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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.

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.

In this worldwide survey, Clive Gamble explores the evolution of the human imagination, without which we would not have become a global species. He sets out to determine the cognitive and social basis for our imaginative capacity and traces the evidence back into deep human history. He argues that it was the imaginative ability to 'go beyond' and to create societies where people lived apart yet stayed in touch that made us such effective world settlers. To make his case Gamble brings together information from a wide range of disciplines: psychology, cognitive science, archaeology, palaeoanthropology, archaeogenetics, geography, quaternary science and anthropology. He presents a novel deep history that combines the archaeological evidence for fossil hominins with the selective forces of Pleistocene climate change, engages with the archaeogeneticists' models for population dispersal and displacement, and ends with the Europeans' rediscovery of the deep history settlement of the Earth.

We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember, because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign – and no memories… The mind of man is capable of anything – because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 1902 Climate and Brains At the heart of unravelling the complexities of long-term climate change lies a simple concept: climate is cyclical. The concept draws its inspiration from the marked seasons of wet and dry in the tropical monsoon belts and the contrasts between winter and summer in more northerly latitudes. It establishes an agricultural calendar with times of scarcity and plenty and a timetable for planting, harvesting and moving flocks to fresh pastures. What happens from year to year and decade to decade is a matter of weather. These variable conditions never alter the cyclical pattern but do affect the outputs. Weather marks the difference between famine and feast. This agricultural concept has been applied to the long-term climates of Terrae 1 and 2 where cycles had a frequency of up to 400ka years. A full cycle moves from predominantly cold conditions through to warmer climates; the classic pattern of glacial to interglacial. This stemmed from the demonstration by geologist Louis Agassiz in the middle of the nineteenth century that extensive glaciations once existed in the agricultural heartlands of Europe and North America. Now the date of 1.8Ma sees the first significant glaciations in the Northern hemisphere. It also marks the boundary between Terrae 1 and 2.

Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 1902 Humans Reunited The prospect of gold had brought them into the mountains. They were pioneers in an unexplored land, and at the end of a day’s steep climb, a large fertile valley lay before them. That night the well-armed party of seventeen men grew apprehensive as they saw fires in the far distance. The next day, they met many people who carried stone axes. This story of encounter could have happened anytime and in many places during the last 600 years. The prospectors could have been Portuguese adventurers, Spanish soldiers, English sailors, Dutch spice-merchants, French trappers, Russian whalers, Danish fishermen, Argentine ranchers or Brazilian loggers. But this was 1930 in the Bismarck ranges of Papua New Guinea (Connolly and Anderson 1988). The two Australian prospectors and their fifteen New Guinean carriers had an official permit to be there. Moreover, they expected to make contact with new people. To help their safe passage, they had brought supplies of trade axes and glass beads. What their leader, Mick Leahy, had not expected were the numbers of people living in the mountains of New Guinea. His small patrol had stumbled across more than a million Highlanders.

The site at Red Barns was excavated in 1975, but the large lithic collection remained unstudied following preliminary examination. This paper reports on further analysis of the lithic material from the site, together with a reappraisal of the faunal remains and original mineralogical analyses, and the results of processing sediment samples from the 1975 excavation. An abundant molluscan assemblage was recovered from the deposits covering the main archaeological horizon, allowing climatic/environmental reconstruction and amino acid dating. The synthesis of these data indicates the site to be older than previously thought, dating to between 425,000 and 200,000 BP.Analysis of the lithic material has suggested that the site is an undisturbed palimpsest of flint tools and debitage. The poor, severely frost-fractured nature of the raw material used for knapping, together with the location of the site on a Chalk outcrop, have enabled investigation of some assumptions about the influences upon knapping technology of i) poor quality raw material and ii) local availability of flint fresh from Chalk bedrock. The persistent manufacture of finely worked plano-convex handaxes suggests that, even in an area where fresh Chalk flint must have been abundant, the immediately available poor quality flint source was not a bar to formation of an assemblage dominated by handaxe production. Secondly, the emphasis on carefully shaped pointed plano-convex handaxes suggests that this shape was both deliberately imposed and not dictated by a lack of local availability of flint fresh from the Chalk. Behaviour at the site was investigated by analysis of the organisation of the lithic production and it was demonstrated that, while some handaxes and flake-tools were abandoned at the site and some flake core reduction also took place there, the dominant pattern was for handaxes to be made at the site and then removed and abandoned elsewhere.

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.

The reconstruction of Palaeolithic society has never been easy with the evidence available. It is argued that rather than the evidence being at fault what is needed is a new methodology. The lead is taken from recent studies of primate societies and social theory which investigates the micro and macro scales of human agency. Palaeolithic society is based here on the individual rather than the group. The creation of social life through interaction in co‐presence and in absentia is discussed. Three networks ‐ intimate, effective and extended ‐ are derived from the emotional, material and symbolic resources available to individuals to produce their social lives. These networks are shown to have consistent demographic sizes based on rules which result from the social use of those resources. A framework is then proposed for the study of Palaeolithic data which recognizes the macro and micro scales of social life. Locales and regions are linked by Leroi‐Gourhan's concept of gesture and action, here des...

