Apple's long-awaited mixed-reality headset, the Vision Pro, is a hot topic in the tech world ahead of its coming debut at the US Apple Store on February 2. Extensive media attention has been drawn to the complex supply chain behind the Vision Pro hardware, with many saying that China's supply chain plays a significant role in its manufacturing. Some industry insiders claim that Chinese mainland companies account for about 60 percent of the supply chain.
Some Western media outlets, which habitually take a biased view of China, have recently published articles suggesting that Apple is likely to move a massive chunk of its production capacity from China to India. It is undeniable that China's labor costs have risen, leading to supply chain restructuring. However, some Westerners tend to exaggerate the risks faced by China's manufacturing industry and deliberately ignore its positive aspects.
Publicly available information indicates that China plays an irreplaceable role in the production of Apple's most advanced products, such as Vision Pro. Apple has described Vision Pro as a revolutionary spatial computer that seamlessly blends digital content with the physical world. It showcases Apple's latest generation technology.
Although the West has been hyping global manufacturers' reduced dependence on China, it's indisputable that China's manufacturing capacity has still provided strong support for Western corporations, including Apple.
Apple has a big year ahead for new products, but it also faces challenges. The Vision Pro headset is Apple's first new product category since it launched its Apple Watch series in 2015. However, analysts do not expect Apple to generate significant revenue from the Vision Pro, at least in the short term, due to its high price that may deter many potential customers.
As reported, the Vision Pro starts at $3,499 with 256GB of storage, while the 512GB model is priced at $3,699 and the most-spacious 1TB version is priced at $3,899. Whether the Vision Pro's prices will fall after going into mass production will be the key to capturing more market share, especially in China and other developing markets. Many types of smart glasses have been launched in the Chinese market, and most of them are significantly cheaper than Apple's Vision Pro.
If Apple can effectively utilize China's manufacturing advantages and further collaborate with China's supply chain, its competitiveness in mixed-reality headsets will be strengthened. It's highly likely that China's well-established industry chain could help Apple reduce manufacturing costs for its Vision Pro.
It is precisely because of such abundant cooperation opportunities that shares of some mixed-reality companies in the A-share market experienced a surge in recent trading after pre-orders for Apple's Vision Pro began on January 19.
Apple's development in the Chinese market and the upgrading of China's manufacturing industry are mutually beneficial. While Apple enjoys the advantages of Chinese manufacturing and its market, it could also bring opportunities for the upgrading of China's manufacturing industry.
Chinese supply chain companies are favored by Apple due to their flexibility and strength. During the development of prototypes for the Vision Pro headset, they have been able to meet Apple's innovative demands, according to media reports.
Through collaborating with Apple to develop innovative products, the quality and efficiency of China's manufacturing industry upgrading will undoubtedly be greatly enhanced. Apple can stimulate innovation in the Chinese supply chain by meeting the market demand for innovative products, accelerating its innovation and upgrading, and promoting industrial upgrading and transformation. This cooperative relationship will bring more development opportunities and competitive advantages for China's manufacturing industry.
The vast and dynamic market, strong manufacturing industry foundation and continuous innovation momentum in China are compelling reasons for Apple or any foreign company to embrace production in China to achieve sustainable growth.
The New York Times wrote in an article entitled "How China Has Added to Its Influence Over the iPhone" in September 2022 that "the critical work provided by China reflects the country's advancements over the past decade and a new level of involvement for Chinese engineers in the development of iPhones."
For Apple's ambition to develop innovative products and win future markets, it is essential to embrace the accelerated upgrading of Chinese manufacturing.
One Boeing 737 MAX flying from Seattle has arrived at the Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport in South China's Guangdong Province on Saturday, flight information provider VariFlight revealed on Saturday.
The delivery ends a nearly five-year freeze since China suspended most orders and deliveries of Boeing planes in 2019 following two fatal crashes of the 737 MAX in other countries.
Information shared with the Global Times shows that the plane, operating under the flight number of CZ5073, has joined the China Southern Airlines fleet.
The delivery of the Boeing 737 MAX comes at a moment as the US plane manufacturer is in its turmoil.
