During the Middle Paleolithic, various populations ancestral to modern Homo sapiens inhabited Africa, while Europe was homeland to the Neandertals. Recent archaeological investigations have provided data showing that the abrupt transition from the Middle to the Upper Neolithic, during which these populations met and interacted, was a fast-moving period of change for both groups. In this volume, the expansion of modern humans and their impact on the populations of Neandertals in Europe, Western Asia, and Northern Africa is discussed in depth, with particular focus on the lithic industries of the late Middle and early Upper Paleolithic.
This book provides a comprehensive review of hunter-gatherer studies, undertaking detailed regional and thematic case-studies that span the archaeology, history and anthropology of hunter gatherers, concluding with an in-depth review of the main opportunities, research questions, and moral obligations that lie ahead.
This volume presents the first of two proceedings from the International Conference on the Replacement of Neanderthals by Modern Humans, which took place in Tokyo in November 2012. Focussing on a highly innovative working hypothesis called the ‘learning hypothesis’, which attempts to explain the replacement as a result of differences in the learning abilities of these two hominid populations, the conference served as the latest multidisciplinary discussion forum on this intriguing Palaeoanthropological issue. The present volume reports on outcomes of the conference in three major sections. Part 1 provides an archaeological overview of the processes of replacement/assimilation of Neanderthals by modern humans. Part 2 consists of archaeological and ethnographic case studies exploring evidence of learning behaviours in prehistoric and modern hunter-gatherer societies. Part 3 presents a collection of papers that directly contributes to the definition, validation and testing of the learning hypothesis in terms of population biology and evolutionary theory. A total of 18 papers in this volume make available to readers unique cultural perspectives on mechanisms of the replacement/assimilation of Neanderthals by modern humans and suggested relationships between these mechanisms and different learning strategies.
Academic Writing has been widely acclaimed in all its editions as a superb textbook—and an important contribution to the pedagogy of introducing students to the conventions of academic writing. The book seeks to introduce student readers to the lively community of research and writing beyond the classroom, with its complex interactions, values, and goals. It presents writing from a range of disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, cultivating students’ awareness of the subtle differences in genre. The fourth edition has been revised throughout and includes a new chapter on visual rhetoric, a new section on the academic peer review system, updated examples, expanded exercises, and new glossary entries.
This update to the award-winning The Origins of Modern Humans: A World Survey of the Fossil Evidence covers the most accepted common theories concerning the emergence of modern Homo sapiens adding fresh insight from top young scholars on the key new discoveries of the past 25 years. The Origins of Modern Humans: Biology Reconsidered allows field leaders to discuss and assess the assemblage of hominid fossil material in each region of the world during the Pleistocene epoch. It features new fossil and molecular evidence, such as the evolutionary inferences drawn from assessments of modern humans and large segments of the Neandertal genome. It also addresses the impact of digital imagery and the more sophisticated morphometrics that have entered the analytical fray since 1984. Beginning with a thoughtful introduction by the authors on modern human origins, the book offers such insightful chapter contributions as: Africa: The Cradle of Modern People Crossroads of the Old World: Late Hominin Evolution in Western Asia A River Runs through It: Modern Human Origins in East Asia Perspectives on the Origins of Modern Australians Modern Human Origins in Central Europe The Makers of the Early Upper Paleolithic in Western Eurasia Neandertal Craniofacial Growth and Development and Its Relevance for Modern Human Origins Energetics and the Origin of Modern Humans Understanding Human Cranial Variation in Light of Modern Human Origins The Relevance of Archaic Genomes to Modern Human Origins The Process of Modern Human Origins: The Evolutionary and Demographic Changes Giving Rise to Modern Humans The Paleobiology of Modern Human Emergence Elegant and thought provoking, The Origins of Modern Humans: Biology Reconsidered is an ideal read for students, grad students, and professionals in human evolution and paleoanthropology.
This book is the first to focus on the African origins of human language. It explores the origins of language and culture 250,000-150,000 years ago when modern humans evolved in Africa. Scholars from around the world address the fossil, genetic, and archaeological evidence and critically examine the ways it has been interpreted. The book also considers parallel developments among Europe's Neanderthals and the contrasting outcomes for the two species. Following an extensive introduction contextualizing and linking the book's topics and approaches, fifteen chapters bring together many of the most significant recent findings and developments in modern human origins research. The fields represented by the authors include genetics, biology, behavioural ecology, linguistics, archaeology, cognitive science, and anthropology.
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.
Modern human origins and the fate of the Neanderthals are arguably the most compelling and contentious arenas in paleoanthropology. The much-discussed split between advocates of a single, early emergence of anatomically modern humans in sub-Saharan Africa and supporters of various regional continuity positions is only part of the picture. Equally if not more important are questions surrounding the origins of modern behavior, and the relationships between anatomical and behavioral changes that occurred during the past 200,000 years. Although modern humans as a species may be defined in terms of their skeletal anatomy, it is their behavior, and the social and cognitive structures that support that behavior, which most clearly distinguish Homo sapiens from earlier forms of humans. This book assembles researchers working in Eurasia and Africa to discuss the archaeological record of the Middle Paleolithic and the Middle Stone Age. This is a time period when Homo sapiens last shared the world with other species, and during which patterns of behavior characteristic of modern humans developed and coalesced. Contributions to this volume query and challenge some current notions about the tempo and mode of cultural evolution, and about the processes that underlie the emergence of modern behavior. The papers focus on several fundamental questions. Do typical elements of "modern human behavior" appear suddenly, or are there earlier archaeological precursors of them? Are the archaeological records of the Middle Paleolithic and Middle Stone Age unchanging and monotonous, or are there detectable evolutionary trends within these periods? Coming to diverse conclusions, the papers in this volume open up new avenues to thinking about this crucial interval in human evolutionary history.
