Search

Palaeoanthropologists and evolutionary psychologists have successfully used the increasing size of the brain during human evolution to infer cognitive and social outcomes. Archaeologists have applied similar reasoning to the development of technology in deep history. This paper goes beyond these approaches by considering the house as a metaphor for the structure of hominin minds. It is argued that the study of the mind in deep history requires, (1) a recognition that mind is distributed between bodies, brains, and the world. The implications are examined through a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study (that unwraps the cerebellum and which suggests that folding rather than cortex size may be more important for understanding cognition.; (2) unmasking the ingrained container-habitus that has been used to describe and investigate minds either in the present or deep past. This bias is explored by entering the eccentric house-mind of Sir John Soane (1753-1837) with its many compartments, paintings, and antiquities; and (3) an exploration of alternative embodied metaphors to enable archaeologists to study distributed mind in deep history. The metaphor ARCHITECTURE WITHOUT WALLS is discussed and briefly compared to the evidence for ‘houses’ in the Middle and Upper Pleistocene. The evidence indicates that hominins have always had complex, distributed minds but only recently in our deep history did we come to think predominantly through and with artificial containers such as houses. Late in human history these constructions became a common-sense habitus that expressed and fashioned our cognitive experience of the world.

Circular features made from mammoth bone are known from across Upper Palaeolithic Eastern Europe, and are widely identified as dwellings. The first systematic flotation programme of samples from a recently discovered feature at Kostenki 11 in Russia has yielded assemblages of charcoal, burnt bone and microlithic debitage. New radiocarbon dates provide the first coherent chronology for the site, revealing it to be one of the oldest such features on the Russian Plain. The authors discuss the implications for understanding the function of circular mammoth-bone features during the onset of the Last Glacial Maximum.

150 years after it was found the search began for the missing flint that was photographed and described on 27 April 1859. This chapter explores what other documentation was lost and, in particular, the two photographs taken on the day of discovery. The idea of archaeology as an experiment is also discussed. The historically important flint was re-discovered in the Prestwich collection that, after his death in 1896, went to the Natural History Museum. Until 2008 its importance was not recognised. It was possible to match the flint tool, identified by a well-glued label in Prestwich’s handwriting, with the close-up photograph taken in 1859. But when examined in detail a question emerged about its authenticity. Was it a genuine artefact or a forgery by one of the quarrymen that deceived both Evans and Prestwich?

The narrative starts at breakfast in the northern French town of Abbeville on the River Somme. Prestwich and Evans are joined by the pioneering, but eccentric antiquary Jacques Boucher de Perthes. They are here to inspect his claims for stone tools found alongside the bones of extinct ice age animals. If they can verify his claim, then the time revolution has begun. The reasons why Boucher de Perthes has been ignored are touched on as the three visit the gravel pits of the town, looking at the evidence. Lunch allows them to study Boucher de Perthes’s huge collection of flints and antiquities, including his strange stone sculptures. They are interrupted by a telegram and leave for Amiens. The train journey from Abbeville to Amiens is used to reflect on how they built their scientific case from facts, not theories. Once in Amiens they are taken by Charles Pinsard to the gravel pits at St Acheul, where they find, and photograph, the evidence they came for. The circumstances of the discovery are described in their own words.

By the end of the decade the time revolution was a done deal. Moulin-Quignon still reverberated, but in 1865 Lubbock produced the first guided tour of the Old Stone Age, in which he accused Lyell of plagiarism. In Pre-Historic Times he filled the new space of deep history with stone tools to show an evolutionary pathway from St Acheul to the Neolithic monuments of Avebury and Stonehenge. Tracing history back was matched by the anthropologist Edward Tylor, who traced it up. Both men were interested in the evolution of racial groups and accounting for the world’s hunters and gatherers. In a typically upbeat assessment, Lubbock saw the lesson of the past as providing hope for the future. Victorian ‘savages’ at the uttermost ends of the earth had not degenerated from a civilized state. They had the potential to evolve, as his ancestors in Europe had done. Unwritten history was making universal history possible. The decade saw deaths and career changes. Prestwich largely abandoned the time revolution, married Falconer’s niece, Grace McCall, and became an Oxford professor. Falconer and Boucher de Perthes died, while Lubbock entered Parliament in 1870. Prestwich’s fixed notion of a single ice age was challenged by James Croll, who painstakingly worked out the changes in the elliptical orbit of the Earth, and from these proposed multiple ice ages. As a bookend to the decade Evans published his fact-rich volume on ancient stone implements. The path of deep history was now set in stone.