Reuters reported that the US Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday tightened pressure on Boeing by barring the troubled planemaker from expanding production of its best-selling 737 MAX narrowbody planes, following "unacceptable" quality issues.
Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun faced questions from senators on the Alaska Airlines incident in a series of meetings on Wednesday on Capitol Hill. Senate Commerce Committee chair Maria Cantwell said she would hold hearings to investigate the root cause of Boeing's safety lapses, according to Reuters.
Regarding the delivery of MAX series in China, China's Foreign Ministry said on Thursday that the Boeing 737 MAX8 model has met delivery requirements set by Chinese regulators as of December 8 of 2023.
Before the delivery of MAX, a 787-9 Dreamliner ordered by Juneyao Airlines had been delivered in December of last year, and it is also the first time since November 2019 that Boeing has delivered a 787 Dreamliner plane to a Chinese airline.
China is regarded one of the most rapidly developing aviation markets in the world, as Boeing forecast in September of last year that China will need 8,560 new commercial airplanes through 2042, driven by economic growth well above the global average and increasing public demand for air travel.
Chinese home-developed C919 aircraft also gear up the flying in China. China Eastern Airlines said on Saturday that all the C919 aircraft it received are being put into the Chinese New Year's travel rush.
Chipmaking equipment producer ASML on Wednesday announced better-than-expected results for the fourth quarter and full year of 2023, while warning that US export controls would affect its sales in China by 10-15 percent in 2024.
For 2023, ASML reported 27.6 billion euros ($30 billion) in revenue, up 30 percent year-on-year. Its gross profit margin was 51.3 percent, with a net profit of 7.8 billion euros, and the unshipped order backlog reached 39 billion euros.
Business with China in 2023 was extremely robust and strong, Roger Dassen, executive vice president and chief financial officer of ASML, said in a statement sent to the Global Times on Wednesday.
The Dutch company has been caught in the broader technology battle between the US and China. On January 2, ASML said that the Dutch government had partially revoked an export license for the shipment of some chipmaking equipment to China, following US export restrictions.
Exports of NXT:2050i and NXT:2100i lithography systems in 2023 were affected, the company said.
"It can be anticipated that in 2024, we will not obtain export licenses for shipping NXT:2000i and higher immersion equipment to China. Additionally, certain advanced chip manufacturing wafer fabs in China will be unable to obtain licenses for shipping NXT:1970i and NXT:1980i immersion equipment," Dassen said.
ASML previously said that the US export restrictions would affect 10-15 percent of China sales. There would be a similar impact in 2024, Dassen said.
"However, we can still observe strong demand in the mature process markets within the end-user market," said Dassen.
The US containment strategy related to high-end chips has failed to prevent Chinese companies from making their own 5G models, so it tightened the curbs, Zhang Hong, a veteran industry observer, told the Global Times on Wednesday.
Zhang noted that the move will only disrupt global industry chains and hit global technology giants' profits, and cause them to lose market shares in China.
In response to the Dutch government's blocking of ASML exports to China, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin on January 2 said that China strongly opposes the hegemonic and bullying practices of the US, which seriously violate international trade rules, undermine the global semiconductor industry structure and affect the security and stability of international industry and supply chains.
Wang urged the Dutch side to respect the spirit of contract and take concrete steps to protect the shared interests of China and the Netherlands and the companies of the two countries, adding that China will resolutely safeguard its legitimate rights and interests.
"The semiconductor sector is a highly globalized industry. In a deeply integrated world economy, the US actions will surely boomerang," Wang said.
China's largest dual-fuel driven car-carrying vessel set sail on its maiden voyage from Shanghai to Europe on Wednesday, supporting the country's vehicle exports, according to China Media Group.
The maiden voyage of the vessel will transport a total of 5,000 China-made vehicles to Europe after setting sail from Shanghai and refill at other Chinese ports. At least half of the shipped belong to new-energy vehicles.
