists who saw him as undermining their ethical position.
By staking out the middle ground, Kateman seemed to provoke the polar views on meat-eating, while some people like his father – equally sceptical of climate change and guacamole – remained unconvinced of the need to cut down. Indeed, meat consumption has gone up alongside our awareness of its toll on the environment.
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Last year, people in the US are thought to have eaten an average of more than 100 kilograms of red meat and poultry, a return to levels not seen since the 2007 recession. Meanwhile, the UN has warned that we have less than a decade to act before the climate crisis is irreversible.
Food systems account for more than a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. But as Bill McKibben of non-profit organisation 350.org notes in the film, against now-familiar scenes of planetary collapse, food has the benefit of being one area “where change is possible” – starting with dinner tonight.
For much of the 80-minute runtime, Kateman cedes the floor to experts who mount a wide-reaching case against meat – or, as he would have it, in favour of less. (The film is partially funded by a cultivated meat company.)

But a subject often as resistant to logic as this one needs to be treated with nuance befitting of the knottiness of the issue, and empathy for those who lack the luxury of choice. Here, Kateman puts himself forward as a guide.
In his own uneasy navigation of the world of meat – from the farm and slaughterhouse to the supermarket and lab – Kateman is even-handed, self-aware and willing to test his own convictions at the expense of appearing an expert.
But it is in his fond, frustrated engagements with his parents that Kateman is at his most relatable. Their circular conversation about climate change will be familiar to many, and refreshing to see. These quotidian conversations, at once casual and high stakes, rarely feature in representations of the climate crisis, though they may be how we most often engage with it.
“Like watching a sinking ship,” Kateman despairs after leaving his parents’ home. But the turnaround by the film’s end brings hope that the stalemate at the dinner table cannot last forever.
Meat Me Halfway will be available on demand on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Vimeo and other platforms from Tuesday 20 July

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By Deepa Padmanaban

A Jain Mahavir statue within the remnants of a temple complexSatyajit Ghosh
An Indian religious settlement built 1000 years ago had an early form of air conditioning created using natural resources and strategic design. The settlement contained Jain temples and dormitories, and was part of a small village called Artipura in what is now the southern state Karnataka in India, a region frequently affected by droughts both now and in the past.
The predominant feature of the settlement was a large granite-skirted natural reservoir storing rainwater, around which temples and dormitories were … More

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 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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