Rare organic artefacts, including wooden figurines and fishnet fragments from the Stone Age (c. 6000–2000 BC) were found in 2020 and 2021 during excavations of a wetland site in Finland. The first results from analysing the artefacts, crafting methods and raw materials provide novel insights into artisanship, material know-how and visual culture of northern hunter-fisher-gatherers.

Archaeological research conducted in the western part of the Lublin Upland (eastern Poland) has yielded new data on hunter-gatherer settlement in Central Europe in the Late Palaeolithic, and has redefined the eastern boundary of Late Magdalenian and Federmesser Culture settlement.

The well-known Zvejnieki cemetery, with 330 burials, is one of the largest hunter-gatherer cemeteries in northern Europe, overshadowing the more than 115 other Stone Age burials from over ten sites in Latvia. This article is a first overview of these other burials, summarizing their research history, characteristics, and assemblages. The authors discuss the problematic chronology of Latvian Stone Age burials and place them in a wider regional context. Most of the burials are hunter-gatherer burials, and a few are Corded Ware graves. This overview broadens our understanding of Latvian Stone Age burials and brings to light the diversity of hunter-fisher-gatherer mortuary practices in the eastern Baltic region.

Archaeological reconnaissance and test excavation conducted in south-central Ethiopia reveal the region's rich Stone Age and Holocene archaeology. Ongoing lithic, faunal and dating analyses aim to understand chronological and behavioural contexts of prioritised rockshelters as part of a newly launched project. Speleothems in some of the caves promise high-resolution palaeoclimatic reconstruction.

The risk to surface archaeological sites posed by heavy machinery has grown significantly, and stone-tool assemblages are particularly susceptible to alteration that may be difficult to recognise. Indeed, the impact of industrial machines on surface scatters of lithic material has not yet been explored. Here, an analytical experiment is used to explore the ways in which machine action can affect a test assemblage resembling a typical Stone Age scatter. The results demonstrate that while formal tool types are not easily replicated through machine action, the creation of assemblages that resemble archaeological debitage poses a much greater challenge for archaeologists.

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.

The authors deliver a decisive blow to the idea of unidirectional behavioural and cognitive evolution in this tightly argued account of why the bow and arrow was invented and then possibly laid aside by Middle Stone Age communities in southern Africa. Finding that all are modern humans (Homo sapiens), they paint a picture of diverse strategies for survival and development from 75 000 years ago onwards. It is one in which material inventions can come and go, human societies negotiating their own paths through a rugged mental landscape of opportunity.

Here is a paper of pivotal importance to all prehistorians attempting to reconstruct societies from assemblages of shells or stone artefacts in dispersed sites deposited over tens of thousands of years. The authors demonstrate the perilous connections between the distribution and content of sites, their geomorphic formation process and the models used to analyse them. In particular they warn against extrapolating the enticing evidence from Pleistocene Willandra into behavioural patterns by drawing on the models presented by nineteenth-century anthropologists. They propose new strategies at once more revealing and more ethical.