South Eastern Mediterranean Peoples Between 130 000 And 10 000 Years Ago

The Upper Pleistocene era encompassed a period of dramatic cultural developments in the south-eastern Mediterranean basin. This book highlights and synthesizes the latest research and current scientific debate on the archaeology of this time period in North Africa and the Near East. Recent archaeological research in North Africa has meant this region now plays a decisive role in scientific debate. After decades of neglect, the archaeological record from North Africa has now been seen to parallel in significance that of the Near East. This book offers an opportunity to observe the Afro-Asian side of the Mediterranean basin as an uninterrupted land, as it was for its Upper Pleistocene inhabitants. Areas of focus include the Out-of-Africa movement of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) into the Levant and the transition from the Middle Palaeolithic/Middle Stone Age to the Upper Palaeolithic/Later Stone Age, during which a change of lifestyle took place, based on plant cultivation and animal husbandry. These topics are of crucial interest to anyone studying human evolution, prehistoric archaeology, anthropology, and palaeo-environmental studies. This volume brings together data as well as perspectives from various scholars, often separated by their areas of interest and location. This volume is complementary to The Mediterranean from 50,000 to 25,000 BP: Turning Points and New Directions edited by M. Camps and C. Szmidt (Oxbow Books, 2009).

Africa has the longest and arguably the most diverse archaeological record of any of the continents. It is where the human lineage first evolved and from where Homo sapiens spread across the rest of the world. Later, it witnessed novel experiments in food-production and unique trajectories to urbanism and the organisation of large communities that were not always structured along strictly hierarchical lines. Millennia of engagement with societies in other parts of the world confirm Africa's active participation in the construction of the modern world, while the richness of its history, ethnography, and linguistics provide unusually powerful opportunities for constructing interdisciplinary narratives of Africa's past. This Handbook provides a comprehensive and up-to-date synthesis of African archaeology, covering the entirety of the continent's past from the beginnings of human evolution to the archaeological legacy of European colonialism. As well as covering almost all periods and regions of the continent, it includes a mixture of key methodological and theoretical issues and debates, and situates the subject's contemporary practice within the discipline's history and the infrastructural challenges now facing its practitioners. Bringing together essays on all these themes from over seventy contributors, many of them living and working in Africa, it offers a highly accessible, contemporary account of the subject for use by scholars and students of not only archaeology, but also history, anthropology, and other disciplines.

Innovation and creativity are two of the key characteristics that distinguish cultural transmission from biological transmission. This book explores a number of questions concerning the nature and timing of the origins of human creativity. What were the driving factors in the development of new technologies? What caused the stasis in stone tool technological innovation in the Early Pleistocene? Were there specific regions and episodes of enhanced technological development, or did it occur at a steady pace where ancestral humans lived? The authors are archaeologists who address these questions, armed with data from ancient artefacts such as shell beads used as jewelry, primitive musical instruments, and sophisticated techniques required to fashion certain kinds of stone into tools. Providing ‘state of art’ discussions that step back from the usual archaeological publications that focus mainly on individual site discoveries, this book presents the full picture on how and why creativity in Middle to Late Pleistocene archeology/anthropology evolved. Gives a full, original and multidisciplinary perspective on how and why creativity evolved in the Middle to Late Pleistocene Enhances our understanding of the big leaps forward in creativity at certain times Assesses the intellectual creativity of Homo erectus, H. neanderthalensis, and H. sapiens via their artefacts

This volume explores the cultural meaning of ochre among the societies of the Late Epipalaeolithic/Mesolithic and the Early Neolithic from the Levant to the Carpathian Basin.

Proceedings of Evolang IX, the 9th International Conference on the Evolution of Language. The Evolang conferences are the leading international conferences for new findings in the study of the origins and evolution of language. They attract a multidisciplinary audience. The proceedings are an important resource for researchers in the field.

Proceedings of Evolang IX, the 9th International Conference on the Evolution of Language. The Evolang conferences are the leading international conferences for new findings in the study of the origins and evolution of language. They attract a multidisciplinary audience. The proceedings are an important resource for researchers in the field. Contents:Evolutionary Parallels between Language and Tool Use (Michael A Arbib)Cortico–Cortical and Cortico–Cerebellar Computations in Language Change (Giorgos P Argyropoulos)The Case for Neanderthal Language — How Strong is It? (Sverker Johansson)Meanings of Touching Object Parts in Pointing (Harumi Kobayashi and Tetsuya Yasuda)Robustness as a Design Feature of Speech Communication (Bodo Winter and Morten H Christiansen)The Exponent of Zipf's Law in Language Ontogeny (Jaume Baixeries, Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho and Brita Elvevåg)and other papers Readership: Graduate students, academics and researchers working on the evolution of language, artificial intelligence, genetics and psychology. Keywords:Language Evolution;Evolution of Language;EVOLANG;Linguistics

Bringing together archaeological, paleoenvironmental, paleontological and genetic data, this book makes a first attempt to reconstruct African population histories from out species' evolution to the Holocene. Africa during Marine Isotope Stages (MIS) 6 to 2 (~190-12,000 years ago) witnessed the biological development and behavioral florescence of our species. Modern human population dynamics, which involved multiple population expansions, dispersals, contractions and extinctions, played a central role in our species’ evolutionary trajectory. So far, the demographic processes – modern human population sizes, distributions and movements – that occurred within Africa during this critical period have been consistently under-addressed. The authors of this volume aim at (1) examining the impact of this glacial-interglacial- glacial cycle on human group sizes, movements and distributions throughout Africa; (2) investigating the macro- and micro-evolutionary processes underpinning our species’ anatomical and behavioral evolution; and (3) setting an agenda whereby Africa can benefit from, and eventually contribute to, the increasingly sophisticated theoretical and methodological palaeodemographic frameworks developed on other continents.

This book is the first complete synthesis of research undertaken so far on the Upper Palaeolithic archaeology of the Caucasus. It discusses the cultural changes that took place across Upper Palaeolithic industries and in the subsistence strategies of modern humans across the entire duration of this period, from approximately 40,000 to 10,000 years ago, in the context of the environmental changes that affected the population in this region. The book views the Upper Palaeolithic of the Caucasus in comparison to various other cultural entities from this period that are known in the extensive surrounding cultural landscape of Western Eurasia.