The year 1863 saw the consolidation of the time revolution. Evans and Prestwich presented further weighty papers on the Somme, but the major contributions came that year in books by Lyell and Huxley. Lyell’s book outraged Falconer, and a bitter argument ensued about intellectual property. Both authors chart the developmental process by which ‘primitive’ skulls became ‘advanced’ ones. Critical to this was Huxley’s use of the Neanderthal skull that became the first ice age human. Evans, in the meantime, was excavating the ‘missing link’ fossil Archaeopteryx in the British Museum. Falconer’s ire was diverted by Boucher de Perthes’s discovery in 1863 of human remains at Moulin Quignon, outside Abbeville. If authentic, these would be the oldest fossil ancestors. What followed was a lengthy examination of the evidence, with English scientists disagreeing with their French counterparts. In 1859 the quarrymen had been treated as a source of knowledge. Now they were branded by the English as forgers. The climate of claim and counterclaim contrasts with the clarity of the 1859 protocols that proved human antiquity.

The next month is a busy time for Evans and Prestwich, who are now back in London, as they fit writing their papers into a hectic business schedule. The importance of two learned societies—the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries—is explained, as is the craft of putting together a scientific argument. Prestwich’s original manuscript and the referees’ reports are used to show the process. Evans’s chance discovery of comparable implements to those they had found at St Acheul proves a game changer. They came from Hoxne in Suffolk and had been found, but forgotten, sixty years before. Revolutions rely on chance. Attention is paid to the case they made that stone tools were human rather than natural. Did Evans fall back on his knowledge of numismatics and his recent struggles with a patent law case to convince sceptics that the tools from the Somme were indeed evidence of ancient humans? The language of the flints is all important. As they prepare and present their evidence, the chapter picks up the story of Falconer and his niece, Grace McCall, who were introduced in Abbeville in Chapter 2. They are now in Italy, caught up in the latest phase of the Risorgimento war.

The timescale now stretches to the year following the presentation of the evidence. They are warned by Charles Kingsley to expect clerical opposition, but it is slow in coming. Instead, there is a lively debate in the papers about the status of the stone tools and how to account for them. These ideas are set against Herbert Spencer’s view that all life and culture proceeds from the simple to the complex. Are Evans and Prestwich tapping into his idea of progress rather than Darwin’s natural selection, which appears later in the year? The chapter explores when, in 1859, historians such as Buckle, Macaulay, and Freeman thought history began. Their views contrast with the Northern Antiquaries of Scandinavia, who had proposed an earlier prehistoric period before written records. The time revolution had to be fitted into this scheme, and Lubbock was instrumental in finding it room. The time revolution set out to correct bad geology. The timescale of Genesis was simply wrong, although further confrontation with religious beliefs troubled Prestwich. The time revolutionaries were supported by the furore surrounding Essays and Reviews, published in 1860, where clerics challenged the Church’s authority on these matters. The question of how old the artefacts were is examined. They had no means of scientifically measuring age and remained sceptical of conjecture. Their suggestions are compared with those adopted by geologists such as Lyell and Phillips for physical changes in the earth.

The three principals, their partners, families, and networks are introduced. The chapter uses Darwin’s explanation of natural selection in 1857: ‘We have almost unlimited time; no-one but a practical geologist can fully appreciate this.’ Evans, Lubbock, and Prestwich were all practical geologists but with conflicting interests in managing London’s water supply for health and business. The chapter explores their geological passion and how they came to investigate the question of great human antiquity—the crux of the time revolution. The idea of using stone tools as a proxy for remote human ancestors is examined and the challenges which faced them set out. The characters of the principals are mapped onto the ideals in Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, where zeal and perseverance sum up the qualities of success in all walks of life. George Eliot’s observations in Adam Bede on the men of New Leisure provides another fit for the three time revolutionaries. The preoccupation of the mid-nineteenth century with time is also examined using three inventions, the railways and railway time, shrinking distance—and hence time—by telegraphy, and freezing time with photographs. Examples range across literature and engineering.

What happened to the surviving time revolutionaries and their legacy? Knighthoods, high office, a peerage, and bespoke mansions all followed. France preserved Boucher de Perthes’s legacy better than England that of its time revolutionaries, whom it forgot. War, however, destroyed Abbeville in 1940 and with it Boucher de Perthes’s collections and public statue. Lubbock was the last to die in 1913, having seen the Piltdown forgery. Then follows an excursion into the development of the modern synthesis of human origins with scientific dates, a detailed deep-sea record of climate change and the ages of the sites they found on the Somme and at Hoxne. Changing views of our remote ancestors are shown in artists’ imaginings and through bestselling authors. The reticence of Prestwich and Evans to speculate was forgotten as deep history was fleshed out to resonate with the present. The chapter ends by placing the time revolution at the start of an interest in universal and deep history. The time revolutionaries changed our relationship with time and set in motion a dialogue with the past that continues to challenge and enthral.

