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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.

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 the onset 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.

New developments in neuroimaging have demonstrated that the basic capacities underpinning human social skills are shared by our closest extant primate relatives. The challenge for archaeologists is to explain how complex human societies evolved from this shared pattern of face-to-face social interaction. We argue that a key process was the gradual incorporation of material culture into social networks over the course of hominin evolution. Here we use three long-term processes in hominin evolution—encephalization, the global human diaspora and sedentism/agriculture—to illustrate how the cultural transmission of material culture allowed the ‘scaling up’ of face-to-face social interactions to the global societies known today. We conclude that future research by neuroimagers and archaeologists will need to investigate the cognitive mechanisms behind human engagement with material culture as well as other persons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]