The complexity of the human brain creates a spectrum of sophisticated behavioral repertoires, such as language, tool use, self-awareness, symbolic thought, cultural learning, and consciousness. Understanding how the human brain achieves that has been a longstanding challenge for neuroscientists and may bring insights into the evolution of human cognition and disease states. Human pluripotent stem cells could differentiate into specialized cell types and tissues in vitro. From this pluripotent state, it is possible to generate models of the human brain, such as brain organoids. The recent observation that brain organoids can spontaneously develop complex neural network activity in a dish can help one understand how neural network oscillations evolve and vary between normal and disease states. Moreover, this finding can be leveraged to other applications outside medicine, including engineering and artificial intelligence. However, as the brain model technology becomes more complex, it raises a series of ethical and moral dilemmas. This article discusses the status of this technology, some of its current limitations, and a vision of the future.

Evaluating synchronies between climate and cultural changes is a prerequisite for addressing the possible effect of environmental changes on human populations. Searching for synchronies during the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition (ca. 48–36 ka) is hampered by the limits of radiocarbon dating techniques and the large chronological uncertainties affecting the archaeological and paleoclimatic records, as well by their low temporal resolution. Here, we present a high-resolution, pollen-based vegetation record from the Bay of Biscay, sea surface temperature changes, additional 14C ages, and a new IRSL date on the fine-sediment fraction of Heinrich Stadial (HS) 6. The IRSL measurements give an age of ca. 54.0 ± 3.4 ka. The paleoclimatic results reveal a succession of rapid climatic changes during the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition in SW France (i.e. D-O 12–8 and two distinct climatic phases during HS 4). Comparison of the new paleoclimatic record with chronologically well-constrained regional archaeological changes shows that no synchronies exist between cultural transitions and environmental changes. The disappearance of Neanderthals and the arrival of Homo sapiens in SW France encompassed a long-term forest opening, suggesting that Homo sapiens may have progressively replaced Neanderthals from D-O 10 to HS 4 through competition for the same ecological niches.

The timing of the Neanderthal-associated Middle Palaeolithic demise and a possible overlap with anatomically modern humans (AMH) in some regions of Eurasia continues to be debated. The Iberian Peninsula is considered a possible refuge zone for the last Neanderthals, but the chronology of the later Middle Palaeolithic record has undergone revision and has increased the debate on the timing of Neanderthal extinction. Here we report on a study of the 5-m-thick archaeological stratigraphy of the Cardina-Salto do Boi, an open-air site located in inland Iberia, from which optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) ages were obtained for Middle and Upper Palaeolithic occupations preserved in overbank alluvial deposits. Geomorphology, archaeostratigraphy, stone-tool evolution, and OSL dating support the persistence of Neanderthals after 41 ka in central Iberia; the transition between the Middle Palaeolithic material culture and the AMH-associated Aurignacian blade and bladelet production is estimated to lie between 34.0 ± 2.0 ka and 38.4 ± 1.9 ka. Our results demonstrate that investigations focusing on different geomorphological situations are necessary to overcome the current limitations of the evidence and to establish more consistent models for Neanderthal disappearance and AMH expansion in the Iberian Peninsula.

Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan became an iconic Palaeolithic site following Ralph Solecki's mid twentieth-century discovery of Neanderthal remains. Solecki argued that some of these individuals had died in rockfalls and—controversially—that others were interred with formal burial rites, including one with flowers. Recent excavations have revealed the articulated upper body of an adult Neanderthal located close to the ‘flower burial’ location—the first articulated Neanderthal discovered in over 25 years. Stratigraphic evidence suggests that the individual was intentionally buried. This new find offers the rare opportunity to investigate Neanderthal mortuary practices utilising modern archaeological techniques.

Epistemology and research history significantly shape scientific understandings, debates, and publication strategies, albeit often implicitly. In Palaeolithic archaeology in particular, these factors are rarely examined in depth. Here, we present a historiographic analysis of how research history has influenced the debate concerning the possible Neanderthal occupation in Scandinavia. We provide a qualitative discussion of this contentious research field as well as a citation network analysis that visualizes, quantifies, and hence clarifies some of the underlying conceptual, geographic, and temporal patterns in the development of the debate. Our results show significant regionalism as a structuring principle driving this debate as well as a basic rift between professional and avocational archaeologists in how they interpret and publish the available data. We also identify a troubling lack of cross-referencing, even when taking language barriers into account. We argue that the debate about Neanderthal occupation in Scandinavia has been shaped (negatively) by the following phenomena: regionalism, nationalism, lack of research and researchers, non-cumulative work, publication in Nordic languages, science by press release/sensationalism, and a lamentable trend towards arguments ad hominem. In order to take this research field forward, we propose an epistemological turn towards a cumulative, international, and hypothesis-driven agenda based on renewed research efforts and novel citizen science tools.