The time revolution of 1859 changed forever the relationship between humans and time. In the space of a calendar year, and at a furious pace, the belief that all human history could be fitted into 6,000 years was shattered. The evidence for such a fundamental change was small, handheld stone tools found in the gravel quarries of the Somme among the bones of ancient animals. The task facing the antiquarian and the geologist was formidable. The tools had to be accepted as artificial and their association with extinct animals demonstrated beyond doubt. The successful proof, made on 27 April 1859, opened up ‘a vast lapse of ages’ for human history and led Charles Darwin to declare it ‘the most interesting subject which Geology has turned up for many a long year’. This book explores the time revolution through the Victorian world of two businessmen and a banker: John Evans, Joseph Prestwich, and John Lubbock. It draws in their sisters, wives and households and their scientific collaborators—Darwin, Falconer, Lyell, Huxley, and the French antiquary Boucher de Perthes. It tells the story of the time revolution through chapters devoted to the day, month, year, and decade. This chronology drives the narrative forward using the words and pictures of the principals. A direction emerges with each chronological step from discovery to presentation, reception, consolidation, and widespread acceptance of their case.

Within cognitive archaeology, the Paleolithic mind is portrayed as rational, experiential, and anthropological. This chapter argues that the use of experiential and anthropological perspectives has the potential to enrich archaeological interpretations of early hominin cognition through the use of emotional and relational aspects. Wynn’s evolutionary cognitive archaeology is extended by using affective and material standpoints to explore the spaces between minds. The chapter emphasizes the importance of the work of Thomas Wynn to the development of the discipline and offers avenues to incorporate social, emotional, and relational aspects of mind in the study of early cognition—for example, the involvement of theory of mind when considering stone knapping, and the cultural transmission of early stone tool industries such as the Lomekwian. In a case study of the Middle Paleolithic site of Bruniquel Cave, the three approaches to the Paleolithic mind are explored, as well as their distinct interpretations.

This paper draws attention to firewood as a natural resource that was gathered, processed and consumedon a daily basis by Palaeolithic groups. Using Gravettian occupation of the Pavlovské Hills as a case study(dated to around 30,000 years BP), we investigate firewood availability using archaeological,palaeoenvironmental and ecological data, including making inferences from charcoal in Pavlovianhearths. The collated evidence suggests that while dead wood was likely readily available in woodlandareas where humans had not recently foraged, longer term occupations – or repeated occupation ofthe same area by different groups – would have quickly exhausted naturally occurring supplies. Oncedepleted, the deadwood pool may have taken several generations (?40–120 years) to recover enoughto provide fuel for another base camp occupation. Such exhaustion of deadwood supplies is well attestedethnographically. Thus, we argue that Pavlovian groups likely managed firewood supplies using methodssimilar to those used by recent hunter–gatherers: through planned geographic mobility and bydeliberately killing trees years in advance of when wood was required, so leaving time for the wood todry out. Such management of fuel resources was, we argue, critical to human expansion into these cold,hitherto marginal, ecologies of the Upper Palaeolithic.

The history of anthropology reveals a discipline driven by fission and fusion. In this article I use the framework of deep history as an example of what might be achieved if anthropology resolved to travel the road of fusion rather than continue with atomization. I will illustrate the pathway by examining the fusion of interdisciplinary endeavour that is encapsulated in the concept of a social brain. By placing social life at the heart of the historical process we find common ground for all the fields of anthropology, and beyond to other disciplines. Here anthropologists have the opportunity to set the agenda. The social brain works in deep as well as shallow history. It unites experimental and historical science. And it marks a return to those core principles which Lubbock and the founders of our Institute established.

The discovery of a cryptotephra (nonvisible volcanic horizon) in a windblown sand archaeological site in Poland highlights how luminescence and tephrostratigraphy may combine to better refine the chronology of such sites. In this study we identify a cryptotephra horizon which on the basis of major and minor element geochemistry and an OSL age of 2.3 ± 0.1 ka is correlated to the Glen Garry tephra. The different methodological strengths of OSL and tephrostratigraphy may be harnessed to counter the limitations of a single approach to produce a more secure chronology. Although in this study the tephra deposition event is shown to post-date the archaeological activity, the methodological approach is clearly demonstrated. Further investigations will reveal if cryptotephra layers are commonly preserved in such environmental settings. If this is so then future applications of this approach may prove to be more widely applicable.

This paper presents the first late Quaternary locality in the present-day territories of Poland where multiple cryptotephra layers have been identified. Located near Wegliny in southwest Poland, study of the Lateglacial gyttja deposits reveals the presence of at least four non-visible tephra horizons. Electron microprobe and laser-ablation ICPMS analysis of glass shards suggests products from at least two Icelandic volcanic centres: Katla and Snaesfellsness. Of particular importance is the discovery of two eruptions believed to originate from the east Eifel volcanic field within the Allerod chronozone. One correlates with the well documented Laacher See Tephra (LST) but the second horizon, herein designated T642/T655 would appear to represent an earlier precursor eruption. The chemical composition of the LST and the precursor tephra both appear to match to the Upper Laacher See Tephra (ULST) phase, which previously was thought to have dispersed not to the northeast but in a southerly direction, towards the Alpine foreland. This indicates the eruption dynamics of the Laacher See are more complex than hitherto recognised.

