Humans

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 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

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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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.

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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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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