This paper examines, through the use of Accelerator Mass Spectrometry dating, the database of Lateglacial cultures involved in the recolonisation of northern Europe. The aim is not only to determine the timing of that recolonisation, but also to propose a general model of hunter-gatherer colonisation at a sub-continental scale. The question is addressed of how long the period of abandonment of northern Europe during the Würm/Weichsel glaciation may have lasted, and when it both started and came to an end. A series of questions is asked concerning the processes and mechanics of recolonisation and the sequences for specific areas are examined. AMS radiocarbon dating shows that a two stage process was involved, which has important implications for our analysis of regional settlement patterns and the changing scale of Lateglacial hunting systems. Recolonisation was a dynamic process, integral to, and internally driven by, the social life of Lateglacial hunters. It may have been constrained by environmental and resource factors, which we have emphasised here, but ultimately it was an historical, social process and should be similarily regarded to that of the farmers. By measuring rates of expansion data are provided for use in other studies of hunter-gatherer colonisation.

Cultural identity is a key area of debate in contemporary Europe. Despite widespread use of the past in the construction of ethnic, national and European identity, theories of cultural identity have been neglected in archaeology. Focusing on the interrelationships between concepts of cultural identity today and the interpretation of past cultural groups, Cultural Identity and Archaeology offers proactive archaeological perspectives in the debate surrounding European identities. This fascinating and thought-provoking book covers three key areas. It considers how material remains are used in the interpretation of cultural identities, for example 'pan-Celtic culture' and 'Bronze Age Europe'. Finally, it looks at archaeological evidence for the construction of cultural identities in the European past. The authors are critical of monolithic constructions of Europe, and also of the ethnic and national groups within it. in place of such exclusive cultural, political and territorial entities the book argues for a consideration of the diverse, hybrid and multiple nature of European cultural identities.

The Palaeolithic is traditionally described as a static period when innovation and creativity were rare. Moreover, with the accent on accounting for modern behaviour this view has stressed the late appearance of novel artefacts in Africa and elsewhere. These beads, ochre and art-works fit well with a model of the mind that emphasises its rational character; a position that underpins current approaches to the transmission of culture. This contribution examines the implications for hominin creativity that adopts a distributed or relational model of cognition. I argue that hominin creativity was not necessarily confined to making new artefacts but instead directed to the opportunities for amplification afforded by the aesthetic properties of materials and the emotional content of the senses. The outcomes for the Palaeolithic are discussed using the framework of the social brain model and the intensification of social interaction.

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.

Cryptotephra of Icelandic origin from the open-air archaeological site of Ahrenshoft LA 58 D (Kr. Nordfriesland, Schleswig-Holstein), northern Germany overlies a Late-glacial Havelte lithic assemblage, hitherto dated by 14 C and biostratigraphy to the earliest part of the Late-glacial interstadial (GI-1e to GI-1c 3 ). Peaks in ash shards are observed in two profiles. Major and minor element geochemistry indicates volcanic ash originating in the Katla system. Precise correlation to previously described tephra is uncertain due to overlapping chemical characteristics. The Ahrenshoft 14 C determinations, litho- and bio-stratigraphy encompass a broad age-span for the cryptotephra bearing sediments, from the end of the Allerod to the Preboreal. The most plausible volcanic eruption correlates are the Vedde Ash (∼Younger Dryas), already known from the European mainland, tephra AF555 (late Younger Dryas) and the Suduroy tephra (∼Preboreal/Boreal), hitherto recorded only in the North Atlantic region. These three ash horizons have been dated to, respectively, 12,171 ± 57 yr b2k in the NGRIP ice-core, c.11,500 cal BP, in Scotland and c.8000 cal BP, by radiocarbon from the Faroe Isles. Ongoing research on deposits from the type sites for the tephra layers may in the future differentiate these markers leading to better discrimination of the chemistries and a resolution of this question.

While it is a commonplace to state that every age gets the Neanderthals it either deserves, or wants, there has recently been a sea-change in these just-desserts and needs. It has taken 150 years for Neanderthals to emerge as humans with a difference and this difference depends not on the shape of the skulls or tools but rather in their competence as social actors. Here, I set out an approach that supplements the rational analysis of their behavior with a relational understanding of their lives. Using the social brain hypothesis I argue that the differences between these perspectives have important implications for the development of Paleolithic archaeology, and in particular the role of artifacts as material metaphors based on the experience of social life.

We wish to take the opportunity to inform colleagues about some new developments in the professionalisation of forensic anthropology in the United Kingdom.The Royal Anthropological Institute of Gre...

Archaeological accounts of cognitive evolution have traditionally favoured an internal model of the mind and a search for symbolic proxies. This chapter argues for an external model of cognition and uses this perspective to develop the understanding of Palaeolithic material culture as based on sensory experience. It explores ways of investigating the evolution of cognition by using the social brain model combined with a theory of distributed cognition. The emphasis is on social extension, which was a necessary step to a global distribution and which was achieved by mechanisms such as focused gaze that amplified the emotional content of bonds. The discussion examines the importance of these mechanisms through three aspects of social extension — ontological security, psychological continuity and extension of self.

Les donnees paleo-ecologiques d'un grand nombre de sites archeologiques d'Europe septentrionale montrent que les hominides etaient capables d'exploiter une serie d'environnements plus vaste qu'on ne le pensait. Ces donnees indiquent que les modeles de colonisation des latitudes nord ont exagere les differences de tolerance ecologique entre les hommes modernes et archaiques

A conference on Interpretive Archaeologies was held at Peterhouse College, Cambridge in September 1991. It sought to explore alternatives; to share rather than impose a programme for interpreting the past. Here is one reaction.