The vessel was the first car carrier invested by Chinese ship owner, the SAIC Anji Logistics Co, with largest capacity among world's in-service car carriers, which has a maximum capacity of 7,600 vehicles with over 40,000 tons of displacement. It dual-fuel engine can reduce 40 percent of CO2 emission, according to the report.
Data from China's General Administration of Customs showed that China exported 5.221 million vehicles in 2023, rising 57.4 percent year-on-year.
Shanghai Waigaoqiao port, China's largest port for vehicle export, realized a record 1.025 million vehicle export in 2023, thepaper.cn reported on Wednesday.
To match the nation's newfound strength in the emerging field of vehicle exports, Chinese shipyards are running at full throttle to keep up with demand from shipping companies as well as auto manufacturers.
Over the next three years, a total of 14 car carriers with various capacity levels will join SAIC Anji Logistics Co's transport fleet, further supporting exports of Chinese auto brands, said the report.
In recent years, Britain's Secret Intelligence Service has intensified its attacks on China for alleged spying activities in Britain. However, if the SIS wants to root out operatives working undercover to steal the country's secrets, they should perhaps ask themselves. The arrest of a businessman surnamed Huang by China's Ministry of State Security brings attention to the hypocrisy of the spymasters at MI6.
Huang, the head of an overseas consultancy, is accused of serious offences. He is said to have worked for SIS for about nine years, using the specialist skills and equipment provided to him after being recruited to steal state secrets. The MSS says that behind his façade as a businessman, his undercover job was to collect China-related intelligence for the British espionage agency and identify potential recruits.
It smacks of double standards. What else would you call repeatedly attacking another state by accusing it of something, and then cynically behaving in the same way?
Last year, the head of MI6, Richard Moore, said in2023 that China presented "an epoch-defining challenge" and that his organization commits more of its resources to Beijing's activities than to any other country. It is not the first time he criticized China. In 2021, he described China ominously as "an authoritarian state, with different values from ours."
The UK's assaults on China come in many forms. They can be a warning of vague, unsubstantiated allegations about individuals having undue influence on British politicians. They can come as personal attacks on people of Chinese heritage simply because they work with influential decision-makers to raise issues of concern to the UK's Chinese community (but without real evidence to back up the slurs). They can even come in the form of sudden arrests by police accusing people of serious espionage offences - and then letting those people go free without charge. A common feature of these events is that they created a great deal of smoke without fire - generating much Sinophobic sentiment fueled by unsupported allegations. Nothing came of them.
The most recent example is of Chris Cash, a researcher in the UK parliament, who was arrested, with an associate, under espionage laws. He could hardly be described as pro-China - he actually worked for an anti-China research group and vehemently denied wrongdoing. The substance of the investigation seems to have been that he had contact with influential politicians interested in Chinese affairs. It looked like guilt by association. Neither he nor his colleague have been charged.
Cash's arrest happened almost a year ago, but it did not become public knowledge until it was leaked to the British media six months later, creating negative publicity, at about the same time that Beijing was hoping to improve China-UK relations at a high level.
Two years ago, Christine Lee, a London-based layer of Chinese origin, was accused by Britain's domestic intelligence service, MI5, of being a spy for Beijing - and yet again, no arrests or charges followed. All that happened was that her reputation - and goodwill toward China - was severely damaged. The agency accused her of being "involved in political interference activities" in the UK. Lawmakers in the House of Commons were also given a so-called "interference alert" - the first issued in at least 80 years. Lee knew nothing about it until she saw media reports branding her "an enemy of the state." She later launched legal action against MI5 in a bid to clear her name.
Britain's intelligence services have clearly identified China as a target for their operations. Is one aspect of that to cast suspicion on people simply because of their Chinese background or with personal connections to China, or with a special interest in China? Why is there so much smoke without any fire, so many accusations without substantiation? In the Huang case London stands accused of doing the very thing it accuses Beijing of doing. It's astonishing hypocrisy, especially when the West has so often been caught out in the past.
The memorandum of understanding between China and the US on preventing illegal entry of Chinese cultural relics into the US has been extended. The new text will enter into force on Sunday and will be valid for five years, as announced by the National Cultural Heritage Administration on Thursday.
