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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Presentation des conferences et des derniers travaux sur Gibraltar et les neandertaliens. Cette conference a ete l'occasion de faire le point sur les decouvertes les plus importantes et les plus recentes sur les neandertaliens.

Human populations, along with those of many other species, are thought to have contracted into a number of refuge areas at the height of the last Ice Age. European populations are believed to be, to a large extent, the descendants of the inhabitants of these refugia, and some extant mtDNA lineages can be traced to refugia in Franco-Cantabria (haplogroups H1, H3, V, and U5b1), the Italian Peninsula (U5b3), and the East European Plain (U4 and U5a). Parts of the Near East, such as the Levant, were also continuously inhabited throughout the Last Glacial Maximum, but unlike western and eastern Europe, no archaeological or genetic evidence for Late Glacial expansions into Europe from the Near East has hitherto been discovered. Here we report, on the basis of an enlarged whole-genome mitochondrial database, that a substantial, perhaps predominant, signal from mitochondrial haplogroups J and T, previously thought to have spread primarily from the Near East into Europe with the Neolithic population, may in fact reflect dispersals during the Late Glacial period, ∼19-12 thousand years (ka) ago. M.P. was supported by Marie Curie Early Stage Training “Advanced Genetic Analysis in the Postgenomic Era” (European Union MEST-CT-2004-504318) and by a Newton International Fellowship. This research was also supported by the Italian Ministry of Education, University, and Research: Progetti FIRB-Futuro in Ricerca 2008 (to A.A. and A.O.), and Progetti Ricerca Interesse Nazionale 2009 (to A.A., O.S. and A.T.); Fondazione Alma Mater Ticinensis (to A.T. and O.S.); the European Commission, Directorate-General for Research (FP7 Ecogene grant number 205419, to R.V.); the European Union Regional Development Fund (through the Centre of Excellence in Genomics, to R.V.); the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research (Basic Research grant numbers SF 0270177As08, to R.V., and SF 0270177Bs08, to E.M.); the Estonian Science Foundation (grant number 7858, to E.M.); and the FCT (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology), through research project PTDC/CS-ANT/113832/2009 and personal grants to J.B.P. (SFRH/BD/45657/2008) and P.S. (SFRH/BPD/64233/2009). P.S. also received support from the DeLaszlo Foundation. N.A.-Z. was supported by the Institute of International Education fellowship. IPATIMUP is an Associate Laboratory of the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology, and Higher Education (FCT) and is partially supported by FCT.

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.

Clive Gamble reviews The Last Neanderthal: The Rise, Success, and Mysterious Extinction of Our Closest Human Relatives By Ian Tattersall and The Neanderthal Legacy: An Archaeological Perspective from Western Europe By Paul Mellars

In a recent synthesis of the British Palaeolithic, Derek Roe concluded that now is the moment to draw it all together and write the prehistory of the British Lower and Middle Palaeolithic—and now is also the moment when the cornucopia of fact and opinion seems suddenly inclined to run dry.... So be it: after all it was made clear at the very beginning of the first chapter that the task of producing an acceptable factual account of how men lived during this period in Britain was actually impossible. (1981:268)