A worked stone from a secure Mousterian context has a bone splinter driven through it and appears to modern eyes like an attempt to represent a face. The authors argue that a face was indeed intended, and that the Roche-Cotard “proto-figurine” can be counted among the earliest art objects. At this place and date it should refer to a Neanderthal people.

The Middle Palaeolithic record of the Arabian Peninsula can provide crucial evidence for understanding human dispersal. The authors summarise the archaeological evidence and suggest some of the routes taken by the earliest humans coming out of Africa, including one implying the use of boats. Early populations adapted to a hospitable environment, but had later to adapt to the advance of the desert.

In this paper the author assembles the evidence for Mesolithic dwelling places surviving as posts, floors and assemblages. This evidence can be used to show how space was organised, where men and women slept, and how some of the implied family relationships anticipated Neolithic practice.

Using ethnographic parallels the authors identify ‘bark peelers’ used in Ice Age Europe. They suggest that Palaeolithic Europeans used these to extract edible and nourishing new growth from the trunks of spring trees.

The author reports the oldest human skeletal assemblage found so far in the pacific Islands: at the site of Chalechol Ra Orrak on Palau, Micronesia.

The cultural transition from the Mesolithic to Neolithic in the Rhône valley has been radically illuminated by excavation in the Grotte du Gardon (Ain). Examination of the well-stratified assemblages shows that flint and pottery associated with early Neolithic cultures in the Mediterranean occurred with lithics of local Mesolithic traditions. The author proposes that during the transitional period in this region in the sixth millennium BC, peoples of the two cultures lived side by side.

Traditionally, the process of neolithization in the Dutch delta has been considered to have been slow, spanning some 1500 years. Re-examination of the available evidence makes clear that a ‘short transition model’ fits the available data equally well.

Excavations at the Camel Site, in the Negev, provide evidence of desert cottage industries making (and probably trading) beads and millstones in the Early Bronze Age. But these were people for whom nomadism was the ‘default lifestyle’.

The relations between the emergent Yan state, local groups and the power blocks of the Shang and Zhou are vividly chronicled by bronze vessels, weapons and burials rites in Bronze Age northern China.

Radiocarbon dating and stratigraphy here offer a new chronological structure for the Iron Age in the Levant. The credit for the construction of massive public monuments in the northern part of Israel is here wrested from David and Solomon and attributed to the later Omride dynasty. The early Israelite monarchs actually ruled over a small kingdom in the highlands around Jerusalem rather than a great empire.

Antiquity is pleased to present a preliminary report on the stone statue of a Celtic warrior recently discovered at the celebrated excavation at Lattes, southern France, and dating to around 500 BC.

The author studies prehistoric sea travel along the coast between West Mexico and Ecuador using a computer simulation incorporating the performance characteristics of sailing rafts. The model predicts that while northward voyages may have taken as little as two months, southward voyages would have entailed at least five months and may have required a strategy that took the rafts offshore for as long as a month.

How were stone tools hafted? Based on experimental evidence the author shows how hafting arrangements can be recognised from macro-and microwear traces on the stone objects.

The authors deconstruct the fictional image of Neanderthals, showing why we see them in the way we do.

The British Museum marked the 250th anniversary of its foundation this year, with an exhibition, The Museum of the Mind: art and memory in world cultures. We asked four archaeologists to review the show: Barry Cunliffe, professor at Oxford University and a trustee of the Museum; Colin Renfrew, professor at Cambridge University and former trustee; Chris Godsen, curator at the Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford University and Helen Geake, formerly at Norwich Castle Museum and now working on the British government's portable Antiquities scheme for England and Wales. Here is what they say.