Art historians often wish that Renaissance painters could shell out secrets of the craft. Now, scientists may have cracked one using chemistry and physics.
Around the turn of the 15th century in Italy, oil-based paints replaced egg-based tempera paints as the dominant medium. During this transition, artists including Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli also experimented with paints made from oil and egg (SN: 4/30/14). But it has been unclear how adding egg to oil paints may have affected the artwork. “Usually, when we think about art, not everybody thinks about the science which is behind it,” says chemical engineer Ophélie Ranquet of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.
In the lab, Ranquet and colleagues whipped up two oil-egg recipes to compare with plain oil paint. One mixture contained fresh egg yolk mixed into oil paint, and had a similar consistency to mayonnaise. For the other blend, the scientists ground pigment into the yolk, dried it and mixed it with oil — a process the old masters might have used, according to the scant historical records that exist today. Each medium was subjected to a battery of tests that analyzed its mass, moisture, oxidation, heat capacity, drying time and more.
In both concoctions, the yolk’s proteins, phospholipids and antioxidants helped slow paint oxidation, which can cause paint to turn yellow over time, the team reports March 28 in Nature Communications.
In the mayolike blend, the yolk created sturdy links between pigment particles, resulting in stiffer paint. Such consistency would have been ideal for techniques like impasto, a raised, thick style that adds texture to art. Egg additions also could have reduced wrinkling by creating a firmer paint consistency. Wrinkling sometimes happens with oil paints when the top layer dries faster than the paint underneath, and the dried film buckles over looser, still-wet paint.
The hybrid mediums have some less than eggs-ellent qualities, though. For instance, the eggy oil paint can take longer to dry. If paints were too yolky, Renaissance artists would have had to wait a long time to add the next layer, Ranquet says.
“The more we understand how artists select and manipulate their materials, the more we can appreciate what they’re doing, the creative process and the final product,” says Ken Sutherland, director of scientific research at the Art Institute of Chicago, who was not involved with the work.
Research on historical art mediums can not only aid art preservation efforts, Sutherland says, but also help people gain a deeper understanding of the artworks themselves.
In a book about his travels in Africa published in 1907, British explorer Arnold Henry Savage Landor recounted witnessing an impromptu meal that his companions relished but that he found unimaginably revolting.
As he coasted down a river in the Congo Basin with several local hunter-gatherers, a dead rodent floated near their canoe. Its decomposing body had bloated to the size of a small pig.
Stench from the swollen corpse left Landor gasping for breath. Unable to speak, he tried to signal his companions to steer the canoe away from the fetid creature. Instead, they hauled the supersize rodent aboard and ate it. “The odour when they dug their knives into it was enough to kill the strongest of men,” Landor wrote. “When I recovered, my admiration for the digestive powers of these people was intense. They were smacking their lips and they said the [rodent] had provided most excellent eating.”
Starting in the 1500s, European and then later American explorers, traders, missionaries, government officials and others who lived among Indigenous peoples in many parts of the world wrote of similar food practices. Hunter-gatherers and small-scale farmers everywhere commonly ate putrid meat, fish and fatty parts of a wide range of animals. From arctic tundra to tropical rainforests, native populations consumed rotten remains, either raw, fermented or cooked just enough to singe off fur and create a more chewable texture. Many groups treated maggots as a meaty bonus.
Descriptions of these practices, which still occur in some present-day Indigenous groups and among northern Europeans who occasionally eat fermented fish, aren’t likely to inspire any new Food Network shows or cookbooks from celebrity chefs.
Case in point: Some Indigenous communities feasted on huge decomposing beasts, including hippos that had been trapped in dug-out pits in Africa and beached whales on Australia’s coast. Hunters in those groups typically smeared themselves with the fat of the animal before gorging on greasy innards. After slicing open animals’ midsections, both adults and children climbed into massive, rotting body cavities to remove meat and fat.
Or consider that Native Americans in Missouri in the late 1800s made a prized soup from the greenish, decaying flesh of dead bison. Animal bodies were buried whole in winter and unearthed in spring after ripening enough to achieve peak tastiness.
