Although the Scandinavian Late Neolithic today is mainly defined by introduction of bifacial flint work, particularly daggers, agricultural intensification must also be seen as a part package, which developed under Bell Beaker-influence in Jutland around 2350 BCE. It argued that changes subsistence led to population increase, was background for spread new culture Scandinavia. A delay East Denma...

Dramatic events in human prehistory, such as the spread of agriculture to Europe from Anatolia and the Late Neolithic/Bronze Age (LNBA) migration from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, can be investigated using patterns of genetic variation among the people that lived in those times. In particular, studies of differing female and male demographic histories on the basis of ancient genomes can provide i...

Humans have been exploiting the Earth’s resources for ages. Owing to tool limitations and risk of injury (including death), early human hunters targeted those individuals that were relatively easy to kill. On land, for instance, human hunters selectively targeted prey in poor condition, that is, the weak, sick, young and old. In the ocean, early humans selectively targeted accessible prey, that...

The loci of the load axis at the femoral distal end were compared for specimens of Neolithic Jomon and modern periods, in which mean oblique length of the femur has been shown to differ significantly. In the present study, mean oblique length of the Neolithic Jomon exceeded that for the modern Japanese. However, mean distal end locus in either period was near the median of the lateral condyle w...

The genetic background of the European Mesolithic and the extent of population replacement during the Neolithic is poorly understood, both due to the scarcity of human remains from that period and the inherent methodological difficulties of ancient DNA research. However, advances in sequencing technologies are both increasing data yields and providing supporting evidence for data authenticity, ...

Feasting is one of humanity's most universal and unique social behaviors. Although evidence for feasting is common in the early agricultural societies of the Neolithic, evidence in pre-Neolithic contexts is more elusive. We found clear evidence for feasting on wild cattle and tortoises at Hilazon Tachtit cave, a Late Epipaleolithic (12,000 calibrated years B.P.) burial site in Israel. This incl...

The IGEAN (Innovative Geophysical Approaches for the study of Early Agricultural villages of Neolithic) Thessaly project focused on Early and Neolithic settlements in Thessaly, Central Greece. The aim of the project was to highlight in an extensive way differences in settlement layouts while investigating commonalities as a way to understand Neolithic use of space. To accomplish this, a suite o...

Multiple geographical regions have been proposed for the domestication of Equus caballus. It has been suggested, based on zooarchaeological and genetic analyses that wild horses from the Iberian Peninsula were involved in the process, and the overrepresentation of mitochondrial D1 cluster in modern Iberian horses supports this suggestion. To test this hypothesis, we analysed mitochondrial DNA f...

Newly available information on the excavation of the Portuguese Mesolithic shell middens, Cabeço da Arruda and Moita do Sebastião, has allowed reassessment of the paleodemography of the sites. Following the restudy of Arruda and an examination of Moita site structure, we now discuss the problem of arriving at a minimum number of individuals (MNI) for Moita and use the age distribution of the de...