This paper examines the relationship between the presence of symmetry and the Acheulean biface within a predominantly British Lower Palaeolithic context. There has been a long-standing notion within Palaeolithic studies that Acheulean handaxes are symmetrical and become increasingly so as time progress as a reflection of increasing hominin cognitive and behavioural complexity. Specifically, the presence of symmetry within Acheulean handaxes is often seen as one of the first examples of material culture being used to mediate social relationships. However, this notion has never been satisfactorily tested against a large data set. This paper seeks to address the issue by conducting an analysis of some 2680 bifaces across a chronological and geographical span. The results from the sample presented here are that symmetrical bifaces do not appear to have a particularly strong presence in any assemblage and do not appear to increase as time progress. These results have significant implications for modern researchers assessing the cognitive and behavioural complexities of Acheulean hominins.

Control over the exchange of prestige goods is an important component of emerging socio-political complexity in many ancient societies. During the Iron Age period (500 bce–ce 500), communities in mainland Southeast Asia were undergoing rapid socio-political changes, due in part to new interactions with societies from South Asia. As objects made from exotic raw materials and using complex technologies, stone and glass beads are one type of prestige object from South Asia that were exchanged widely across Southeast Asia. This study examines beads from 12 sites in Cambodia and Thailand. Morphological and compositional analyses using LA-ICP-MS resulted in the identification of different bead types that were circulated in distinct exchange networks. Initially, beads were exchanged within a pre-existing South China Sea network. However, as trade with South Asia intensified in the late Iron Age, exchange networks in Southeast Asia expanded, with an increase in the quantities of beads circulated. These results show the utility of studying beads as a means of examining trade and emerging socio-political complexity. Lastly, in considering evidence for control over the exchange of beads, I propose looking to an emerging state in the Mekong Delta.

In southwest Asia, the emphasis on architecture and burial ritual, which was instrumental in the construction of place-bound identities during the Early Neolithic (c. 10,000–7000 cal. bc), shifted toward an emphasis on miniature portable objects, such as figurines, stamps and ceramics, during the Later Neolithic (c. 7000–5000 cal. bc). Through a focus on stamps, this article argues that the appearance and proliferation of image-bearing portable objects is related to a new understanding of identities around emergent concepts of ‘house’ and ‘community’, which reordered the terms of social affiliation as well as difference and hierarchy at various scales. In terms of an iconographical approach, stamp imagery shows some affinities with the anthropomorphic and zoomorphic themes of the Early Neolithic; however, the majority of the Later Neolithic stamp imagery is composed of highly abstract types that cannot immediately be associated with the themes of the Early Neolithic. A close examination would indicate that these abstract types were also reproduced by manipulating ancestral imagery. It would also appear that certain types of images were employed on certain types of objects, such as ceramics and figurines, in increasingly structured ways. Arguably, these seemingly different object classes are an outcome of a seamless historical discourse of raw materials, images and forms, continuously shifting the conceptualization of self and society. It is in this context that stamps may be treated as figurines of a highly abstract, highly crafted and highly standardized nature. While the clay figurines appropriated social identities in the domestic sphere, stamps and ceramics were instrumental in linking multiple scales of identity formation, from personal to communal. Reconsidering the material shift from the Early to Late Neolithic, I suggest that the spreading regulation of appropriating body and food was central in the construction of a convergent politics of reproduction around the concepts of ‘house’.

The wealth of inscriptions at the Wadi Hammamat greywacke quarries (Egyptian Eastern Desert) have made it a key place to pursue enquiries about the social organization of expeditions to procure resources. Analysis of this textual material alone has, however, given us only a partial view of the social milieu that maintained quarrying from the fourth millennium bc to the fifth century ad. This article presents a fresh perspective on Egyptian quarrying that aims to balance the more accepted (and persistent) perceptions of overriding state control of these activities with viewpoints gained from recent archaeological survey of the Wadi Hammamat quarries. Practically and theoretically, a holistic approach is taken that contextualizes the textual sources and other elements of the archaeological record within the quarry landscape as a series of material complexes. Cross-cultural and comparative approaches to interpreting the data have enabled both reappraisal and augmentation of the ways in which we understand the social interplay between local and regional kin-groups within notions of state control of these activities. The article argues for the essential roles played by kinship ties and linkages to place, through the continual inscribing of names, as parts of the underlying human narrative that maintained quarrying here for generations.

In the last few decades, archaeologists have increasingly studied the material expression of religion. At the same time, they have recognized that some objects are animate in ways similar to people. Building on previous research that combines studies of religion, object agency and behavioural perspectives, we present an approach that focuses on the variety of rituals, especially rites of passage, in which objects participate over the course of their life histories. Occurring in societies at all levels of organizational complexity, rites of passage offer archaeologists an opportunity to contribute to the anthropology of ritual and an understanding of the ways that some objects take on, or are given, attributes of life. More subtly, by comparing the rites of passage of objects and the people who interact with them, we can assess differences in the specific qualities of object and human agency. These approaches may help us to orient the search for archaeological evidence of rites of passage as well as to interpret enigmatic deposits such as caches, hoards and offerings.