But such accounts provide a valuable window into a way of life that existed long before Western industrialization and the war against germs went global, says anthropological archaeologist John Speth of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Intriguingly, no reports of botulism and other potentially fatal reactions to microorganisms festering in rotting meat appear in writings about Indigenous groups before the early 1900s. Instead, decayed flesh and fat represented valued and tasty parts of a healthy diet. Many travelers such as Landor considered such eating habits to be “disgusting.” But “a gold mine of ethnohistorical accounts makes it clear that the revulsion Westerners feel toward putrid meat and maggots is not hardwired in our genome but is instead culturally learned,” Speth says.
This dietary revelation also challenges an influential scientific idea that cooking originated among our ancient relatives as a way to make meat more digestible, thus providing a rich calorie source for brain growth in the Homo genus. It’s possible, Speth argues, that Stone Age hominids such as Neandertals first used cooking for certain plants that, when heated, provided an energy-boosting, carbohydrate punch to the diet. Animals held packets of fat and protein that, after decay set in, rounded out nutritional needs without needing to be heated. Putrid foods in the diets of Indigenous peoples Speth’s curiosity about a human taste for putrid meat was originally piqued by present-day hunter-gatherers in polar regions. North American Inuit, Siberians and other far-north populations still regularly eat fermented or rotten meat and fish.
Fermented fish heads, also known as “stinkhead,” are one popular munchy among northern groups. Chukchi herders in the Russian Far East, for instance, bury whole fish in the ground in early fall and let the bodies naturally ferment during periods of freezing and thawing. Fish heads the consistency of hard ice cream are then unearthed and eaten whole.
Speth has suspected for several decades that consumption of fermented and putrid meat, fish, fat and internal organs has a long and probably ancient history among northern Indigenous groups. Consulting mainly online sources such as Google Scholar and universities’ digital library catalogs, he found many ethnohistorical descriptions of such behavior going back to the 1500s. Putrid walrus, seals, caribou, reindeer, musk oxen, polar bears, moose, arctic hares and ptarmigans had all been fair game. Speth reported much of this evidence in 2017 in PaleoAnthropology.
In one recorded incident from late-1800s Greenland, a well-intentioned hunter brought what he had claimed in advance was excellent food to a team led by American explorer Robert Peary. A stench filled the air as the hunter approached Peary’s vessel carrying a rotting seal dripping with maggots. The Greenlander had found the seal where a local group had buried it, possibly a couple of years earlier, so that the body could reach a state of tasty decomposition. Peary ordered the man to keep the reeking seal off his boat.
Miffed at this unexpected rejection, the hunter “told us that the more decayed the seal the finer the eating, and he could not understand why we should object,” Peary’s wife wrote of the encounter.
Even in temperate and tropical areas, where animal bodies decompose within hours or days, Indigenous peoples have appreciated rot as much as Peary’s seal-delivery man did. Speth and anthropological archaeologist Eugène Morin of Trent University in Peterborough, Canada, described some of those obscure ethnohistorical accounts last October in PaleoAnthropology. Early hominids may have scavenged rotten meat These accounts undermine some of scientists’ food-related sacred cows, Speth says. For instance, European explorers and other travelers consistently wrote that traditional groups not only ate putrid meat raw or lightly cooked but suffered no ill aftereffects. A protective gut microbiome may explain why, Speth suspects. Indigenous peoples encountered a variety of microorganisms from infancy on, unlike people today who grow up in sanitized settings. Early exposures to pathogens may have prompted the development of an array of gut microbes and immune responses that protected against potential harms of ingesting putrid meat.
That idea requires further investigation; little is known about the bacterial makeup of rotten meat eaten by traditional groups or of their gut microbiomes. But studies conducted over the last few decades do indicate that putrefaction, the process of decay, offers many of cooking’s nutritional benefits with far less effort. Putrefaction predigests meat and fish, softening the flesh and chemically breaking down proteins and fats so they are more easily absorbed and converted to energy by the body.
