Proxy Hesabatlar
Celena Holtzberg
Private firms around the world are the ultimate decision makers regarding the international use of the dollar and they respond to the incentives facing them, namely access to and costs of dollar financing. And, for the first time in nearly 20 years, it is substantially cheaper to conduct short-term borrowing in renminbi (RMB) rather than dollars. In other words, a portion of the dedollarization trend is driven not only by geopolitics but also by interest rate differentials.
For the first time in nearly 20 years it is substantially cheaper to conduct short-term borrowing in RMB rather than dollars. Borrowing costs, as measured by the proxy of a one-year government bill, imply short-term borrowing in RMB is around two percentage points cheaper than analogous borrowing in dollars. This is pushing firms, particularly those engaging with Chinese individuals and firms on either end of the transaction, towards RMB-denominated debt for trade financing to take advantage of efficiency gains.
Without abundant dollar financing alternatives, such as during the 2008 financial crisis, the impact of this would have subdued global trade. However, following concerted efforts by Beijing to promote RMB-denominated lending, firms seeking short-term finance can now turn to RMB lenders or RMB-denominated debt markets. Indeed, in the past year overseas units of Chinese firms, as well as Western companies like BMW and Crdit Agricole, have raised a record 125.5 billion RMB ($17.33 billion) selling RMB-denominated bonds during the January-October 2023, a 61 percent increase from the same period last year.
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Globally, the number of Palaeolithic cannibalism fossil sites remain relatively few5, further suporting the notion that the practice of hominin cannibalism may have been an exceptional activity. However, given the sparse nature of the hominin fossil record, the fact that we have evidence for cannibalism at all infers that the behaviour was perhaps more common within prehistoric populations7 than the number of archaeological sites suggests. Additional support for the possible widespread nature of prehistoric cannibalism comes from genetic studies of global patterns of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs)8, which imply that prehistoric TSE polymorphisms were a routine feature of hominin life. Mead et al., for example, propose that the repeated exposure of hominins to the effects of TSEs (such as Kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) resulting from cannibalistic activities, drove the polymorphism adaptation as a selective advantage within prehistoric populations8,9. These authors argue that such an adaptation would only be necessary if exposure to the neurodegenerative diseases (through the consumption of infected flesh) was a common feature in prehistoric hominin lifeways.
Instances of prehistoric cannibalism have been distinguished within the archaeological record based on anthropogenic modification of hominin skeletal remains in relation to taphonomic processes. The key signatures of cannibalism1,2,11,14,19,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37 include: 1. lack of a cranial base (to get to the brain) on otherwise complete or near-complete skeletons; 2. virtual absence of vertebrae (due to crushing or boiling to get at bone marrow and grease); 3. cut- and chop-marks; 4. cutmark arrangement: position, number and placement; 5. long bone breakage (to access the marrow); 6. anvil abrasions; 7. comparable butchering techniques on human remains as in faunal (food) remains; 8. post-processing discard of hominin remains similar to faunal remains; 9. evidence of cooking in the form of burnt bone; 10. peeling: a roughened bone surface with parallel grooves or fibrous texture is produced when fresh bone is fractured and peeled apart; 11. percussion pits: the point of impact where a stone or any solid matter struck the bone cortex and scarred the surface; 12. human tooth marks; and 13. scraping marks.
To construct the human nutritional template in this study, the total average weights and calorie values (fat and protein) for each body part were combined from published chemical composition analyses of four male individuals42,43,44. The published materials used here are the only sources that shared the same original data format, in displaying the full body compositional data as percentages for body weight, fat and protein content. This in turn facilitated a clear comparison of data across the individual specimens. The results are summarised in Table 1, with full methods, calculations and detailed data tables given in Supplementary Information 1 (S1).
