Stratified Middle and Upper Palaeolithic sites in Central Asia are rare. The recently discovered Soii Havzak rockshelter, in the Zeravshan Valley in northern Tajikistan, is a stratified site that contains several phases of Palaeolithic occupation rich in lithic, faunal and charcoal remains that help establish chronology of the region.

The Palaeolithic archaeological record from current dryland contexts informs on activity across only a fraction of occupied Pleistocene landscapes. Now-submerged contexts, such as those preserved beneath the southern North Sea, allow past human activity to be considered at a more representative scale. Previous investigations have recovered internationally significant Middle Palaeolithic archaeology associated with submerged Pleistocene landscapes in the southern North Sea. Discovered through aggregate dredging in marine aggregate licence Area 240, the archaeology is associated with Pleistocene deposits of the Paleo-Yare river system. Subsequent studies have demonstrated that the Palaeo-Yare catchment extended across adjacent aggregate areas, leading to the implementation of a regional monitoring programme at aggregate wharfs to monitor, manage, and assimilate new archaeological data.

This paper reviews all new Palaeolithic lithic finds recovered between 2011 and 2022 from Area 240 and adjacent licence areas. Most are Middle Palaeolithic artefacts from Area 240. These new Middle Palaeolithic discoveries are related to previous finds and the combined collections placed within their wider Middle Palaeolithic British context. Middle Palaeolithic activity within the Palaeo-Yare catchment included multiple phases of occupation associated with different favoured technological repertoires, indicating that two groups of artefacts are present: Levallois artefacts likely to date to the early Middle Palaeolithic (MIS 8–7–6) and handaxes dating to the Late Middle Palaeolithic (MIS 5d–3).

During the last glacial period, rapidly changing environments posed substantial challenges to Neanderthal populations in Europe. Southern continental regions, such as Iberia, have been proposed as important climatic “buffer” zones during glacial phases. Contextualising the climatic and ecological conditions Neanderthals faced is relevant to interpreting their resilience. However, records of the environments and ecosystems they exploited across Iberia exhibit temporal and spatial gaps in coverage. Here we provide new evidence for palaeotemperatures, vegetation structure, and prey herbivore ecology during the late Pleistocene (MIS 5–3) in northern Spain, by applying multiple stable isotope tracers (δ18O, δ13C, δ15N, δ34S) to herbivore skeletal remains associated with Neanderthal occupations at Axlor Cave, Bizkaia. The results show little change over time and indicate stable climatic conditions and ecosystems across different occupations. Large within-layer isotopic variability in nitrogen and sulphur suggests the presence of a mosaic environment and a variety of isotopic ecotones that were exploited by Neanderthals and their prey. We implement a combination of carbonate and phosphate δ18O measurements to estimate palaeotemperatures using a cost-effective workflow. We show that the targeted use of phosphate δ18O measurements to anchor summer peak and winter trough areas enables high-precision seasonal palaeoclimatic reconstructions.

La Mina is one of three sites, along with Cueva Millán and La Ermita, located in the middle course of the Arlanza river. La Mina was excavated for the first time in 2006 and three test pits were carried out. In one of them, evidence of two Palaeolithic occupations was identified and several remains of woolly rhinoceros were recovered. Amino acid racemisation dating yielded an age of 52.5 ka BP, the earliest Upper Pleistocene date for Coelodonta antiquitatis on the Iberian Peninsula. This new record may have several implications for understanding the access routes to the Castilian Plateau, together with the definition of a new migratory wave of this species at the end of the Pleistocene. The location of La Mina on the Castilian Plateau may help researchers to complete the movements of this species through the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic on the Iberian Peninsula.

The Tracking Pleistocene Human Occupations in the East of Iran project was initiated with two field seasons in 2020 and 2022. The authors present the results of this fieldwork, which identified 176 Palaeolithic localities, demonstrating the presence of Lower Palaeolithic and Middle Palaeolithic occupations in the Ferdows-Sarayan-Qaen plains.

This article presents preliminary results from mountain survey in the Chatkal Range in the western Tian Shan piedmonts, eastern Uzbekistan. In 2021, several new Palaeolithic sites were discovered, including a single, multi-layered, open-air site—Kuksaray 2—located near a flint outcrop. The authors’ initial investigations have recovered a stone tool assemblage containing tools displaying both Middle Palaeolithic and Initial Upper Palaeolithic characteristics.

Large, conglomerate caves in north-eastern Iberia have been significant places since the Neolithic through to historical times; however, their significance during the Palaeolithic has barely been explored. This project is the first systematic study of the use of these iconic geological landmarks among Pleistocene hunter-gatherers.

El Niño cave, located on the south-eastern border of the Spanish Meseta, hosts a discontinuous sequence including Middle Palaeolithic and Neolithic levels, along with Upper Palaeolithic and Levantine style paintings. It is a key site for understanding human occupations of inland Iberia during the Palaeolithic and early prehistory. This paper summarises the main results of a multidisciplinary project aimed at defining the prehistoric human occupations at the site.

Fuente Mudarra is on a gentle slope on the left bank of the Pico River, near Sierra de Atapuerca, Burgos, Spain. A 12−m2 test pit was dug at this large open-air site between 2012 and 2017. Several upper Pleistocene archaeological levels were documented. Results from Fuente Mudarra confirm that Neanderthal groups, little represented at cave sites, occupied Sierra de Atapuerca from the end of the middle Pleistocene and during the upper Pleistocene. The site also provides insight into Neanderthal spatial organization in the Atapuerca area and whether they used the caves in an occasional, non-habitual way like the open-air sites.