Given the ethnohistorical evidence, hominids living 3 million years ago or more could have scavenged meat from decomposing carcasses, even without stone tools for hunting or butchery, and eaten their raw haul safely long before fire was used for cooking, Speth contends. If simple stone tools appeared as early as 3.4 million years ago, as some researchers have controversially suggested, those implements may have been made by hominids seeking raw meat and marrow (SN: 9/11/10, p. 8). Researchers suspect regular use of fire for cooking, light and warmth emerged no earlier than around 400,000 years ago (SN: 5/5/12, p. 18).
“Recognizing that eating rotten meat is possible, even without fire, highlights how easy it would have been to incorporate scavenged food into the diet long before our ancestors learned to hunt or process [meat] with stone tools,” says paleoanthropologist Jessica Thompson of Yale University.
Thompson and colleagues suggested in Current Anthropology in 2019 that before about 2 million years ago, hominids were primarily scavengers who used rocks to smash open animal bones and eat nutritious, fat-rich marrow and brains. That conclusion, stemming from a review of fossil and archaeological evidence, challenged a common assumption that early hominids — whether as hunters or scavengers — primarily ate meat off the bone.
Certainly, ancient hominids were eating more than just the meaty steaks we think of today, says archaeologist Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo of Rice University in Houston. In East Africa’s Olduvai Gorge, butchered animal bones at sites dating to nearly 2 million years ago indicate that hominids ate most parts of carcasses, including brains and internal organs.
“But Speth’s argument about eating putrid carcasses is very speculative and untestable,” Domínguez-Rodrigo says.
Untangling whether ancient hominids truly had a taste for rot will require research that spans many fields, including microbiology, genetics and food science, Speth says.
But if his contention holds up, it suggests that ancient cooks were not turning out meat dishes. Instead, Speth speculates, cooking’s primary value at first lay in making starchy and oily plants softer, more chewable and easily digestible. Edible plants contain carbohydrates, sugar molecules that can be converted to energy in the body. Heating over a fire converts starch in tubers and other plants to glucose, a vital energy source for the body and brain. Crushing or grinding of plants might have yielded at least some of those energy benefits to hungry hominids who lacked the ability to light fires.
Whether hominids controlled fire well enough to cook plants or any other food regularly before around 400,000 to 300,000 years ago is unknown. Neandertals may have hunted animals for fat Despite their nutritional benefits, plants often get viewed as secondary menu items for Stone Age folks. It doesn’t help that plants preserve poorly at archaeological sites.
Neandertals, in particular, have a long-standing reputation as plant shunners. Popular opinion views Neandertals as burly, shaggy individuals who huddled around fires chomping on mammoth steaks.
That’s not far from an influential scientific view of what Neandertals ate. Elevated levels of a diet-related form of nitrogen in Neandertal bones and teeth hint that they were committed carnivores, eating large amounts of protein-rich lean meat, several research teams have concluded over nearly the last 30 years.
But consuming that much protein from meat, especially from cuts above the front and hind limbs now referred to as steaks, would have been a recipe for nutritional disaster, Speth argues. Meat from wild, hoofed animals and smaller creatures such as rabbits contains almost no fat, or marbling, unlike meat from modern domestic animals, he says. Ethnohistorical accounts, especially for northern hunters including the Inuit, include warnings about weight loss, ill health and even death that can result from eating too much lean meat.
This form of malnutrition is known as rabbit starvation. Evidence indicates that people can safely consume between about 25 and 35 percent of daily calories as protein, Speth says. Above that threshold, several investigations have indicated that the liver becomes unable to break down chemical wastes from ingested proteins, which then accumulate in the blood and contribute to rabbit starvation. Limits to the amount of daily protein that can be safely consumed meant that ancient hunting groups, like those today, needed animal fats and carbohydrates from plants to fulfill daily calorie and other nutritional needs.
Modern “Paleo diets” emphasize eating lean meats, fruits and vegetables. But that omits what past and present Indigenous peoples most wanted from animal carcasses. Accounts describe Inuit people eating much larger amounts of fatty body parts than lean meat, Speth says. Over the last few centuries, they have favored tongue, fat deposits, brisket, ribs, fatty tissue around intestines and internal organs, and marrow. Internal organs, especially adrenal glands, have provided vitamin C — nearly absent in lean muscle — that prevented anemia and other symptoms of scurvy.
