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Straight-tusked elephants ( Palaeoloxodon antiquus ) were the largest terrestrial mammals of the Pleistocene, present in Eurasian landscapes between 800,000 and 100,000 years ago. The occasional co-occurrence of their skeletal remains with stone tools has generated rich speculation about the nature of interactions between these elephants and Pleistocene humans: Did hominins scavenge on elephants that died a natural death or maybe even hunt some individuals? Our archaeozoological study of the largest P. antiquus assemblage known, excavated from 125,000-year-old lake deposits in Germany, shows that hunting of elephants weighing up to 13 metric tons was part of the cultural repertoire of Last Interglacial Neanderthals there, over >2000 years, many dozens of generations. The intensity and nutritional yields of these well-documented butchering activities, combined with previously reported data from this Neumark-Nord site complex, suggest that Neanderthals were less mobile and operated within social units substantially larger than commonly envisaged.

Control of fire is one of the most important technological innovations within the evolution of humankind. The archaeological signal of fire use becomes very visible from around 400,000 y ago onward. Interestingly, this occurs at a geologically similar time over major parts of the Old World, in Africa, as well as in western Eurasia, and in different subpopulations of the wider hominin metapopulation. We interpret this spatiotemporal pattern as the result of cultural diffusion, and as representing the earliest clear-cut case of widespread cultural change resulting from diffusion in human evolution. This fire-use pattern is followed slightly later by a similar spatiotemporal distribution of Levallois technology, at the beginning of the African Middle Stone Age and the western Eurasian Middle Paleolithic. These archaeological data, as well as studies of ancient genomes, lead us to hypothesize that at the latest by 400,000 y ago, hominin subpopulations encountered one another often enough and were sufficiently tolerant toward one another to transmit ideas and techniques over large regions within relatively short time periods. Furthermore, it is likely that the large-scale social networks necessary to transmit complicated skills were also in place. Most importantly, this suggests a form of cultural behavior significantly more similar to that of extant Homo sapiens than to our great ape relatives.

Description, Studies of ancient lake sites in Germany suggest landscape manipulation by prehistoric hunter-gatherers, 125,000 years ago., Little is known about the antiquity, nature, and scale of Pleistocene hunter-gatherer impact on their ecosystems, despite the importance for studies of conservation and human evolution. Such impact is likely to be limited, mainly because of low population densities, and challenging to detect and interpret in terms of cause-effect dynamics. We present high-resolution paleoenvironmental and archaeological data from the Last Interglacial locality of Neumark-Nord (Germany). Among the factors that shaped vegetation structure and succession in this lake landscape, we identify a distinct ecological footprint of hominin activities, including fire use. We compare these data with evidence from archaeological and baseline sites from the same region. At Neumark-Nord, notably open vegetation coincides with a virtually continuous c. 2000-year-long hominin presence, and the comparative data strongly suggest that hominins were a contributing factor. With an age of c. 125,000 years, Neumark-Nord provides an early example of a hominin role in vegetation transformation.

Studies of the defence capacity of ancient hominins against toxic substances may contribute importantly to the reconstruction of their niche, including their diets and use of fire. Fire usage implies frequent exposure to hazardous compounds from smoke and heated food, known to affect general health and fertility, probably resulting in genetic selection for improved detoxification. To investigate whether such genetic selection occurred, we investigated the alleles in Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans at gene polymorphisms well-known to be relevant from modern human epidemiological studies of habitual tobacco smoke exposure and mechanistic evidence. We compared these with the alleles in chimpanzees and gorillas. Neanderthal and Denisovan hominins predominantly possess gene variants conferring increased resistance to these toxic compounds. Surprisingly, we observed the same in chimpanzees and gorillas, implying that less efficient variants are derived and mainly evolved in modern humans. Less efficient variants are observable from the first early Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers onwards. While not clarifying the deep history of fire use, our results highlight the long-term stability of the genes under consideration despite major changes in the hominin dietary niche. Specifically for detoxification gene variants characterised as deleterious by epidemiological studies, our results confirm the predominantly recent appearance reported for deleterious human gene variants, suggesting substantial impact of recent human population history, including pre-Holocene expansions.

Archaeological indications for off-site burning by late Pleistocene and early Holocene hunter-gatherers present intransigent interpretive problems; by contrast, burning practices by recent hunter-gatherers are well documented. Here, we present a systematic global inventory of extant burning practices-including the reasons for burning and the environmental setting of firing activities-and also discuss their visibility in the archaeological record. This inventory is based on ethnographic and historical texts. In historical times, off-site fire was used for a wide range of purposes, irrespective of age and gender, with significant advantages for its producers. While the reasons given for burning can vary between individuals, in the longer term, many hunter-gatherer firing practices created more mosaic types of environments than would have occurred naturally. The historical visibility of hunter-gatherer burning activities contrasts with the relative invisibility of such practices in the contemporary archaeological record, highlighting the difficulty of analyzing past use of fire. On the basis of its ethnographic importance, we suggest that diverse off-site fire use is as old as the regular use of fire. New multiproxy data from well-sampled sequences, analyzed at a local scale, is needed to test this hypothesis.

