Recent genetic data showing that Neanderthals interbred with modern humans have made it clear that deeper insight into the behavioral differences between these populations will be critical to understanding the rapid spread of modern humans and the demise of the Neanderthals. This volume, which brings together scholars who have worked with faunal assemblages from Europe, the Near East, and Africa, makes an important contribution to our broader understanding of Neanderthal extinction and modern human origins through its focus on variability in human hunting behavior between 70-25,000 years...

Over the last decade, Africa has taken a central position in the search for the timing and mechanisms leading to modern human origins, and the rich archaeological and human paleontological record of North Africa is critical to this search. In this volume, we bring together new research into the archaeology, human paleontology, chronology, and environmental context of modern human origins in North Africa. The result is a volume that better integrates the North African record into the modern human origins debate and at the same time highlights the research questions that are currently the focus...

Plio-Pleistocene sites are a rare occurrence in same sites. This combination of factors is the archaeological record. When they are unique in East African Plio-Pleistocene uncovered, the faunal materials so crucial to archaeology and has stimulated much debate unlocking their behavioral meaning are often over the socioeconomic function of early sites. poorly preserved. For example, at Koobi Fora, Influential models of early hominid behavior Kenya, a prolific region that preserves several in the late 1960s and early 1970s were based classic Plio-Pleistocene sites, many bones are exclusively on...

The Late Cenozoic Yushe Basin, Shanxi Province, China embodies the bulk of our knowledge on successions of terrestrial vertebrates in the northern part of East Asia.

The Central European Magdalenian

This volume introduces a model of the expansion of cultural capacity as a systemic approach with biological, historical and individual dimensions.It is contrasted with existing approaches from primatology and behavioural ecology; influential factors like differences in life history and demography are discussed; and the different stages of the development of cultural capacity in human evolution are traced in the archaeological record.
The volume provides a synthetic view on a) the different factors and mechanisms of cultural development, and b) expansions of cultural capacities in human...

This volume describes a 3.6 million-years-old partial skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis from the Woranso-Mille, central Afar, Ethiopia. This specimen is the first adult partial skeleton to be recovered since Lucy's (A.L. 288-1) discovery in 1974. It is older than Lucy by 400,000 years and sheds light on the paleobiology of early Australopithecus afarensis, particularly the morphology of the shoulder girdle and thoracic shape, which are thus far poorly understood and actively debated. The fauna associated with the partial skeleton tells us enormously about Au. afarensis...

The aim of the atlas is to provide images of taphonomic modifications, making it as comprehensive as possible with evidence presently available. This volume is intended both as a field guide for identifying taphonomic modifications in the field, and for use in the laboratory when collections of fossils are being analyzed. Images in the book are a combination of scanning electron micrographs, regular photographs, cross-sections of bones and line drawings and graphs. By providing good quality illustrations of taphonomic modifications, with links between similar types of modification, the atlas...

This edited volume describes the geology, stratigraphy, anthropology, archaeology, dating, taphonomy, paleobotany, paleontology and paleoecology of Azokh caves (also known as Azykh or Azikh). The chapters review exhaustively the key recent research on this limestone karstic site, which is located near the village of the same name in the region of Nagorno Karabagh in the south-eastern end of the Lesser Caucasus. The site is significant due to its geographic location at an important migratory crossroad between Africa and Eurasia. These caves contain an almost complete sedimentary sequence of...