Western explorers noted that the Inuit also ate chyme, the stomach contents of reindeer and other plant-eating animals. Chyme provided at least a side course of plant carbohydrates. Likewise, Neandertals in Ice Age Europe probably subsisted on a fat- and chyme-supplemented diet (SN Online: 10/11/13), Speth contends.
Large numbers of animal bones found at northern European Neandertal sites — often viewed as the residue of ravenous meat eaters — may instead reflect overhunting of animals to obtain enough fat to meet daily calorie needs. Because wild game typically has a small percentage of body fat, northern hunting groups today and over the last few centuries frequently killed prey in large numbers, either discarding most lean meat from carcasses or feeding it to their dogs, ethnographic studies show.
If Neandertals followed that playbook, eating putrid foods might explain why their bones carry a carnivore-like nitrogen signature, Speth suggests. An unpublished study of decomposing human bodies kept at a University of Tennessee research facility in Knoxville called the Body Farm tested that possibility. Biological anthropologist Melanie Beasley, now at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., found moderately elevated tissue nitrogen levels in 10 deceased bodies sampled regularly for about six months. Tissue from those bodies served as a stand-in for animal meat consumed by Neandertals. Human flesh is an imperfect substitute for, say, reindeer or elephant carcasses. But Beasley’s findings suggest that decomposition’s effects on a range of animals need to be studied. Intriguingly, she also found that maggots in the decaying tissue displayed extremely elevated nitrogen levels.
Paleobiologist Kimberly Foecke of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., has also found high nitrogen levels in rotting, maggot-free cuts of beef from animals fed no hormones or antibiotics to approximate the diets of Stone Age creatures (SN: 1/2/19).
Like arctic hunters did a few hundred years ago, Neandertals may have eaten putrid meat and fish studded with maggots, Speth says. That would explain elevated nitrogen levels in Neandertal fossils.
But Neandertal dining habits are poorly understood. Unusually extensive evidence of Neandertal big-game consumption has come from a new analysis of fossil remains at a roughly 125,000-year-old site in northern Germany called Neumark-Nord. There, Neandertals periodically hunted straight-tusked elephants weighing up to 13 metric tons, say archaeologist Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser of Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany and colleagues.
In a study reported February 1 in Science Advances, her group analyzed patterns of stone-tool incisions on bones of at least 57 elephants from 27 spots near an ancient lake basin where Neandertals lit campfires and constructed shelters (SN: 1/29/22, p. 8). Evidence suggests that Neandertal butchers — much like Inuit hunters — removed fat deposits under the skin and fatty body parts such as the tongue, internal organs, brain and thick layers of fat in the feet. Lean meat from elephants would have been eaten in smaller quantities to avoid rabbit starvation, the researchers argue.
Further research needs to examine whether the Neandertals cooked elephant meat or boiled the bones to extract nutritious grease, Speth says. Mealtime options would have expanded for hominids who could not only consume putrid meat and fat but also heat animal parts over fires, he suspects.
Neandertals who hunted elephants must also have eaten a variety of plants to meet their considerable energy requirements, says Gaudzinski-Windheuser. But so far, only fragments of burned hazelnuts, acorns and blackthorn plums have been found at Neumark-Nord. Neandertals probably carb-loaded Better evidence of Neandertals’ plant preferences comes from sites in warm Mediterranean and Middle Eastern settings. At a site in coastal Spain, Neandertals probably ate fruits, nuts and seeds of a variety of plants (SN: 3/27/21, p. 32).
Neandertals in a range of environments must have consumed lots of starchy plants, argues archaeologist Karen Hardy of the University of Glasgow in Scotland. Even Stone Age northern European and Asian regions included plants with starch-rich appendages that grew underground, such as tubers.