It has been proposed that a strong relationship exists between the population size and density of Pleistocene hominins and their competence in making stone tools. Here we focus on the first ‘Out of Africa’ dispersal, 1.8 Ma ago, and the idea that it might have featured lower population density and the fragmentation of hominin groups in areas furthest away from the point of origin. As a result, these distant populations in Central and East Asia and Europe would not be able to sustain sophisticated technological knowledge and reverted to a pattern of simpler stone-knapping techniques. This process could have led to the establishment of the ‘Movius Line’ and other long-lasting continental-scale patterns in the spatial distribution of Lower Palaeolithic stone technology. Here we report on a simulation developed to evaluate if, and under what conditions, the early ‘Out of Africa’ dispersal could lead to such a demographic pattern. The model comprises a dynamic environmental reconstruction of Old World vegetation in the timeframe 2.5–0.25 Ma coupled with a standard biological model of population growth and dispersal. The spatial distribution of population density is recorded over the course of the simulation. We demonstrate that, under a wide sweep of both environmental and behavioural parameter values, and across a range of scenarios that vary the role of disease and the availability of alternative crossing points between Africa, Europe and Asia, the demographic consequence of dispersal is not a gradual attenuation of the population size away from the point of origin but a pattern of ecologically driven local variation in population density. The methodology presented opens a new route to understand the phenomenon of the Movius Line and other large-scale spatio-temporal patterns in the archaeological record and provides a new insight into the debate on the relationship between demographics and cultural complexity. This study also highlights the potential of simulation studies for testing complex conceptual models and the importance of building reference frameworks based on known proxies in order to achieve more rigorous model development in Palaeolithic archaeology and beyond.

The spread of anatomically modern humans (AMH) into Europe occurred when shifts in the North Atlantic meridional overturning circulation triggered a series of large and abrupt climate changes during the last glacial. However, the role of climate forcing in this process has remained unclear. Here we present a last glacial record that provides insight into climate-related environmental shifts in the eastern Mediterranean region, i.e. the gateway for the colonisation of Europe by AMH. We show that the environmental impact of the Heinrich Event H5 climatic deterioration c. 48 kyr ago was as extreme as that of the glacial maximum of Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 4 when most of Europe was deserted by Neanderthals. We argue that Heinrich H5 resulted in a similar demographic vacuum so that invasive AMH populations had the opportunity to spread into Europe and occupy large parts before the Neanderthals were able to reoccupy this territory. This spread followed the resumption of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation at the beginning of Greenland Interstadial (GIS) 12 c. 47 kyr ago that triggered an extreme and rapid shift from desert-steppe to open woodland biomes in the gateway to Europe. We conclude that the extreme environmental impact of Heinrich H5 within a situation of competitive exclusion between two closely related hominids species shifted the balance in favour of modern humans.

Archaeologists regard the demonstration of human antiquity in 1859 as a major breakthrough in the development of prehistoric studies. However, the significance of this event, although acknowledged by other disciplines, is largely passed over. We investigate why this is so by examining the procedures that the antiquary John Evans and the geologist Joseph Prestwich used to make their argument. We present previously unreported documents from the Royal Society's Library that show how they built their case for a prehistory without history. Instead it fell to two other antiquaries-archaeologists, John Lubbock and General Augustus Lane-Fox, to flesh out the discovery of deep time. Lubbock supplied a contemporary human face for the makers of Palaeolithic stone tools in the form of Tasmanian aborigines, and Lane-Fox, through his artefact-based ‘philosophy of progress’, presented a model of a stratified mind that contained primeval elements. These events, which took place between 1859 and 1875, set the pattern for research into human origins for the next century.

We know that there are fundamental differences between humans and living apes, and also between living humans and their extinct relatives. It is also probably the case that the most significant and divergent of these differences relate to our social behaviour and its underlying cognition, as much as to fundamental differences in physiology, biochemistry or anatomy. In this paper, we first attempt to demarcate what are the principal differences between human and other societies in terms of social structure, organization and relationships, so that we can identify what derived features require explanation. We then consider the evidence of the archaeological and fossil record, to determine the most probable context in time and taxonomy, of these evolutionary trends. Finally, we attempt to link five major transitional points in hominin evolution to the selective context in which they occurred, and to use the principles of behavioural ecology to understand their ecological basis. Critical changes in human social organization relate to the development of a larger scale of fission and fusion; the development of a greater degree of nested substructures within the human community; and the development of intercommunity networks. The underlying model that we develop is that the evolution of ‘human society’ is underpinned by ecological factors, but these are influenced as much by technological and behavioural innovations as external environmental change.

