Shortly after his retirement from a distinguished career in the Department of Archaeology at Edinburgh, the author gave the Rhind Lectures for 2009, bringing together his thoughts about the Neolithic revolution, and comparing Childe's ideas with today's. These lectures, summarised here, announced the modern vision to a wide audience. It is a reversal of the old: Epipalaeolithic people came together in the first large, permanent communities, to form extensive settlements which only later needed to be fed by farming.

New work from the Caucasus is revolutionising the timing and character of the shift from Neanderthals to early Modern humans in Eurasia. Here the authors reveal a powerful signal of that change from excavations at Mezmaiskaya: the abrupt appearance of a well-formed bone industry and ornaments.

Chewing coca in South America began by at least 8000 cal BP: our authors found and identified coca leaves of that date in house floors in the Nanchoc Valley, Peru. There were also pieces of calcite — which is used by chewers to bring out the alkaloids from the leaves. Excavation and chemical analysis at a group of neighbouring sites suggests that specialists were beginning to extract and supply lime or calcite, and by association coca, as a community activity at about the same time as systematic farming was taking off in the region.

The authors give us a newly documented account of the dissemination of agriculture, and rice cultivation in particular, into southern China and beyond. From the central and eastern Yangtze it spread in two prongs – east to Guangdong, Taiwan and island Southeast Asia and south to Guangxi and Vietnam.

Detailed analysis of the anatomy and taphonomic process of a burial in Jordan shows that the body was originally bound in a sitting position and placed in marshland, where it collapsed into the splayed tableau eventually recovered by excavation. The authors succeed in reconstructing a burial rite from one of the most elusive of mortuary phases: the Early Epipalaeolithic in south-west Asia.

The invention of the bow and arrow was a pivotal moment in the human story and its earliest use is a primary quarry of the modern researcher. Since the organic parts of the weapon – wood, bone, cord and feathers – very rarely survive, the deduction that a bow and arrow was in use depends heavily on the examination of certain classes of stone artefacts and their context. Here the authors apply rigorous analytical reasoning to the task, and demonstrate that, conforming to their exacting checklist, is an early assemblage from Sibudu Cave, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, which therefore suggests bow and arrow technology in use there 64 millennia ago.

The authors explore the arrival of the earliest Gravettian in north-west Europe, using new high precision radiocarbon dates for bone excavated at Maisières-Canal in Belgium to define a short-lived occupation around 33 000 years ago. The tanged points in that assemblage have parallels in British sites, including Goat's Hole (Paviland). This is the site of the famous ochred burial of a young adult male, confusingly known as the ‘Red Lady’, now dated to around 34 000 BP. The new results demonstrate that this British ‘rich burial’ and the Gravettian with tanged points may belong to two different occupation horizons separated by a cold spell.

The authors find a context for the rock art of the central Sahara by excavating and recording examples of engraved stones from circular platforms used to sacrifice animals. The type of rock art known as the Pastoral style, featuring evocative outline drawings of cattle, appears on upright stones incorporated into the platforms in the period 5430–5150 BP, and probably earlier. Furthermore, they show that these places were part of a dense and extensive monumental landscape, occupying a harsh environment, supplying quartzite, but with little settlement, appearing to serve the spiritual needs of hundreds of Neolithic people.

The authors have surveyed the little known paintings of the Kurnool area in central south India, bringing to light the varied work of artists active from the Palaeolithic to the present day. By classifying the images and observing their local superposition and global parallels, they present us with an evolving trend – from the realistic drawings of large deer by hunter-gatherers, through the symbolic humans of the Iron Age to the hand-prints of more recent pilgrims and garish life-size modern ‘scarecrows’. Here are the foundations for one of the world's longest sequences of rock art.

A petroglyph showing a human face found in East Timor is dated to the late Pleistocene. It recalls ancient Australian forms and raises the possibility of connecting early cave art with the better known painted figures of Lapita/Austronesian art ten millennia later. This new discovery at a known cave shows what precious evidence still lies in store even in well-trodden places.

Archaeological investigations of ‘desert kites’ in south Israel show them to have been animal traps of considerable sophistication and capacity, constructed in the Early Bronze Age or earlier. Extensive stone-wall arms gather in gazelles from their habitual trails and canalise them into a sunken enclosure, cunningly hidden from view of the galloping herd until it was too late…

Explorations of Stone Age diversity take another step forward with this study of a group of neighbouring sites in Arctic Norway. While all are situated around a fjord, and only a few kilometres apart, the faunal assemblage shows that some are seal specialists, while others hunt reindeer and others again ambush dolphins. Each was creating its own local environment, hunting territory and landscape, not defended but respected, with intimate connections between people and places.

Presented here is the so far unique discovery and interpretation of an occupation area directly associated with Upper Palaeolithic cave paintings. The paintings, of red spots and hand stencils, overlook two hearths with selected flints. There were also fragments of stalactite, deduced by analysis and experiment to be waste products from the manufacture of beads. The authors deduce that the hearths and their assemblage complement the ritual nature of the paintings.

Before 3000 BC, societies of western Asia were cultivating wheat and societies of China were cultivating broomcorn millet; these are early nodes of the world's agriculture. The authors are searching for early cereals in the vast lands that separate the two, and report a breakthrough at Begash in south-east Kazakhstan. Here, high precision recovery and dating have revealed the presence of both wheat and millet in the later third millennium BC. Moreover the context, a cremation burial, raises the suggestion that these grains might signal a ritual rather than a subsistence commodity.

Well-designed experimental archaeology combined with ingenious social argument show that a type of coarse-ware pottery, the BRB, performed a key role in early Mesopotamian governance. Its thick walls and conical shape produce a fine loaf of risen bread, supplied perhaps as tasty recompense to those undertaking the newly-proliferating public administrative duties.

The beginning of monolithic monumentality in Europe is of outstanding significance and its accurate dating a consummation devoutly to be wished. In this case study from England, the researchers had the good fortune to find monoliths stratified above and below by peat and so were able to give them a bracketed radiocarbon date and an environmental context. The results show that the stones, belonging to a linear alignment of eight others, were erected in a clearing of heathland in the fourth millennium BC. The date raises the possibility of a Neolithic appearance for this type of stone row in south-west Britain and Britanny.