Neandertals could also have obtained starchy carbs from the edible, inner bark of many trees and from seaweed along coastlines. Cooking, as suggested by Speth, would have greatly increased the nutritional value of plants, Hardy says. Not so for rotten meat and fat, though Neandertals such as those at Neumark-Nord may have cooked what they gleaned from fresh elephant remains.
There is direct evidence that Neandertals munched on plants. Microscopic remnants of edible and medicinal plants have been found in the tartar on Neandertal teeth (SN: 4/1/17, p. 16), Hardy says.
Carbohydrate-fueled energy helped to maintain large brains, enable strenuous physical activity and ensure healthy pregnancies for both Neandertals and ancient Homo sapiens, Hardy concludes in the January 2022 Journal of Human Evolution. (Researchers disagree over whether Neandertals, which lived from around 400,000 to 40,000 years ago, were a variant of H. sapiens or a separate species.) Paleo cuisine was tasty Like Hardy, Speth suspects that plants provided a large share of the energy and nutrients Stone Age folks needed. Plants represented a more predictable, readily available food source than hunted or scavenged meat and fat, he contends.
Plants also offered Neandertals and ancient H. sapiens — whose diets probably didn’t differ dramatically from Neandertals’, Hardy says — a chance to stretch their taste buds and cook up tangy meals.
Paleolithic plant cooking included preplanned steps aimed at adding dashes of specific flavors to basic dishes, a recent investigation suggests. In at least some places, Stone Age people apparently cooked to experience pleasing tastes and not just to fill their stomachs. Charred plant food fragments from Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan and Franchthi Cave in Greece consisted of crushed pulse seeds, possibly from starchy pea species, combined with wild plants that would have provided a pungent, somewhat bitter taste, microscopic analyses show.
Added ingredients included wild mustard, wild almonds, wild pistachio and fruits such as hackberry, archaeobotanist Ceren Kabukcu of the University of Liverpool in England and colleagues reported last November in Antiquity.
Four Shanidar food bits date to about 40,000 years ago or more and originated in sediment that included stone tools attributed to H. sapiens. Another food fragment, likely from a cooked Neandertal meal, dates to between 70,000 and 75,000 years ago. Neandertal fossils found in Shanidar Cave are also about 70,000 years old. So it appears that Shanidar Neandertals spiced up cooked plant foods before Shanidar H. sapiens did, Kabukcu says.
Franchthi food remains date to between 13,100 and 11,400 years ago, when H. sapiens lived there. Wild pulses in food from both caves display microscopic signs of having been soaked, a way to dilute poisons in seeds and moderate their bitterness.
These new findings “suggest that cuisine, or the combination of different ingredients for pleasure, has a very long history indeed,” says Hardy, who was not part of Kabukcu’s team.
There’s a hefty dollop of irony in the possibility that original Paleo diets mixed what people in many societies today regard as gross-sounding portions of putrid meat and fat with vegetarian dishes that still seem appealing.
Beer lovers could be left with a sour taste, thanks to the latest in a series of studies mapping the effects of climate change on crops.
Malted barley — a key ingredient in beer including IPAs, stouts and pilsners — is particularly sensitive to warmer temperatures and drought, both of which are likely to increase due to climate change. As a result, average global barley crop yields could drop as much as 17 percent by 2099, compared with the average yield from 1981 to 2010, under the more extreme climate change projections, researchers report October 15 in Nature Plants. That decline “could lead to, on average, a doubling of price in some countries,” says coauthor Steven Davis, an Earth systems scientist at University of California, Irvine. Consumption would also drop globally by an average of 16 percent, or roughly what people in the United States consumed in 2011.
The results are based on computer simulations projecting climate conditions, plant responses and global market reactions up to the year 2099. Under the mildest climate change predictions, world average barley yields would still go down by at least 3 percent, and average prices would increase about 15 percent, the study says.
Other crops such as maize, wheat and soy and wine grapes are also threatened by the global rising of average atmospheric temperatures as well as by pests emboldened by erratic weather (SN: 2/8/14, p. 3). But there’s still hope for ale aficionados. The study did not account for technological innovations or genetic tweaks that could spare the crop, Davis says.