Hominin dispersal and human colonization have been hallmark concepts in the last two decades of palaeanthropological research,1–7 even though the terminology in these approaches is loosely defined (Box 1). The number, frequency, and routes of dispersal have been analyzed on a global scale,8 beginning with the earliest movement of hominins between Africa and Asia, and back again.9 Investigating dispersals has provided a much-needed dynamic to account for recent human origins in Africa10 and the replacement elsewhere of older regional hominin populations that include the Neanderthals.11 In the last twenty years, phylogeographies based on a wealth of molecular studies have added enormously to our understanding of global population history from the Paleolithic to the Vikings12 and has, in particular, revitalized the study of farming dispersals.13 As a result, Quaternary hominins and humans have been on the move as never before. However, not all of these movements are considered within an evolutionary framework. Interest has focused instead on using dispersals to support the claims for either a Neolithic or human revolution as the turning point in human prehistory. Here, I explore an alternative by considering the implications of the major shift that occurred in Paleolithic technology from instruments to containers.14 I argue that this development can be explained by the selective pressure from population dispersal for novel forms of cultural display that enhanced information exchange among adaptive generalists and which allowed the stretching of social relationships in space and time.15 The British Paleolithic record provides a case study.

There can be no doubt that Peter Bellwood's First Farmers is a major new statement which presents a robustly expressed solution to one of those classic problems which provides a benchmark for theorization and justifies archaeology as a field. But agreement stops there. Few academic books published recently have evoked such highly charged reactions. On the one hand, First Farmers has impressed many critics, reached audiences far afield from traditional archaeological readerships, and garnered major book awards from professional bodies such as the Society for American Archaeology. On the other hand, it has been subjected to a level of concerted criticism rare in the academic world. As the reviews below show, it has clearly hit a nerve; the gloves are off.First Farmers polarizes scholars in complex ways. Much recent work on agricultural origins, particularly in Europe, has had a strongly indigenist and particularistic tone, averse to mass movements of peoples and ‘grand narratives’ in general. But even advocates of grand narrative in general may take exception to Bellwood's ‘language dispersals’ thesis. Similarly, the very attempt to bring together linguistic, genetic and archaeological data in an account of the past is controversial to some, but even those who aspire to this kind of interdisciplinary synthesis rarely agree on how it can be carried out.Neither the book nor its critics here are likely to be the last word on the subject. But whether one agrees with it or not, First Farmers is a welcome addition to the agricultural origins scene, which, at least in Europe, has been evolving over the last two decades towards a sort of eclectic middle-ground consensus in which difference of opinion is accommodated by eschewing bold generalization.

Stellen wir uns einmal Folgendes vor: Auserirdische besuchen, getrieben von langen Erinnerungen und der typischen Neugier intergalaktischer Touristen, alle 500.000 Jahre die Erde. Vor 1,5 und einer Million Jahren fanden sie bei ihren Visiten den Homo erectus und wunderten sich daruber, wie langsam der Wandel ablief. Bei ihrem nachsten Besuch vor 500.000 Jahren trafen sie auf Homo heidelbergensis, und der erinnerte sie mehr oder weniger an ihre beiden vorangegangenen Reisen, auch wenn der Kopf mittlerweile deutlich groser war. Das Letzte, womit sie fur das nachste Mal gerechnet hatten, waren wir – der Homo sapiens, der in Stadten lebt, eine hoch entwickelte Technologie besitzt, das Sonnensystem erkundet und mit dem Smartphone kommuniziert. Verblufft waren sie auch daruber, dass diese klugen Kopfe nicht viel groser sind als beim letzten Mal. Uber die Reise nach dem Motto „Da andert sich nicht viel“ mussen sie nun zu Hause mit den Worten „Kaum drehst du dich um, schon hast du was verpasst“ berichten.

Mit der Vorstellung vom sozialen Gehirn verfugen wir uber eine starke Hypothese: Danach war unser Sozialleben die Triebkraft fur das Wachstum unseres Gehirns. Aber von welchem Zeitpunkt an wenden wir diese Hypothese auf die Evolution des Menschen an? Und wie uberprufen wir sie? Manche Hypothesen, beispielsweise dass Objekte mit unterschiedlicher Masse gleich schnell fallen, kann man mit einem einzigen Experiment verifizieren. Die Hypothese vom sozialen Gehirnwirft jedoch das Problem auf, dass ihr Kerngedanke in einer Kurve steckt, die sich je nachdem, wo wir die Geschichte beginnen lassen, unter Umstanden uber viele Millionen Jahre erstreckt.

