Rudolf Karl Ludwig Virchow was born in Pomerania on 13 October 1821 of German parents. He became a pathologist, the leading medical scientist in Germany, and attained world-wide fame through establishing the correctness of the ‘cell theory’ that now underlies all biological and medical thought. He was also a radical politician, in the 1860s one of the few effectual opponents of Bismarck, and for 25 years chairman of the Finance Committee of the Prussian Landtag.

In recent years there have appeared a number of books about the Etruscans. These have for the most part been devoted to Etruscan art and culture of the historical period, and touch only lightly on the so-called mystery of Etruscan origins. This mystery is a peculiar thing, for no one regards the origin of other ancient peoples such as the Greeks or the Romans as mysterious. It is simply assumed that they developed where they are found at the beginning of history out of various prehistoric elements that had already arrived.

The Etruscan mystery arises in part from the remarkable differences both in language and in civilization between the Etruscans and the other peoples of pre-Roman Italy. The ancients also speculated about it, and the puzzle is in part due to contradictory statements made by them. Herodotus in the 5th century B.C. said that the Etruscans came from Lydia, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the 1st century B.C. said that they did not come from anywhere but originated in Italy. The aim of much discussion in recent times has been to determine which was right. I should say at once that it seems to me that there is something in both views. But the statement of Herodotus can hardly be taken literally, since there is insufficient specific connexion between the ancient language and culture of Lydia and anything in Etruria. I shall return to that part of the story later.

In essence, Pargeter et al. argue that claims for the antiquity of modern San ‘cultures’ involve a misuse of analogical reasoning. In general, I agree. But, let me take issue with a few of the specifics they discuss, and argue instead that things may be more complicated than they seem.

In contrast to the Acheulian and Middle Palaeolithic, the Late Palaeolithic archaeological record of the south-east coast of India is poorly understood (Pappu 2001; Petraglia et al. 2010; Pappu et al. 2011). Considerable uncertainty surrounds the definition of the blade-based microlithic or non-Levallois, flake-based assemblages, largely as a result of the lack of chronometric dates from excavated sites and due to the paucity of lithic studies (Pappu 2001). The Late Palaeolithic is a crucial period in relation to questions about the dispersals of anatomically modern humans across India and Sri Lanka (Petraglia et al. 2010; Mellars et al. 2013; Roberts et al. 2015) and regional evolutionary trajectories of blade technologies. Here, we present an overview of the site complex of Kunjaram (KJ) in the Kortallaiyar River Basin, Tamil Nadu, south-east India. This represents one of the 43 Late Palaeolithic sites documented in this region (Pappu et al. 2010). While analysis of the lithics from other sites continues, we focus here on the lithic assemblage from KJ-3 because of its good preservation and potential to yield information on all stages of the reduction sequence, as well as its geographic proximity to the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic site of Attirampakkam, which would enable the construction of regional cultural sequences.

This brief review assesses a dynamic virtual exhibition that has been curated by the University of Malta and Heritage Malta, with the support of the Malta Tourist Authority and the backing of the Ministry of Tourism and Consumer Protection, Malta. The exhibition, Underwater Malta (https://underwatermalta.org/map/), aims, through a virtual platform, to explore 17 wrecks ranging in date from a 2700-year-old Phoenician shipwreck found off Gozo to a submarine and numerous ships that sank in the Second World War, and a Victorian gun (cannon) site. The most numerous wreck type is aircraft, with nine that were active in the Second World War (Figure 1). While the wrecks are unified by their underwater resting place, the material, their chronologies and the depths at which they are located on the seabed vary considerably, the deepest being the Phoenician shipwreck that lies beneath 110m of water.