There are some caveats to consider with the nutritional template presented in Table 1. First, the nutritional template represents only the potential nutritional value of an adult human male. Ideally, nutritional templates for females and a range of ages would be constructed, to represent the full nutritional potential of hominin social groups (see discussion). However, data for females and sub-adults are not available within the published literature, and the collection of primary data of this nature was outside the ethical (and legal) scope of this study. Given the proxy nature of the nutritional template, one solution to the age distribution problem is to calculate the weight percent ratio of male infant, child, juvenile, and adolescent to adult, and downscale the proxy calorie value accordingly (Table 2). Male weights were used to fit the parameters of the human nutritional template and taken from the United Kingdom Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and World Health Organisation growth projection charts46,47. It should be kept in mind that as growth rates are not linear, the values represent a simplified reflection of reality in regards to calorie values. However, the average values presented within the broad age categories in Table 2 (infant, child, juvenile, adolescent and adult) match the age categories used in the archaeological sites under investigation (Table 3) and are therefore useful as a heuristic device when calculating the overall calorie values for episodes of Palaeolithic cannibalism.
A further consideration is that the nutritional values obtained only pertain to modern humans. It is unknown whether the data would change substantially for non-Homo sapiens species. In the case of Neanderthals, for example, it is probable that the values for skeletal muscle and related organs would increase given their greater muscle mass48. The estimates given in this study should therefore be taken as minimum values for non-Homo sapiens hominin species. A third caveat is the use of average values from a small base sample when calculating human calorie values. Due to the variable nature of each human individual this cannot be avoided without a substantially larger dataset (which was unavailable at the time of writing). Finally, the values in Tables 1 and 2 are for raw meat only. There has been much recent interest in how cooking can increase the calorie value retrieved from meat49,50,51. However, given the nature of this study, it was not possible to conduct analyses on cooked human flesh.
Having established baseline calorific values for the human body it is now possible to apply those values to a sample of Palaeolithic cannibalism episodes (Table 3). The sites chosen were those highlighted in a recent review on prehistoric cannibalism5 that did not have any ambiguity surrounding the interpretation of cannibalism as a behavioural act. Later Prehistoric sites were not included as the focus of this research falls within the Palaeolithic and understanding the motivations of our hominin ancestors for such acts. We know that Homo sapiens motivations for cannibalism are frequently context specific, including survival, warfare and symbolic cannibalism as discussed above5. Attempting to understand the possible range of motivations for cannibalism in other hominin species therefore forms a focal point of interest here. When estimating the calorific values of the selected cannibalism episodes, three values were assigned per Palaeolithic site (Table 4): (i) A total full body calorie value (using the Total value from Table 1), which can be seen as a maximum value for the episode, (ii) an intermediate value using only the body parts known to be consumed through the ethnographic and archaeological records (*), and (iii) a minimum value where only the skeletal muscle calorie values were applied.
From Table 4 we can see that there are a range of calorie values per site that correspond directly to the number of individuals being consumed. To assess the nutritional viability of the cannibalism episodes in their broader archaeological context, a comparison is needed with the nutritional value of other faunal species from sites where cannibalism is known to have occurred (Table 3). Table 5 shows the nutritional value of a human body based on skeletal muscle compared to the nutritional value for a number of anthropogenically modified fauna found in close association with hominin remains at the Palaeolithic sites.
Previous studies52,53 have tended to focus on calorie values for the flesh of the Pleistocene fauna. However, as with the hominin remains, faunal remains are often exploited for additional resources (e.g. bone marrow). Skeletal muscle was used for the nutritional comparison due to a lack of data to facilitate a full body break down of nutritional values across all faunal species. Despite this limitation, the skeletal muscle values serve as a reasonable proxy to assess the calorie values of hominins and other faunal remains. While all the non-carnivorous species from Table 3 are represented in Table 5, there were limited data available (apart from bear) to represent the carnivore remains. Fish and birds are included to represent a scale of low calorie faunal remains that are frequently exploited by humans, even if not directly represented within the assemblages of the sites under study. As with the hominin sites above, the calorie values presented are based on the assumption that 100% of the flesh was consumed to facilitate a direct comparison between faunal and human species. Table 5 shows that when compared to most other fauna, human skeletal muscle has a nutritional value broadly in line with those that match our size and weight, but produce significantly fewer calories than most of the larger fauna such as mammoth, woolly rhino or deer species known to have been regularly consumed by past hominins.
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