Was macht uns eigentlich zu Menschen? Wenn man die Evolution des Menschen erforschen will, besteht eines der grosten Probleme darin, dass wir uns selbst definieren. Vor rund 300 Jahren taufte uns Carl von Linne, der grose schwedische Klassifikator der Tiere und Pflanzen, auf den Namen Homo sapiens, der kluge Mensch. Und er schrieb auch: „Homo. Nosce te ipsum“. („Mensch. Kenne dich selbst.“) Damit griff er einen altgriechischen Wahlspruch auf, gab ihm aber einen neuen Dreh: Wir sollten uns als Spezies kennenlernen. Wissenschaftlich betrachtet, sind wir Richter und Geschworene, die daruber entscheiden, wer zum Club der Menschen gehort und wer nicht – in der Natur findet man eine solche Entscheidung nicht, sondern sie erwachst aus dem Ballast kultureller Vorurteile und historischer Interpretationen. Archaologen mussen irgendwie entscheiden, wo sie bei unseren Homininenvorfahren die Grenze ziehen. In der Regel erstellen sie dazu Listen mit Kriterien wie Schmuck und Kunst, aber auch Tatigkeiten wie Jagd und Religion. Dabei stellt sich nur das Problem, dass wir fur die ferne Vergangenheit nur uber sehr kurze Listen von Merkmalen verfugen, die wir uberprufen konnen. Und da wir keinen unabhangigen Gerichtshof haben, der unsere Behauptungen beurteilen konnte, ist es kaum verwunderlich, dass keine Einigkeit daruber besteht, was uns im Einzelnen zu Menschen macht, ganz zu schweigen von der Frage, wann solche Eigenschaften zum ersten Mal auftraten.

In der Menschheitsgeschichte gab es wahrend der Laufzeit des Lucy-Projekts zwei Meilensteine. Im Jahr 2007 lebten zum ersten Mal mehr Menschen in Stadten als auf dem Land, und 2011 wuchs die Weltbevolkerung auf mehr als 7 Mrd. Die Archaologie ruckt diese Wendepunkte in den richtigen Zusammenhang. Vor 11.000 Jahren, am Ende der Eiszeit, bestand die Weltbevolkerung einer Schatzung zufolge aus 7 Mio. Menschen. Stadte gab es nicht, und die Menschen lebten vom Fischen, Jagen und Sammeln. Sie verfugten uber Kunst, ihre Zeremonien zeigten sich bei Bestattungen, ihre Architektur hatte die Form von Hutten und Dorfern. Zu den technischen Errungenschaften gehorten Pfeile mit Steinspitzen, Sicheln und Messer, auserdem Schalen, Mahlsteine, Morser und Pistille. Auch ein breites Spektrum pflanzlicher Materialien wurde verwendet – sie wurden zu geflochtenen Korben verarbeitet, oder man trug sie als Kleidung. Die wichtigste Losung fur die Probleme, die sich aus veranderlichen Ressourcen und zwischenmenschlichen Konflikten ergaben, bestand darin, den Problemen nach dem altbewahrten Prinzip von Aufteilung und Verschmelzung, das man noch heute bei Jagern und Sammlern beobachtet, ganz buchstablich aus dem Weg zu gehen.

Die Evolution des Menschen ist eine legendare Geschichte, die uns immer wieder aufs Neue fasziniert und verzaubert. In unserer Vergangenheit verbirgt sich einer der Triumphe der Evolution: der Prozess, durch den sich sowohl die ausere Gestalt als auch die Lebensweise eines gewohnlichen afrikanischen Menschenaffen so veranderten, dass er am Ende zur beherrschenden Spezies der Erde wurde. Erst seit rund hundert Jahren konnen wir wirklich einschatzen, was fur eine grosartige Geschichte das ist und wie oft sie durch Augenblicke der Unsicherheit und des Beinahe-Aussterbens gefahrdet war.

In der Familie der Primaten machte die Evolution eine grosartige Erfindung: das Sozialleben. Aber das Leben in Gruppen hat seinen Preis. Je mehr Tiere die Gruppe umfasst, desto grosere Strecken muss man jeden Tag zurucklegen, denn jedes Tier muss in einem ungefahr gleich grosen Gebiet auf die Suche gehen, um die benotigte Nahrung zu finden. Das bedeutet eine Belastung: In der gleichen Zeit konnten die Tiere sich sonst still im Schatten eines Busches ausruhen oder gesellig mit ihren „Freunden“ zusammen sein. Das Leben in Gruppen erfordert aber auch physiologischen Aufwand: Wenn Artgenossen zusammentreffen und sich gegenseitig von einem besonders saftigen Stuck Nahrung oder einem sicheren Schlafplatz vertreiben, kommt Stress auf. Solche Zwischenfalle werden mit zunehmender Gruppengrose zwangslaufig haufiger.

