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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.

My aim in this paper is to put the question, ‘Where was the centre of the Upper Palaeolithic world?’. I promise no answers and I will confine the discussion to Europe.The purpose behind raising such a seemingly irrelevant problem is that its investigation leads us directly into issues of palaeolithic society, the interpretation of art in such contexts and the often opposed views of how art contributed to adaptation and change.At the outset let me declare that I amnotdealing with the origins of art and its association, or not, with language. Art for me is, however, a system of communication and includes a wide range of mediums and messages. As an act of social communication it is defined by style which, as Wiessner (1984, 191) argues, has its behavioural basis in a fundamental human cognitive process; personal and social identification through comparison. Consequently style is not just a means of transmitting information about identity but is an active tool used in building social strategies (ibid.194). It has a role in negotiation which, as I shall argue below, is the basis for defining palaeolithic society.

John Wymer devoted his professional life to the study of the Palaeolithic, and his importance to the subject extended far beyond a brick pit in Suffolk. He was the greatest field naturalist of the Palaeolithic. Wymer had acute gifts of observation and an attention to detail for both artefacts and geology that was unsurpassed. He provided a typology and a chronology for the earliest artefacts of Britain and used these same skills to establish major sequences in South Africa. In doing so Wymer ordered and energised what was a neglected and demoralised subject so that it is now one of the most vibrant communities in British archaeology.

Author(s): J. M. Lindly, G. A. Clark, O. Bar-Yosef, D. Lieberman, J. Shea, Harold L. Dibble, Phillip G. Chase, Clive Gamble, Robert H. Gargett, Ken Jacobs, Paul Mellars, Anne Pike-Tay, Yuri Smirnov, Lawrence Guy Straus, C. B. Stringer, Erik Trinkaus and Randall White Reviewed work(s): Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Jun., 1990), pp. 233-261 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2743625 . Accessed: 15/09/2012 00:27

Sadly, we are about to witness the premature death of Concorde, an aircraft whose structure still has no finite life…. For the first time in evolution, humankind is about to go slower. Brian Christley, Ex-chief Concorde instructor, Guardian letters 20 October 2003 Highways to the future I have often thought that the Age of Enlightenment would be better described as an Era of Entanglement. In their search for a tipping point for the origins of the modern world, historians motor up and down between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, identifying changes in attitudes to society, politics and knowledge (Hampson 1968:15). Such a broad carriageway is strewn with the crashes that resulted from speeding revolutions, and although the road is initially bumpy the surface improves as the journey progresses. Technology is an inescapable element in the narrative. Indeed, the Scottish engineer John Loudon MacAdam, after whom tarmacadam, or tarmac is named, was born in 1756 at the heart of the Enlightenment with the Industrial Revolution getting into full swing. It was his idea to use broken stone ‘which shall unite by its own angles so as to form a hard surface (http://www.hotmix.org/history.php)’, while later hot tar was employed as a bond to keep the surface together and reduce dust. Where would the modern world be without tarmacadam pavements? Caught in the ruts of history no doubt, but more to the point entangled in other different strands of change.

In this study Clive Gamble presents and questions two of the most famous descriptions of change in prehistory. The first is the 'human revolution', when evidence for art, music, religion and language first appears. The second is the economic and social revolution of the Neolithic period. Gamble identifies the historical agendas behind 'origins research' and presents a bold alternative to these established frameworks, relating the study of change to the material basis of human identity. He examines, through artefact proxies, how changing identities can be understood using embodied material metaphors and in two major case-studies charts the prehistory of innovations, asking, did agriculture really change the social world? This is an important and challenging book that will be essential reading for every student and scholar of prehistory.

The northern Magdalenian, as Rensink so clearly points out, has outstripped the efforts of ethnoarchaeologists to provide descriptive models of how it was organized. Perhaps with hindsight this was always going to be case since the models of land use and mobility which have been developed in the past thirty years were always more at home in the caves and abris of the southern Magdalenian. Here it was possible to describe assemblages as curated or expedient without having to worry too much about variation within sites, such as that now revealed by the complex settlement archaeology of say Verberie or Gönnersdorf. The only added complication in the southern Magdalenian was the cave art, but that could always be treated separately, and may have to be if the 30,000 bp plus dates for the new Ardèche cave are found to spill over into the Dordogne. I therefore agree with Rensink that we must become our own ethnographers of the Magdalenian rather than constantly trying to fit our patterns to those derived from a particular actualistic study. But in this respect it must be remembered that Binford, one of the suppliers of such models, has always warned against working towards definitions; the belief that by naming an assemblage as curated we have done a good archaeological job. Far from it. All we have achieved is a congratulatory nod towards our own descriptive systems. If we are to understand the palpable variation in the archaeological record then we must understand contexts and the conditions for their use which causes patterning in what was left behind. This requires a focus on what we mean by magdalenian society rather than concentrating solely on the properties of the adaptive system.

Our understanding of the first peopling of Britain has recently undergone a transformation. On the one hand there have been fundamental advances in the investigation of Pleistocene environments and chronology, while on the other exceptionally well preserved archaeological sites of the period have now been investigated. These data are allowing us to reinterpret the society and palaeo-ecology of the people who inhabited this small corner of north-west Europe between 500,000 and 35,000 years ago. In order to put these findings into their proper context I will, however, need to roam more widely across the Palaeolithic world and consider the evolutionary changes and geographical processes that were involved over such long time-spans. One aspect I will concentrate upon in this contribution is that, although these earliest inhabitants did not dramatically transform the landscape, in the manner that either prehistoric farmers did with fields and ritual monuments (see Whittle in this volume) or, later, more complex societies achieved through trade, cities and the military machine (see Cunliffe and Härke in this volume), we can, none the less, see the beginnings of such shaping in the way they went about their daily and lifetime routines. My point is that these early hominids (a term which includes ourselves and all our fossil ancestors) were not slaves to nature, ecological creatures determined in everything by the environment, but rather creative builders of social networks that linked their daily landscapes of habit into very different social worlds. Their act of living in the worlds of half a million years ago was every bit as transformative for those environments as our acts of living are today. In other words, the idea that our earliest ancestors lived solely in a natural landscape because they had very simple technologies, smaller brains, and tiny social groupings, while we by contrast create and inhabit a complex cultural world, needs to be revised. Moreover, the second theme of this volume, population diversity and movement, is also illustrated in these early beginnings.

We live in interesting political times. Because Paleolithic and Pleistocene archaeology have always reflected contemporary interests, changes in the political map have usually been met with a geographical shift in the cradle of human origins or the center from which humanity sprang. My aim in this chapter is to look at the components of a center-edge model that have a long and continuing use in classifying and interpreting Paleolithic data. The three components are: 1 The geographical location of centers and edges. 2 The dispersal of population between them. 3 The interpretation of centers as complex societies.

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