The authors propose a new model for the origins of humans and their ecological adaptation. The evolutionary stimulus lies not in the savannah but in broken, hilly rough country where the early hominins could hunt and hide. Such ‘roughness’, generated by tectonic and volcanic movement characterises not only the African rift valley but probably the whole route of early hominin dispersal.

This paper shows the remarkable level of social history that can be drawn from the high quality excavation and analysis of a well-preserved stratigraphic sequence. A Bronze Age settlement in Cyprus could be defined as a series of households, comprising dwellings, outbuildings and courtyards that were established, extended, replaced or abandoned over some 500 years. The authors' interpretation offers intimate access to the private lives of the inhabitants over a period in which their settlement grew from a village to a town and then reverted to a deserted ruin.

A new study of the group of kurgans (burial mounds) which stands near Orenburg at the south end of the Ural mountains has revealed a sequence that began in the early Bronze Age and continued intermittently until the era of the Golden Horde in the Middle Ages. The application of modern techniques of cultural and environmental investigation has thrown new light on the different circumstances and contexts in which mound burial was practised, and confirmed the association between investment in burial and nomadism.

Prehistorians and early historic archaeologists often puzzle over seemingly random distributions of artefacts remote from settlements. Here is at least one possible explanation. Using ethnographic and archaeological evidence the author reveals how an early historic people of central Russia used trees in their religion, and describes some of the meanings that lay behind their rituals.

When did people start to eat small seeds, and what drove them to it? New investigations and dating at the Danger Cave in the American Great Basin show that seeds (pickleweed seeds) did not become part of the staple diet until after 8700 b.p. It was at this time that animal and plant resources had begun to seriously diminish in a shrinking wetland.

New excavations and survey on the island of Rapa have shown that a rockshelter was occupied by early settlers around AD 1200 and the first hill forts were erected about 300 years later. Refortification occurred up to the contact period and proliferated around AD 1700. Taro cultivation in terraced pond-fields kept pace with the construction of forts. The authors make a connection between fort-building and making pond-fields, demonstrating that the pressure on resources provoked both the intensification of agriculture and hostility between the communities of the small island.

A newly discovered site at Shangshan in the Lower Yangzi River region has revealed the oldest open-air sedentary village and domesticated rice in south China.

The origin of pottery is among the most important questions in Old World archaeology. The author undertakes a critical review of radiocarbon dates associated with the earliest pottery-making and eliminates a number of them where the material or its context are unreliable. Using those that survive this process of ‘chronometric hygiene’, he proposes that food-containers made of burnt clay originated in East Asia in the Late Glacial, c. 13 700-13 300 BP, and appeared in three separate regions, in Japan, China and far eastern Russia, at about the same time.

A recent study has suggested that the decorated Bronze Age metalwork of South Scandinavia depicted the path of the sun through the sky during the day and through the sea at night. At different stages in its journey it was accompanied by a horse or a ship. Similar images are found in prehistoric rock art, and this paper argues that, whilst there are important differences between the images in these two media, they also signal some of the same ideas.

Sexual roles in deep prehistory are among the most intriguing puzzles still to solve. Here the author shows how men and women can be distinguished by scientific measurement in the prints and stencils of the human hand that occur widely in Upper Palaeolithic art. Six hand stencils from four French caves are attributed to four adult females, an adult male, and a sub-adult male. Here we take a step closer to showing that both sexes are engaged in cave art and whatever dreams and rituals it implies.

The authors examine a sample of olive stones from Egyptian contexts and show that from the first millennium BC, if not before, some of them relate to cultivars originating from the Levant. But equally prominent and just as early is another variety, of unknown origin and currently peculiar to Egypt. The method used is geometrical morphometric analysis – essentially classifying the olive stones by their shape.

The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) is currently producing a digital elevation model of most of the world's surface. Here the authors assess its value in mapping and sequencing the network of water channels that provided the arterial system for Mesopotamia before the petrol engine.

Professor John Mulvaney, pioneer and champion of Australian archaeology, offers us some reflections from the vantage point of his eightieth year. On his retirement 20 years ago Antiquity was glad to publish his Retrospect (Mulvaney 1986), in which he described his awakening interest in history at Melbourne, his first visit to the Rollright Stones and his fruitful encounters with Gordon Childe, Graham Clark, Glyn Daniel, Mortimer Wheeler and many other great figures of the 50s, 60s and 70s in classrooms at Cambridge and in the field in England and Australia. This paper remains a classic of archaeological history which readers will find in our electronic archive (at http://www.antiquity.ac.uk). It ended with his (victorious) battle for the archaeological heritage of the Franklin River heritage of Tasmania in the early 1980s.

Now he reflects on the subsequent decades in which much has changed. Of especial interest to our readers will be Professor Mulvaney's current assessment of the Aboriginal-European discourse and the management of the Australian heritage.

Stable isotope analysis has startled the archaeological community by showing a rapid and widespread change from a marine to terrestrial diet (ie from fish to domesticated plants and animals) as people moved from a Mesolithic to a Neolithic culture. This could be a consequence of domestication, or as Julian Thomas (2003) proposed, of a kind of taboo (‘Touch not the fish’). In a key challenge, Nicky Milner and her colleagues (2004) questioned the reality of this nutritional revolution, contrasting the message of the bones and shells found on settlement sites, with the isotope measurements in the bones of people. Here Mike Richards and Rick Schulting, champions of the diet-revolution, strongly reinforce the arguments. The change was real, it seems: so what does it mean? Milner and colleagues respond.