Der schwierigste Teil jedes Forschungsprojekts ist die Uberprufung von Ideen. Sie macht aber auch am meisten Spas. Die Archaologen, die in diesem Kapitel die weitere Geschichte erzahlen, uberprufen ihre Ideen mithilfe handfester Belege. Ausgrabungen haben nicht den Zweck, antike Gegenstande um ihrer selbst willen zu bergen, sondern wir wollen damit Fragen beantworten – wollten wir das nicht, sollten wir uns nicht als Archaologen bezeichnen. Wir stecken nie einen Spaten in den Boden, ohne eine Vorstellung davon zu haben, was wir finden werden oder zu finden hoffen und welches Licht es auf die Geschichte der Menschheit werfen wird. Anhaltspunkte an der Oberflache helfen uns zu entscheiden, wo wir am besten nachsehen: abgeschlagene Flintsteine, Tierknochen und auch fruhere Arbeiten, die schneller in grosere Tiefen vorgestosen sind als moderne Ausgrabungen. Dennoch lautet die goldene Regel fur Archaologen: „Erwarte das Unerwartete.“ Als John Gowlett, damals noch ein junger Wissenschaftler, in Kenia an der Fundstatte Chesowanja grub, suchte er nach alten Steinwerkzeugen. Er fand aber einen der ersten Belege fur die Beherrschung des Feuers. Und man stelle sich nur vor, wie uberrascht der australische Archaologe Mike Morwood im Jahr 2003 gewesen sein muss, als er in der Hohle Liang Bua auf der indonesischen Insel Flores eine Reihe winziger menschlicher Skelette ans Licht brachte – die sogenannten Hobbits, die den Anlass gaben, die Lehrbucher uber die Vielfalt der Menschen neu zu schreiben.

Chronometric attention in the Late Glacial of Western Europe is turning from the dating of archaeological cultures to studying how the continent was re-populated at the end of the last ice age. We present results from a survey of all available radiocarbon determinations (the S2AGES database) which show that when calibrated, and compared to the GRIP stratotype of climatic events, the data can be interpreted as five population events in the 15ka prior to theonset of the Holocene. The fine-grained climate record provides an opportunity to study the impact of environmental factors on a human dispersal process that not only shaped subsequent European prehistory, but also the genetic makeup of modern Europeans. The population events have implications for archaeologists and molecular geneticists concerning the timing, direction,speed and scale of processes in Western European demographic history. The results also bear on the role of climatic forcing on the expansion and contraction of human populations and in particular the correlation of ice core and terrestrial records for the onset of warming in the North Atlantic. Pozornost kronometričnih raziskav se v poznem glacialu zahodne Evrope odmika od datiranja arheoloških kultur k proučevanju ponovne poselitve kontinenta ob koncu zadnje ledene dobe. Predstavljamo rezultate pregleda vseh dosegljivih radiokarbonskih sekvenc (podatkovna baza S2AGES), ki kažejo, da lahko datume, potem ko jih kalibriramo in primerjamo z GRIP stratotipom klimatskih dogodkov,interpretiramo kot zaporedje petih populacijskih dogodkov v času 15kapred pojavom holocena. Podrobno strukturiran klimatski zapis nam omogoča proučevanje vpliva okoljskih faktorjev na process človekove razselitve, ki je sooblikoval evropsko prazgodovino in genetski zapis modernih Evropejcev. Populacijski dogodki so pomembni za arheologe in molekularne genetike, ki se ukvarjajo s časovnim usklajevanjem, smerjo, hitrostjo in obsegom procesov v zahodnoevropski demografski zgodovini. Rezultati kažejo na pomen klimatskih pritiskov pri širjenju in krčenju človeških populacij in še posebej na korelacijo med lednimi in kopenskimi zapisi ob začetku segrevanja v severnem Atlantiku.

Why are humans musical? Why do people in all cultures sing or play instruments? Why do we appear to have specialized neurological apparatus for hearing and interpreting music as distinct from other sounds? And how does our musicality relate to language and to our evolutionary history?Anthropologists and archaeologists have paid little attention to the origin of music and musicality — far less than for either language or ‘art’. While art has been seen as an index of cognitive complexity and language as an essential tool of communication, music has suffered from our perception that it is an epiphenomenal ‘leisure activity’, and archaeologically inaccessible to boot. Nothing could be further from the truth, according to Steven Mithen; music is integral to human social life, he argues, and we can investigate its ancestry with the same rich range of analyses — neurological, physiological, ethnographic, linguistic, ethological and even archaeological — which have been deployed to study language. In The Singing Neanderthals Steven Mithen poses these questions and proposes a bold hypothesis to answer them. Mithen argues that musicality is a fundamental part of being human, that this capacity is of great antiquity, and that a holistic protolanguage of musical emotive expression predates language and was an essential precursor to it.This is an argument with implications which extend far beyond the mere origins of music itself into the very motives of human origins. Any argument of such range is bound to attract discussion and critique; we here present commentaries by archaeologists Clive Gamble and Iain Morley and linguists Alison Wray and Maggie Tallerman, along with Mithen's response to them. Whether right or wrong, Mithen has raised fascinating and important issues. And it adds a great deal of charm to the time-honoured, perhaps shopworn image of the Neanderthals shambling ineffectively through the pages of Pleistocene prehistory to imagine them humming, crooning or belting out a cappella harmonies as they went.

