First generation modelling of cultural systems, as applied in archaeology, frequently invoked linear, deterministic relationships as well as privileging concepts such as stability and an assumed cumulative evolution towards increasing complexity. But can the world of human affairs with its numerous reversals and unintended consequences really be captured by such models? Recent advances in the natural sciences have demonstrated the central role of non-linear phenomena, discontinuities and unpredictable breaks from established patterns and events. It is argued that such findings can form the basis for a new theoretical framework, human ecodynamics.

Archaeology has wandered into exciting but daunting territory. It faces floods of new evidence about the human past that are largely digital, frequently spatial, increasingly open and often remotely sensed. The resulting terrain is littered, both with data that are wholly new and data that were long known about but previously considered junk. This paper offers an overview of this diluvian information landscape and aims to foster debate about its wider disciplinary impact. In particular, I would argue that its consequences: a) go well beyond the raw challenges of digital data archiving or manipulation and should reconfigure our analytical agendas; b) can legitimately be read for both utopian and dystopian disciplinary futures; and c) re-expose some enduring tensions between archaeological empiricism, comparison and theory-building.

Have ancestors replaces chiefs as the defining entity of prehistory? This provocative view from the Mediterranean world may provoke a little debate.

This review of the evidence for early agriculture in New Guinea supported by new data from Kuk Swamp demonstrates that cultivation had begun there by at least 6950–6440 cal BP and probably much earlier. Contrary to previous ideas, the first farming in New Guinea was not owed to SouthEast Asia, but emerged independently in the Highlands. Indeed plants such as the banana were probably first domesticated in New Guinea and later diffused into the Asian continent.

The authors present new dating evidence for a refined understanding of human presence in Central Europe between 23,000 and 14,000 BP.

Neanderthal diet is explored by examining stone tools found at the site of La Quina for residues and microwear. The Neanderthal people are found to be using their scrapers for working plants and woods as well as meat.

What was the effect on Late Minoan civilisation of the catastrophic destruction of Akrotiri on Thera (Santorini) by volcanic eruption? Not much, according to the evidence for continuing prosperity on Crete. But the authors mobilise their ingenious mathematical model (published in Antiquity 82: 1009–1024), this time to show that the effects of removing a major port of call could have impacted after an interval, as increased costs of transport gradually led to ever fewer routes and eventual economic collapse.

Discussion about a possible African origin of modern humans is hampered by the lack of Late Pleistocene skeletal material from the Nile valley, the likely passage-way from East Africa to Asia and Europe. Here we report the discovery of a burial of an anatomically modern child from southern Egypt. Its clear relation with Middle Palaeolithic chert extraction activities and a series of OSL dates, from correlative aeolian sands, suggests an age between 49,800 and 80,400 years ago, with a mean age of 55,000.

The earliest Upper Palaeolithic industries of the Levant, which figure prominently in discussions of the spread of anatomically modern humans and the origins of the Upper Palaeolithic, are known from a small number of localities. Two sites in the Hatay region of Turkey have yielded initial Upper Palaeolithic assemblages similar to those found in the Levant. One of the sites, Üçaǧizlı’ cave, has also provided radiometric dates and faunal remains, both relatively rare for sites of this period.

The Yafteh cave in Iran has an intact Aurignacian sequence over 2m deep. First explored by Frank Hole and Kent Flannery in the 1960s, its strata and assemblage are here re-evaluated at first hand by a new international team. The authors show that the assemblage is genuine Aurignacian and dates back to about 35.5K uncal BP. They propose it as emerging locally and even as providing a culture of origin for modern humans in West Asia and Europe.

Palaeoethnobotanical evidence reveals that there was increasing emphasis on greater varieties of species and cropping practices in the changing subsistence of the Indus civilization: agricultural intensification is discussed in relation to social and environmental changes.

The report announces the important radiocarbon-dated sequence recently obtained at Dzudzuana Cave in the southern Caucasus foothills. The first occupants here were modern humans, in c. 34.5–32.2 ka cal BP, and comparison with dated sequences on the northern slope of the Caucasus suggests that their arrival was rapid and widespread. The rich, well-dated assemblages of lithics, bone tools and a few art objects, coloured fibres, pollen and animal remains deposited at Dzudzuana through 20 millennia provide an invaluable point of reference for numerous other sites previously excavated in western Georgia. Detailed information has been placed in a supplementary excavation report online. The data support the significance of these excavations for a better understanding of modern human dispersals.

During the early post-Pleistocene there flourished right across the middle belt of the African continent a highly distinctive way of life intimately associated with the great rivers, lakes and marshes. This belt–or arc, to be more precise, corresponding roughly with the drought zone of the early 1970s–comprises the southern Sahara and the Sahel from the Atlantic to the Nile and there bends up-river to the East African rift valleys and the equator. Traceable as early as the eighth millennium BC, the zenith of this ‘aquatic civilization’ was achieved in the seventh millennium, being a time when higher rainfall made rivers longer and more permanent and caused lakes to swell and burst their basins (Butzer et al., 1972; Zinderen Bakker, 1972). Around 7000 BC, for instance, fish populations as well as hippos and crocodiles reached the central Saharan highlands, while, to their south, Lake Chad expanded enormously till it overflowed via the Benue and Lower Niger into the Atlantic. In East Africa at the same time the small lakes in the Kenya rift valley rose to combine or to create riverain links over the normal watersheds, while to their north Lake Rudolf reached a height sufficient to help feed the White Nile system.

Greenland, far north land of the Atlantic, has often been beyond the limit of European farming settlement. One of its Norse settlements, colonized just before AD 1000, is — astonishingly — not even at the southern tip, but a way up the west coast, the ‘Western Settlement’. Environmental studies show why its occupation came to an end within five centuries, leaving Greenland once more a place of Arctic-adapted hunters.

For the last half-century, the story of very early hominids, and their stone industries, has been almost exclusively ‘in Africa’. This first report of a very early industry takes the story ‘out of Africa’ and into the Indian sub-continent – that is, in a geographical direction towards the early industries of eastern Asia.

A careful survey of reports of early sheep in southernmost Africa combines with new radiocarbon dates to revise our knowledge of early pastoralism in the Cape. The new chronology shows the keeping of domestic stock and the making of pottery are not simultaneous and intertwined but separate events in a more complex history.

Traces of starch found on a large flat stone discovered in the hunter-fisher-gatherer site of Ohalo II famously represent the first identification of Upper Palaeolithic grinding of grasses. Given the importance of this discovery for the use of edible grain, further analyses have now been undertaken. Meticulous sampling combined with good preservation allow the authors to demonstrate that the Ohalo II stone was certainly used for the routine processing of wild cereals, wheat, barley and now oats among them, around 23 000 years ago.