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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.

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.

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.

The picture of human evolution has been transformed by new evidence in recent years, but contributing disciplines seem to have difficulty in sharing knowledge on a common basis. The disciplines producing primary data in paleoanthropology scarcely reach out to a broader picture and are often bypassed by writers in other disciplines. Archaeology is encouraged by its material evidence to project a view that "what you see is what there was": by definition, there can be only a late flowering of human abilities. Yet there is a vital alternative paleontological record of the early hominins that gives us important information about their brains and suggests that brains become large and complex far earlier than that late material complexity might imply. How, then, to account for the large brains acting far back in time? Evolutionary psychology, in the form of the social brain hypothesis, claims that these large brains were concerned with managing a far-reaching social life. In becoming human, those brains did not merely become larger, but of necessity they took on new socialized perspectives, a domestication of emotional capacities allowing greater insights and collaboration. We argue that there is at least a 2-million-year social record that must be made part of mainstream interpretation. © 2012 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.

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.