Neolithic

• The South Korean dog meat trade will officially end in 2027 after a bill was passed making the slaughter of dogs and the sale of dog meat for human consumption illegal in the country (though the consumption of dog meat will still be legal).
• The news has been embraced in South Korea as a long-awaited victory by many animal protection organisations.
• Dog meat is the fourth-most consumed meat in South Korea after pork, beef and chicken.

Stigmatisation of a practice

• But an important moment of national and international friction around the practice occurred in the run-up to the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games.
• Influential South Korean public and political figures took a public stance in favour of dog meat as a national cultural symbol.
• It was reported that the hiding of dog meat restaurant signs and dog carcasses had once again been introduced by the government.

A practice in sharp decline

• In recent decades, a civil movement led by animal protection charities has campaigned for the end of the trade.
• It could be argued that the COVID pandemic has also played a part in the sharp fall in dog meat consumption in recent years.
• Since then, municipal authorities have opened a dialogue with dog retailers to negotiate the demolition of dog slaughtering facilities.

The perspective of the dog farmers

• Since 2014, some of these municipalities have agreed to compensate dog meat retailers for closing dog meat stalls in traditional markets.
• However, now that a full ban is coming into effect, dog meat farmers are requesting compensation schemes as this new law will directly affect their livelihoods.
• The Korean Dog Meat Association has been arguing that the bill represents an abuse of power that overlooks the perspective of many South Koreans, and that it infringes on the right to choose what one wants to eat.

Julien Dugnoille received funding from the Korea Foundation and the Academy of Korean Studies to conduct part of the research on which this paper is based. John Knight does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• 150 cities from 46 countries around the world entered the Toyota Mobility Foundation Sustainable Cities Challenge.
• PLANO, Texas, Nov. 7, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Toyota Mobility Foundation, in partnership with Challenge Works and World Resources Institute, announces the shortlist for the $9-million Sustainable Cities Challenge.
• "The Sustainable Cities Challenge will bring cities and innovators together with city residents to tailor solutions to real world challenges through open innovation."
• The Sustainable Cities Challenge is funded by the Toyota Mobility Foundation and has been designed in partnership with Challenge Works and World Resources Institute.

• The unprecedented findings open unsuspected horizons for a broader understanding of the social, cultural and spiritual background of the ancient peoples of north-west Arabia.
• Researchers emphasise the probable communal character of the ritual and the possibility that people journeyed specifically to prehistoric stone structures known as mustatils to undertake the ritual, which would represent one of the earliest known pilgrimage traditions.
• Mustatils are large-scale, open-air rectangular structures with low stone walls.
• Though the structures' function was at first unknown, excavations since 2018 have pointed to a ritual significance and provided increasing insights into the practice.

• Our new results, published today in Nature, show a group of prehistoric farmers who lived within a network of other communities.
• This group even brought with them the bones of a “founding father”, establishing a lasting, male-dominated lineage.

Difficulties looking into the past

• Ancient burials can tell us a lot about how prehistoric people treated their dead.
• But figuring out how these societies behaved on a day-to-day basis has always been challenging for researchers.
• These challenges are due to a lack of written records, and physical data that can be hard to interpret.
• But only a few, much smaller burials have been found that would likely represent the everyday people of the region.

A network of communities

• Using specialised ancient DNA techniques and several sources of evidence from the burials, we reconstructed two of the largest ever family trees from a prehistoric cemetery.
• Interestingly, some of the “new incoming” female individuals were distantly related to each other, meaning they may have come from a network of nearby communities, and even from the same communities.
• Lastly, we also observed the adult daughters from Gurgy were not buried at the site, meaning they had likely left Gurgy to join other nearby communities themselves (once they had reached a certain age).

A founding father

• We observed an entire group, made up of several generations (children, parents and grandparents), arrived at Gurgy together from the beginning.
• This group must have left a previous site, leaving behind any previously deceased children (but yet still brought and reburied the founding father).
• Hence, like the founding group, these last generations abruptly departed Gurgy together, leaving behind their own buried children.