Domesticated rice (Oryza sativa) is one of the five major crops in the world and a staple food for more than 30% of the world population. Yet the question of where, when, why and how the domestication of rice originated has been, and still is, a question under debate. However, as more archaeological and archaeobotanic discoveries have recently come to light, the question of the origin of rice cultivation now seems less elusive than it was a few decades ago. To date, both archaeological and archaeobotanic discoveries seem to indicate that rice cultivation first began in the middle Yangzi Valley by 8500–8000 years BP, and subsequently expanded to south China and Southeast Asia.

Have ancestors replaces chiefs as the defining entity of prehistory? This provocative view from the Mediterranean world may provoke a little debate.

What was the effect on Late Minoan civilisation of the catastrophic destruction of Akrotiri on Thera (Santorini) by volcanic eruption? Not much, according to the evidence for continuing prosperity on Crete. But the authors mobilise their ingenious mathematical model (published in Antiquity 82: 1009–1024), this time to show that the effects of removing a major port of call could have impacted after an interval, as increased costs of transport gradually led to ever fewer routes and eventual economic collapse.

Discussion about a possible African origin of modern humans is hampered by the lack of Late Pleistocene skeletal material from the Nile valley, the likely passage-way from East Africa to Asia and Europe. Here we report the discovery of a burial of an anatomically modern child from southern Egypt. Its clear relation with Middle Palaeolithic chert extraction activities and a series of OSL dates, from correlative aeolian sands, suggests an age between 49,800 and 80,400 years ago, with a mean age of 55,000.

The authors present new dating evidence for a refined understanding of human presence in Central Europe between 23,000 and 14,000 BP.

The earliest Upper Palaeolithic industries of the Levant, which figure prominently in discussions of the spread of anatomically modern humans and the origins of the Upper Palaeolithic, are known from a small number of localities. Two sites in the Hatay region of Turkey have yielded initial Upper Palaeolithic assemblages similar to those found in the Levant. One of the sites, Üçaǧizlı’ cave, has also provided radiometric dates and faunal remains, both relatively rare for sites of this period.

This review of the evidence for early agriculture in New Guinea supported by new data from Kuk Swamp demonstrates that cultivation had begun there by at least 6950–6440 cal BP and probably much earlier. Contrary to previous ideas, the first farming in New Guinea was not owed to SouthEast Asia, but emerged independently in the Highlands. Indeed plants such as the banana were probably first domesticated in New Guinea and later diffused into the Asian continent.

During the early post-Pleistocene there flourished right across the middle belt of the African continent a highly distinctive way of life intimately associated with the great rivers, lakes and marshes. This belt–or arc, to be more precise, corresponding roughly with the drought zone of the early 1970s–comprises the southern Sahara and the Sahel from the Atlantic to the Nile and there bends up-river to the East African rift valleys and the equator. Traceable as early as the eighth millennium BC, the zenith of this ‘aquatic civilization’ was achieved in the seventh millennium, being a time when higher rainfall made rivers longer and more permanent and caused lakes to swell and burst their basins (Butzer et al., 1972; Zinderen Bakker, 1972). Around 7000 BC, for instance, fish populations as well as hippos and crocodiles reached the central Saharan highlands, while, to their south, Lake Chad expanded enormously till it overflowed via the Benue and Lower Niger into the Atlantic. In East Africa at the same time the small lakes in the Kenya rift valley rose to combine or to create riverain links over the normal watersheds, while to their north Lake Rudolf reached a height sufficient to help feed the White Nile system.

The Yafteh cave in Iran has an intact Aurignacian sequence over 2m deep. First explored by Frank Hole and Kent Flannery in the 1960s, its strata and assemblage are here re-evaluated at first hand by a new international team. The authors show that the assemblage is genuine Aurignacian and dates back to about 35.5K uncal BP. They propose it as emerging locally and even as providing a culture of origin for modern humans in West Asia and Europe.

Neanderthal diet is explored by examining stone tools found at the site of La Quina for residues and microwear. The Neanderthal people are found to be using their scrapers for working plants and woods as well as meat.

For the last half-century, the story of very early hominids, and their stone industries, has been almost exclusively ‘in Africa’. This first report of a very early industry takes the story ‘out of Africa’ and into the Indian sub-continent – that is, in a geographical direction towards the early industries of eastern Asia.

Archaeology has wandered into exciting but daunting territory. It faces floods of new evidence about the human past that are largely digital, frequently spatial, increasingly open and often remotely sensed. The resulting terrain is littered, both with data that are wholly new and data that were long known about but previously considered junk. This paper offers an overview of this diluvian information landscape and aims to foster debate about its wider disciplinary impact. In particular, I would argue that its consequences: a) go well beyond the raw challenges of digital data archiving or manipulation and should reconfigure our analytical agendas; b) can legitimately be read for both utopian and dystopian disciplinary futures; and c) re-expose some enduring tensions between archaeological empiricism, comparison and theory-building.

Traces of starch found on a large flat stone discovered in the hunter-fisher-gatherer site of Ohalo II famously represent the first identification of Upper Palaeolithic grinding of grasses. Given the importance of this discovery for the use of edible grain, further analyses have now been undertaken. Meticulous sampling combined with good preservation allow the authors to demonstrate that the Ohalo II stone was certainly used for the routine processing of wild cereals, wheat, barley and now oats among them, around 23 000 years ago.

Greenland, far north land of the Atlantic, has often been beyond the limit of European farming settlement. One of its Norse settlements, colonized just before AD 1000, is — astonishingly — not even at the southern tip, but a way up the west coast, the ‘Western Settlement’. Environmental studies show why its occupation came to an end within five centuries, leaving Greenland once more a place of Arctic-adapted hunters.

Recent availability of declassified satellite images of landscapes and ancient cities in Turkey offer new and valuable material for archaeolgical research. Here David Kennedy explains the significance and use of some images in the Euphrates Valley.

Absolute dating of rock paintings has always used an indirect means, generally by dating material in strata sealing or overlying the pictures. AMS dating of very small carbon samples now allows direct determination of the age of an organic portion in the matter of the picture itself.

When did a human presence reach Crete, largest of the Aegean islands, and invitingly joined to the mainland by intervening stepping-stones? Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, or only in the Neolithic, when the deep sequence of occupations under the site of the later palace at Knossos began. How many sailed to Crete? What did they bring with them?