Here we present a new site in the Sierra de Atapuerca (Burgos, Spain): Galería de las Estatuas (GE), which provides new information about Mousterian occupations in the Iberian Plateau. The GE was an ancient entrance to the cave system, which is currently closed and sealed by a stalagmitic crust, below which a detritic sedimentary sequence of more than 2 m is found. This has been divided into five litostratigraphic units with a rich assemblage of faunal and lithic remains of clear Mousterian affinity. Radiocarbon dates provide minimum ages and suggest occupations older than 45 14C ka BP. The palynological analysis detected a landscape change to increased tree coverage, which suggests that the sequence recorded a warming episode. The macromammal assemblage is composed of both ungulates (mainly red deer and equids) and carnivores. Taphonomic analysis reveals both anthropic, and to a lesser extent, carnivore activities. The GE was occupied by Neanderthals and also sporadically by carnivores. This new site broadens the information available regarding different human occupations at the Sierra de Atapuerca, which emphasizes the importance of this site-complex for understanding human evolution in Western Europe.

During the Middle Paleolithic period, carnivores and hominids periodically occupied the same areas at different times and each predator generated significant palimpsests, rendering difficult their archaeological interpretation. Teixoneres Cave, a carnivore den site, located in the northeastern part of the Iberian Peninsula, demonstrates that it is possible to overcome these problems by using a careful strategy in selecting samples for radiocarbon dating, in order to produce an accurate chronology of the site in question and certainly attest the human occupation.

Traditional views of Neanderthal hunting strategies envisage them preying on herd species such as bison and deer, rather than the sophisticated tracking of solitary animals. Analysis of faunal remains from El Esquilleu Cave in northern Spain, however, demonstrates that during certain periods of the Middle Palaeolithic occupation, Neanderthals focused on the hunting of ibex and chamois, small solitary species that inhabited the mountainous terrain around the site. These results indicate that Neanderthal hunting practices may have had more similarity to those of their Upper Palaeolithic relatives than is usually assumed.

Did Neanderthal hunters drive mammoth herds over cliffs in mass kills? Excavations at La Cotte de St Brelade in the 1960s and 1970s uncovered heaps of mammoth bones, interpreted as evidence of intentional hunting drives. New study of this Middle Palaeolithic coastal site, however, indicates a very different landscape to the featureless coastal plain that was previously envisaged. Reconsideration of the bone heaps themselves further undermines the ‘mass kill’ hypothesis, suggesting that these were simply the final accumulations of bone at the site, undisturbed and preserved in situ when the return to a cold climate blanketed them in wind-blown loess.

Symbolism, symbolically mediated culture and the production of symbolically charged artefacts are today almost unanimously accepted in palaeoanthropology as the defining hallmarks of cognitively and behaviourally modern human beings. This orthodoxy, however, suffers from a number of serious problems, including pervasive dualisms, an internally contradictory methodology and an unwillingness to grapple critically with the symbolism concept. It is suggested that the symbolism paradigm originated in the ideas of Leslie White in the 1940s and 1950s, but did not become a serious presence in palaeoanthropology until the 1980s. This is explained in terms of the adoption of cladistic phylogenetics in that period, and by reference to new evidence that removed Neanderthals from the ancestry of living peoples. The implications of the growing body of evidence for Neanderthal symbolism are discussed. It is concluded that the symbolism paradigm is essentialist and ahistorical, and has acquired the character of an origins myth.

Few events of European prehistory are more important than the transition from ancient to modern humans around 40 000 years ago, a period that unfortunately lies near the limit of radiocarbon dating. This paper shows that as many as 70 per cent of the oldest radiocarbon dates in the literature may be too young, due to contamination by modern carbon. Future dates can be made more secure — and previous dates revised — using more refined methods of pre-treatment described here.

Stable isotopes extracted from two hominins and a range of animals from the original Neanderthal site shows these Middle Palaeolithic people to have been hunters predominately on a meat diet. Comparison with other specimens further south suggests this diet – deer, but no fish or plants – to be something of a behavioural norm, whatever the latitude and plant cover.

The author argues for a significant social and cognitive transition between the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic in Europe. Between about 300 000 and 200 000 years ago, early Neanderthals developed stone working techniques which combined methods that were previously discrete, began to occupy high-relief terrain and to settle systematically the highly seasonal environments of central and eastern Europe – skill-sets here termed the ‘incorporation of difference’. These findings make us rethink the competence of pre-modern hominins and to review, in the author's words, ‘the boundaries we erect to police the uniqueness of humanity’.

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.

Using ethnographic parallels the authors identify ‘bark peelers’ used in Ice Age Europe. They suggest that Palaeolithic Europeans used these to extract edible and nourishing new growth from the trunks of spring trees.