Here we report the findings from excavations at the open-air Middle Palaeolithic site of Alapars-1 in central Armenia. Three stratified Palaeolithic artefact assemblages were found within a 6-m-thick alluvial-aeolian sequence, located on the flanks of an obsidian-bearing lava dome. Combined sedimentological and chronological analyses reveal three phases of sedimentation and soil development. During Marine Oxygen Isotope Stages 5–3, the manner of deposition changes from alluvial to aeolian, with a development of soil horizons. Techno-typological analysis and geochemical sourcing of the obsidian artefacts reveal differential discard patterns, source exploitation, and artefact densities within strata, suggesting variability in technological organization during the Middle Palaeolithic. Taken together, these results indicate changes in hominin occupation patterns from ephemeral to more persistent in relation to landscape dynamics during the last interglacial and glacial periods in central Armenia.

Well-stratified Middle Palaeolithic assemblages are extremely rare in Mongolia. Initially investigated between the 1960s and 1990s, three major Middle Palaeolithic sites in the Orkhon Valley of central Mongolia yielded a large quantity of data and generated many research questions that still await answers. Re-investigation of these sites has uncovered chronostratigraphic and cultural sequences that may shed new light on human dispersal routes.

This article focuses on the Middle Palaeolithic of a region of south India, highlighting diverse stratigraphic contexts and lithic reduction sequences suggestive of high mobility and planning in raw material usage.

New data from Strashnaya Cave have revealed previously unknown complexity in hominin occupation of the Altai Mountains, including the first regional evidence for the presence of anatomically modern humans.

Late Pleistocene palaeoenvironments in the Thar Desert (India), located at the eastern extent of the Saharo-Arabian desert belt, have fluctuated considerably as a result of the varying range and intensity of the Indian summer monsoon. Phases of widespread Pleistocene aridity are well documented in the Thar Desert, but research focusing on humid proxies is critical to examine how the region may have facilitated population expansions across southern Asia. At Katoati, located on the northeast margin of the Thar Desert, the combination of field recording of sediment sections with detailed analyses (micromorphology, stable isotope, loss on ignition, magnetic susceptibility, and X-ray fluorescence) from an archaeological site identify a series of hominin occupations during phases of enhanced humidity between ~96 and 60 ka. A gradient of humidity on the eastern margin of the Thar Desert during the late Pleistocene is identified, with the periodic humidity evident at Katoati occurring more frequently and with longer duration towards the southern margin. This uneven distribution of humidity in the Thar Desert is likely to have strongly influenced when and where hominin populations could expand into and across the region.

Single-grain optically stimulated luminescence dating was applied to Late Quaternary sediments at two sites in the Middle Son Valley, Madhya Pradesh, India. Designated Bamburi 1 and Patpara, these sites contain Late Acheulean stone tool assemblages, which we associate with non-modern hominins. Age determinations of 140–120 ka place the formation of these sites at around the Marine Oxygen Isotope Stage 6–5 transition, placing them among the youngest Acheulean sites in the world. We present here the geochronology and sedimentological setting of these sites, and consider potential implications of Late Pleistocene archaic habitation in north-central India for the initial dispersal of modern humans across South Asia.

The Nihewan Basin is a key region for studying the Palaeolithic archaeology of East Asia. However, because of the lack of suitable dating methods and representative lithic technologies in this region, the ‘Middle Palaeolithic’ sites in this basin have been designated based mainly on stratigraphic correlation, which may be unreliable. In this study, three Palaeolithic sites, Motianling, Queergou and Banjingzi, which have been assigned previously to the ‘Middle Palaeolithic’, are dated based on luminescence dating of K-feldspar grains. Our results show that the cultural layers at Motianling, Queergou and Banjingzi have ages of 315 ± 13, 268 ± 13 and 86 ± 4 ka (corresponding to Marine Isotope Stages 9, 8 and 5), respectively, suggesting that Motianling and Queergou should be assigned to the Lower Palaeolithic, while the age of Banjingzi is consistent with a Middle Palaeolithic attribution. Our results suggest that reassessing the age of ‘Middle Palaeolithic’ sites in the Nihewan Basin, and elsewhere in North China, is crucial for understanding the presence or absence of the Middle Palaeolithic phase in China. Our dating results also indicate that the Sanggan River developed sometime between about 270 and 86 ka ago.

Is the Middle Palaeolithic an appropriate concept in eastern Asia? The issue has been debated for China in two recent papers in Antiquity (Yee 2012; Li 2014), which in turn responded to an earlier argument set out by Gao and Norton (2002). But does the Korean record offer a different perspective? Here, the authors argue that Korean archaeology, as with the Chinese record, provides no support for a distinct Middle Palaeolithic. Rather than seeking to validate an inappropriate chronological framework derived from European Palaeolithic research, emphasis should instead be placed on developing a regionally specific model of prehistory for eastern Asia. They conclude, akin to Gao and Norton (2002), that the East Asian Palaeolithic should be divided into two major cultural periods: Early and Late.

The relevance of a study of the Eemian occupation of Europe lies largely in the discussion on the environmental tolerances of early humans and in the limits encountered during the reconstruction of Palaeolithic habitats. The traditional vision is reviewed; then follows a discussion of Gamble’s studies (1986, 1987) in which he postulated an absence of human occupation in North-Western Europe during the Eemian. Gamble’s explanatory models and the reactions to his work are presented. Finally, the relation is considered between the distribution pattern of sites, the former dispersal of early humans across the European landscape, and the implications of this evidence for hypotheses of environmental tolerances of Palaeolithic humans.