This paper offers an updated review of the variety physicochemical analysis applied so far to Levantine rock art (Spain) characterize composition pigments, as well substrate and/or natural coating covering these particular prehistoric paintings. is part a broader special issue evaluating real contribution scientific approaches research, assessing how they have improved our understanding this he...

While the material remains of death and the treatment and commemoration of the dead have been studied by archaeologists since the early nineteenth century, the more intensive and coherent analysis of death in its social context has only been a feature of this discipline during the last three decades. The starting point for this change of emphasis was James Brown’s edited volume Approaches to th...

From prehistoric times, man has felt the urge to depict the surrounding world on various substrates by using coloured materials. Historical paintings, such as prehistoric cave paintings, are often called ‘windows on the past’ and have allowed later generations to imagine how former human societies looked and/or functioned. Historical paintings are, therefore, considered to be a very valuable pa...

It has been argued that the worldwide prevalence of certain types of geometric visual patterns found in prehistoric art can be best explained by the common experience of these patterns as geometric hallucinations during altered states of consciousness induced by shamanic ritual practices. And in turn the worldwide prevalence of these types of hallucinations has been explained by appealing to hu...

Whether man is predisposed to lethal violence, ranging from homicide to warfare, and how that may have impacted human evolution, are among the most controversial topics of debate on human evolution. Although recent studies on the evolution of warfare have been based on various archaeological and ethnographic data, they have reported mixed results: it is unclear whether or not warfare among preh...

Prehistoric environmental change in Hawai'i is evaluated through the analysis of sedi-ment and pollen samples from dated cores and excavation profiles in the coastal low-lands of O'ahu. It is suggested that a lowland Pritchardia palm forest and associatedspecies underwent rapid decline starting between about A.D. 1000 to 1200. This de-cline seems to have occurred earlier in coas...

Understanding extinction drivers in a human-dominated world is necessary to preserve biodiversity. We provide an overview of Quaternary extinctions and compare mammalian extinction events on continents and islands after human arrival in system-specific prehistoric and historic contexts. We highlight the role of body size and life-history traits in these extinctions. We find a significant size-b...

Although previous paleopathological studies have used disturbances in enamel formation as indicators of childhood stress, the full potential of this technique has not been realized. This paper presents a test case which demonstrates that the frequency of disturbed enamel formation (i.e., Wilson bands) is associated with other stress indicators (i.e., probability of dying and infectious lesions)...

Holocene fossils document the extinction of hundreds of bird species on Pacific islands during prehistoric human occupation. Human hunting is implicated in these extinctions, but the impact of hunting is difficult to disentangle from the effects of other changes induced by humans, including habitat destruction and the introduction of other mammalian predators. Here, we use data from bones colle...

The devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami caught millions of coastal residents and the scientific community off-guard. Subsequent research in the Indian Ocean basin has identified prehistoric tsunamis, but the timing and recurrence intervals of such events are uncertain. Here we present an extraordinary 7,400 year stratigraphic sequence of prehistoric tsunami deposits from a coastal cave in Ace...