The author makes the case for cultural change during the period traditionally assigned to the Middle Palaeolithic in China (140–30 kya), challenging an earlier proposal (Antiquity 2002) that the period saw little change and the term should be abandoned.

Using the behaviour of related primates to provide analogies for early humans has a long tradition in archaeology. But these primates too have a past, and experienced particular contexts for the adoption of tool-using. In this pioneering review, the author explores distinctions among chimpanzees in ecology, diet and innovation, sets a wider agenda for a prehistory of primates and explains how archaeology could serve it.

Owing to a thick blanket of loess and other later geological disruptions, the earliest hominins to reach Europe are hard to find. To a handful of possible sites, our authors add a new assemblage of lithics with a clear local context and corroborated OSL ages. Ancient humans were present in what is now Romania between 300 000 and 400 000 years ago.

The authors present new research on social and economic developments in southern China in the Early Holocene, ninth to fifth millennia BC. The ‘Neolithic package’ doesn't really work for this fascinating chapter of the human experience, where pottery, social aggregation, animal domestication and rice cultivation all arrive at different places and times. The authors define the role of the ‘pottery-using foragers’, sophisticated hunter-gatherers who left shell or fish middens in caves and dunes. These colonising non-farmers shared numerous cultural attributes with rice cultivators on the Yangtze, their parallel contemporaries over more than 5000 years. Some agriculturalists became hunter-foragers in turn when they expanded onto less fertile soils. No simple linear transition then, but the practice of ingenious strategies, adaptations and links in a big varied land.

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.

The authors present the discovery of a Han period farming site sealed beneath 5m of flood deposits, where courtyard houses have been excavated belonging to the Western Han Dynasty and Wang Mang period (c. 140 BC–AD 23). Preservation is exceptional, both at the village of Sanyangzhuang itself and, by dint of satellite reconnaissance, over a vast landscape contemporarily covered by the flood. Deep profiles show that here land surfaces of the Neolithic and Warring States periods also lie buried. The potential for the study of the early agricultural sequence and a deeper knowledge of Han society is truly outstanding. The discoveries also offer a vivid account of the way a settlement was overwhelmed by flooding.

The sites of the first modern humans who occupied what is now Britain have been reduced to a handful by subsequent glaciation and the rise in sea level, and their assemblages have been further depleted because early excavators ignored the microliths. Confronting the challenges of this exiguous material, the author succeeds in painting a vivid picture of Aurignacian hunters following prey down the now submerged Channel River Valley, colonising the preferred hilly zones at the west of Britain. The presence of two types of bladelet manufacture suggests a lengthy or repeated period of subsequent occupation.

Marc Azéma a Palaeolithic researcher and film maker has been exploring the representation of animal movement in cave art for more than 20 years, and here shares with us his latest examples, culled from the parietal art in the Chauvet Cave (Ardèche) and La Baume Latrone (Gard). Here he has shown that Palaeolithic artists have invented systems of breaking down movement and graphic narrative. His co-author, Florent Rivère, discovered that animal movement was also represented in more dynamic ways—with the use of animals drawn on a spinning disc. In these flickering images created by Palaeolithic people, the authors suggest, lie the origins of cinema.

Renewed in-depth multi-disciplinary investigation of a large coastal mound settlement in Peru has extended the occupation back more than 7000 years to a first human exploitation ~13720 BP. Research by the authors has chronicled the prehistoric sequence from the activities of the first maritime foragers to the construction of the black mound and the introduction of horticulture and monumentality. The community of Huaca Prieta emerges as innovative, complex and ritualised, as yet with no antecedents.

The excavated site termed Yana RHS is dated to about 28000 BP and contained a stunning assemblage of ornamented and symbolic objects—the earliest art to be excavated in the Arctic zone. Decorated beads, pendants and needles connect the site to the Eurasian Upper Palaeolithic; but other forms and ornaments are unparalleled. Shallow dishes and anthropomorphic designs on mammoth tusks find echoes among hunting practice and shamanistic images of the indigenous Yukaghir people recorded in the early twentieth century.

Carbonised textiles were found in a burnt down building inside a cave 30km from the far eastern coast of Russia. The textiles were made from untwisted or hand-twisted blades of sedge grass to form ropes, nets and woven mats. Dated by AMS to c. 9400–8400 cal BP these are the earliest textiles so far known from East Asia.

The authors rewrite the character of Early Mesolithic settlement in Europe with their new research at one of its most famous sites. The picture of small mobile pioneering groups colonising new land is thrown into contention: far from being a small hunter-gatherer camp, Star Carr in 9000 cal BC extended for nearly 2ha and involved the construction of an estimated 30m of lakeside waterfront and at least one post-built house. With some justice, they suspect that the ‘small groups’ of Early Mesolithic Europe may have their rationale in the small excavations of archaeologists.

Using excavation and radiocarbon dating, the authors show that construction of megalithic pillar sites begins in eastern Africa by the fifth millennium BP, and is contemporary with the earliest herding in the region. Mobile herders and/or hunter-gatherers built and used these sites in a dynamic context of economic and social change. We are more familiar with monumentality as an adjunct of cereal cultivators—but this study demonstrates a relationship between early herding and monuments, with clear relevance to pre-cultivation monumentality of very much earlier periods elsewhere.

A Late Palaeolithic amber figurine has been skilfully recovered and reassembled from a ploughed open site in northern Germany. Dated between 11 800 and 11 680 cal BC it occupies a key point between the Magdalenian and the Mesolithic. The authors show that the figurine represents a female elk which was probably carried on the top of a wooden staff. They argue for continuity of art but change of belief in this crucial transition period.

We are pleased to present the latest account of the sequence of burial and construction at the site of Stonehenge, deduced by its most recent excavators and anchored in time by the application of Bayesian radiocarbon modelling. Five prehistoric stages are proposed, of varied duration, and related by our authors to neighbouring monuments in the Stonehenge environs. While it may never be possible to produce a definitive chronology for this most complex of monuments, the comprehensive and integrated achievement owed to these researchers has brought us much closer to that goal. It is from this firm platform that Stonehenge can begin its new era of communication with the public at large.

Tierra del Fuego represents the southernmost limit of human settlement in the Americas. While people may have started to arrive there around 10 500 BP, when it was still connected to the mainland, the main wave of occupation occurred 5000 years later, by which time it had become an island. The co-existence in the area of maritime hunter-gatherers (in canoes) with previous terrestrial occupants pre-echoes the culturally distinctive groups encountered by the first European visitors in the sixteenth century. The study also provides a striking example of interaction across challenging natural barriers.