Oceans and seas are more frequently thought to have been barriers to than enablers of movement for archaic hominins. This interpretation has been challenged by a revisionist model which suggests that bodies of water facilitated the dispersal of pre-moderns. This paper addresses the revisionist model by defining maritime dispersal as a series of cognitive and organizational problems, the capacity to solve which must have arisen during the evolution of Homo. The central question posed is: knowing the type of social and cognitive configuration necessary for strategic maritime dispersal, and knowing the social and cognitive capacities of hominin species implied in the revisionist dispersal model, how likely is it that such species possessed the capacity to undertake purposive maritime colonization? Available data suggest that the evolution of modern cognitive architecture during the Late Pleistocene correlates positively with increasing evidence for maritime dispersal in the Upper Palaeolithic, and that behavioural modernity is implicated in the appearance of strategic maritime dispersal in Homo. Consequently, it is likely that deliberate trans-oceanic seagoing is restricted to Anatomically Modern Humans, and possibly Neanderthals.

This article discusses the relation between knowing, learning and teaching in relation to early Palaeolithic technologies. We begin by distinguishing between three kinds of knowledge: knowing how, knowing what and knowing that. We discuss the relation between these types of knowledge and different forms of learning and long-term memory systems. On the basis of this analysis, we present three types of teaching: (1) helping and correcting; (2) showing; and (3) explaining. We then use this theoretical framework to suggest what kinds of teaching are required for the pre-Oldowan, the Oldowan, the early Acheulean and the late Acheulean stone-knapping technologies. As a general introductory overview to this special section, the text concludes with a brief presentation of the papers included.

Studying the emergence of teaching in our lineage entails identifying learning strategies among human and non-human groups, understanding the situations in which they occur, evaluating their performance, recognizing their expression in the archaeological record, identifying trends in the way knowledge transmission changed through time, and detecting the key moments in which members of our lineage complemented pre-existing transmission strategies with those that led our species to develop cumulative culture and eventually ‘teaching’ as we know it. Here we explore how learning processes function in spatial, temporal, and social dimensions and use the resulting situations to build a tentative framework, which may guide our interpretation of the archaeological record and ultimately aid our identification of the learning processes at work in animal and past hominin societies. We test the pertinence of this heuristic approach by applying it to a handful of archaeological case studies.

Increasing reliance on skill-intensive subsistence strategies appears to be a hallmark of human evolution, with wide-ranging implications for sociality, brain size, life-history and cognitive adaptations. These parameters describe a human technological niche reliant on efficient intergenerational reproduction of increasingly complex foraging techniques, including especially the production and effective use of tools. The archaeological record provides a valuable source of evidence for tracing the emergence of this modern human condition, but interpretation of this evidence remains challenging and controversial. Application of methods from psychology and neuroscience to Palaeolithic tool-making experiments offers new avenues for establishing empirical links between technological behaviours, neurocognitive substrates and archaeologically observable material residues. Here we review recent progress and highlight key challenges for the future.

Human hunting represents one of the most difficult foraging activities. It is a skill-intensive pursuit with an extended learning process. Different from other animals, Stone Age hunter-gatherers used complex strategies and technologies to outsmart and pursue their prey. Such strategies and technologies were grounded in extensive knowledge that facilitated context-specific solutions during different phases of weapon production and hunting. Apart from subsistence behaviour, Stone Age hunting technologies also inform on a suite of associated skills, behaviours and levels of cognition. At least since the start of the Holocene in southern Africa, and probably much earlier, behaviours associated with hunting permeated almost every sphere of hunter-gatherer life, and I argue that the theme is a suitable angle from which to explore broader aspects of the evolution of teaching and learning. I provide a brief overview and broad timeline of the ‘evolution’ of hunting technologies associated with the southern African Stone Age record and present some ethnographic hunter-gatherer examples of teaching and learning associated with hunting. The aim is to start situating the archaeological and ethnographic data within a theoretical framework of teaching and learning evolution.

During the Late Pleistocene, children in southwest France and northern Spain grew up engaging with the world around them through the lenses of locally and historically situated pictorial cultures. This particular period and region is not the site of the earliest example of symbolic behaviour, nor is it the only example of the production of imagery during the Pleistocene but the rich record of Franco-Cantabrian visual material culture provides a unique opportunity to explore how children learned to decode and transform the world around them through imagery. In this paper, focusing on parietal art, I consider the biological, cognitive and social underpinnings of the uniquely human ability to move between two and three dimensional worlds and to perceive a fourth dimension—time—through the perception of motion from still images. These abilities, which can be traced through the archaeological record, allowed children and the adults they became new ways of imagining and acting in the world.

Two recent studies—the first by MacDonald & Roebroeks (2013), the second by Tallerman (2013)—draw inferences about the social use of language by premodern hominins from data about the linguistic behaviour of modern hunter-gatherers and other modern people with traditional cultures. Such inferences cannot be sound, though, unless they meet a particular requirement: they need appropriate warrants. These have to serve as conceptual bridges that span the ontological gap between the behaviours and capacities of modern humans and those of the premodern hominins concerned. Interestingly, both MacDonald & Roebroeks and Tallerman make a serious attempt to support their respective inferences with the aid of such conceptual bridges. The present article inquires whether these bridges are strong enough to serve this purpose, and argues that both bridges have components that are harmful to their solidity. In the process of arguing this, the article pursues the question of the conditions under which uniformitarian assumptions can be used as components of the substructure of the conceptual bridges needed for underpinning inferences about the use of language in the teaching and learning of subsistence skills by premodern hominins. More generally, the article elucidates an important limitation of the ethnographic record as a putative window on the evolution of language.