The authors present new research on the Chifeng area of north-eastern China where they have been studying the remains of a society of the second millennium BC. This northern region, which saw the introduction of agriculture at the same time as the Yellow River basin experienced a brief and intensive period of fortification in the Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age: natural ridges above the valleys were ringed with double stone walls and semicircular towers enclosing clusters of round houses with yards. Using large-scale survey and analysis of the structures at the key site of Sanzuodian, they place this phenomenon in its cultural and social context.

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.

The author uses a detailed analysis of lithic assemblages to propose a major social and economic change in the Pyrenees around 18 ky cal BC, roughly the watershed between the Lower and Middle Magdalenian periods. Nomadic groups begin to settle down, occupy loose territories, move raw materials over vast distances and specialise in manufacture for hunting and domestic use. These trends coincide with a cold period and an increase in grassland, the Heinrich Stadial.

The Aurignacian, traditionally regarded as marking the beginnings of Sapiens in Europe, is notoriously hard to date, being almost out of reach of radiocarbon. Here the authors return to the stratified sequence in the Franchthi Cave, chronicle its lithic and shell ornament industries and, by dating humanly-modified material, show that Franchthi was occupied either side of the Campagnian Ignimbrite super-eruption around 40000 years ago. Along with other results, this means that groups of Early Upper Palaeolithic people were active outside the Danube corridor and Western Europe, and probably in contact with each other over long distances.

The authors present a new type of communal and monumental structure from the earliest Neolithic in western Asia. A complement to the decorated stone pillars erected at Göbekli Tepe in the north, ‘Wadi Faynan 16 Structure O75’ in the southern Levant is a ritualised gathering place of a different kind. It serves to define wider western Asia as an arena of social experiment in the tenth millennium BC, one in which community seems to take precedence over economy.

The authors describe the discovery of the first human burial of Magdalenian age to be found in the Iberian Peninsula—the partial skeleton of a young adult whose bones were stained with red ochre. The burial was well stratified in a sequence at the vestibule rear running from the Mousterian to the Mesolithic, and was adjacent to a large block that had fallen from the cave roof and been subsequently engraved. A preliminary AMS radiocarbon date on associated faunal remains from the ochre-stained, galena speckled burial layer yielded a date of 15700 BP, while a hearth directly above the burial is dated to 15 100 BP, placing the interment of this individual in the Lower Cantabrian Magdalenian, the period of most intensive human occupation of El Mirón Cave during the Upper Palaeolithic.

The Royal Tombs at Ur have been long famous for their chilling scenario of young soldiers and courtesans who loyally took poison to die with their mistress. The authors investigate two of the original skulls with CT scans and propose a procedure no less chilling, but more enforceable. The victims were participants in an elaborate funerary ritual during which they were felled with a sharp instrument, heated, embalmed with mercury, dressed and laid ceremonially in rows.

The authors used knapping experiments to study the way that microburins are produced. Once thought of as signature pieces of the Mesolithic, these experiments suggest that they were by-products of a gradual technological development by knappers trying to make arrowheads that had no bulb of percussion — and were thus easier to haft. They make a case for an evolution already present in the late Palaeolithic and determined by practical, rather than cultural, social or environmental imperatives.

Intensive research on China's Western Loess Plateau has located 63 Palaeolithic deposits, which together allow the authors to present a general model of hominin occupation from 80 000 to 18 000 years ago. Tools, subsistence and settlement correlate nicely with the climate: the warm wet MIS3 seeing expansion and more organised acquisition of quartz, and the Late Glacial Maximum that followed, a reduction in human presence but possibly an increase in ingenuity.

As Mesolithic people living on the Baltic coast began to adopt farming in the later fifth millennium BC, imports of a new type and quality started to reach them from the south — highly decorated pots and then copper axes from the Hungary-Serbia area. With new excavations at the site of Dąbki 9 in northern Poland, the authors are able to show how high quality thin-walled shiny black vessels are travelling over 1000km in the early fourth millennium BC, bringing prestige cups and jugs to the Baltic shore.

Radiocarbon dating of 32 stratigraphic samples aided by Bayesian analysis has allowed the author to produce a high precision chronology for the construction and development of a continental Neolithic long barrow for the first time. She shows when and how quickly people living on the shore of the Baltic adopted pit graves, megalithic chambers and long barrows. Better than that, she provides a date for the famous cart tracks beneath the final barrow to 3420–3385 cal BC. Although other parts of the package — ploughing and pottery — are late arrivals, her analysis of the global evidence shows that Flintbek remains among the earliest sightings of the wheel in northern Europe.

The authors deconstruct the basis for dating the Palaeolithic cave paintings of France and find it wanting. Only five per cent are directly dated and the remainder belong to a stylistic framework that has grown organically, and with much circularity, as new paintings were brought to light. Following a constructive bouleversement, the authors recommend a new chronometric foundation based on chains of evidence anchored by radiocarbon dates. The story so far is striking: it brings many of the themes and techniques thought typical of the later painters into the repertoire of their much earlier predecessors.

Marvellous preservation of organic materials at the Neolithic site of La Draga in north-east Iberia include a range of wooden harvesting tools. The authors examine the wood and flint to describe a range of the earliest harvesting techniques and their diverse applications.

Careful examination of the probable natural conditions for travel in the North Sea and Irish Sea during the late Mesolithic are here combined with the latest radiocarbon dates to present a new picture of the transition to the Neolithic in the British Isles. The islands of the west were already connected by Mesolithic traffic and did not all go Neolithic at the same time. The introduction of the Neolithic package neither depended on seaborne incomers nor on proximity to the continent. More interesting forces were probably operating on an already busy seaway.

Long doubted, the existence of Pleistocene rock art in North Africa is here proven through the dating of petroglyph panels displaying aurochs and other animals at Qurta in the Upper Egyptian Nile Valley. The method used was optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) applied to deposits of wind-blown sediment covering the images. This gave a minimum age of ~15 000 calendar years making the rock engravings at Qurta the oldest so far found in North Africa.

Excavations in the rockshelter at Pınarbaşı, 24.5km south-east of Çatalhöyük, have brought to light a sequence of structures and a rich assemblage of animal bones, with some of the bones embedded in plaster objects. The authors argue for a strong link with Çatalhöyük, and propose a hunter-herder site operated by a close-knit group from that settlement, supplying meat to it, but practising their own up-country rituals — so providing a glimpse of the ‘lived landscape’.