This article presents the initial results from the S2AGES data base of calibrated radiocarbon estimates from western Europe in the period 25,000–10,000 years ago. Our aim is to present a population history of this sub-continental region by providing a chronologically-secure framework for the interpretation of data from genetics and archaeology. In particular, we define five population events in this period, using dates-as-data, and examine the implications for the archaeology of Late Glacial colonization. We contrast this detailed regional approach to the larger project which we call the cognitive origins synthesis that includes historical linguistics in the reconstruction of population history. We conclude that only archaeology can currently provide the framework for population history and the evaluation of genetic data. Finally, if progress is to be made in the new interdisciplinary field of population history then both disciplines need to refrain from inappropriate agricultural thinking that fosters distorting models of European prehistory, and they should also pay less, if any, attention to historical linguistics.With comments from L.G. Straus, J.-P. Bocquet-Appel, P.A. Underhill & R. Housley and followed by a reply from the author.

A link between climate change and human evolution during the Pleistocene has often been assumed but rarely tested. At the macro–evolutionary level Foley showed for hominids that extinction, rather than speciation, correlates with environmental change as recorded in the deep sea record. Our aim is to examine this finding at a smaller scale and with high–resolution environmental and archaeological archives. Our interest is in changing patterns of human dispersal under shifting Pleistocene climates during the last glacial period in Europe. Selecting this time frame and region allows us to observe how two hominid taxa, Neanderthals and Crô–Magnons, adapted to climatic conditions during oxygen isotope stage 3. These taxa are representative of two hominid adaptive radiations, termedterrestrialandaquatic, which exhibited different habitat preferences but similar tolerances to climatic factors. Their response to changing ecological conditions was predicated upon their ability to extend their societies in space and time. We examine this difference further using a database of all available radiocarbon determinations from western Europe in the late glacial. These data act as proxies for population history, and in particular the expansion and contraction of regional populations as climate changed rapidly. Independent assessment of these processes is obtained from the genetic history of Europeans. The results indicate that climate affects population contraction rather than expansion. We discuss the consequences for genetic and cultural diversity which led to the legacy of the Ice Age: a single hominid species, globally distributed.

For many archaeologists the term "Paleolithic" evokes long lists of stone tool types leavened only by the explosion of cave art during the peak of the Last Glaciation. This is a shame, because the Paleolithic period encompasses momentous events in human evolution. It begins more than 2.5 million years ago with a diverse array of early hominid species and culminates with the global dominion of modern humans. The Pleistocene Epoch (1.7 million to 12,500 years ago), during which the bulk of the Paleolithic drama played out, was a period of wide and frequent climate changes. Ice Age humans lived in a "lost world" that we only know indirectly, through archaeology. Europe's peninsular shape and its proximity to the Arctic Circle during Pleistocene glacial periods probably made this continent a peripheral zone of human habitation compared to Africa and South Asia. Nevertheless, the historical priority of Paleolithic research in Europe has created a richer archaeological record on this continent than in any other region. For much of the 20th century, the structure of the European Paleolithic was the model for the Paleolithic in the rest of

The current trend to unite rather than divide the early Palaeolithic world is long overdue. For too long we have been interested in partition, dividing the Early Stone Age from the Lower Palaeolithic and the Middle Stone Age from the Middle Palaeolithic. As a result sub-Saharan Africa and Europe, the Near East and North Africa have become the archaeological equivalent of the old joke about England and the USA — two countries separated by the same language. The INQUA session in Durban on “Out of Africa: once, twice or continuously in the Pleistocene”, organised by Bar-Yosef and Straus, provided a much-needed forum to air the concerns and showcase the results of archaeologists on either side of the geographical divide. There is clearly much discussion ahead concerning the details of dating and the significance of artefact assemblages, and more on these aspects below. But what is so encouraging, as the papers in this volume amply demonstrate, is that explanations of the early Palaeolithic will now be placed in a very wide geographical framework. To understand human evolution in Africa we need to understand what is going on in Europe and vice versa. The globalisation of Palaeolithic enquiry is confirmed as not just the prerogative of those who write endwords for conference volumes but of everyone researching the subject. However, the move to globalisation is currently hindered by the baggage inherited from past approaches. I will direct my comments at three areas which most concern the papers in this volume and which also led to some lively discussions at the workshop which followed the formal session. The three issues are technological modes, hominid movement, and being modern. I will also use the latitude normally accorded authors of endwords to present three hitherto un-named archaeo-continents which, if adopted, would greatly assist the study of hominid dispersal.