We use climatic and satellite remote sensing data to characterize environmental seasonality in the geographical ranges of extant non-human primates in order to assess the effect of relative brain size on tolerance of more seasonal habitats. Demonstration of such an effect in living non-human primates could provide a comparative framework for modeling hominin dispersals and geographical range dynamics in the Pliocene and Pleistocene. Our analyses found no such effect: there are neither positive nor negative correlations between relative brain size and either geographical range size or the average and range of values for environmental seasonality, whether analysed at the level of all primates, or within parvorders (strepsirrhine, catarrhine, platyrrhine). Independent analyses by other researchers comparing feeding behaviour and ecology at individual primate study sites demonstrate that in seasonal environments, the year-round metabolic costs of maintaining a relatively large brain are met by adaptive behavioural/dietary strategies. However, consistent with our own results, those comparative studies found that there was no overall association, whether positive or negative, between ‘raw’ environmental seasonality and primate relative brain size. We must therefore look elsewhere for a comparative model of hominin geographical range dynamics in the Pleistocene.

Recent discoveries of evidence for hominin activity in Britain before MIS 13 challenge previous understanding of the nature of the earliest colonization of NW Europe. Insights into the nature of colonization in this region may be obtained by examining the much richer fossil and archaeological record from Iberia. It has generally been assumed that southern Europe was permanently occupied after the first appearance of hominins in the region, and that it provided a reliable source for populations re-colonizing areas further north. However, continuity of occupation in these southern areas is still to be demonstrated. This paper provides an outline of the palaeoenvironmental, archaeological and fossil evidence from Iberia during the Early Pleistocene and early Middle Pleistocene. This evidence is used to argue that hominin occupation in this region and time period was discontinuous. This may help to address a number of questions about the earliest occupation history of NW Europe: who were the colonists and where did they come from? Were they strongly limited by climatic conditions? Were source populations always available in nearby areas, and did this influence the permanency of occupation in this region?

Due to its geographical location and climate, northwestern Europe was at the edge of the hominin range throughout most of the Palaeolithic period. The pattern of the presence and absence of hominins through time, and the implications for their survival skills, have been the focus of considerable research. Here, we take the relatively rich late Middle Palaeolithic record from northern France as a starting point for examining the demographic processes underlying hiatuses in the Palaeolithic record. What did this involve in terms of changes in the distribution and abundance of Neandertal populations, and interactions between populations, during the glacial–interglacial cycles? Definitions in the ecological literature of terms such as ‘refugia’ and research on the nature of population responses to Pleistocene climatic fluctuations may be helpful in posing this and other questions regarding human evolution. Current understanding of Neandertal ecology and comparative data support the argument that rather than tracking preferred habitats, northern populations of Neandertals suffered local extinctions. The archaeological record and genetic studies of Neandertals and carnivore species potentially provide information relevant to this hypothesis, but interpreting this evidence is challenging. This process of repeated regional extinction would have been an important factor in the demography of hominin populations, and may have been at the root of the development of the Neandertal lineage.

This paper is a cross-cultural examination of the development of hunting skills and the implications for the debate on the role of learning in the evolution of human life history patterns. While life history theory has proven to be a powerful tool for understanding the evolution of the human life course, other schools, such as cultural transmission and social learning theory, also provide theoretical insights. These disparate theories are reviewed, and alternative and exclusive predictions are identified. This study of cross-cultural regularities in how children learn hunting skills, based on the ethnographic literature on traditional hunters, complements existing empirical work and highlights future areas for investigation.

Book description: In 1953 a young female Japanese macaque called Imo began washing sweet potatoes before eating them, presumably to remove dirt and sand grains. Soon other monkeys had adopted this behaviour, and potato washing gradually spread throughout the troop. When, three years after her first invention, Imo devised a second novel foraging behaviour, that of separating wheat from sand by throwing mixed handfuls into water and scooping out the floating grains, she was almost instantly heralded around the world as a 'monkey genius'. Imo is probably the most celebrated of animal innovators. In fact, many animals will invent new behaviour patterns, adjust established behaviours to a novel context, or respond to stresses in an appropriate and novel manner. Innovation is an important component of behavioural flexibility, vital to the survival of individuals in species with generalist or opportunistic lifestyles, and potentially of critical importance to those endangered or threatened species forced to adjust to changed or impoverished environments. Innovation may also have played a central role in avian and primate brain evolution. Yet until recently animal innovation has been subject to almost complete neglect by behavioural biologists, psychologists, social learning researchers, and conservation-minded biologists. This collection of stimulating and readable articles by leading scientific authorities is the first ever book on 'animal innovation', designed to put the topic of animal innovation on the map and heighten awareness of this developing field.